These 3 Things Helped us Increase our Income $100k Per Year

What steps can be taken to significantly increase one's income? That's the question on everyone's mind, and not surprisingly so - the more money you can earn and keep, the more flexibility you have with your choices and the easier many of life's aspects become.

My husband and I were in a rough spot financially when we got married. I was just beginning my career and my husband was starting his own business. We were making a combined $40k working close to 40 hours/week. That's not a bad starting point, but our problem was the excessive bills we owed. On top of normal living expenses (food, rent, gasoline, insurance, etc.), we had close to $1,000/month in bills associated with debt. Unless we wanted to live a stressful paycheck-to-paycheck type of lifestyle for the majority of our lives, we needed to increase our income FAST. I'll give you the ending of the story first - our income went from $40,000 a year to $140,000, but it wasn't a microwave fix. A lot of hard work and sacrifice were involved.

So what changed? First, I quickly realized the value of time. After being at my company for three months I saw a $0.25/hour raise. I realized this was a consistent theme when speaking with other colleagues who had been there longer than I had, which meant we would only make a dollar more per hour in a year. This did not compensate for the gained experience in the field nor inflation. I began to look at other companies which paid anywhere from $5 to $7 more per hour for only a year's experience for the same job. I saw my time was worth a lot more.

This is actually why more workers only stay with a company for an average of two years, then move on to another company that pays significantly more for their experience and skills. In my opinion this is why the "good ole days" of staying with one company for 25 to 30 years is over.

When I changed companies, our income jumped from $40k to $55k, a $15,000/year increase, all by finding a company that paid me more for my time.

My husband started to get more work with his business and started to increase his rates as demand went up. This helped us go from $55k to $75k, giving us another $20,000 per year. This took about two years to make happen, but we gained $35,000 in those two years just by increasing our base pay for talents we already possessed and had more experience in.

Another thing we did was look for contract work, or work on an as needed basis. It may seem a bit strange to think adding an extra 6-12 hours of work per week could almost double your income, but this is what happened with us. Companies who hire this way will pay large amounts when they are short staffed. In my field this happens frequently. I was able to add a few extra hours of work with another company for a huge financial gain - being paid double, sometimes triple my full time base rate for the same job at another company, working a fraction of the hours. This raised our pay another $30,000 - $40,000 per year.

If you can do this in your field, it could raise your income substantially. If not, offering your skills and talents on a contract basis can bring similar results.

My husband saw this working in my field and started to pick up more work on a contract basis, bringing us up to $140,000 per year in a four year time frame.

The downside to picking up so many extra hours of work? We were working all the time. We didn't do anything else. Physically we were only able to do this for a short period of time to pay off the remainder of our debt and save six months worth of expenses. For us, the sacrifice was worth it for the short amount of time needed to achieve our goals and become debt free.

We quickly realized being paid an hourly rate is only scalable to the finite amount of time you have in a day. It's not infinite. We started to look for other ways to make money online, eventually through passive means.

If you are able to put in the large amount of effort it takes at first to get passive streams of income going, you have the potential for a much more scalable income. This is something my husband has been working toward for the past year and is starting to get anywhere from $30 to $100 per month. It sounds small, and it usually is at first, but the rate at which it can grow is exponential.

We started doing this to provide ourselves with a mobile stream of income, not bound by an hourly rate, and could be passive (making money while we sleep). Investments are like this as well, and something we are learning more about.

With all that being said, I hope this gives you some ideas for how you can increase your income as well. Also, to look into passive income/investments for a long term plan.

We wish you much success on your journey finding ways to increase your income that works best for you.