There’s never been a better time to invest and earn more money. Too many think a traditional 9-5 employment is the only way to earn income. That couldn’t be further from the truth. One of the best ways to earn more money is by investing in assets such as index funds.
I personally acquired my wealth by investing in index funds. Every two weeks, I would put in money in the S&P 500 in my 401k. I maxed out my 401k every single full year of employment. That’s a lot of money from my paycheck that I put into the markets.
I now have a net worth of $500k+ at just 28 years old. And I’m nowhere near being done until I reach that elusive millionaire status. Every year, I make an additional $25k – $50k from my investments alone. This is on top of the $200k I earn in my day job.
That’s a lot of extra income! Who couldn’t use that extra money? Invest and earn starts slowly but it begins to pick up steam later down the road. The more we invest, the more we earn. Many don’t even start investing because it’s very slow to begin with.
Maybe in the first year, you earn an extra $500. That’s only an extra $40/mo! People will say. However, over a decade, it can turn into additional tens of thousands of dollars in income. That’s what’s great about investment income. It compounds, unlike our 9-5 income.
The opportunities and the upside are unlimited. It’s a great source of income.
Invest and Earn: 9 Ways to Invest Your Money
Below are the 9 ways to invest and earn! We can always make more money. It’s time to put in the work and make our financial dreams a reality.
1) Index Funds
Index funds, specifically the S&P 500, is where I made my money. I strongly believe in them, even though results are not guaranteed. I currently have a net worth of $500k+ and I have no doubt index funds will get me to the millionaire status real quick.
Index funds are the best way to invest and earn because of how passive it is. In real estate investing, there are operational decisions that you have to make such as getting the tenant, screening them, and maintaining the property.
With index investing, all you’re doing is clicking a few buttons and you’re done! Bonus points if there’s automation involved. After a decade or two, you may even become the automatic millionaire. That’s the best kind of wealth. When you don’t even know you’re building wealth in the first place.
There’s even the juicy dividends to go along with the index funds, too. A win-win.
2) Invest and Earn: Dividend Stocks
I personally don’t recommend individual stock picking. However, a second way to invest and earn passively is by investing in dividend stocks. There are companies who make so much money that they don’t even know what to do with.
So they give the money back to their shareholders in the form of dividends. Companies who pay dividends know how to manage their cash very well because dividends are seen as a consistent way of generating cash flow to the investors.
There are great companies out there who not only grow in value but pay dividends to their shareholders. I personally haven’t dabbled in individual stock investing but great dividend paying companies are out there. Bonus points if they grow their dividend payouts to their investors.
It means business is so good that they can afford to payout more money every year.
3) Cash Flowing Businesses
Too many think investing is just investing in assets like real estate or stocks. However, we can actually acquire businesses to earn more money with. There are many that are on sale today online, just because they don’t want to manage the business anymore.
Some of these businesses have great margins with increasing revenue. A lot of these businesses are held by Boomers who want to retire and want to offload their businesses. And they’re not selling at a very high multiple, either!
There’s a lot of due diligence that’s involved with buying businesses. But the ones who figured it out and knows how to go through with the purchase get rewarded well. Coming from the blogging world, I would prefer to buy another blog to maintain as a business.
However, there are great brick and mortar business that are going for sale every day. It’s a non-conventional way to invest and earn.
4) High Yield Savings Accounts
From 2010 – 2021, people were laughing at high yield savings accounts. That’s because banks were only paying 0.01% interest on them! It was literally nothing. However, everything changed in 2022 and 2023. I personally have high yield savings accounts that yield over 4.5%!
And it was completely risk free. It was impossible to get risk free returns from the US government by buying Treasuries at 4%, let alone a high yield savings account. In 2022, that became possible. If we can invest and earn by taking on 0 risk, that’s as good as employment income.
Too many people scoff at 4.5% returns and think they need the 20% returns to build wealth. That’s not the case at all. The power of compound interest is real and it can’t be ignored. A consistent single digit return is better than double digit returns one year and negative returns the next.
Everyone thinks they can manage risk well until they lose six figures in their brokerage account.
5) Treasury Bills
In late 2022, 30-year Treasury bills were paying 4%+! That was an insane time. I had ~$400k at the time. If I put all of my money in the 30-year Treasury bills, that would give me an extra $16k/yr in risk free and guaranteed money for the next 30-years.
Wow! At my annual spending of ~$20 – $25k/year, that would’ve covered the majority of my expenses. Which means I could’ve been living for free. That possibility was unheard of from 2010 – 2021. We don’t need to take on outlandish risk to invest and earn.
We can go the income generating route and invest in risk free securities to grow our money with. As the Fed raised rates and cut off the availability of cheap debt and credit, savers won out in the end. By 2023, I earned an extra $1.5k/mo risk free.
That made all the difference in the world in giving me confidence at my 9-5 and in the wake of layoffs.
6) Your Education and Skillset
The best investment is an investment in yourself. When you can sell your education, knowledge, and specialized skillset, that’s where the income is made. That’s when you can upcharge for your services because replacing you would be more expensive than the salary they’re paying you.
I’m happy to have learned finance in college as that got me a high paying job by the end of it all. The best $10,000 investment is one that gets you an additional $25k per year in income. That’s an infinite ROI and too many people ignore this investment.
They just want to look for the next hottest stock they can put their money into. That’s not it. Invest and earn doesn’t just mean putting money into assets. It means investing your money that provides the best ROI. None of my friends’ investment incomes come close to my 9-5 income.
There’s a lesson there. Education is what sets people free. Knowledge is powerful.
7) Invest and Earn: Rental Properties
Investment and rental properties are a good way to invest and earn. Traditionally, real estate has not out performed stocks over the long term. However, investment properties are a different story. Some investment properties can outperform stocks because they are a form of active income.
Although this is one of the most active ways to earn more money, it’s still a good source of investment income. I personally want to get into the real estate game later down the road. It’s a physical property that you can touch and feel.
However, until I’m ready to, I’m holding my money where I want to hold it for now and going to slowly work into real estate down the road. There’s a reason the majority of millionaires own real estate. It’s a great way to build wealth and earn monthly income with the rental checks.
At a certain point, slow and steady has more worth than chasing the next big and hot investment that makes you millions.
8) Books
Knowledge is the best investment. Before I knew everything there is to know about personal finance, I invested myself into books. I learned how to manage my money and I learned the maths and principles it takes to get rich. I invested time into acquiring knowledge.
It was money well spent. A $10 book that gives you a $10,000 idea is worth the time spent to acquire the knowledge. Invest and earn by reading books is a great way to make more money. Knowledge doesn’t just happen to fall to your lap. You have to spend time to get the knowledge.
We can’t expect the results without the effort. Maybe the results are not as good as we hoped but we can’t get any results without any effort. My weekends after graduating college for two straight years was reading a book a week.
My friends were partying and going to bars but I read books. It’s paid a huge amount of dividends so far.
9) Advertisements
FaceBook Ads, TikTok Ads, Twitter Ads, and Instagram Ads are all worth it as long as you go through the hard process of learning what works and doesn’t. Advertisements, surprisingly, are worth the money when you have a business. I personally haven’t invested and earned income through ads yet.
However, I’ve personally seen business owners do it and gain great results. This is more so if you have a business that sells physical goods and products. Like a Shopify store. A $100 investment can turn into $500 investment in a short amount of time.
Invest and earn by investing into advertisements. It could be to sell a physical product, a service, or affiliate marketing. As the world moves to digital, businesses need to be smart about allocating their precious resources into investing in the best producing ROIs.
Creating engagement is a valuable skill that can be monetized. The creator economy is wonderful.
Invest and Earn: My Story
I wanted wealth, money, and power when I was in college. So I did everything I could in college to earn more money. I worked every single summers and saved as much money as I could. After graduation, I didn’t let the flame die out. I kept the same invest and earn mentality.
I would save 50%+ of every paycheck, living in cockroach invested places for $600 – $750/month. Because I was young and single, there was no one else that I needed to take care of. After months and months of saving and investing, the results showed!
I reached a $100k net worth at the young age of 23. Then I kept getting promotions after promotions and I kept going with the same principles. After ~5 years of saving and investing a majority of my income, I reached a $400k net worth! At just 26 years old!
Some months would bring me more income than I did at my day job. 2 years later, I have a net worth of $500k to think about. It would just take one doubling of my money to reach the millionaire status. Throughout the years, I never lost the goal to invest and earn.
The only way I will slow down is when I already reach the millionaire mark. I have no desire to slow down or stop before I reach that mark and by then, I will already be so used to earning investment income that it will be on autopilot.
The journey was definitely worth it and I would do it all over again in a second.
Invest and Earn to Make More Money
There’s a limit to how much money we can save but there’s no limit to how much money we can earn. We don’t have to depend solely on our 9-5 income to build wealth with. We can make our money work for us and invest and earn more money.
The goal should always be to earn more money and not to cut as much expenses as you can. I’ve done that and I regret focusing so much on cutting as much expenses when I should have focused on increasing my income.
With a 9-5, you may get a 2 – 5% standard raise. With investment income, the opportunities are unlimited. I increase my income by 10 – 33% every year because I make my money work for me instead of the other way around.
We can’t depend on our employers because an industry may be going down or they just had a change of heart or a number of other different factors that causes layoffs. We have to take care of our own financial situation and use capital the best way we can to one day surpass our 9-5 income.
Even though my 9-5 income is already high at $200k, I can’t wait for my investment income to surpass that number and get to $300k/yr. The great thing is that I see a path to invest and earn more money to get to the $300k/yr figure from investment income, alone.
All I need is a little bit more time and everything will take care of itself.
Invest and Earn: 9 Ways Shortlist
- Index funds
- Invest and earn: dividend stocks
- Cash flowing businesses
- High yield savings accounts
- Treasury bills
- Your education and skillset
- Invest and earn: rental properties
- Books
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