The Easiest Way to Earn Money for a Goal ⭐

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Over the year’s I’ve shared a LOT of ways to make extra money on the side on this blog.

From selling crafts at craft fairs to flipping items you find at the thrift store on Facebook marketplace.

But one thing I don’t think I’ve shared is the commonality among these ideas and the overarching idea behind really setting & meeting big financial earning goals.

Setting Goals to Make Specific Amounts of Money

I learned this a long time ago from a tax professor I had in my master’s degree program.

He was the coolest guy with the best dry sense of humor.

I remember vividly the day he taught us exactly how to make money – like real money – whenever we wanted to.

It was specific to being a tax consultant, but honestly, it’s applicable to almost any field of work. I have yet to find an exception!

The Money Advice That Changed My Entire Outlook on Money

What my professor said wasn’t complicated, but it was profound.

What he said was this –

When you have a financial goal to meet in the near future, then you need to become an expert in something. Become an expert in that thing just long enough to raise the money you need and then you can stop doing that if you want. Or if you want to keep going then you just created a new job for yourself. This is what I did when I needed $25,000 to send my daughter to college. I became an expert in a tiny section of tax law that nobody really cared about, but it turns out companies needed help defending themselves in court over this issue against the IRS. I did some IRS litigation on the topic, raised my extra $25K, and sent my daughter to college.

When he told us that, I almost FELL OUT of my chair.

It all made sense.

All this school, all the nerdy tax topics, all the late night studying….

I wasn’t learning specifically how to be an expert on any one particular thing at that point, but I was getting ready to be ABLE TO BE an expert on just about any tax subject OF MY CHOOSING.

How Does This Money-Related Goal Setting Advice Apply to Everyone

So how does this apply to everyday life and to people who aren’t tax experts?

You might be wondering this because it seems SO SPECIFIC. But it’s really not!

Let’s go over some examples!

If you are a cosmetologist, you could temporarily specialize in lash extensions
If you love dogs, you could specialize in house sitting for families with multiple dogs when they go on vacation (I happen to know there’s a huge market for this….someone who will come to your house to stay with the dogs AND doesn’t charge an arm and a leg because it’s multiple dogs!)
If you are good at planning parties, then you could specialize in planning & putting on 1st birthday parties because there’s a huge market for this, and the process would be just about the same every single time!
If you love to cook or bake, you could find one thing like CHICKEN POT PIES or a special dessert that you can cook the heck out of and sell those, even renting a spot in a commissary kitchen if necessary
If you are a mental health expert, you could extra specialize in a specific part of autism and create practical resources to help parents
If you like to sew, you could sew items to sell on Facebook, at craft fairs or even at vintage stores
If you like paper crafting, you could specialize in handmade personalized notecards and take special orders

You get the idea!

Anything you are qualified to do or even just ENJOY doing, think really specific in that niche and come up with something you could totally nerd out and specialize in!

That will be the thing that you can do – even just for a little while – to earn money to meet your goals!

If your goal is more like $100, $250, or $500, then any number of ideas would work!

If your goal is larger like $1,000, $2000, $5000, 10,000 or $20,000, then you will just have to work longer at it OR think of something that earns more for the effort you put in.

Financial Goals….Break Them Down into The Basic Math Problems They Are

Remember – a financial goal is JUST A MATH PROBLEM. It’s a simple math problem that most kids learn how to figure out by 5th grade.

A lot of people try to complicate finances, but it’s really not that complicated when you remember that all of personal finance is solving the math problem facing you.

We complicate simple math problems by throwing emotions into the equation, but when was the last time a math teacher said “add A + B then divide by C and a little bit of guilt?” Or “if you subtract X from Y, how much doubt or excitement do you need to equal 5?”

That’s not how it’s done!

Yet that’s how many of us are guilty of solving our financial “math problems.”

Let’s start simplifying the calculations and start meeting our goals! 🙂

You can do this!