Do you believe that earning more money will help you attain financial success? Truth is yes, but only if you know just what to do with your money. There’s a large possibility that your financial struggle doesn’t cease to exist just because you earn more money. It’s more about how you manage your money that makes the real difference. Very often you may get a pay hike, bonuses, incentives, cash certificates, return on investments, dividends from stocks and many more cash boons but at the end of the day you are again left with no money.

It isn’t so much about earning more money but how you handle your money is the important question. What do you do with that extra money? Save it in the piggy bank so you can use it on a rainy day, or go and buy the latest gadget that you have been eying for a while. Most people fit in this category. However there are those who know just what to do with their money. Every time a little money comes in, they invest it. It’s the best thing to do, just pretend the extra money did not come along. Quite simply you were managing rather well without the money all these months so why should it be any different now. As soon as you get extra cash, invest it safely and have the money work for you. You can save it at the bank or invest in stocks if you’re already keen in the share market.

You can even start putting your money to back small time investors and businessmen and get a return on your capital. Truth is if you are patient you’ll actually see money grow. Your small investment will start giving you dividends and you can choose to reinvest that money or simply use that money to meet your fancies rather than waste the capital. Whenever there’s a chance of receiving additional finances think of ways of putting that money away. Every dollar that you put away is every dollar saved. And if you got into the habit of saving now, then there’s no need to wait for a pay hike anymore because your little investments will start getting in more and more money for you. Your financial success is dependent on how much money you can save rather than how much you can earn.

If you’re giving nothing you should expect to get nothing. If what you give has little value you should expect to get something of little value. For as much as you want to get be willing to give the same. In other words, don’t expect to pay a dollar for something worth a million dollars. For a dollar you usually get something worth a dollar. And if you’re the one with the product or service for sale, don’t expect people to pay you a million dollars for something that’s worth a dollar. When you give value you will usually get value. Likewise when you give nothing you will usually get nothing.

Applied to the input of effort on your own behalf with regard to making money, if you make little effort you will get little result. Granted sometimes you can put forth tremendous effort and still not get what you go after; but that could be because you went fishing where there was no life in the water. No amount of determination and will can manifest fish in water where there is no life.

Be practical about your approach to making money. If you’re going to rely on hope, play the lottery. Risking your dollar on a game of chance makes more sense than sitting back and waiting for something to happen.

You want big money? You need to face the reality of what getting big money entails. If you’re clueless how to make big money you need to get a clue to begin with. What are your plans? Step by step, how are you going to make your money? Let’s get serious now. Imagining your website will suddenly turn out millions after years of tuning out pennies is relying on crazy hope. Here are some lotto numbers in that case (08,17,27,39,41,50).

In the meantime stop dreaming about easy money. Money that comes easily usually goes as easily.

Whether it’s a product or a service, to make money you generally need to be selling something. So what are you selling? If you don’t have a product or service to sell how are you hoping to make your money? People give money in exchange for something they need or want that someone else possesses and is willing to sell to them. Is there anything you have that people want that you’re willing to sell?

Look at this picture of a young Indonesian boy who has found a doll in the trash at the village dump. He’s smiling. He feels joy or pride or both. In the background you can see a woman. Maybe a mother. Maybe a grandmother. She’s also smiling, happy for the child possibly. Do you feel pity for them? These people are happy about items they’re finding in trash and we look at them, at their happy, smiling faces, and we pity them. We wouldn’t want to be them. Yet we don’t know the last time we smiled; the last time we felt happy about anything, however small, because for us happiness is measured in how much money we have, how many high tech toys we can go out and purchase. Our lives are reduced to our need to make money so we can afford to have brand new shiny gadgets; and if we’re not making money, if we can’t afford the gadgets, we go through life sulking and complaining.

Everybody is looking to make money. In many cases money is as necessary to sustain life as oxygen. Unless you live where you can grow your own food and build your own shelter, you need money to in order to fill two of most important human needs. For this reason, to ensure their survival and the survival of their offspring most adults are forced to prioritize making money over any other interest or preoccupation. Even the rich people who have money work every day to make more money. We live in a world where everything is about money.

But for many of us, it isn’t that we don’t have money enough to feed and clothe and shelter ourselves. We just want to have a certain amount of money so we live at a certain level of life and for as long as we don’t have that certain amount of money we’re depressed and angry and disenchanted with life.

For some people, lack of money is so much the reality that there isn’t that sense of abject misery or those feelings of hopelessness and desperation the rest of us feel when our bank account balance drops to zero. The idea of a bank account for these people is unheard of. They struggle to scrape two coins together and yet they can still find reasons to smile. We shouldn’t pity these people. We should learn something from them. We should take note of how genuinely happy they look and we should realize that, while it’s perfectly acceptable to want to make money and to wake up everyday and set off on a mission of making money, we shouldn’t be allowing money to control our lives to the point where we can’t get any joy out of life because we only have five dollars in our wallet.

Photo credit:

A boy from an East Cipinang trash dump slum shows his find, Jakarta Indonesia. Picture taken by Jonathan McIntosh, 2004.