How To Increase Cash Flow

There are many great ways to increase cash flow which will help you accomplish your personal financial planning goals. This page is dedicated to covering some of the things you can do to make sure you're bringing in more money than you spend each month.

1. Clean out and clean up. Most people have things in their attic or garage that they never use, and most likely won't ever use again. Some of these items truly are worthless, but some of them are hidden treasures. You can increase cash flow by going through these old things and using sources like eBay and Craigslist to turn your junk into cash. There are a lot of books and websites out there that will help you weed the trash from the treasure.

A client of mine who's husband recently passed away was going through his old things and came upon a stamp collection that he had put together over 20 years ago. She had no interest in collecting stamps and knew nothing about them. She bought a stamp catalog for a few dollars and did some research on the web, and was able to find out that many of the stamps were quite valuable. She is now in the process of selling them to someone who will enjoy & appreciate them, and she will enjoy the cash from the sale!

I recently put an old trampoline on Craigslist and sold it for $50 in less than 12 hours. I also sold a 20 year old lawn mower for $40 in a matter of one day.

2. Tell them what you think. Companies spend millions of dollars every year to find out what consumers think, buy, read and do. What could be easier than you telling them. There are great research companies in every state who pay consumers just like you to tell them about your consumption habits. Some in the Charlotte, NC area are Leibowitz Market Research-GroupNet, (704) 357-1961; AOC Marketing Research, (704) 341-0232; and 20/20 Research; (877) 713-2020.

Call companies like these and sign up to participate in their marketing research. They recently paid one person $75 for spending two hours talking about what kind of wine she bought. Many of the companies out there also offer online surveys as a way for you to increase cash flow. But be careful. You want to make sure you're working with a legitimate company who won't take advantage of you.

3. Get paid to shop. Yes, that's right. There are many secret shopping companies out there who will pay you to shop at and visit businesses who have hired them. After you visit the store you report on the quality of service you received. There should never be a fee to sign up for these programs. A few that you can check out are:
www.secretconsumer.com
www.sassieshop.com
www.shopuntilyoudrop.com
www.shoppingjobs.net
www.moneyandshopping.com

4. Enjoy pets? You can offer your services as a pet sitter. During the summer, there will be plenty of families and neighbors who are going out of town on vacations. It's expensive to board animals at a kennel. Plus, people need their mail taken inside and plants watered. Many families have more than one pet too. Take my family for example: we have a dog, two cats, 3 frogs, and lots of plants that need watering. In our town it costs about $17 per day to kennel a dog, and about the same for each cat. And I don't even know of anyone that would take in 3 frogs to feed on a daily basis. I would gladly pay someone $20/day to come in and take care of those simple things while I'm gone!

5. Like to work in the yard? Summer time is also the time to mow the lawn. It's not so bad in the late spring, early summer. But when it gets into the 90's, many folks dread going outside to cut the grass. Another way to increase cash flow is to start cutting a few extra lawns in the neighborhood each week. One 12 year old kid in our community cuts enough lawns to earn an extra $100/week (with no taxes taken out!). Again, this is another thing people need done while on vacation.

6. Do you know a lot about something? Everybody knows a lot about something. Maybe from a past career, a sport you played, or a current hobby. Your expert knowledge can be a great way to increase cash flow. You can set up a website of your own with lots of top-quality information and education about your subject matter. As people come to your site to learn more about that topic, they can click on advertisements and links that you will get paid for. They can also buy things that you have for sale on your site through an online store or affiliate links. Or, they can become customers for you if you already have a business. Doing this is actually pretty simple when you use Site Build It!

Maybe you already have a blog? Why just blog when you can turn that blog into a real business that will increase cash flow. Building an income stream from this type of online business is a lot easier than you may think. You don't need to know anything about building website to be able to do this. Site Build It! does all the techno geek squad work for you. All you do is type in the expert content, which you already know!

Blogging is pretty easy to do, and it's a very low cost way to start on online business. There are just a few things you need to get started. First, you need to buy a domain name for your new site. This will be the name of your website...like www.your-new-site.com, or whatever. You can go to Yahoo! or really anywhere on the web to buy these for under $10 per year. This will give you your own email address (actually any number of email addresses that you might want).

Then you need to have a place to host your site. The most affordable place I have found is Host Gator where you can host an unlimited number of sites for as low at $7.95 per month. Once you've done that, all you need to do is create your site. This is very easy if you use Wordpress to create a blogging site. Wordpress is free to use and has thousands of free templates so that you can find the look you want. With a domain name for $10/year and a site host for $7.95/month, you've got your own online business started. How you just need to build the content that people will want to find and read, and you're going to increase cash flow for sure.

The great things about this type of business are:

1. You can do it from anywhere (as long as you have internet access.

2. You can work on it in your spare time.

3. It takes very little to start it up.

4. Once you increase cash flow, you can spend more time doing the things you really enjoy doing (ie. spending time with your family, traveling, gardening, exercising...or whatever!)

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