A trick that doubled my income 📈
👋🏽 Welcome to Financial Hot Girl, you’re officially one of us.
A couple weeks after the pre-launch and we’re 890+ subscribers strong in 1 month. What an amazing community to have already! Let’s dig right into a mindset shift you can make to start earning more money and answering the questions you’ve submitted 👩🏾💻
Treat yourself like a business
Treating yourself like a business isn’t a lifelong strategy. It’s a bridge from now to a point in the future where you’re super intentional and making daily action towards your goals.
Let’s face it—in this economic climate, trying to budget or save our way to financial independence (or any financial goal) is virtually impossible. The more costs you try to cut down, the crappier life tends to feel. Counting pennies is just 👎
So imagine you’re a business. Your expenses and your income leave you with a profit. You focus energy on maximising resources, investments and shifting the needle towards your business goals. Every single decision adds up toward making that bottom line.
So, how do you do it?
These two initial steps will get you thinking right:
Audit every single decision you make in a day. What are the outcomes of those decisions? Do these outcomes move you closer to your goals or values?
Audit how and where you spend your money. Where could income be reinvested? What can you leverage to create more income?
Treating yourself like a business doesn’t mean tunnel visioning on just making money. It’s a way to guide your daily decisions and give you a lot more financial direction.
With this mindset, I can look at at extra £100 leftover in my monthly budget and think: do I reinvest this into myself or splurge this on impulse buys (that will ultimately get me nowhere)?
As part of this mindset, I still spend money on life-enriching experiences. Because those form part of my goals. I wouldn’t be the person that’s able to create as much income if I was depriving myself of those experiences—a great example of reinvestment, if you will.
Community AMA
I need help on how to save and invest money with a career with an average to below average salary. For instance, I earn £21k per annum and I would like to really start investing, but I feel like my salary and monthly expenses won’t allow it.
I started investing on a similar salary, but I made sure I did two main things first:
Paid off any and all consumer debt: at the time this included a credit card and my overdraft
Settled on a target figure for my emergency fund (at the time this was 3 months of my salary)
I went down the route of investing with very little. I started with around £25 in a Stocks & Shares ISA, and because of the habits I’d built paying off my debt and beginning to build my emergency fund, £25 wasn’t a huge adjustment for me.
If you are budgeting to the penny and still feel like you can’t manage to find money to invest, I’d think about three things:
Is every penny I’m spending necessary and aligned to my goals?
Is there any way I can reduce my expenses?
Is there any way I can increase my income?
Similarly to treating yourself like a business, I would want to make sure my monthly expenses are truly necessary and adding value to my life. If they are, focus on increasing that income...
How can you increase your salary: new job? New role?
Do you have skills you could leverage into a side hustle? If not, are there skills you’re interested in that you could build for a side hustle?
My most controversial opinion on this is that if you truly don’t have the money to invest, I believe it’s better to invest time into yourself. Up-skill yourself and give yourself a year to become someone who can increase their income with ease.
Spending a year learning a skill that you could turn into an additional income stream is probably a better use of your time than investing £1 a month into an S&S ISA.