As Becky Bloomwood’s father tells us in Confessions of a Shopaholic, there are two ways to solve your debt problem, “you can Cut Back or Make More Money.” While Becky decides she’s a Make More Money person, I am firmly a Cut Back and Make More Money person. (As you can probably guess, there are few similarities between Becky and me, but I love this series of books and if you’re looking for a quick fun read, I highly recommend it!).
Even if you don’t have a debt problem, I think it’s always good to be simultaneously cutting back and making more money. I’ve written extensively about saving money (check out posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), and today we’re going to talk about making more money.
In college I worked three jobs during the year (Residential Assistant, blogger, and digital design/intern for a sales training company (you may remember I ended up in Disney when traveling for this company!)) and two during the summers (blogger and intern or nanny). Being an RA was a great decision because for 3 years I did not have to pay for housing and got money towards my meal plan. My loans were far less than they could have been because I put in the work during the year.
Now that I’m working full time, I still keep up the blog and do work for the sales training company, allowing me to Make More Money. Truly, I don’t make much from my blog. I don’t do many partnerships and it’s hard to find the few I do when I am a proud minimalist who encourages people not to spend their money (sort of a hard message for a brand to get behind who wants to sell products, I know). However, I do make some money and will count it as a job because it is something I work on every week.
No doubt it can be challenging to take on work outside of my primary job at IBM and motivate myself to continue working on the nights and weekends, but I love doing it and am proud when I’ve done a good job and my bank account is happy. After managing this for a while a now, I am excited to share my best tips for staying on top of multiple jobs.
As always, it comes back to the calendar.
Once you know what you have to do, setting a hard date (and giving yourself a little more time than you think you’ll need) is essential. Just like you would do with school assignments, assign deadlines before the deadlines to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
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