Grow your Income in 5 ways

Even though most of the suggestions made in this article do not apply ot me, there may be others who might learn something from it.

This article has been written by David Bach who has written many best seller books like Start Late, Finish Rich: A No-Fail Plan for Achieving Financial Freedom at Any Age and The Automatic Millionaire: A Powerful One-Step Plan to Live and Finish Rich

Five Ways to Grow Your Income by 20 Percent
Posted on Monday, February 26, 2007, 3:00AM

One of the things I like most about the new Yahoo! Finance format is the immediate feedback I get from readers. Just last month, my column "Five Ways to Save $2,500 in 20 Minutes" received enormous positive feedback.

I also received comments from concerned readers who basically said, "Your ideas won't work for me -- what else can I do to stop living from paycheck to paycheck?"

These readers certainly aren't alone. I completely understand that too many people today simply can't make ends meet with the salary they're earning. If that's the case, it's time to consider ways to grow your income.

Meet the Egglestons

Over the past year, I've had the honor and pleasure of appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show as an expert money coach for her Debt Diet series. The mission of this life-changing program is to start a worldwide movement helping millions of people get out of debt and finally realize their goal of true financial freedom.

On the show, I coached an amazing couple -- Dan and Sally Eggleston. Dan and Sally are both elementary school teachers earning a combined income of $92,000, and live in Indiana, where they're raising three wonderful kids. When I first met them a year ago, they were $100,000 in debt and on the brink of bankruptcy.

Working together, we managed to find ways to cut back on about $500 of unnecessary expenses each month (using what I call the Double-Latte Factor). That was a great start. But due to the huge amount of debt Dan and Sally had accumulated, they had to do more.

In order to make measurable progress toward paying down all their debt, they not only needed to seriously cut back on their expenses, they also required a solid plan to grow their income by at least 10 percent over the year. The Egglestons didn't just succeed -- they crushed my goal by growing their income by over 20 percent!

Continue...