Barriers to Earning More Money

I recently presented you guys with 3 reasons why your new business won’t succeed. Then a few days after that I was perusing through my favorite personal finance/entrepreneurship blog- IWTYTBR, when a post really struck a cord with me. I really enjoyed the post on 5 surprising insights on earning more money. At the end of the article, Ramit asked the readers for any barriers they had about earning more money.

After siphoning through the comments and through my own thoughts, I wanted to list some of the barriers to earning more money/jumping into entrepreneurship that many of us share:

Waiting around.

Whether it be waiting around for the “million dollar idea” or trying to decide on a company name, we spend too much time waiting to get things into motion. I’m 100% guilty of this myself. I’ve been planning on getting my own newsletter off the ground for the longest time now. I keep on talking about with people and getting tips. In essence all I’m doing is waiting around. When I reached out for help yesterday one of my peers gave me the simplest advice, he told me just to start the newsletter and worry about the minor details later. This makes perfect sense. Every day that we spend waiting around is another day we don’t earn more money.

Saving money mentality.

We’re so accustomed to being told to save money that it really comes out of left field when someone suggests that we spend a little bit of money. The reality is that if you want to increase your income, you might have to invest in yourself initially. Don’t get me wrong here– I’m not suggesting that you go to a Venture Capitalist to help you raise a million dollars so that you can buy a McDonald’s franchise. I’m just suggesting that it doesn’t hurt to invest some money to improve your skillset.

For example, when I first started college I wanted to earn some more money so I took a course where I got my license to work as a Personal Trainer. I spent a couple of hundred bucks on the course (textbooks, equipment, and other administrative stuff) and in the end I had a license to earn more money, and more importantly I learned a valuable skill.

Lack of immediate income.

This ties into the point above. When you have a steady paycheck it’s extremely difficult to steer off into the unknown. When you try to earn more money on the side, or try to become an entrepreneur, your income situation becomes pretty damn random. You no longer have guaranteed income, nor do you have steady income. The fear here in my opinion lies in figuring out how to deal with the very lean times, without going into panic mode and selling your car! It can easily become nerve-wrecking when you no longer get paid X amount every other Thursday. Subsequently, this becomes another barrier for many of us that are concerned about becoming entrepreneurs/becoming 100% responsible for our income.

Effort.

Once you have everything else taken care of, you must be willing to put the work in. The biggest problem with making more money is time (I didn’t mention it as a separate point because it’s too easy). I’m not referring to some sort of time famine, where you have absolutely no time. I’m talking about wanting to go home early so that you can start working on your freelance projects. I’m talking about actually looking forward to parts of the job. There’s no point in trying to earn more money on your own, if the work feels more mundane than your day job.

Effort is a major barrier to earning more money because there’s simply a plethora of options when it comes to distributing our effort. We could go to the gym, go for drinks, go to the coffee shop, watch a Saved By The Bell marathon, and plenty more. How does one find the effort to do more work after a long day of work? This is where the major challenge comes into play of setting aside enough time to get things done.

Motivation.

If you live at home and your parents don’t force you to pay rent, you simply won’t care about earning more because you’re content with your current situation. You can also run into the problem where all of your friends are professionals, that happen to work in the financial district. Do you want to become the one person that’s not at lunch every day? Do you want to put up with those around you hassling you about your completely absurd schedule (working at weird hours of the night while everyone sleeps)? The answer is usually no. As a result, the motivation to earn more money/start your own side business slowly fades away and we go back to our old ways.

Fear.

What if I fail? What if I spend money and end up not earning any extra cash? What if my friends and family will laugh at me?

I’m in no position to talk about this, so I left it to a few much bigger fish. Jonathan Fields addressed this issue of the fear of failure:

You wanna be afraid, really afraid, take a look at what your life’ll look like not if you try and fail…but if you keep on keeping on for decades. That’s the real nightmare scenario for most people.

Also allow me to quote Aristotle on this topic:

To avoid criticism say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.

Is that how you want to live? Don’t take it from me. Take it from those that have been there.

Now I turn it over to the readers of Studenomics: what are your barriers to earning more money? What’s holding you back right now?