108. How to Optimize Your Income: From Side Hustles to Salary Increases

Ready to optimize your income and reach your financial goals faster? In this episode, we explore practical strategies to increase your income without sacrificing family time or burning out. Whether you're a stay-at-home mom, working parent, or career-driven professional, you'll discover actionable tips to grow your income:

✅ Negotiate a raise or promotion effectively.
✅ Start a side hustle that fits your lifestyle.
✅ Leverage employer benefits and professional development opportunities.
✅ Explore 10 profitable side hustles for 2025.

Don’t let financial goals feel out of reach—take control of your income today! 🌟

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Transcript

Laura: 0:03

hello and welcome to money and career mastery from overwhelmed to ownership. I'm Laura Sexton, your abundance and legacy coach here to help you navigate the world of money, debt payoff, and career growth with confidence and clarity. In this podcast, we'll tackle the financial and career challenges, holding you back, optimize your income and build the freedom that comes with true ownership. If you're ready to break free from overwhelm, create a budget that aligns with your values and design a legacy that empowers future generations. You're in the right place. Hey Accelerators! Today we're going to talk about optimizing your income because let's be honest, who doesn't want to optimize their income? Everybody here would be happy with more money coming in. If you are trying to hit any kind of financial goal at all inside of your family and you are a stay at home mom, I've got ideas for you to optimize your income while you're home. If you are a working parent, I have ways for you to optimize your income without having to lose time with your children. So please listen to me when I tell you I've got ways for you to optimize your income, be it in the job that you're currently in or having to add something on the side or Finding something that really lights you up and going to do that too. So optimizing your income, it is a key strategy toward, financial mastery. I have had people that I've worked with that have. Implemented each of these strategies that I'm going to give you today. All of them have been able to increase their income in some way, shape, or form in order to hit their financial goals. You know how important I think it is to have a goal, go after that goal and do it in a way that is sustainable. I don't want you to be putting yourself in a position where you are running yourself ragged. and not getting anywhere. I don't want you spinning your wheels. I want you focused, moving forward and increasing your income. You can do all of these things at once. So let's talk about exploring your opportunities for growth. Let's say that you are currently in a role. that you love. This is your dream job and you're sitting here going, Laura, I don't want to do anything to jeopardize this. Well, guess what? That's wonderful. I'm so excited that you were in your dream role and that you're loving what you're doing right now. But now may be the time to go ahead and ask for a raise. If you own your own business, January is a great time to increase your rates. If you are a coach, January is a great time to increase your rates. If you're me, I increase my rates in the middle of summer because I have a new Year starts in August. But if you don't own your own business, and you want to go into your employer, and you want to ask about a raise, there are ways to do this responsibly, without going in and going, hey, give me more money. Because nobody likes that. You need to put yourself in the other person's shoes first and foremost. You want to walk in and think about it as if somebody is walking into your office and asking you for more money. What would you like to see from them before you agree or disagree? In some instances, you've been working at a job and especially women. Women are so bad about asking for a raise. Men will ask for a raise two to three times a year, whereas women ask once every 18 months. So let's talk about how to prepare and make your case. If you're going to be walking in, walk in humbly. And an attitude of curiosity, ask them about what it would look like for you to continue to help continue to grow within the company, expand your income producing potential make more money yourself. Sometimes what we need to do is we need to do some market research. If you have been working in a job and you haven't asked for a raise in quite some time, the best thing for you to do is to look online and see what your role is currently. If there are people in your industry and they are making 10, 000 more per month, it's an okay thing to bring in that statistic. If there are people in your role and they're making 5, 000 less, you still have to be prepared with that statistic, but that doesn't mean that you can't go in and say, Hey, I've been with the company for this many years, and I want to know what it would take. For me to continue to grow in this position so that I can earn more money, we're not going in and demanding more money. We're not even going in and necessarily asking for a specific dollar amount. But what we're asking for is a chance to increase our value within the company and then have that reciprocated. That said, if you're within your current role and you are loving it, you can also ask to expand your responsibilities or take on a new project that will increase your value to the company. This not only stretches you and makes the work more fun, but it gives you a chance to prove what it is you can give to this company and it gives you a chance to prove that you were worth the increase in pay that you were asking for. These are great ways for you to stay in your current role and increase value. Now what you don't want, if you're in your sweet spot and this is your current role and you were loving this, you don't need a promotion. Sometimes service providers get this wrong or salespeople get this wrong where they are really good at sales or they are really good at fixing cars and they get moved up to a management position and they are terrible at managing people. That's not what you want. Make sure that you are within your sweet spot, still enjoying what you can do for this company. Do not allow yourself to be moved out of your sweet spot because of the promise of more money. More money does not mean more fulfillment. Now, let's say that you were working on a really big financial goal. Maybe you're working on paying off debt, which you know is one of my favorite things. Maybe you're focused in on saving for a house or a car and you're thinking the best thing I could do right now is a side hustle. Maybe you're a stay at home mom and you don't want to push beyond, you don't want to have to start your own business. You don't want to have to add anything extra to your plate, but you're still trying really hard to reach this goal. A side hustle is a great way to do that. So I'm going to give you 10 popular and profitable side hustles that you can do in 2025. And you can do them while still being at home with your child or maybe taking them with you. The first of which is freelance writing or editing. If you have writing and editing schools for businesses, for websites, for individuals, for writers, you're gravely needed. People need your help because guess what? Even with AI, it's not easy to write things and it's not easy to edit things. The computers get it wrong sometimes or they make it sound like a computer wrote it. We need people writing words to people and sometimes we are flying through things and we make silly mistakes that an editor could fix. Freelance writing and editing can also be done during your child's nap time. It can be done After they go to bed, it can be done at all hours of the day or night. Similarly would be number two, graphic design services, creating logos, marketing materials, or social media graphics for clients. I'm terrible at this. I outsource these things. I hire a graphic designer. Specifically, I hired someone to create graphics for my new podcast. Hello. Thank you. If you were listening to money and career mastery, you see this brand new logo and it was done by someone else. Thank you. Kelly Gibbs creative. She was able to make this for me because she has the eye for making things beautiful. And I can decide what I like and what I don't like, but I don't know how to make things come together at all. Option number three for an excellent and profitable side hustle would be online tutoring. Teaching subjects to that you are proficient in. Oh my goodness. It's so needed if somebody were to come to me and say, Hey I'm a reading tutor. I can help your child get better reading. Yes, please. And thank you. There are ways that you can tutor people in other countries to learn to speak English where you don't have to worry about doing any of the translating. You only do the English side. That pays a lot of money. So definitely look into online tutoring. If you are great at guitar or piano or anything like that, having a side business where you were teaching somebody something important. You want to be doing this. Number three. Nope. I have two number threes. Number four, pet sitting or dog walking, providing pet care services in your local area. You can either do it at somebody's house or at your house. My mother has started doing this recently where she put up a sign and said, Hey, if you need somebody to watch your dog overnight I'm the person. We love dogs. Bring them over. She does this for cats. This is just a really easy side hustle that she started that she can keep herself busy and she loves dogs. So pet sitting, dog walking, house sitting, baby sitting, all the sitting. Guys, these are things that people need and having somebody reliable and dependable. Please. It's worth the money and people will pay for it. Number five, become a virtual assistant. You get to assist businesses or entrepreneurs with administrative tasks and you can do it remotely. A virtual assistant is 100 percent remote and 100 percent necessary. Businesses that have a virtual assistant are so blessed. And these are things you can do from home, making calls, responding to emails, setting up funnels. These are all things that you have the ability to do from home. Side hustle number six, handyman services. Maybe you are one of these people that can offer to repair or to maintenance services for homes or businesses. Let me tell you, there are people that live near me that pay my friend to come put in light bulbs. I could do that. I could put it in the light bulb for you. I'll climb up. Well, not while I'm pregnant, but I'll climb up a ladder and do your light bulbs for you. There are just some people that aren't handy. And if you can be that handy person and you can help with little things around the house, people pay really good money for that. Ikea even has people that they pay to put furniture together and then it gets delivered to your house fully finished. You don't have to do the things that you don't want to do. You can hire somebody for that. Or you can be that person. You can be that handyman. You can be the one doing that. And let me tell you, friends, if you are a handyman or handywoman, and you can teach other people to do that, teaching other people how to be handy around the house is definitely a good job that you should look into. That wasn't a side hustle I had written down, but it's definitely one that you could do. Side hustle number seven is ride share driving. You guys know about Uber and Lyft. You know you can do it during your spare time. And if you live near an airport, there is a premium rate for driving people to and from the airport. It may not be the most glamorous job, and you may not want to do it. Because for me, having somebody I don't know get in my car makes me uncomfortable. But I know plenty of people that do Uber and Lyft and make good money. So that is an option. Another option that does involve your car, but doesn't involve as many people, especially not people in your space, is delivery services. Now this could be things from. Amazon Flex, where you're delivering packages. It could be DoorDash. But there's Instacart. That's the one. Instacart. You could go to go shopping for people. I have clients that have shopping desires. They just really want to be shopping all the time. And so what we have put in place for them is they're not doing their own shopping. They're doing somebody else's shopping. They're still getting the dopamine hit of swiping the card and making the purchase, but it's not their purchase. And in fact, what this is doing is it's continuing to decrease their dependence on the swipe, decrease the dopamine hit that they get when they make their own purchases. So if you have a desire to impulse shop, And you were trying to get out of debt and you're trying to stop using your credit cards. Getting in with Instacart and doing some shopping for other people is a really great way to give yourself immersion therapy. Number nine, rent out a room in your house. If you have a spare room or an income producing connected to your home, you can use Airbnb or VRBO and have short term rentals coming in, especially if you live in a college town. Having an ADU, an additional dwelling unit, having something like that could be incredibly valuable to bring in money. However, you do have people in your space. And so that may not be for everybody, but I have friends that have their own Airbnb and they can make a decent amount of money by having people come in. And theirs is. in their backyard, but it's not, they don't have to interact with that person all the time. So it's not like they are sharing a room and a bathroom. It's not like that. I have clients that rent out a room in their apartment or in their house, and they love it because they found somebody that they enjoy spending time with. And so there are pluses and there are minuses and you choose for yourself. The last one would be selling handmade crafts, creating and selling crafts on platforms like Etsy. Michaels now has a new platform for handmade crafts only, and sometimes just doing something with your hands, taking up that time, can really help your brain develop. It can help you keep your mind off of the things you may not be having. Now listen, If you are going to do any of these side hustles, you need to make sure that you are balancing any extra work with your family, your self care, and if you are working outside the home, your actual job. Now doing something like a delivery service, you can bring your kids along, they can be in the back seat and you can deliver things. That's great. Bring your kids along, whatever it is you decide to do. Pet sitting, dog sitting, bring your kids along. Maybe not ride sharing. That would be difficult, but you know, if, if you're going to do anything, balance out the family and the self care, but know that hitting a goal quickly is the best way to get it done. Do not use your family as an excuse to not hit your goals because eventually you will grow to resent them instead of feeling a little bit guilty for a short period of time for missing out. So as we're exploring opportunities for growth, there's one key area that we all should focus on, and that is skill building. They're free and low cost ways to learn in demand skills. I know our community centers have plenty of classes in adult education to teach you things like Excel, coding QuickBooks, you can learn to do other people's books, which would be invaluable if you decide to be a virtual assistant. You can learn these things at low cost. There are ways to learn them at a very high cost. I don't recommend those because your ROI is not going to be there, but there are plenty of resources, online courses, webinars, mentorships. If you feel like being a handyman, but you don't feel like you're handy enough, start working with somebody else that is a handyman and learn from them so that they can help you grow in your skillset. I think everyone should have a mentor and a mentee. You are a few steps ahead of somebody else, and there's somebody that's a few steps ahead of you. Leverage your relationships. Build your skills out. Learn from people. Be in association with other people. Spend time with people. I think this is one thing that we are really lacking in today's society. Spend time with people. Real people. Face to face in front of them. My friends, I want you to think beyond the paycheck as well. While we are optimizing our income, think beyond the paycheck. This could mean leveraging employer benefits that some, one of my clients has tuition reimbursement as she's going and getting her doctoral degree, her boss is paying her per class. If she passes the class, they reimburse her tuition. Now you will need to have tuition for the first semester upfront. So you will want to save up that money so that you can pay that not take out a student loan, but pay that first tuition, that first semester tuition. And then they will reimburse that payment and you can use that reimbursement to pay the next month. But then when you finish that final semester, the tuition reimbursement that you get from your employer just goes back in your pocket because you fronted the initial semester's tuition. Many employers have professional development budgets. They want to grow. They're employees. They want you to stick with them. They don't want you to run off and be looking to leave for an extra, you know, an extra penny or quarter here. We are currently in a place where 55 percent of employees say that they would leave their current position if the new employer offered a higher 401k match. They really love a forced savings benefit. But employees have also come to rely on their employers for other things like support, building emergency savings and navigating financial decisions. And if that's you, if you've asked your employer to help you make a budget, or you've asked your employer for more money, because you were part of the 89 percent that experienced anxiety due to day to day finances, ask your boss, if they want to do a financial wellness program, ask your boss what go to HR and find out what kind of benefits they are giving you. And if they don't have a financial wellness benefit, reach out to me and I will help you get that set up inside of your company. The benefits that they have for you at the company are because they want you to stay. They want you to be a part of the company long term. So utilize those benefits. Don't let them sit by the wayside. Go to HR and ask what they are. Ask for some information about tuition reimbursement or I have one former client that works at a company and they have the most outrageous benefits and she just had to ask and they were able to give her extra in many different areas, including mental health support, which ended up being incredibly impactful for her. What I don't want you to do is get swayed by the idea of a passive income opportunity. There are a lot of people that are like, Oh, just arbitrage, arbitrage, arbitrage, meh. No. Do not put yourself in a position of risk in order to have a passive income. You don't need to go out and buy a brand new car and put it up on Turo. The risk there outweighs the reward. Be sure that your passive income right now, while you were working on these big financial goals, paying off debt and saving for emergency savings, or whatever your goal is right now, the only passive income that you need to be focused on is what is currently growing in your 401k, and we're not even adding anything to that right now. Passive income tends to be a myth. People that are like, oh, we have renters. It's passive income. Do you have any idea how hard it is to deal with renters? Have you ever dealt with humanity? Like, people do not always behave in the best ways. So let's try to use our smarts instead of trying to follow a TikTok trend. All right, my friends, that is going to be it for this podcast, or we talked about optimizing your income. I encourage you to reflect on your current situation and write down a couple different ways that you can increase your income potential. Then I want you to reach out to me and let me know what that, what one step you're willing to take towards optimizing your income this week. Is there a side hustle that you're wanting to start? Are you wanting to have a conversation with your boss about increasing your salary? What is it that you, are you planning on going to HR and figuring out if there is an employer benefit that you have not been utilizing? All of these are great ideas and I would love to help you along the way. If you've never made a budget and so you don't even know what kind of income you need to make all of your financial dreams come true, Then you need the Better Budget Bootcamp. In 15 minutes a day for five days, I will help you create a budget that is perfect for you and your family because it is based on your values and what matters most to you. So I highly recommend going over to my website, AccelerateYourLegacy. com slash resources and checking out the Better Budget Bootcamp. That's it for this week, Accelerators. Go out and make a difference. thank you for spending time with us today on Money and Career Mastery from Overwhelm to Ownership. Remember, your legacy isn't just about financial freedom. It's about living with purpose, taking action, and building a foundation that lasts for generations. Don't just listen, implement what you've learned and share it with someone who could use a financial or career breakthrough. If you found value in today's episode, help us grow by rating, reviewing, and sharing the podcast. I'll be back next week with more strategies to help you master your money and career. Until then take ownership of your future and build your legacy with intention.