It’s quite obvious to me that in order to get our debt under control in a relatively short amount of time we will need to increase our income. The most obvious place to start is our day jobs. We are both paid by the hour so in order to increase our income we would need to increase our hours. The only way to do this consistently in our current job is to get promotions into management which we have both thought about. We have both worked in retail management before and know it brings about a lot of extra hours and a lot of extra stress. Anyone who has worked in retail management before will attest that the small pay rise you get when divided by the heap of extra hours you are expected to do usually means you are on an hourly rate not much higher than the people who work for you. We have decided that this is not the best way for us to maximise our income. We are better off doing the extra hours elsewhere.
My husband has asked for any extra hours that come up if someone is sick or on holidays. This won’t be every week but will boost his income by the end of the year.
I, on the other hand, have decided to get a second job. I am a casual employee at my current job and find that the number of hours I get can fluctuate greatly. I can’t rely on this if I am determined to get out of debt. This is the best way to increase my hours. I will let it be known that I am after extra hours at my current job. This also depends on how my health holds up working more hours. I may not be able to do it long term but it is worth a try.
After looking at increasing our hours we realise that we can’t physically work enough hours to increase our income to the levels we need to crush the debt. Our hourly rate is too low and we do need to sleep sometimes! Going forward, we will need to think about passive income streams or things that we can earn a residual income from.
