I grew my income x4 in one year, going from $27k to $116k. Here’s how I did it.
From December 2021 to December 2022, I raised by income over 4x.
This is still so wild of me to say because this wasn’t the plan. I knew I wanted to pay off all of my debt, and I knew I wanted to make more money, but in no way did I think it would happen as rapidly as it did.
In no particular order, here’s what I’ve pinpointed so far that helped me achieve this accomplishment (and pay off all $37K of my debt too!)
I networked and promoted myself often through social media, word of mouth and more.
As an Actor and Performer, promoting myself can come easy, for acting. But I realized the same way I email Theatres, audition for them, and network at arts events was what I needed to do in other fields if I wanted these new occupation titles to go anywhere.
I joined Facebook groups relevant to the new areas I was pursuing, I updated my LinkedIn to reflect my new adventures, and I would casually bring up in conversation what I do. Instead of saying, “I’m a professional actor,” I started to read the room and introduce myself as the occupation that seemed most helpful to those around me.
“I’m a Creative Virtual Assistant.”
“I’m a Self Care Coach.”
“I’m a Web Designer.”
“I’m a Dramaturg.”
And one by one, I made more connections. When I first begin Virtual Assisting, 2 out of 5 of my clients were through Word of Mouth, and then one was through a Referral from a Word of Mouth client. Try it and see what happens. You may surprise yourself.
I invested in myself through classes and business mentorships.
Now this was scary, because for the first time in a long time I was signing up for classes. After 7 years of schooling and a low-key traumatic experiencing gaining my Master’s, I was extremely hesitant to enroll in any learning program again. But I found an online VA course and took a gamble that ended up being worth it. I didn’t learn everything I needed to know in my business (which is why I created my own Virtual Assistant course to cover ALL the gaps) but it gave me the basics that helped me start! After two months of launching my business, I had five clients!
After three months, I hit my first $5k month! But I also realized I was working 40-60 hours per week just for extra funds, so I enrolled in a business mentorship program.
The mentorship program I’m in is a 6-month accelerator program focused on helping entrepreneurs scale to 5-10k months, and when I first saw the cost, I honestly fell over. But if I can make $5K months in my business, then I can invest in said business to make even more. It has definitely been worth it to be learning, meeting, and implementing with other driven small business owners! I’ve also gained confidence in my skill set, created automated systems to gain some time back, and built a strong community of folks I can lean on for both guidance and support.
I haven’t hit a $10k month yet, but I’m in the program until end of April so we’ll see!
I bought and sold real estate.
First thing I want to say about this is that I full-hearted acknowledge this privilege and advantage I have over the regular wealth builder of owning a few properties. However, out of the $116,000 brought in last year, only $12,000 came from selling real estate. So I still managed to break 6-figures even without this endeavor. Disclaimer aside, here’s what that looked like:
Last year, I owned three homes. One is a rental property, the other was where my spouse and I lived at the time, and the last one we bought in September 2022. The September home was not planned (our goal was to buy and move in 2023), but it met all of our needs and we had just enough saved up for a down-payment. Once we bought this one, we put the house we were living in on the market. It sold in 25 days. After realtor fees, repairs, and other house sale expense, we got a total of $24,673 (about $12.3k for each my spouse and I) and decided to put all of it toward our debt, which felt REALLY good. We were consumer debt free for the remainder of the year.
I had six months of saying “yes,” then six months of saying “no.”
When January 2022 hit, I was Jim Carey’s Yes Man. I said yes to almost every job, side hustle, and money-making opportunity that came my way for the purpose of earning more money, learning more skills, and seeing what I actually liked doing. I would not recommend this for the faint of heart, because I burned out rather quickly by working maybe 45 hours per week in various areas. But it did show me what I was good at and what I actually enjoyed doing.
I did this until June, and once July hit, I felt confident enough in what I actually wanted to pursue (which at the time was getting more VA clients), that I started saying “no” to anything that didn’t align with the new direction I was going in.
Teaching Workshops? “I’m currently pausing this endeavor, but follow up with me in the winter.” Dramaturg gig? “I’m booked with other projects until January, please contact me then.” I put up boundaries around my work availability for all occupations I wasn’t focusing on until I had the space to see if I wanted to return to them. This helped me stay in the fields I was interested in, invest in myself and purchase the VA Bootcamp, build my business and make over $5K months, and more.
I increased my streams of income.
At the time, the main way I understood how to make money was by getting more jobs, so that’s exactly what I did. My streams of income at the start of 2022 were Theatre Acting, Theatre Teaching, Virtual Assisting, and my Rental Property. During the year, I added Web Design, Dramaturgy, Self Care Coaching, TV/Film and Commercial Acting, and Affiliate Marketing for the VA Bootcamp. Now that it’s 2023, I’ve implemented other ways I learned about adding streams of income, including investing, and digital products. I am now a huge fan of not trading time for money if I can, and will be leaning into ways I can earn more but work less.
I didn’t want for opportunities to come along. I created my own.
I would say about 80% of the jobs, clients, and money secured from last year were from opportunities I created myself. From starting a VA business, to networking and promoting myself, I made things happen. Yes, I was applying for jobs at companies during this time as well, but I wasn’t waiting around for one of them to hire me.
I ended up securing a 9-to-5 job in September, but by that time, I had already made around $70,000 through the year, because I put myself out there to find people who could benefit from my services.
I understand that promoting yourself and making your own jobs, path, and money doesn’t come naturally. But if you’re scared, I recommend you do it anyway, because you will only regret what you don’t try. Why not try and see if it works out first?
I heavily prioritized myself health wise, goal wise, and need wise.
Health wise, I find that when I overwork, I tend to get stress sick. There were multiple parts of the year where I got back into this habit, but the difference was I had an awareness around it and could create a plan to change where I was. Whenever I realized I was taking too much on, I would release what I could or ask for help. I still got sick (hello COVID April 2022), but I definitely fell ill less than my “normal.”
Goal wise, I was steadfast in achieving things with a plan, consistency, and urgency. If something in my life didn’t align with my new goal, I released it. Friends, Netflix, buying so many new clothes, I looked at all my habits and worked to keep the ones that enforced who I wanted to be. I wanted the only thing to get in my way of reaching my goals to be me. I can finally say I’m now at that place. It took over a year, but it’s worth it to be here.
Need wise, I wrote down my needs to live a joy-filled life and went from there figuring out how to get them met. My partner provides some of those needs, companionship, touch, love, but if I ever want extra, I don’t immediately go straight to them to solve my problems because I have my list. If I want touch and my partner isn’t available, I will book a massage. If I want companionship and spouse isn’t around, I will FaceTime my mom or a close friend. Bottom line, I know what all I needed and where to go to meet them.
I did a lot of self work and mindset work to prepare myself for a season of both receiving and growth.
This point feels like the most important one. If I hadn’t worked on myself, release habits, stories, and mindsets that no longer served me to make space for ones that did, my income wouldn’t have grown so quickly. Some self and mindset work I did that really helped me with this was look at my relationship with money, see how I felt about it, and change it to how I wanted to feel about it by asking myself lot of questions.
Another one was finding my limiting beliefs and changing those as well. A big one I had was that I couldn’t be a millionaire. I nipped that in the bud quick because it is possible. Just because I haven’t seen a million dollars does not mean I can’t achieve that level of abundance.
The last big one was gratitude. For every dollar that came in, I said thanks to the universe. Then bigger and bigger amounts would come, and I was already in a place of receiving, so they would come easier.
Set yourself and your mind up for success, and anything you want to do, you will be able to.
There were a lot of ups and downs last year. Moving, COVID, my dad passing. But despite it all, I still did a really amazing thing. I hope reading this inspires you to go for your goals as well.
Gentle reminder that it’s you against you. Don’t hold yourself back from greatness.
(If you need a little help with reaching your goals, get my Goal Setting Planner here.)
