This is the quintessential question? How do you know when you will have enough money to do the things that you desire? Do have more bills than income? Then you will need to either reduce your spending and or pay off your debts or make more money to exceed your debts.
What are the ways you can reduce your spending? Not increase your debts and find saving habits. An area that is variable and I could have control was my food expenses. I set out a budget for the week. I write out my food spending and chose a meal planning approach. I reduced my need to spend during the week for eating out and coming home resorting to ordering out meals. I ate what was in my pantry and refrigerator. This extra money I could divert to adding to my savings to invest. I have hobbies and this is an expensive habit. I decided to limit my hobby spending to $20 per week. I would take out cash for my hobbies and place them in an envelope. When this was gone. That was my limit.
How to pay off your debts. Leave credit cards alone and pay more than the minimum. Create an emergency fund. use a micro saving technique which is automated. Acorn is automated and you will be surprised how quickly your money will grow. Try a $5.00 per week as a goal. You can see the magic. I pay more than the minimum balance on my credit cards that I used to learn some new skills. I realized that I would have to work longer on my current job if I did not contain this sneaky habit of using my credit cards without paying down. When I earned $250 from my extra savings, I paid my account down with that extra $250.
How can you earn more money currently? I chose to learn and earn with invest to save approach. I took stock of my skill sets and decided to monetize them. One inspiration was side hustleschool.com/episode 281. I looked at what others were doing to create the work that they liked without leaving their current job. This was an eyeopener. I have three ideas that resonate with my gardening and investing in the stock market. When people start asking me how did I grow my veggies and find the time. I listened to the questions. I developed a waist-high planting bed for my spinach, kale and bok choy in my backyard. Now I can have veggies in the winter and share the harvest. I have a ton of succulents and found this might be a great way to share my love and grow extra money. Someone sent me a plant box of the month idea. Perhaps the best idea was when I learned about volatility investing and trading. I found a system that I could share with others and they could easily duplicate the method. From this my teaching a course on volatility trading was born. My friends wanted to know what type of system did I use and would I be able to teach them. I first decided to offer it free and get the kinks out and then set up a system to monetize my course. To monetize I decided that $125 per course was just about right. I could set up a course using zoom and have it available at times, students were available. This gave me freedom and time.
My breakthrough was when I knew I when I earned $3000 per week. I transferred this to my checking account. This became my tangible goal. When I combined all three approaches to my spending plan, I could reach my freedom and time quickly. I could have a comfortable lifestyle and have more freedom and time to wake up when I wanted. Garden when I wanted. Work hours that I desired when I wanted and for short periods of time.
My mind shifted from scarcity to it is possible. This was my breakthrough thinking. I could see that in a few months I could be living the lifestyle that I desired and that had been eluding me in the past. What I know is that trial and error are the way to help you gain an insight on what can be successful for you. Every experience is our teacher; we learn from the persons, the events, the circumstances that surround us. Most of the time we are not aware that we are learning because we are more aware of the struggles. We do not see that our efforts are teaching us and freeing us.
