Podcast: Multiple Ways to Make More Money

Multiple Ways to Make More Money | FIRE & Chill | Episode 27

Pat: [00:00:00]

Hello. You’re back with dave from strong money Australia and Pat from lifelong shuffle for another episode of fire and chill. Thanks for tuning in wherever you are. And just a side note, our listener ship has been increasing episode or an episode, and we’re pretty excited about that. So if you’re new here, thanks for jumping on board and.

I suppose we’ll just jump right into today’s episode, which is about making more money.

Dave: [00:00:42] Yeah. And it’s a pretty exciting topic, Pat because who wouldn’t like to make more money, don’t think anyone. But yeah there’s multiple ways to where you can actually make more money on your financial journey. So we’ll get into a few of those today. And I think there might be a little bit of a misconception out there that maybe you and I aren’t all that keen on the idea of trying to increase our income and things like that because we do talk so much about saving.

Do you think that might be true?

Pat: [00:01:10] I think that perception is out there. Yeah. But it’s totally unwarranted. I think we just, we talk about saving to begin with, because that’s what you have to get right. To begin with, but making more money. Well, definitely increase your savings rate and help you get to financial independence earlier.

Dave: [00:01:27] yeah, 100%. And this is something that both of us, despite maybe not talking about it a lot, this is something that we both did on both of our throughout our lives. And it’s definitely made a big difference to our financial progress. And we can get into a bit about the things that we’ve both done. During today’s episode,

Pat: [00:01:44] yeah, I actually find that I probably didn’t unconsciously. It wasn’t necessarily something that I focused on or something that, and just more came naturally to me. I think it might’ve came naturally to you too, to begin with is that’d be fair to say or

Dave: [00:01:59] do you mean the urge to make more money or what do you mean.

Pat: [00:02:03] yeah. The urge and the propensity to do things that will earn you more bunny.

Dave: [00:02:09] Yeah. Yeah. Ah, yeah, I think pretty accurate because you, I guess intuitively you know, okay, well I’m going to build wealth and it’s helpful if I have more money coming in and less money going out. So if I can work on both of those things, that’s going to help rather than just one of those things.

Pat: [00:02:24] Yeah, definitely.

Dave: [00:02:25] All right. So just a bit of a caveat first for me on my side, I’ve only actually had two jobs in my adult life. So I don’t have the most optimal experience in the whole career progression kind of area, I suppose you could say. So I haven’t done a whole lot of, job hopping and all the rest of it.

So maybe you can help me out where I might be lacking there a bit, Pat.

Pat: [00:02:47] yeah, I’ll do my best. I, how many career jobs have I heard? One, two, three. Only for like full-time career jobs. I definitely had plenty of part-time and uni gigs and that sort of thing before that. But yeah, not that many either, to be honest.

Dave: [00:03:03] Okay. All right we’ll do our best anyway.

Pat: [00:03:05] Yeah, definitely.

Dave: [00:03:07] All right. So let’s kick things off with the first way that we can make more money. And that is to probably the simplest option, which is to work more hours that would be like overtime in the current job that you are doing right now, or maybe just different types of hours in the current job that you’re doing right now.

And so this one’s pretty self-explanatory, it is exactly like, it sounds, you’re just working more to earn more money. And if you go on hourly wages, that’s exactly how it would work, but. I you, do you have this option, Pat? Do you actually get paid more for over time or how does that work on your end?

Cause during my career, I would do actively do overtime and get paid extra and get paid quite well for doing extra hours above my normal 40 hour workweek. But what about, does that, is that how it works for you?

Pat: [00:03:54] no, that, isn’t how it works for me. I get a salary and I just do, what’s required to get the cup time throughout the year, but I also worked plenty of weekends cause I do Ray or construction. And the only time Sydney’s rail network is ever closed is either in the dead of the night or on a weekend. And when I do like full 12 hour shifts on a weekend, on a Saturday Sunday, I will get that back in Lu

Dave: [00:04:22] so time in Lou essentially. Yeah.

Pat: [00:04:24] time in lieu essentially.

So it’s not extra pay, but it’s, I am compensated in that way now.

Dave: [00:04:30] Okay. Do you get any bonuses or anything for getting projects done on time or early or anything like that?

Pat: [00:04:37] Theoretically it’s

Dave: [00:04:39] What does that mean?

Pat: [00:04:40] I mean, I’ve, it’s never happened before and it’s not like I haven’t had very successful projects in the past, but companies only give out bonuses if the entire company is doing particularly well. So even if you’re doing well, but you’re, so there are some other parts of the company that might be struggling.

You, they offset each other and that means no one gets any extra.

Dave: [00:05:03] Yeah. Okay. All right.

Pat: [00:05:04] And that’s generally what happens statistically. Like when a company’s got 10, 20, 30 projects outstanding, some of them will do really well. Some of them will do not so well and they’ll offset each other and you’ll end up a little bit ahead at the end of the year.

Dave: [00:05:17] Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose it’s a little bit frustrating for the teams that maybe worked extra hard and got stuff done early, that the projects that didn’t go so good, that kind of averages out and they don’t get rewarded for that.

Pat: [00:05:29] Yeah, it does get frustrating, but at the same time, you just, you take it because you know that it isn’t always because of a hardworking team. There are like circumstances outside of anyone’s control and it just happens.

Dave: [00:05:43] Yeah. No, that makes sense. But aside from working we’ve already just roughly explained why working more hours might not be even might not be feasible or you might not be actually rewarded for that certain jobs, if you’re on salary, for example, but if you’re on wages, you can also work different hours.

And so this might be in your current job, but just working different. Different shifts for example, and this was the case for the job that I used to have. And I know it’s the case in certain other jobs as well. And so you’ll earn penalty rates for working outside normal hours. So maybe you could work afternoon shift rather than morning shift and you would be compensated for that.

And when I first started this the last job that I had, the forklift job, I would prefer just to do day shift morning shift, because that’s what I was used to. And I was thinking why would you do afternoon shift or night shift? That just, I was like, nah, no, thanks. I don’t want to do that.

And then someone told me, Oh, you get 30% loading or extra for that. Oh, wow. Really? And I was like, Oh yeah, sign me up. Cause I was thinking, if I could do the same job, the same kind of intensity the same hours and get paid 30% more yak, I’ll sign up for that. Yeah, well, I’m not. So I ended up doing it and it ended up being that afternoon shift tended to be my favorite and night shift tended to be my favorite.

So yeah, that was quite a surprise to me as a young worker. And I was pretty excited about that.

Pat: [00:07:06] Yeah. I find that younger people are much more keen to do those odd hour shifts and do the extra overtime and all that sort of thing. Once people become more established in their lives and they’ve built a bit of wealth and maybe they’ve just got more other responsibilities. They avoid them generally much more than the younger people.

Dave: [00:07:24] yeah, that makes sense. You’re probably a little bit, well, you’ve got more energy when you’re younger and you’re also maybe a little bit hungrier you’re financially motivated when you’re younger as well.

Pat: [00:07:33] Well, you’re poor. You got plenty of energy. You got plenty of time, but you’re poor, like when you’re 18, 19. So you just get out there and you try and work.

Dave: [00:07:41] That’s true. So anyway I did both of those things in my job, like working more hours, but also working nonstandard hours. So if I’m just making numbers up as a standard, maybe forklift job would be maybe $50,000 to do like day shift, 50 to $60,000. But because of the environment that I was in doing night shifts and some weekends that turned into 75, $80,000 job.

And then if I did overtime on top of that, it boosted that higher again. So there’s definitely ways where you can, depending on your industry and your job, where you can earn a lot more than the standard just by working outside regular hours and doing different things like that, including some overtime as well.

Pat: [00:08:20] Yeah. Yeah, absolutely not really applicable to a salary person though.

Dave: [00:08:26] unfortunately for you, Pat,

Pat: [00:08:28] Well, no, I mean,

Dave: [00:08:29] You get paid. All right there.

Pat: [00:08:30] I’m compensated and all of that is theoretically taken into account. I do the afternoon shifts the night shifts. I do, long hours, theoretically, my salary has meant to consider all

Dave: [00:08:41] do you think it does? Do you feel fairly compensated?

Pat: [00:08:44] I feel fairly compensated. Yes.

Dave: [00:08:47] that’s good.

Pat: [00:08:47] Yeah. I don’t want for more compensation for what I’m doing,

Dave: [00:08:50] Yeah. Yeah.

Pat: [00:08:51] so that’s good.

Dave: [00:08:52] All right. So let’s move on to strategy number two. And that would be to get a better job in the same industry and in the same type of role, because, when we think about it, the way we think about it, not every workplace will pay you the same amount to do the same job. There is quite a variation in the level of pie between different employers across the same industry and the same type of job description.

Isn’t there.

Pat: [00:09:16] Oh, yeah. A huge discrepancy. Like we’re talking sometimes upwards of 50%. Some employers are notorious for underpaying and then they just lose their staff to the employers that are paying more. And that happens often.

Dave: [00:09:30] And so if you’re looking for ways to make more money shopping around for the best type of employer who rewards their employees and pays them well then you definitely want to be looking around and checking those types of things out because it’s, there’s definitely that variation.

Pat: [00:09:47] yeah. Yeah. I don’t know how much more we can speak to this, but I’ve noticed that my partner has noticed that.

Dave: [00:09:53] have you or Steph done this? Have you jumped hopped to places where maybe the pay was a bit better for roughly the same job?

Pat: [00:10:02] Yes, certainly. I do remember the employer, my partner started with, they were notorious for underpaying. I think the industry was notorious for underpaying and she’s in HR. So she had very good mobility between industries and that meant she just moved to an industry that pays HR professionals a bit better  and got a huge bump up because of that.

Yeah.

Dave: [00:10:28] It’s interesting. Isn’t it? How you might be doing roughly the same work, but just different employee, a different environment. You can make a lot more money.

Pat: [00:10:34] Yeah, definitely.

Dave: [00:10:35] Same thing happened to my partner working in admin, like admin office, top work. Yeah, just switching employers, slightly different slightly different service, slightly different industry, but roughly the same type of admin work.

And Patty pay went up about yeah, 15 to 20%. And it was less, less workload to let’s say less stress and everything, which was yeah. Big difference.

Pat: [00:11:01] And an important thing to mention in this section is the difference between private industry and government clubs. Like you were just saying, sometimes you can just change jobs and get a much higher pay. And this is definitely true. I think of lower level or more entry level government clubs, they tend to pay very, very well compared to the private industry.

So, Oh yeah, I’ve noticed because my first job out of uni was in a government role. And out of uni, that was fantastic. I got paid very well for someone with zero experience in the industry. And that was great. And even people around me, not necessarily doing highly skilled work somethings that certainly didn’t need a tertiary qualification to get into like admin type roles or officer type roles and invoicing type roles, that sort of thing.

They were getting 80, $90,000 per year. And in the private industry, their counterparts were maybe on 50 or $60,000 per year. So entry level roles, government, I think pays the best. Once you start getting much higher up on the ladder, getting into that sort of top five, 10% of earnings. I think those government roles really start to taper off.

And they don’t pay as well as private industry.

Dave: [00:12:20] okay. Yep. Okay.

Pat: [00:12:21] So that’s an interesting dynamic

Dave: [00:12:24] Yeah. And I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that once you’ve got some experience up your sleeve and you feel good at what you do, you have much better leverage over getting a better a better pay or better salary or whatever for the job that you doing. And so you’ll be more able to maybe hop around different places, different employers, or negotiate a better, better salary from your current employer.

And I know that there’s people that do this and they, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but there tends to be a certain group of people who will work super hard at a certain employer for a few years, get all those skills up their sleeve, and then they’ll move to another employer and they’ll get get more and more skills up their sleeve in there.

So they’re more valuable to each employer as they climb up. The ladder as they go and get higher pay as a result of that.

Pat: [00:13:12] Yeah. I’ve noticed that I have probably unwittingly done that myself. I’ve yeah.

Dave: [00:13:18] Okay. Yeah. Master plan that you didn’t even know it was in place.

Pat: [00:13:21] Yeah, exactly. I certainly spent, okay. The longest was my first globe was about four and a half years after that it’s never been longer than two and a half, sometimes two years. One job. I only spent 11 months set.

Dave: [00:13:32] Yeah. Okay. I’ll see, you’ve done quite a bit of this job hopping then.

Pat: [00:13:35] yeah. Yeah. And for whatever reason, like especially larger companies, like they have skewed policies around, Oh, just annoyingly, stupid policies made by people in like ivory towers.

Yeah. Armchair generals like that say,

Dave: [00:13:52] who’ve never done the job in their life.

Pat: [00:13:54] no, no. But like at one of my employers, this was actually the 11 month employer. It was like, we have a company-wide policy where we are not allowed to give anyone a pay rise of more than 10%. And I was like, this other jobs offering me like $30,000 per year more.

Now I’m sorry. We caught back shit and I’m like, okay, whatever goodbye.

Dave: [00:14:16] the same job you’re saying,

Pat: [00:14:17] Same job. Same job. And scoop it. Cause then they, then they just, they go out and they have to hire someone new and spend all the money doing that. And then they end up paying them all that extra money anyway, because the market has moved. No, it’s just like, Oh, well,

Dave: [00:14:33] Just because I had a rule or a guideline written down somewhere. Oh no, this is what it says on this document. This is what we have

Pat: [00:14:39] Yeah, yeah. No policy says, no, you can’t. Computer says no.

Dave: [00:14:44] Yeah, like you said, that’s how they ended up losing staff and ends up. It can potentially end up costing them a lot more than just giving that current employee a wage increase if they’re a good employee.

Pat: [00:14:54] Yeah, exactly.

Dave: [00:14:55] I guess that people tend to move jobs a lot more than they used to. You used to get a job decades ago. You’d get a job. You stay there for 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. But now it’s very rare that happens. People tend to stay in jobs for just a few years at a time.

Pat: [00:15:10] Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to stick in a job for that long when you can increase your pay a bit more rapidly by moving around and getting more broad experience.

Dave: [00:15:18] All right. Speaking about moving around this, move on to the next way you can make more money. And that is to just get a better paying job, which might be in a different industry or a different job entirely. So some, sometimes it’s worth looking around and seeing what people earn in different roles in other industries that you might not currently work in and seeing whether any of them appeal to you, whether you’d consider doing any of those yourself, maybe you’d be good at them.

And you hadn’t thought about it before. Some of them might be, have quite low barriers to entry where you might be able to do some training or some sort of study and get in there without too much trouble. So in terms of some examples let’s say maybe you’re currently a courier driver or something like that.

It’s not too much of a leap to think that you could be driving vehicles in the mining industry, for example, You might already be qualified to do so he might just not have experience yet.

Pat: [00:16:12] Yeah, that’s a great example. Really?

Dave: [00:16:14] And you can imagine that the difference in pay is going to be astronomical for two, those two job roles.

Pat: [00:16:21] yeah, you’re right. Yeah. And again, like the skills would be highly transferable and the barrier to entry, wouldn’t be all that high. There might only be a few days of additional courses you need to do to get into sort of mining industry.

Dave: [00:16:35] yeah.

Pat: [00:16:36] it’s all the safety sort of stuff you’d have to do to get into that industry, but that wouldn’t take a huge amount of time at all.

Dave: [00:16:42] Something to consider if you’re a career job, because the mining industry is doing pretty well right now, another example is maybe you currently work in retail. You’re good with people. And maybe you’d even be good at sales. So sales is a type of job where anyone can basically get started. You don’t need to have  high level qualifications to get started in sales. And the thing with sales is if you’re good at it, that there’s almost well, there literally is no cap on the potential that you can make.

Cause it’s a lot of sales is commission based.

Pat: [00:17:18] I don’t even want to speak about this one because I would hate sales,

Dave: [00:17:22] this would be the last job on earth that I would do.

Pat: [00:17:26] But clearly some people can do it. They can do it really well and they enjoy it. So

Dave: [00:17:30] That’s why we’re on a podcast talking to each other mate. Not out there selling shit.

Pat: [00:17:37] I’d be an awful salesman.

Dave: [00:17:38] Oh man. You be telling people I don’t need it.

Pat: [00:17:41] yeah, yeah. All the time. Oh, you don’t really need this.

Dave: [00:17:45] But maybe that would work, who knows that reverse psychology stuff,

Pat: [00:17:50] it’s I appreciate your honesty. I’m going to buy it anyway.

Dave: [00:17:55] uh, who knows it?

No, but seriously it’s the type of job where it’s another example where it’s low barrier to entry, but huge potential earnings. So if you’re, if you’re good with people and maybe have a kind of persuasive or charismatic personality might be something to consider. And if it’s no good, you don’t like it.

You can always go back to regular retail or whatever else you might be doing. Anyway, I suppose that’s the thing to remember with changing jobs. If you change industries and you try it out for a year or two years, it’s not like you’ve lost the skills from the old job. So you can quite comfortably find a role in the type of job you were doing before.

If you don’t like the new one.

Pat: [00:18:32] Yeah, exactly. And you might bring back newer experience and qualifications. That could be valuable.

Dave: [00:18:37] true. That’s true. But it is worth considering the trade-offs because you might be trying to look for a job in a different industry or a different position, but it might not be something that’s really suited to you. You might not actually enjoy it. So you’re just really chasing more money, but you’re not really gonna, you’re not really gonna enjoy it.

It’s not going to feel worth it. It’s gonna feel like a lot more work to get that extra pie. Even though you’re doing the same amount of hours, it’s not going to might not fit with your personality. Like maybe me and Pat doing sales, it might just not be worth it.

Pat: [00:19:08] no, definitely not. I think everything we’re saying here is with the baseline assumption that you’re not going to do something that you absolutely hate to case an extra 10% salary.

Dave: [00:19:19] Cause we definitely wouldn’t recommend that.

Pat: [00:19:21] No, no. We’re only talking about tweaking things within what you already want to do or something that you might enjoy and not necessarily just aiming for maximum income at all costs

Dave: [00:19:32] Yep. Maximize the benefit while minimizing the pain.

Pat: [00:19:38] best benefits for pain trade off.

Dave: [00:19:43] All right. What’s the next strategy pat

Pat: [00:19:44] This one is pretty obvious, but I’ll, we’ll get into it getting promotions. So perhaps by doing further study performing really well or just progressing and getting enough experience in your career in a lot of careers, a lot of organizations, you can climb the ladder, so to speak, you can put up your hands to take on more responsibility.

You can prove yourself. And then when a new position comes up, you might be able to get it.

Dave: [00:20:10] I saw a lot of people doing this in my old workplace. It was never something that I really was attracted to. Cause I didn’t mind the work that I did. I didn’t, none of the other jobs looked appealing to me. So I was just happy to do overtime and X and worked at odd hours and whatever.

But yeah, this is definitely something that people do. And you can start maybe, I guess if we go back to the example of my job, like some people started on their kind of factory floor and they ended up being a warehouse manager  that happened a couple of times. It’s not, definitely not too much of a stretch to think that you can work your way up, even starting with very little or no qualifications.

Pat: [00:20:46] yeah. If you’re that way inclined, if you’ve got the right mindset, if you’re competent enough to do that, then certainly working your way up in a lot of clubs is possible.

Dave: [00:20:58] Just as a side note. Do you think that the kind of people we’re speaking to who are motivated by financial independence, do you think that’s a lot of them probably aren’t career orientated in the sense that they’re not like the ladder climbing type? What do you think about that? What do you think it’s a normal split.

Like it would be with the normal population

Pat: [00:21:18] yeah, good one.

Dave: [00:21:19] stumped you there

Pat: [00:21:20] Yeah. You’ve stumped me. I’ve long considered because in my career I’ve gotten a few promotions over the years and worked my way up as I’ve become more experienced and more competent at what I do. when do you call it enough? Because that ladder goes up essentially not infant to infinity, but for all intents and purposes, for most normal people, like we’re not going to be CEOs.

So there’s enough rungs on that ladder that if you want to keep climbing it, you can just keep climbing it for most of your career. it’s the same problem that you get with. Spending money. It’s

like

Dave: [00:21:54] a bit. It becomes a treadmill, doesn’t it?

Pat: [00:21:56] It’s a treadmill. Like when do you just call it enough? When do you just say, okay, this is good.

This is a good level of responsibility, a good level of stress. I don’t have to just keep climbing for the sake of climbing.

Dave: [00:22:07] Because that’s the thing. There’s always a trade-off. So every REM you go up higher, you’re attacking you on. Generally you’re taking on more responsibility and calming with that is, is most of the time more stress as well.

Pat: [00:22:18] Yeah. Yeah. Despite popular belief, the executives at the top of the ladder, ARCA, smoking cigars and drinking Coniac around their boardroom tables while laughing about the working class.

Dave: [00:22:29] I only do that on nine days, the rest of the way they work.

Pat: [00:22:37] despite the fat cat cartoons, that’s generally not what happens at that level. And in general, they’re working stupidly long hours and they’re giving up their entire lives for work.

Dave: [00:22:49] Yeah.

Pat: [00:22:49] And the stress levels are enormous.

Dave: [00:22:52] And that’s what got me about it. I suppose I looked at people who were doing it and then taking on the extra stress each time I was thinking, why, why would you bother it? It didn’t seem, it just didn’t seem like the extra compensation was really worth it. I’d rather work more hours in an easier job.

Then be consumed by stress and responsibility in a high paying job and doing less hours. It, yeah, I looked at it and looked at the, what extra pay you get. And I thought, eh, that’s not really worth it. I’d rather do an easier job.

Pat: [00:23:24] That’s the thing. That’s always something you need to consider. If this is the game you’re playing. But most of us don’t consider it. Cause it’s just like spending, it’s just the treadmill. Like you can always buy something better. You can always get a better job. And it’s, it is a trap because it plays on your, the reward circuits in your brain that always want more

Dave: [00:23:43] You’re always looking forward to that next thing, I guess that next promotion, that next pay rise.

Pat: [00:23:48] Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s one of the hardest things in the world is to know when you have enough.

Dave: [00:23:53] Yeah. Yeah.

Pat: [00:23:55] it’s a skill you need to build. So I’m yeah, I, right now I’d like to say I’m probably at enough of where I want to be.

Dave: [00:24:02] because I was just going to say, because you’ve done this career progression a bit. Haven’t you Pat. And so how did you,  how many steps would you say you climb that ladder and then how did you decide that? Okay. That’s roughly enough. I know, I feel like I feel comfortable with this kind of situation.

I don’t really feel the need to climb higher.

Pat: [00:24:20] yeah, so probably four steps or something like that. And I think the last time I dumped up a step, like I was probably pretty happy in the one lower rung than where I am now, but also just working for someone who’s totally incompetent and it ruined my day. Like it ruined several months of my life. So I just to get into position where I wasn’t. Working and miserable about working for someone that I found less competent than I just moved up a rung and said, no, this is,

Dave: [00:24:50] Wow. That’s interesting. So you essentially said your current job was being made worse because the person above you wasn’t very good at this. And you felt you could do a better job at it.

Wow. That’s interesting. I wonder how many people that happens to that’s it

Pat: [00:25:04] Might happen to a lot of people.

Dave: [00:25:06] that sounds like a, an unusual reason for jumping up another rung on the letter.

That’s yeah, that’s interesting.

Pat: [00:25:13] I don’t want to work for people that are less competent than you. So you’re just like, okay, I need a move up a rung in the letter. Otherwise I’m going to be working for people that

Dave: [00:25:21] It’s like, Hey, give me the steering

Pat: [00:25:22] I do about this. Yeah, exactly.

Dave: [00:25:25] you sit in the back. Ah, interesting. Alright, so what are some other what’s the next strategy? Let’s go to strategy number five in ways to make more money. And that is through side jobs or what? The popular kind of cringeworthy term side hustles.

What do you think about, do you not like that?

Pat: [00:25:45] I think that it is a highly popularized term that is used as a magic panacea to be able to make more money, very popular on things like YouTube

Dave: [00:25:59] It’s glorified, isn’t it as a

Pat: [00:26:00] Yeah. Yeah. Where people make really outrageous faces for their YouTube video photos. How to increase your income by 10 times with this one simple side hustle,

Dave: [00:26:12] Okay. Working only two hours a week or something like that.

Pat: [00:26:15] You notice that this podcast so far has been mostly very tame. We’ll say typical ways to increase your income. Not really exciting type of stuff, but here we are. Let’s talk about the side hustle.

Dave: [00:26:29] Well, that’s the site.

Pat: [00:26:31] about using your spare time to create more income in a different way to your main club.

Let’s say

Dave: [00:26:38] Wow. That’s that’s a lot less sexy than it sounds.

Pat: [00:26:41] damn well.

And some of these are pretty taming themselves like using gig economy type stuff, maybe doing some Uber, some Uber eats, maybe getting on air Tasker and using your skills to do things like graphic design or video editing, anything like that could be considered a side hustle, maybe selling something on the side.

Dave: [00:27:05] yeah. There’s so many different little things, I guess you can do in your spare time. Like maybe you’re good at building things like cabinets or maybe you lack. You find cleaning therapeutics. So you wouldn’t mind cleaning people’s houses or walking dogs, or there’s just a million different things you could do in your spare time.

And I suppose the thing to consider is we would only recommend doing this if it was something that you were actually going to enjoy. Like we mentioned before and it was going to fit into your schedule and not going to be too cumbersome, because then it’s actually a benefit to you because it’s an enjoyable way to spend your spare time. Because if you enjoy building things or fixing stuff or whatever it is, it’s not actually going to feel like laborious work in your spare time. So that’s when it really becomes a big benefit of a way to spend your days off or your weekends or whatever it is.

Pat: [00:27:57] Yeah, I think too many people start dedicating too much time to a side hustle that they might not really enjoy all that much. And they would honestly be better off just getting a promotion at work or working a couple of extra hours at work over overtime. And they would make more money with less stress doing something like that.

Instead of doing a side hustle.

Dave: [00:28:20] And why do you think that is? Why do you think they go for the side hustle rather than something at their current job? Do you think it’s for variety or do you think they ha they feel like the side hustle is going to have a big payoff or what do you think.

Pat: [00:28:33] I think there’s a small possibility that a side hustle will pay off really big. And so that plays into it. I also think that it feels good doing something that feels like it’s more working for yourself than it is working for someone else.

Dave: [00:28:49] That’s a good point.

Pat: [00:28:50] So when your like you said, maybe doing some cabinet making on the side and selling it on Facebook marketplace, that kind of feels like your work is more directly related to your financial benefit.

Dave: [00:29:03] it’s a sense of independence as well. Isn’t it?

Pat: [00:29:05] Yeah. Sense of independence. So that could have maybe positive emotional feelings or positive mental feelings around doing that side hustle.

Dave: [00:29:15] Yeah, that makes sense. And I suppose we’ve, I think we’ve mentioned in a past episode that if you are going to do something like a side job or a side hustle, you can think of it in terms of the things that you might consider doing after you reach financial independence or semi-retire or whatever you want to call it, you can test those things out on your weekends possibly or on any time off you have from work, you could try these little things as little experiments while you’re on the journey to see if you like them.

If you have time, obviously, and then when you get to semi-retirement, whatever you want to call it, then you can say, okay, I really like this thing. I’m going to dedicate some more time to it, rather than getting there and then thinking, okay, I’ve got 10 different options. Let’s go and try them. Yeah. In that sense, you can get a better idea of what you like and what you don’t like throughout your financial journey.

So then when you get to financial independence, you have a better idea of what kind of work or what kind of productive activities you might want to do to fill your time with

Pat: [00:30:14] Yeah. And that’s a much healthier way to do things as well. So instead of just grinding away for five or 10 years, as much as you can spending as little as you can, so you can get to this man’s magic fi or fireplace, and then you’re going to live your best life. That’s not a really healthy way to look at it.

It’s probably better to, like you said, try out things that you want to try out along the way and see what you deal with and see what you don’t. And then if they can make you a bit of extra cash live, why not? And then when you do finally get to pull the trigger on financial independence, reduce hours, or no hours with your full-time club, then you’ve already built this life that you would employ living.

Dave: [00:30:54] Yeah. Well said. What do you think about, what do you think about talking about, should people start a blog or a podcast? Would you write, would

Pat: [00:31:01] if you really enjoy it,  I’m still, I think at this point I’ve made more money than I’ve spent on my blogging and podcasting though. It’s not as clear cut as

Dave: [00:31:13] why you want, you think you’ve made more than you spent?

Pat: [00:31:15] yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I’m pretty sure I have, but it’s not like raining money on me.

I’m not sitting here flicking the hundred dollar bills at everyone. I see. Yeah. It’s not.

Dave: [00:31:29] I think people tend to. Like, I mean, my blog makes some income, but when I think about the hours that are put in, I would have been way better off like working at hungry jacks or something like that, you know? But so say if you’re going to do it I didn’t start it to thinking that I was going to make heaps of money.

I just thought, Oh, I might like writing, so let’s try that. And I did like it, so I just kept doing it. So you want to do it for the activity itself? Not for whether it’s going to have a huge payoff because the chances are, it’s not.

Pat: [00:32:02] Oh man, making money in content creation online are like so skewed. I very, very small number of people make all of the money and 99.9% of people just make nothing. They just waste their time and they close down early. All of these again, I would just burn to pick all of these sort of make money.

You tubing side hustle, blogging. You’re only hearing from the 0.1% of people that have already been super successful, the 99.9% of people that, crashed and burned. Aren’t making YouTube videos about how making YouTube videos makes no money. And if they are, you’re not seeing them because they’re not making enough money and

Dave: [00:32:47] it’s, it’s funny how many people are in that kind of business learn that they’re making money online, teaching people how to make money online. It’s very circular,

Pat: [00:32:57] yeah, yeah. This slippery internet funnel.

Dave: [00:33:03] but if like genuinely if you think that you might enjoy writing as a hobby and that it might turn into something, then by all means, give it a try. And if you enjoy it, then stick with it. But if you think you’re gonna make a handsome kind of income from the get, go, throw that out. Just to start just doing something else.

Pat: [00:33:20] How old is your blog

Dave: [00:33:21] Uh, four years old.

Pat: [00:33:23] For years? I think I’m about the same, about four years old now. Yeah. Right. And our podcast is one year old.

Dave: [00:33:30] year. Yep. When this goes out, it’ll be one year old.

Pat: [00:33:32] We’re here good times. And just to put that in perspective, Dave and I have been working at our content creation. We’ll call them side hustles fakies and when we’re not making bank, we’re making a beard and muddy now, but yeah, to be fair, you don’t make stupid click baity, YouTube titles with stupid photos.

That try and get people to like, listen and watch our stuff at all costs.

Dave: [00:33:59] it.

Pat: [00:33:59] That is our problem. We have too much integrity when not in it, just to get the maximum amount of use and listens though. We do enjoy that. And we’re really happy when we get lots of listens and I’m not gonna, we’re not gonna make an episode titled 10 ways to become financially Rick and independent within two years or anything like that.

That was my sad attempt at a click baity title. You can tell that our don’t do that often.

Dave: [00:34:25] I don’t know about you. I think we’ve had this discussion before, but when you see that kind of stuff, something in my stomach, I just can’t click it. I can’t click it because that’s kind of things just make me feel sick. Cause you could have, you know, you’re being manipulated

Because if you’ve watched a couple of those videos after you watch it, you go, there’s nothing in this.

This is rubbish. And so then

Pat: [00:34:45] I’ve just wasted five minutes of my

Dave: [00:34:47] Exactly. So then, you know, the next time you see it, ah, I’m being manipulated the click, this frigging button, because I’m going to learn some secret when really it’s complete nonsense.

Pat: [00:34:57] The thing is once, once you see it, you cannot see it. Like now that we’re accustomed to it, I can’t unsee it when I’m scrolling through YouTube or something. I’m like, nah, f*ck all that crap.

Dave: [00:35:10] You can’t click it high. You have to ignore it.

Pat: [00:35:12] Yeah. Yeah. But until like you become a tune into it, like I can see how it would just fly past your radar.

Dave: [00:35:19] it’s kinda like advertising in a way. And certain levels of marketing, that’s trying to provoke certain emotions to make people buy things.

Pat: [00:35:27] Oh yeah. And it works. They get me wrong. It a hundred percent works. If your goal is to maximize views, to maximize income it a hundred percent works. But I guess I hate it. It makes my stomach churn.

Dave: [00:35:40] A hundred

Pat: [00:35:41] Yeah. I couldn’t do that to myself because I’m not in this just to make the most money

Dave: [00:35:45] you feel? No, you feel sick? I think.

Pat: [00:35:48] Yeah, definitely.

Dave: [00:35:49] All right. So moving on, we also have three ways to make a bit more cash, which are not work-related. So let’s get into those now. Number one is sell some stuff that you don’t need, and this will give you some extra funds to invest with. I don’t know about you Pat all, we haven’t really done this.

We’ve done it with the odd thing, but mostly like mostly big items, like a second car that we had. And we also had a scooter that we got rid of, but we don’t have. Yeah, we haven’t really done this in terms of, we don’t have a lot of back excess possessions lying around and stuff that we could offload, but I know there are a lot of people that do and probably should and it would create a fair bit of cash.

But what about you? Have you done any of this? Actually, I think I seen some old blog posts from you about Gumtree sales and stuff like that. You want to get into

Pat: [00:36:40] Yeah, yeah. We’ll get into this.

Dave: [00:36:42] me, tell me the ways of the Gumtree.

Pat: [00:36:44] I’ll tell you the ways that the Gumtree Facebook marketplace is so much better. These days Gumtree, you get less time-wasters on Facebook marketplace than you do on Gumtree, but let’s go into the story of young Patrick’s history.  So I used to buy a lot of video games a lot and I never sold them.

Dave: [00:37:04] Oh, collector.

Pat: [00:37:06] yeah.

You could say I was a low level collector. I didn’t have like bookshelves where I displayed everything, but I just never sold them. We’re talking like decades old video games.

Dave: [00:37:17] It’s eight, eight talking like super Nintendo or what are you talking about?

Pat: [00:37:21] We’ll say from men, Nintendo 64 onwards and PlayStation onwards.  And I took relatively good care of them. Cause I’d know, I valued

them maybe about three years ago. I started offloading these, this video game collection. And I still have some because I’m not in any rush to just get rid of it all, but I’ve made bank on some of this stuff just like stupid.

Stupid money on not crazy stupid, like the original Nintendo stuff, where some things go for thousands of dollars, but certainly I’ve sold some things for hundreds of dollars that I didn’t expect to.

Dave: [00:37:54] Wow. And is that because they are now like highly valued by collectors and people for the nostalgia

Pat: [00:38:01] Yeah, yeah,

Pat: [00:38:03] yeah. Yeah. And for whatever reason, Nintendo used to sell their stuff in like these crappy, thin boxes that absolutely no one preserved properly over the course of two decades. But if you just had them sitting in a box in your garage or under your couch and you never touched them and oxygen, didn’t get to them and they weren’t in a moist environment and you get them out and they’re in good condition.

That’s super rare because there was so flimsy and crappy that everyone just threw them away to begin with.

Dave: [00:38:32] Yeah. How much what kind of multiples are we talking about on your, what kind of returns mate?

Pat: [00:38:38] They’re not big. They’re not beating the stock market. Let’s put it that way. It’s unless you’re super lucky to just get like that super rare item. You’re not beating the stock market.

Dave: [00:38:49] Man I had, when I was a youngster, I had a ton of Pokemon cards

Pat: [00:38:56] Oh

Dave: [00:38:57] and I just I’m pretty sure I just left them at home. And then my mom saw them in garage sale. This was like 15 years ago. They’d probably be worth a lot of money now.

Pat: [00:39:06] Oh yeah. Like the gold charizard

Dave: [00:39:09] I had two of them.  I had two, I’m not joking.

Pat: [00:39:13] Do you, uh, how much are they going for now? They’re going for thousands of dollars.

Dave: [00:39:17] that was my favorite.

Pat: [00:39:20] Cause they’re all from the original print. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Dave: [00:39:24] Should have kept em.

Pat: [00:39:25] Yeah. Now we’re talking about alternative investment.

to be talking about side hustles. I sorry. Alternative income, increasing income. Anyway. Yes. I have sold I’ve sold like that. That’s the bulk of it, but I’ve also sold other bits and pieces along the years, like an old guitar and maybe a backpack that I bought for my first year old trip that I then decided I wanted to downsize from to a smaller backpack and just little bits and pieces like that.

Dave: [00:39:54] so maybe a little bit of cash still in this sort of stuff.

Pat: [00:39:58] Yeah. Yeah. Just getting rid of that. So that sort of stuff. And honestly the driver of it wasn’t to make money. It was more to just declutter my home and my life because it just it’s just this crap I was carrying around and I wasn’t

Dave: [00:40:11] I was going to say, I was going to say you probably want to do this anyway. Even if you don’t think you’re going to make tons of cash from it, just to clear out your house a little bit and simplify, your possessions a bit.

Pat: [00:40:20] yeah, that is the driving factor. And that’s still the driving factor. Like I just don’t want to be carrying so much crap around with me.

Dave: [00:40:27] Yeah, damn. Now I’m burning about those tires and odds.

Pat: [00:40:34] So let’s go. Another way to make some money is to maybe rent a room in your house, or if you’re a renter, have a share, live in a share house, say, so you’re not just wasting space.

Dave: [00:40:46] I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you can pretty much rent out anything. Now, Patty, you can rent out your, you can rent storage space in your house. You can rent out your garage, you can rent out your car, you can rent out, parking spots and it’d be saying these kinds of things popping up.

Pat: [00:41:01] Yeah. With the Uber application of everything. Oh, sorry. Not Uber. The Airbnb, maybe the Airbnb of everything.

Dave: [00:41:09] Yeah, that’s

Pat: [00:41:10] Once Airbnb took off, all these other little ones started coming out of the woodworks.

Dave: [00:41:15] I haven’t done a lot of research on this. I don’t know about you. So I can’t say whether they’re any good and whether they pay well. But it’s definitely worth looking into if you’ve got, if you’ve got stuff, if you’ve got storage space you might like to use, or, you barely use your car or you’ve got a garage parking spot you don’t use.

And you’re in a good location. Definitely worth looking into anyway.

Pat: [00:41:34] Yeah. I know some people who live in nicer locations who have had a bit of land, because you are able to buy properties in nicer locations with a bit of land without, mortgage in your liver. And they felt like a little holiday accommodations on their land. And they now rent those out.

Airbnb style

Dave: [00:41:54] yeah. Whereabouts is this?

Pat: [00:41:57] are sort of outskirts of Sydney who not quite Sydney just cast outside of it. So central coast Illawarra, that sort of thing.

Dave: [00:42:06] Yup. So I suppose on this topic, we did rent a room out in our house for a few years, but it was to a family member. So that was relatively straightforward and no real risks there. But man, if you what’s that website called, is it kinda gives you a chart on how much your room is possibly worth in terms of income, potential.

Pat: [00:42:26] all right now I have no idea,

Dave: [00:42:28] have to look it up, I’ll give you, it tends to be pretty, pretty substantial, like five to $10,000 for a very simple room in half decent location. If you’re in better locations with more expensive real estate, you can earn even more than that. But then. There’s some potential tax complications.

If it’s your, well, it would be your place of residence as well. So it’s definitely worth considering that as well. But like on this topic, it’s having the ability to create that kind of income stream. Let’s call it seven to $10,000. That’s a huge potential benefit in like when you might be living your financial independent life later, and the potential to just effectively switch on that income stream is pretty powerful.

And that has the effective value of a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Just being able to turn on that tap, essentially, whenever you like.

Pat: [00:43:18] Yeah, it is as you said, 10 K in cashflow per year, man, that’s like worth $250,000 in investments, or say it reduces your withdrawal rate by maybe up to 1%, depending on how much your withdrawal rate is. So it’s very powerful.

Dave: [00:43:37] Yeah, that’s I’ll find that website with the room value estimator, and I’ll put it in there, put it in the show notes. Very wrong. Definitely worth considering despite the possible tax complications. But you can just get around that I suppose, but I never sell on your house.

Pat: [00:43:52] a lot of people don’t,

Dave: [00:43:53] Would you ever consider doing that down the track?

Pat: [00:43:57] Probably not in my, in the house I bought if I’m still living there because it doesn’t lend itself to that very well, but I can definitely.

Dave: [00:44:05] Does depend on your house and that, that kind of the layout of it and the size of it and stuff like that. So it’s definitely not for everyone.

Pat: [00:44:11] No, definitely not. But using share houses is definitely something I did for a very long time. So that’s a great way to reduce expenses.

Dave: [00:44:22] you really did. How long did you do that for? Was it something like 10 years?

Pat: [00:44:26] Up to not quite 10, maybe eight, eight or nine years or something. So I didn’t mind that it wasn’t an inconvenience to me to do that. Whereas it’s not the horror stories that people think of where you’re in, like this boarding house with eight people and no one cleans everything and anything.

And there’s just mold growing everywhere and people like someone’s playing on the drums all day. And the other guys like the loudest video games, it’s not like that most of the

Dave: [00:44:52] you, did you rent with friends?

Pat: [00:44:55] To begin with, with friends and the final place I had, I was just sharing with some guy I met on what was it?  flatmates.com

Dave: [00:45:05] Yeah. Okay. And so did you rent the property and then sublease the room? Or how did that work?

Pat: [00:45:11] well, funnily enough, I was living with my brother, but then he was going to move in with his then fiance. So I was left trying to find a new roommate or find a new place. And then I advertised on flatmates.com and this guy, like in the building right across the road from me, advertise the flatmates.com at around the same time.

And so we’d just, he found my advert and then we just met up and he was like, yeah, this is pretty cool. How about we just go in together? And we’re like, yes, wait. So I ended up just moving across the road into his place.

And then we both signed a lease where we both had yeah. 50% responsibility for everything so that wasn’t no big

Dave: [00:45:57] Yeah, no, I rented I’m in a share house for the first, I think three years. And it works. You saved so much, man. And that was just with friends.

And there was five of us and we could rent because there’s five people paying rent and you can afford to rent Mark a pretty big house. Yeah.

Yeah. So that works out.

Pat: [00:46:14] I think it works out more often than people make out. I’m sure there are horror stories, but yeah, they get too much attention compared to the benefits.

Dave: [00:46:24] agree with that. All right. So the next place you might be able to create some extra cash is by getting better deals on your current bills and reducing your expenses in that way. And I know it doesn’t really sound like earning more income, but essentially it’s exactly the same because you’re basically getting paid to shop around and nail down the best deals on your current bills, because by doing it, you’ll end up with less money leaving our bank account, which is the same as more money going into your bank account.

Pat: [00:46:53] Often, this is the highest pay per hour. Most people can get per year.

Yeah. Spend a few hours. You can save it’s maybe thousands of dollars, depending on how bad a deal you are on now.

Dave: [00:47:05] is depending on the bill you’re attacking too. Cause if it’s your, think about your mortgage and your interest rate, if you can shave, 0.5 0.4% of that, you’re looking at thousands.

Pat: [00:47:15] yeah. Like some people can,

if that’s not already highly optimized.

Dave: [00:47:20] yeah, exactly. And then you’ve got, power and gas and you’ve got maybe your phone, your internet, your insurances.

There’s a lot of things that you can make sure you’re getting the best deal on. All right. So let’s talk about some things that we want to try and remember when we are trying to make more money on our financial independence journey.

Pat: [00:47:37] Yeah, it’s not always just about maximizing money. So we just want to really mention these things because we don’t want to give people the wrong impression here. So we need to put a value on your own time. Think about whether doing a side hustle or working or studying is really worth it to you and worth putting your time and energy into.

Maybe it is if it can have a really big payoff longterm, but if your spending hours like collecting plastic bottles and then driving over to the return and earn, and, making 10 bucks from putting in a hundred plastic bottles, if you’re doing that for environmental reasons, great. And you’re making a bit of extra cash doing it.

Fantastic. But if you’re literally doing that just to make some extra money. There’s probably some better ways to spend your time and make a bit of extra money.

Dave: [00:48:28] And you also got to remember, tax will take a, maybe a decent chunk of your extra earnings depending on where they’re coming from. So $10,000 might really only turn into $6,000 after you’ve paid the tax man, his share. So you want to be careful that you’re not spending You also want to be careful.

You’re not spending more on your days off just to make, just to compensate yourself and make yourself feel a bit better for being a bit more stressed and dealing with an extra workload. Cause sometimes that’s the natural instinct we want. Okay. Arts, I did an extra day of work and you’re kind of grumpy or whatever on your other day, I’ll say, let’s go and do this and do that as a reward, which it makes sense.

But then you’re losing some of the benefit of your overtime or your extra work in the first place. So you have to be a little bit careful with those sort of things.

Pat: [00:49:14] And remember to also consider all of the extra costs. So things like Uber and stuff, the hot, the costs are really hidden. So you think you’re making a lot of money, but then you’re spending more money on changing the tires on your car on doing more regular maintenance on fuel on depreciation. So at the end of the day, you might not be making as much as you think of that.

You think you are. And I actually had someone told me that they raise, be it a dragons or something, and they may do that as a side hustle, which is great, but I don’t think they were considering like all of the extra electricity costs. Cause you have to keep like these heat lamps on all the time. So this is just a general thing to like really consider all the additional costs before you really dive into a side hustle just to make money.

Dave: [00:49:59] and remember, you always want to keep an eye to your savings rate as well because chasing extra cash, as we mentioned earlier, without some control over your spending, probably isn’t going to help because just like you can’t out train a bad diet in terms of, health and fitness, you can’t really out earn your bad spending habits.

So something to keep in mind.

Pat: [00:50:18] Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So how about we share some personal experience, Dave, just quickly, what did you do to earn some extra money?

Dave: [00:50:26] Yeah. So from these things that we’ve mentioned, I did as I said, some overtime at my job, I ended up getting extra pay because of the odd hours that I was working. And I probably did, six hours a week on average over time, which tended to that, that worked out really well, honestly, on my journey.

And I would do it again. It kinda made me a bit more grumpy on my days off connect cause I was tired and whatever, but it looking back it was worth it. So I would probably do that again. But yeah, I definitely spent some many red-eyed many red-eyed nights doing doing extra work and night shifts and that but it felt natural almost like you said in the beginning, Pat, because I was so motivated and so obsessed, with financial independence that it just felt like the natural thing to do.

And so sometimes I really enjoyed it because I was progressing towards this goal. That was so important to me. So in that way it didn’t feel like work all that much.  It was obviously work, but because I was so motivated by that goal, I didn’t really care what I had to do almost to get there. You know what I’m saying?

Pat: [00:51:30] Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah. Sometimes when you’ve just, you’ve got the eye of the tiger, you’re hungry,

Dave: [00:51:36] Yeah. That

Pat: [00:51:37] you just, yeah, you just, you can do so much.

Dave: [00:51:41] that’s true. What about you?

Pat: [00:51:43] Oh, I’ve done so much of all of this. Honestly, getting promotions, moving jobs, selling stuff, to create extra cash, living in a share house, like optimizing expenses. There’s, I’ve done more than half this list of fix myself. So it’s, they are good ways to make sure that you’re optimizing your life and

Dave: [00:52:02] Yeah, so it sounds like we’ve both done a fair few of these things that we’ve mentioned today, and that’s not to say that everyone has to do all of these things, but we definitely want to be considering whether we can and how much kind of effort is going to go into that because they’re all going to make a difference to our progress and how much we can earn and how much we can save, which is really important.

Pat: [00:52:23] definitely.

Dave: [00:52:24] So just to recap quickly on the things we’ve covered today, different strategies that we can make more money on our way to financial independence. Number one is to work more hours. Number two is to switch to a better employer in the same industry. Number three is to switch to a better paying industry.

Number four is working on getting promotions and climbing the ladder. Number five is side jobs or other sources of part-time income. And then our three non-work ways to make extra cash was selling stuff to create extra money renting out part of your house or your car or some other space or asset that you have.

And number three was getting better deals on your current bills and expenses. So as you can see, there’s so many ways that we can bring more money into our life. And we’ve really only scratched the surface in this show. We could probably talk for another hour about other ways we could think of to make extra cash, but we hope we’ve given you a good overview of the options.

And as we said, you don’t have to do all of these things, but everyone should at least be doing one or two of these things. And many of them, if we’re honest, aren’t even that hard at all. So whatever you choose it’s really up to use just whatever kind of fits into your lifestyle and your motivations and what you’re most comfortable with.

Pat: [00:53:38] yay. Good summary, man. So we hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode. We are thanks again for your feedback and your support and your reviews and just all of the lessons we’ve been getting. We really appreciate it all. And we it’s really great to hear everyone getting some value from the podcast. So we’ve received plenty of great topic, ideas and questions.

And we just want to say here that we will start working on them. We’ve got so many things and so many emails that have topics people want us to cover. So just give us some time and hopefully in the next few years we can get through. All of those big meaty topics that people really want us to cover. So that’s all from us today.

As usual, you can find more from both of us, Dave at strong money, australia.com and myself, pat@lifelongshuffle.com. And you can always send your questions to fireandchillpod@gmail.com. So thanks. We hope you have a great week and we’ll catch you again. Next time.