We live in a day and age where the money we earn keeps shrinking in value and expenses keep growing. More and more money is becoming a struggle that too many people deal with. Hence Filipinos start living paycheck to paycheck or, worse, start getting into debt. Our fifteenth and thirtieth life savers start becoming insufficient.
In January alone inflation rose by four percent. Meaning if you were spending 500 a day in December, You’re losing another twenty pesos a day. Virtually that’s like dropping another twenty pesos on the road every single day for the rest of your life. With this scenario, we are faced with the need to increase cashflow.
Too often, I hear people make the excuse that they can no longer push themselves to earn more. I find this ironic considering that Filipinos spend up to four hours a day on social media. Four hours. That’s a part time job and an opportunity to get another fifty percent of your current earnings.
So what if I told you you could take even just another few hours on the weekends to earn another five thousand pesos? It won’t happen overnight, but with constant hard work, practice and consistency, you’ll end up earning another five thousand or even more on the weekends. Here are a few ways that could happen.
1. Earn from Reselling
Just recently, Facebook launched another feature on their mobile app called Marketplace, which opens up a FREE platform for people to feature products. You could easily buy anything and resell it at an arbitrage- ukay okay clothes, shoes from outlets, accessories, bags, gadgets and so on. Sometimes you don’t even have to put out capital. You just need to act as an intermediary for a trusted supplier.
2. Get Per Hour Jobs Online
There are tons of jobs online through online job platforms that pay anywhere between P50 to P500 per hour on simple tasks. Imagine getting a job that pays P200 an hour and spending eight hours (two days worth of Facebook) a weekend doing that. You could earn up to eight thousand a month.
Don’t expect to land a paid gig overnight though. Some people give up on online jobs just because they don’t get hired after three resumes. When I started out online, I was passing up to fifteen resumes a day. I know others who do more. It’s all about putting in the work.
3. Make Small Snack and Food Packages
Let’s say you work at an office with a hundred employees. What if you could talk to ten percent of the people in your office to order sandwiches from you two times a week? You make the Sandwich for thirty pesos and sell it at P80. You make fifty pesos per head with just ten workmates. That’s P1,000 a week. Take that up a notch and do sandwiches for twenty people. Why not throw in a beverage or fries and upsell them too? You could be making another P10,000 a month in no time!
4. Cut Back On TGIF Nights Out
As finance experts always say, “Money you aren’t spending is money you are making.” How much does one spend on a typical Friday and Saturday night out with friends? Let’s say you set yourself back P700 to P750 a night conservatively. That’s for your split of dinner, coffee, taxi and a few beers as well. With that you’ll spend about P1,400 to P1,500 a weekend. Multiply that by 5 weeks and you’re burning P7,500 a week!
Or let’s take the less KJ route and say that instead of spending P750 a night, you limit your budget to P250. That’s P500 less a day or P1,000 a week. That’s another P5,000 going straight into your savings account.
5. Get A Weekend Gig
Nowadays there could be many skills that you could use to earn a few thousand pesos extra on weekends. If you’re a great talker and entertaining you could get emceeing gigs on weekends. If you like taking pictures then you could do a few weddings on weekends with a borrowed (or rented) camera. Maybe you’re great at events and you can help someone stage a debut or corporate event. If you’re spending hundreds of pesos on your physique and skin, might as well try getting an ROI by doing some modeling or being an extra on some TVCs! There are tons of per-project gigs that won’t eat a lot of time but still help you make a quick buck.
The Bottomline: Do It Consistently!
I can almost hear the naysayers crying “easy for you to say!” Maybe some of you have tried it to no avail. Question I’ll ask you next is this- how many times did you try? Maybe you did it for three weekends straight. Well what’s stopping you from trying it out another three, six, ten, twenty more weekends? What have you got to lose? More time at home watching Netflix?
Not saying that we shouldn’t take breaks, but there are 168 long and valuable hours in the week- forty maybe spent at a day job and another forty sleeping. You still have Eighty eight more hours to use. If you took just ten percent of that to do something productive, you could be seeing yourself out of your hand to mouth cycle in a few months time. The overlying principle is to start doing and to keep doing it consistently.