Three ways of making more money

I suppose at some point in your life, the thoughts of making more money must have crossed your mind. Otherwise, you will not be visiting my blog! When I started my financial journey, I did not know that I would follow my late father’s footstep and become a sole breadwinner one day. Being young, I could not appreciate what Dad has done for us. On hindsight, if you have been receiving all the time and not giving, you may tend to take things for granted.

To feed us, Dad had toiled and worked hard all his life, much to the detriment to his health. At the age of 38, he suffered from a crippling stroke that would make him disabled for 20 long years. As a result, his income abilities got impaired and our family suffered for many years. Now that I am approaching 40 and am taking on the same responsibility as a sole breadwinner, I am determined to work hard for money and also to make my money work hard at the same time in order to mitigate the financial damages arising from permanent disabilities.

Work hard for money

The conventional way to make more money is to moon-light or take on part-time jobs. Basically you are still trading time for money, albeit from different paymasters. There is nothing inherently sinful with this approach because it is an honest way of earning extra cash for your family. Who don’t want a better life? If you are young and energetic, you can do so for probably 5 to 6 years. But if you are in your mid-thirties or forties, your body may not take this kind of stress. After some time, you probably want some balance in your life and realize that it may not be so worthwhile to go this route in order to make some extra cash.

A better alternative for most office workers in Singapore is to climb up the corporate ladder. To position yourself for promotions and higher salaries, you need to create your own opportunities. Sometimes, certain job positions may not exist in an organization but if such a need arises, then you must make sure that you are the most qualified candidate for the job. To do so, you need to ask yourself whether you are doing the same job as the rest of your colleagues. Do you have any special projects that allow you to take on more responsibilities? Are you working on a special assignment that allows you to work closely with the top management and thus enable you to glean their insights on the company growth? Personally for me, I prefer this route because essentially I will be trading the same amount of time in my job but my earning power will be enhanced.

Make money work hard

While you are working hard for money, please don’t forget to make your money work hard for you too! The problem with most wealth builders is that we are not trained nor educated on the art and science of making money. In school, we are not taught on how to preserve wealth, budget, invest, trade, buy assets and save for retirement. Instead, we are taught useless subjects like mathematics, languages, science, geography and history. Apart from basic mathematics and languages, how often do you make use of your knowledge on the rest of the subjects when you join the workforce? Chances are, what you learned in school will not enable you to be a successful wealth builder. In essence, you have to unlearn and relearn in order to make more money.

To excel in your investments, you need to monitor and understand the changes in the economy and market forces. From there on, you form your own analysis and start to build your wealth.

However, the financial system can be complex and dynamic, especially for a new investor. To shorten the learning curve, it will be advantageous to leverage on the knowledge of the others. After all, to beat the system, you must first of all know the game. Thus, networking for the purpose of gaining leading edge information is important as you must learn to hunt in pack like wolves. Knowledge is power. If you don’t start to transform yourself into a predator, you would end up being a prey.

Magically yours,

SG Wealth Builder