5 Tips to Make Money Easier

When it comes to finances, not everyone wants to know the ins and outs of it all.

Scrimping and saving, doing every little thing to save money, isn’t everyone’s idea of fun either.

By implementing a few simple tips, you can set yourself up for success but it won’t happen immediately.

It is up to you how you manage your finances and what you do to improve where you can.

The cost of living has gone up significantly in recent years, making life incredibly stressful for many families.

These tips are designed to help reduce stress and make life a little easier.

Note: If you like free money, check out how to get a $100 cash bonus from ING, $21 from Up Bank or have a look at the full list of freebies, offers and discounts for every state.

Disclosure, this post may contain affiliate links.

1. Create a Plan

Without knowing what you want and creating a plan, nothing will happen.

It might sound basic but taking the time to create a solid plan you know you can stick to is important.

Work out when you want to retire, how much you want to retire with, what sort of lifestyle you want now and look at your income vs expenses to see how realistic what you want is.

It can be a good idea to get help from a financial advisor or similar but be sure to do your research and choose the right one for you.

They are not all the same and there is so much information out there now on finances that you can probably do the basics without hiring someone to help.

One option many Aussies take is reading and implementing books such as The Barefoot Investor or Money With Jess.

They are both basic, general plan style books but excellent for helping you set things up easily.

They aren’t the sort of books to make you wealthy but they are a good start.

If you want more on investing and increasing wealth books such as Quit Like A Millionaire, The Simple Path to Wealth and We Should All Be Millionaires are better, once you have the basics sorted.

For setting up a budget, check out how to create and stick to a budget also how to create and stick to a budget as a single-income family.

2. Automate What You Can and Review it Regularly

Once you know your budget and plan, a lot of it can be automated from investing and saving through to bill payments.

This gets easier the longer you are sticking to your budget and have time to build cash reserves.

Often when starting it is difficult to juggle it all and get up to date on payments.

You might feel as if you are chasing your tail and getting nowhere.

Start by automating one thing, even if it’s $10 a week to your savings account.

As you progress and adjust your budget, you can increase what you automate.

Up Bank makes this easy and you can have multiple accounts plus round up every time you spend to make your savings grow faster. They also have an instant $15 sign-up bonus.

3. Patience and Compound Interest

Be patient with your progress. It takes time but the power of compound interest is huge.

Stick to your plan, knowing it will take time. In the beginning, it looks like nothing is happening then suddenly, in a few years, all that hard work starts to pay off big time and the results are visible.

Read Atomic Habits and The Compound Effect to learn more, get motivated and set things up.

By automating a lot of your money, it’s easier to be patient.

Use visuals such as savings graphs with how much is saved and images of what you are saving for to keep motivated.

Create a delayed gratification list.

Put anything you want to buy on it and 30 days later, if you still want it, then look at working it into your budget.

Check out 5 tips to reduce temptation and 10 tips from a shopaholic to help.

4. Invest. Invest. Invest

Putting money in the bank isn’t effective if you want to build wealth. Investing is.

Shares, business, real estate, whatever you prefer and can get good returns on make significantly more money than simply putting it in the bank to earn interest.

All investing has some risk, often the higher the risk, the higher the reward but if it doesn’t work out, it can be devastating.

Work out your risk tolerance level by playing around with smaller amounts first..

You can read how to set up a business for under $100 here.

Check out some ideas on how to make your mortgage pay for itself.

Before investing, get professional advice or make sure you know what you are investing in and feel comfortable doing it.

As they all carry some risk, do not invest anything you cannot afford to lose.

5. Review Your Money and Plan

Finances need to be reviewed regularly, both your expenses and income.

While automating it and doing what I have suggested above makes it easier, you still need to review it all to ensure it is performing well and you are on track.

Simply setting it all up and leaving it forever can result in huge losses and financial difficulties.

Always review it, know what your money is doing and make changes as necessary.

When it comes to your income, there are ways to increase it, read how to double your income for ideas.

Do a full annual financial review to stay on top of your budget but aim to check-in at least once a month on all your finances.

Passive Income to Make You Rich

The above is all aimed more at personal finances.

We strongly believe in having multiple streams of income, as do most millionaires.

In fact, they typically have 7 income streams and business is usually included as at least 1 of those 7.

Here are some of the things we’ve done to make money that are mostly passive or require very little effort.

Rent The Garage

List it on Spacer or create and sign a contract with someone, hand over a key or remote for the garage and get paid.

The money is paid directly into your account each month, so there are rarely issues.

Check your insurance policy and if you aren’t using a site such as Spacer, then we strongly recommend having a solid contract.

Dividends From Shares

If you own shares of a company, you get paid dividends when they make a profit.

You can reinvest my dividends to build your portfolio faster then live off the dividends later if all goes well.

With a little research or using simple platforms, this can be easy but please do research before getting into any form of investing.

There is the risk that companies won’t make money or they will go bankrupt etc.

So start slow, and test your risk tolerance level and how you feel about it, learn everything you can and get professional advice before investing.

Some people can handle the ups and downs of the sharemarket; others find it extremely difficult.

Quit Like a Millionaire and The Simple Path to Wealth are two good books to explain this better.

Real Estate

When it’s good, it’s great but when it’s bad it’s a nightmare.

With a great property manager and tenants, real estate can be easy.

Rent money comes in, and expenses such as a mortgage, rates, insurance etc go out.

However, when tenants trash the property, don’t pay rent, the agent isn’t checking things or there is major damage, it can go south real quick.

Investing in property developments is another story.

They can be much easier and less stress with a good chance of capital gains from it.

With multiple ways to invest in property, it is up to you to do research, get professional advice and decide what works for you, if anything when it comes to real estate.

Websites/Blogging

When done well and outsourced, this can become relatively passive.

In the beginning, there is a fair bit of set up though and you need a good team plus systems in place to ensure it runs smoothly.

Check out how to make money blogging for ideas on how to get set up and make money with it.

That said, if you do it all yourself, it is NOT passive at all. Being a social media influencer isn’t passive either.

It’s a lot of photos, video, editing, trying products, writing, a good marketing plan etc.

It can be quite involved so don’t assume the 30 second video from someone with 1 million followers only took 30 seconds to create. It took much longer.