There are many ways to increase your net worth. If you make it a personal quest to discover and deploy a number of them, the effects can be dramatic, and life-altering. Here are a few of them: Moonlight
Identify something you're good at and figure out a way to turn it into extra money. Depending on your skills, you may even be able to earn more per hour on the side than you do during your day job. Do some exploring in your areas of interest. A low-cost course or certification can sometimes turn up the heat on the income you can earn.
Become your own lender
When you draw down your savings, resolve to pay yourself back with interest! This does two things. It increases your savings beyond the original balance, and it gives you an incentive to avoid drawing down the savings in the first place.
Boost your ROI, boost your net worth
Are you earning 1% in a savings account? Is your retirement account barely scraping by at 3% or 4% earnings per year? Time to go back to the drawing board! Did you know it's possible to earn 50% or 100% on your money or more? Without much risk either? The key is figuring out how. Most people never do. Even the wall street money men (who, granted are trying to earn on hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars) rarely get into double figures - 10% or more. But if you're savvy, and learn the ropes, you can move this rate up to 50%, 100%, even in rare cases and for short periods, greater than 100% per year. Without gambling, or drilling for oil wells (oh, wait, that's the same thing!)
Even small moves can make a big difference over the long run. Adjusting your activities to produce 10% instead of 4%, and especially if you can shelter the vast majority of that from the tax man, will triple your growth rate. So, get busy and start studying!
Hide your wealth from yourself
No, I'm not talking about a coffee can, or leaving money in your own piranha pond. One of the best places to lock your funds away is a retirement account. Look closely at the long-term effects though, and make a decision between a pre-tax account and a post-tax one. They are radically different, tax-wise, when you retire.
Sometimes, a simple payroll deduction, deposited directly into savings is sufficient to get you in the habit of "paying yourself first" - but sometimes you need to take more drastic measures. It all depends on knowing yourself and your limitations.
Another trick is to move some funds overseas. This has the added effect of reducing the dramatic and painful effects of a free-falling US dollar.
