Live more comfortable and earn extra money

[CottonCandyCrank]

This seems to be the most popular thread so thought id post here and hopefully get more advise

The title says it all. I want to be able to live more comfortably. I come from a family that's always just got by, pay to pay, month to month. And I want better for us. I've not any qualifications and never went to uni.. so basically need advise on what is available without any of that.

I work part time/term time currently as it fits around my child at school and saves on childcare during school holidays. Partner works full time and earns an average wage. Between us we earn around 50k per annum (before tax) and it's in and out each month. We are all happy and healthy, we have a small semi house, we can just about manage 1 holiday abroad a year (but that uses the years savings) I have no extra savings should we need a new car/kitchen. Both our cars are over 10/15 years old. Partner does all (or the majority) of the DIY in the house. I help where I can, painting, flooring etc.

I don't want money to be flashy and buy designer clothes, expensive cars or upgrade to a bigger house, I just want to save more for possible uni fees, mortgage to be paid off, pensions, savings, newer cars etc. And to not live pay to pay.

I would love ideas to enable me to pay off my mortgage as my first goal. One less thing to worry about each month. I want to have plenty of savings in my bank.

I would love to work freelance to enable me to travel and earn money and I also want out of the UK to live somewhere with a nicer climate and a better lifestyle. Ideally Spain or Balearics but that wont likely come to fruition. Just somewhere where the weather is warm and the people are more relaxed and chilled. Less busy.

I just want something else to work towards to better our financial situation to enable us more freedom as a family and to give my children a better life. Where do people start? How to find the opportunity's? What is there to do? I'm not talking social media (tik tok and the likes) I hate being behind a camera. What are good ways to earn extra money online? Not selling old clothes etc, I do that when I can. But something that can give me a steady income each week/month? Where I dont have to risk losing money.
I need some inspiration or ideas on where to start to get me out of this lull I'm in.

People who earn in excess off 100k per annum.. what's the secret? What do you do for a job? Reading a thread on here about savings people have.. I want that 🤑 It's got me thinking what do people do to get so wealthy? And where the hell do you start?

What are the prospects in your current job? Do you have any time to set up a business or do some freelance work? What are your partners prospects?

There is no easy way really. You can monetise skills you already have or could learn, I have friends who have started doing things like that while on maternity and have made some money from it each month but just extra pocket money amounts really rather than mortgage amounts.

Investing can be a good option but you need to have money to put in initially and you need to be prepared to lose it, so if you’re not looking for something you need to put money into and don’t want to risk/can’t afford the loss then that’s not a viable option.

In your position I’d be looking at both of your careers to see where you can make extra money or work your way up. If that’s not possible where you are then think about transferable skills and what jobs you could do instead with better earning potential. It’s easier to focus on one thing than to spread yourself thin and wait for one of the things you’re giving some time to to take off.

I'd say it's not very 'sexy' but could you get a job as a bartender a few nights a week? (If your current role is school hours) That's probably your best bet of immediate income.

I earn well over 100k without a degree, but honestly it's been a huge slog to get here. Think working 60 hour weeks with a newborn and strategising every move and promotion in my career. I'm very happy now, and my role is incredibly flexible around DS, but I made big sacrifices to make it happen (that everyone else thought I was crazy doing). Everyone else I know on the same salary either had family backing for an amazing uni experience getting top marks, or had a degree and a huge drive from their early career, or was a coding genius.

You either need a side hustle or, or a full time job with good career progression.

What qualifications do you have?
The easiest way to earn more is for both you and your partner to improve your job prospects.

What do you do for jobs? Would you consider emigrating?

You can also make sure that every penny you have works for you. I use cards/ accounts that give cashback on spending. Any money that isn't earmarked for mortgage or bills goes in to savings account. We use credit cards for every day spending and pay them off at the end of the month from that account so we get a bit of interest. I use top cashback too. You can even use it on groceries.
It doesn't sound like much but it adds up over the year.

What do you currently do for work, and are there transferable skills there? For example, I’m a CoSec as a day job but do a bit on the side minute-taking and Board support for schools, small charities, community orgs which only need a few hours’ a month of this stuff rather a salaried employee. Can you do anything like that? Or can one of you even just pick up bar or retail shifts part time? In terms of getting to £100K - I’m at that level and I think it’s really just focusing on your careers, and e.g. prioritising salaries and bonuses over flexitime and being able to do school pick up etc. £50k joint means you’re both earning barely above NMW right now - is there scope for working your way up in seniority and progression, which is often more about effort rather than qualifications?

You’re looking ahead to e.g. pensions, saving for university and paying off the mortgage: for many families with young children this isn’t something they can really begin to think about until DC are older and they’re less wrapped up in caring for them and can focus on promotions and industry moves for themselves. It’s good to look towards future financial security, but also to be aware of your limitations right now and avoid getting despondent at not “having it all.”

I am office admin, apart from moving from part time to full time business manager or bursar, that's as far as I can go... currently. Once my little girl is old enough to be left home alone during school holidays, I can then move out of part time/term time only and get a business manager role elsewhere. But the cost of childcare during school holidays and before and after school club, I don't see the point yet and we do enjoy our time together in the holidays. Apart from last week.. that was shit as weather was pants 😂 It will be around 8 years minimum before I will be able to make that move tho.

I do have time in an afternoon and evening to do freelance or set a business up but it's what business to start or where to find freelance. I see all this all over of people selling digital marketing strategies and Amazon affiliates but I don't want to spend money if it's fake. Some will be legit I know but it's finding one.

My partner is a hgv driver, he earns good pay for our area, but for him to make better money, he would have to work away all week and neither of us want that as he will miss quality time with our youngest and you don't get that back. He can't really move up Or to go alone doing something else, but he is full time and it's when he can fit it in.

Yes investments seems a good way, but unfortunately I don't have the initial funds to put in. Plus zero experience.. I wouldn't even know where to start

What do you do? If you dont mind sharing?
Since turning 30, I've blinked and I'll be 40 really soon... I feel like time is going by so fast and I've gotten nowhere in life.

I do suffer with interview anxiety terribly, its crippling and that has really held me back in so many ways. I've had 2 jobs my whole adult life because of this, I've had promotions but only through moving up and not needing to go through the interview process 🫣 I'd love to work in crime/coroner office/forensics. Some I can't as I don't have the uni degree, but some I've been to petrified to apply. It sounds ridiculous but it is so delibitating

Office admin and hgv driver. Someone has to do it 😂

But yes we would absolutely love to emigrate, but it's how we can or where we can now, we don't have skilled roles and I'm not sure if we are to old now to get working visas 😂

Remote work anywhere in the world would be great but again without experience or knowing where to start, it's near impossible to get the chance too

I earn just over £160k a year.

I do this by working long hours, having lots of relevant qualifications, and generally being very dedicated to my work (eg, commuting a few times a week meaning 5am starts, doing lots of things outside my comfort zone like speaking at conferences).

You’re being very unrealistic if you think you can increase your earning potential massively with the wishlist you have.

Qualify as an accountant (CIMA) and go work in finance.

If you can do office admin then you could probably move into project manager or office manager type roles, even a PA. But you might need to take a step down in order to go up if you don’t have experience in that field and it’s hard to find new opportunities that are only part time…..but short term pain of paying for childcare in the holidays or working away from home often pays off in the long term.

Really with investing you need a decent amount of money to start up & you either need the knowledge to do it yourself OR you need to pay someone who had the knowledge to do it for you. It can bring great returns but it’s not without risk & it’s not without a cost to yourself to start or continue if paying for advice.

I'm a business support officer in a school so transferable skills in that kind of work, yes. Previous work was payroll. I only work 20 hours a week term time so pay is absolute shite. (44 weeks paid out of 52) But it means I dont have to pay childcare, but then our summer holidays are through the roof as I have to take them during holidays 😕

Other half makes the bulk of that 50k and the majority of my wage goes into small savings pots, ie christmas/bday, holiday, house fund for diy, that kind of stuff that you spend as quick as it goes in 🤣. I didn't return to work after mat leave until we got free childcare as I would literally be working for £10 a day after nursery fees, it seemed ridiculous to have someone else look after my baby to work full time for that amount. We knew our 2nd child would set us back 5 years and it did.

I just need to find something that's online where I dont have to sacrifice family time, if that makes sense. Our eldest (now an adult) was at nursery 8-6pm daily and I still have so much guilt now as you don't ever get that time back. Even to make a passive income.. which looks so easy but I don't even know what I need to do for that. Or if that's even possible.

I think I worry as there is so many scams around, buy this package and ill show you how i earn xxx amount a month, you can do it to..

I earn 200k and now WFH and pretty much never outside of 9-5 Mon-Fri.

I don’t have hugely impressive qualifications but have been very proactive in earlier years in terms of career progression.

I aggressively targeted new opportunities and used those to aid career progression. I have lived in quite a few different places dictated by work requirements.

Once I reached a level I was happy with I got a fully WFH job and moved back to where I wanted to live and had a child. I doubt I’ll move areas again now.

I’ll continue in this role until my pension and investments are sufficient to retire which hopefully will be before DS starts secondary school.

I am literally the most normal person imaginable. Almost anyone could have done what I did if they were minded to do so. I defo have no special skills!

My one key piece of advice is to seek out new opportunities with new employers that may well be outside of your comfort zone. Much easier to convince a prospective new employer that you are capable of more to turbo charge your career than it is to stay put and wait for what are often much slower internal promotional opportunities.

One final thing I soon realised is that with very few exceptions those who earn huge sums are really not geniuses. Once you realise that you lose the imposter syndrome feeling which rapid progression can often result in.

@CottonCandyCrank can you look for an office manager kind of job from office admin? Depending on the company that can open a lot of doors.
I think if you're seriously looking at progressing your career, you just need to pony up for the childcare over the holidays.
If both of you work full time you'll each get a minimum of 4 weeks holidays, which means if you take it separately you only actually need childcare for 5 weeks. Depending on where you are holiday camps can be £50ish a day? So £1,250. If you split that out over the year it's £100ish a month (sorry for the very basic maths, but I broke it down like this and it made it slightly less painful for me!) ~ you'd likely earn more than that going full time and that's only in the short term.

In answer to your question, I work in Tech but as a Director on the operations/HR side of things. I started in retail, then bumped across to the corporate world after learning a bunch of skills in a very underpaid management role (so in retail I was handling mass redundancies/recruitment/HR documentation/disciplinaries/appeals for like, £30k - turns out those skills are worth nearly triple that in corporate! But I picked them and up deliberately in retail because I had researched what skills I'd need to move industries) and my career really took off over the last few years - and I've company hopped in corporate too.
FWIW I know of people who've taken the same kind of route from office admin (office admin - office manager - HR - climbed ranks into HR Ops) but you have to be strategic about the roles you go for (ie always ones that include aspects of your following job move, so office manager but there's a role specification about helping with HR systems for example).

Part of my success is also risk (to take this role I left an established company and joined a scale-up with not much UK presence) and luck (said company did extremely well and I've already had big payrises/bonuses/well performing stocks) and networking (found current role through a friend of someone I met at a networking event) ~ though it definitely took hard work too!

Aware this reply is already about a million paragraphs too long, but I've done lots of recruitment/payroll benchmarking for various roles and if you have any in depth questions you're welcome to drop me a message!

Well done you.. this is amazing! What do you do career wise?

You sound like a real go getter, I do unfortunately lack confidence altogether so I struggle massively in that way 😪

If I had my head screwed on when younger I would have 1000% waited to start a family and focused on my career but I didn't 😒 I didn't have the drive and was never pushed or advised in anyway career wise, I had no clue what kind of jobs were out there or what I wanted to even do, so I just did the mundane 9-5 basic office job and here I am getting nowhere fast.. i just feel like I'm back peddling now

The hope of finding online freelance work for evenings is unrealistic to give the kind of lifestyle and savings you are hoping for. You need to put in the time to reap the rewards so this would mean increasing your hours to year round and using holidays clubs. Not necessarily full time but stepping outside term time will be a good start for more options which you can then use to move up further.

The majority on very high salaries have put in a lot of time (and often study) to get there. After degree and professional qualifications, I did 60+ hour weeks for many years in my 20s before reducing to normal full time and then eventually looking for flexible working as my children got older. It takes time to get there

I work in compliance in a very heavily regulated sector.

I was fortunate to have pretty clued up parents who encouraged me to build a career before having children.

I probably left it a bit late to get pregnant but everything worked out in the end and I couldn’t be happier now. If you had children earlier you have time to work on the career side of things now. Apply for things that might be one level higher than you’d normally consider. You’ll eventually land one and after a while in your new role you’ll wonder why you were ever so cautious and will look for the next opportunity. When you finally land on one that works for you both financially and logistically then stick with it and make yourself as indispensable as possible. Good luck!

You have done fab.. 😊 thank you for your detailed reply. It's really helpful and I really appreciate your time.

What is a corporate job/business? And where do you find these opportunities? Sorry I'm having a blonde moment 🥴 😂

I do wish I had proper guidance growing up as that would have been much more helpful and it's certainly what I will be guiding my children towards as I want better for them ☺️

I had children early and late.. 13 year age gap. One an adult now and one mid primary years 😂 I've still got nearly 30 years of work left in me until retirement so I still have time. I just want to give my youngest a better and more fulfilled childhood to what we could offer my eldest 😌

Thank you 😄

You need to work on your confidence, I've always looked for higher paid jobs that I had some skills for and during interview emphasised that I could quickly learn the skills I didn't. A lot of employers will take a risk on someone with the right attitude. There are tons of office manager roles that will pay more than you earn now and they are also a good stepping stone for other higher paid roles. You will need to pay for childcare though bit you should qualify for tax free child care up to certain limits.