Spruce Your Nest: 31 Days Towards Financial Freedom ~ Day 13 *EARNING EXTRA INCOME*

Thursday, October 13, 2011

So remember how I started out this series by telling you to get on a budget and stick to it?

Sounds simple enough, unless you are one of the lucky one's who find out that they don't have the means to even stay in the budget no matter how much they are trying to cut.

So what do you do if your bottom line comes out to be a negative number?

The answer is pretty straight forward - you either need more income or more cuts...

I am going to offer a couple ideas for making a little extra money.

1. Clean houses, do yard work, etc. for those in need. When we needed a little extra income and I was trying to avoid having to go back to work so that I could still stay home with my girls, I started cleaning on the side to make a little extra. This was a great option for me because I actually like to clean and it gave me some alone time ;-) The great thing about this work is the schedule is usually flexible.

2. Sell things. I absolutely love having garage sales to make some extra dough and do some massive cleaning and purging. Another option is to put some ads on Craigslist or EBay. I will admit that I have several items cleaned and ready to sell on EBay, but I am an EBay virgin and have no idea what I am doing! That is my next goal...to actually put an ad up ha ha!

3. Make money online. This takes some patience and work, but it definitely can be done. We all know that there is money to be made in blogging, but it takes time and a good blog ;-) There are also sites, like hubpages where you can write posts about anything you choose and make some side money. Your main form of income is writing good hubs about topics that people will search and find online. It is actually quite fun and if you already have a blog it is easy to just stem from there.

4. Up cycle furniture. Not only is it so fun for me to re-do furniture that someone would normally throw out, it can turn a profit as well. The key here is to not spend a lot on the piece to start out with. Here is an example of a $25 dresser and hutch that we turned into two different projects...