How to double your income according to Barefoot Investor

We paid off our debt last year. That’s Step #3 of The Barefoot Investor book. We are now on Step #4 — Buy Your Home. We are saving up for our home deposit, 20% is ideal to stay away from paying loan mortgage insurance.

It’s been seven months and we’ve saved up a fair amount already. With the rate that we’re going it would take us more than two years to come up with the sum we need to buy our first home. A boost in income would help would dramatically.

Which leads me to the question: How can I increase my income? To be more specific, how can I double my income?

There are a lot of ways to skin a cat but here’s the Barefoot way:

Freelancing

It is the easiest and quickest way to make money. By using your existing skills in your day job, it’s likely that other people need the exact same skills for their businesses.

It can be a good way to test out your ideas, pricing and learn new soft skills (e.g. negotiation, communication, marketing, etc.)

How do you start?

By writing down three people you want to work with. These should be people that are within reach not utterly impossible. Think about how you can help them. From there, let your creative juices work to get in contact with them and give a it a shot.

What are my thoughts in this?

I would like to try out freelancing. If this is a great way to make money on the side, sign me up. The hard thing is to take the first step. Although this is a path to self-employment the end goal is to create a business that works on its own.

If I would take on freelancing jobs, what would those jobs look like? My bread and butter is programming. I reckon doing freelance programming would be stressful unless it’s not demanding. I would have a ton of experience to bring to the table.

One thing I’d like to do more of is to be a Content Creator. First thing that comes to mind is doing writing gigs, then moving on to producing my own high quality photos as well. That’s the dream.

As a start, I would list down three people that I would like to work with. See what they need and If I could offer my services to them well and good. I am off to a great start.

Written by Andrew Artajos
I'll keep it brief.