Turning the Stream Into a River

There are two obvious ways to find extra money to pay off debt:

• Save, scrimp and live frugally
• Earn more money

Combine the two and you'll get to where you're going faster.  When I first became a housewife, my focus was 100% on living frugally because I had no possible way of making extra money.  I found every hack I could to slash our budget and we were down to bare bones.

Since then, that bare bone living has become the norm for us and no longer feels like effort.  The habits we adopted through those first couple of years are now our lifestyle.  It is wonderful for frugal living to be so natural, but when it comes to wanting to make major changes, there isn't a lot of extras to scrimp in the budget.

So we move to option two: earn more income.

Through living frugally, I found the world of blogging.  Not really looking for a career, I monetized my blogs in the easiest ways possible - an Adsense ad here and an Amazon link there - until I had a trickle of an income.  I was amazed that I was making any money at all but it showed me that it was possible.

From there, I wanted to find every opportunity I could to make money from home, but I wanted to use my time wisely and not work hard for freebies.  I wanted cash and cash only.

As of today, I have a handful of different income streams that add up to a part-time job.  It's wonderful because I enjoy it and can make my own hours.  If I don't want to work, I don't.  If I want to make more money, I work more.  So the next step is to work more.  I want to take my steady stream of income and turn it into a rushing river that gains steam the more I work.

Through the course of this blog, I am sure I will mention here and there a little more about my income sources.  I know few things are as frustrating as having a blogger tell you that they have found an amazing and simple way to make money at home and then to have them not tell you what it is, but I run into the issue of competition.  Most don't share their secrets because if the secrets got out, the opportunities wouldn't exist.  But I am willing to share with you the sources through which I make some of my money:

• Selling my writing.
• Using writing platforms that pay based on traffic.
• Blogging ads on a few different blogs that I own.
• Selling merchandise in my blogging niche.
• Selling children's books.
• Inbox Dollars and Send Earnings which you'll find in my sidebar.
• Transcribing.

The key to having a decent work-from-home income is to have a lot of eggs in a lot of baskets.  I was striving to work for one hour a day but I am going to attempt to up it to two (three when I can) hours a day in order to double or triple my income.

Combined with an overly frugal lifestyle, this will surely make a huge difference in our debt destruction and will launch the snowball full speed downhill.