5 Ways to Earn More Money (and how to work less)
Sep 26, 2026Read time - 4 minutes / Disclosure
Today let's review 5 ways to earn more money (and how to work less).
Earning more money can:
- Reduce your stress.
- Boost your savings.
- Help make 9-5 life optional sooner.
Unfortunately, there's only 24 hours in a day.
The Dilemma
According to the American Time Use Survey, most people spend weekdays like this:
- 3 hours on leisure.
- 8 hours working a job.
- 9 hours on personal care (includes sleeping).
Plus 4 hours doing things like chores, eating, shopping and caring for family.
While there's many hours in a day.
There's limits to how many hours a person can actually work.
"Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you can't get more time."
— Jim Rohn
Like most people, I was excited to get my first full-time job.
Meeting new people, learning new things and feeling like my contributions mattered felt great.
But as time passed, I realized I needed to make more money.
And the fastest solution I could come up with at the time..
Was to work more hours.
In the beginning, it was great watching my paychecks grow larger.
And I felt lucky my job let me work extra hours.
But as time went on, I realized working 50-60 hour weeks wasn't something I wanted to do forever.
And figured there had to be a better way.
A smarter way to make more money.
A way that didn't cut into my personal time with my friends and family.
The Smart Money
As a younger person, I didn't know any millionaires.
Everyone I knew worked an average job making average money.
And of course there's nothing wrong with doing that.
But I wanted the option to leave 9-5 life ten or twenty years early.
To be able to do my own thing.
To have more control over my time.
So I started reading books written by wealthy people.
People who built wealth starting from scratch (because I was starting from scratch too).
- Books on money.
- Books on investing.
- Books on real estate.
Most of the books said the same 3 things:
1. Find ways to earn more without working more.
2. Find ways to earn while working less.
3. Find ways to earn without working.
And they gave many examples.
So I started to think about which ways would work best for my money goals.
The Passive Income Escalator
After working in banking for 10 years in my 30s.
And watching everyday Americans become millionaires starting from scratch.
These became my 5 favorite ways to build wealth to:
- Earn more without working more.
- Earn while working less.
- Earn without working.
Here they are broken down:
Let's dive into the 5 ways:
1. 9-5 Job Income Options
Earn more money with a 9-5 job.
Here's 2 common strategies:
1. Getting a promotion.
Working closely with your boss to grow within the company can mean getting a 10%+ raise if offered a promotion.
Someone making $70,000 per year that get's a 10% raise means making $7,000 more per year.
2. Job hopping.
This means doing the exact same job for a different employer.
Changing employers can also come with a 10%+ raise.
Especially if you're good at what you do, other employers may be willing to pay more for the exact same work.
Another strategy for someone who doesn't want to leave their current employer is to get a better job offer someplace else.
And give a copy of that better job offer to their current employer while asking the current employer if they can match the better job offer.
Changing your job title or changing an employer can boost your paycheck fast.
2. Small Business Income Options
Earn money with a small business.
Turn your knowledge into income.
Starting a small online business part-time has never been easier (or cheaper).
And there's many ways to make money.
Here's 3 ways:
1. Course income.
Getting paid after creating a course on a topic you know a lot about and selling the course online.
2. Sponsorships.
Getting paid to allow a company to advertise their products to your customers.
3. Affiliate revenue.
Getting paid to promote another companies products to your customers.
My favorite person to learn these things from while building Millennial Wealth (this little online business) is Justin Welsh.
He built his own little online business with no employees from $0 to $15M in 7 years.
Your expertise is worth more as content than it is as labor.
— Justin Welsh (@thejustinwelsh) October 21, 2025
Starting your own little online business has never been easier or cheaper (but does take time to figure things out).
3. Individual Stock Income Options
Earn money with individual stocks.
This means deciding which stocks to buy.
And doing research on a company to decide if it's worth buying which means researching:
Doing these things take time and patience.
2 ways to earn money with individual stocks include:
1. Stock appreciation.
The value of a stock's price going up over time.
2. Options premium.
Selling covered calls and cash-secured puts is a more advanced way to earn money with stocks.
Earning money from stock appreciation or stock options comes with risk (it's important to learn first before doing).
A good reminder...
"Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing."
— Warren Buffett
4. Real Estate Income Options
Earn money with real estate.
There's many ways to make money with real estate.
A common way since the 1960s has been to get a loan to buy a home and simply keep it long term:
History of house prices
2 more of my favorite ways to make money with real estate include:
1. Buying a house with a loan and turning it into a rental property.
The tenant pays off the loan slowly over time until the property has no loan.
2. Renting out part of a house.
Renting out a room or a completely separate living area can mean an extra $700 - $1,500 in monthly income.
Which can help lower your monthly costs, big time.
There's many ways to make money with real estate, some ways are more passive than others.
5. Stock Fund Income Options
Earn money with a stock fund.
A big perk with owning a stock fund is:
Not having to decide which stocks to buy.
For example.
One of the largest stock funds is VOO (The Vanguard S&P500 ETF).
It includes 500 of the largest companies in the U.S.
Which means $100 invested in an S&P500 fund like VOO means automatically owning:
- NVDA stock.
- Apple stock.
- Microsoft stock.
- Amazon stock.
- Google stock.
Plus 495 other stocks.
Stocks from the 500 largest companies in the U.S. have been growing 10% per year on average the past 30 years.
Stock market history
Buying a stock fund is one of the most passive ways to invest.
The bottom line
Over the years I've tinkered with all of these different strategies.
But the 3 that seemed to help me the most going from $80k in debt at 29 to $1M net worth at 36 were:
1. Finding ways to make more money at work (without having to work more like promotions or job hopping).
2. Investing the raises I got into an S&P500 Fund inside my retirement account and doing the same thing in a non-retirement account (also called a brokerage account, or a general investing account).
3. Getting my finances right so I could get loans to buy real estate and hang on to those properties long term.
Buying homes with a separate area I could rent out to help keep my monthly payments down became one of my favorite strategies (plus, I found it nicer to not have to share a kitchen or a common living area with a renter.)
Most of these things I learned through trial and error.
Which means I've also made lots of mistakes along the way.
Many of them!
But learning how other people built wealth eventually helped me figure out my own path starting from scratch.
And everyone's wealth building journey looks a bit different.
If you're near the beginning of your journey. I hope sharing the things I've learned is useful in some way.
If you're further along on your journey.
Maybe you just paid off a credit card.
Or maybe you just hit $10k in investments.
Or just bought your first house.
Or hit $100k+ in investments.
Congrats! It can feel tough figuring these things out.
But they're so worth doin'.
And I'm glad to have you here with me. Thanks for reading.
That's all for today.
See you next Saturday.
