16 Best Money Tips for Hard Working Dads

Before we get too far in here, you should know that I’m not a financial professional or adviser. I’m just a guy who’s done some research, lived life and wants to share what he’s learned. If you need financial advice, get a qualified adviser, not some guy whose post you read on the internet.

If you’re living pay check to pay check, that’s going to catch up on you soon enough. Or if you’re unable to budget and always seem to be dipping into your savings — will that magic pot of money last forever?

What if you’ve come into a bit of money recently, how do you make sure it’s as well invested as possible?

All of these are important questions when your family is relying on you to provide for their needs. Your kids need clothed, fed and the occasional treat. And you want to be able to give them those things. That’s why I’ve compiled this list of 16 financial tips — so that you can earn more money, keep it for longer and make it work hard for you.

To make these tips as simple as possible, I’ve organised them into four categories:

- Earning money
- Making more money
- Keeping your money
- Making your money work harder

I’m not a financial guru or expert and this is all for entertainment purposes. But I have plenty of experience of managing money and making sure my family doesn’t want for anything. I want these tips to be a guide to you or a prompt to change. I want you to be encouraged to put them into practice and reap the benefits further down the line.

Let’s dive in…

Before you do anything with your money, you need to earn it. But which is best: self employed, employed, business owner? And are there certain types of jobs to go for and others to avoid? Keep reading if you want to know more:

I remember being in my first year at University. Some of my molecular biology lectures were in the psychology department. In the restrooms, some clever spark had graffiti-ed the toilet paper dispenser with the words:

It took me a while to get it but when I did I LOL’ed hard. The message is clear — if you choose a career or vocation that doesn’t pay well, you’re always going to struggle. Medicine, law, engineering and economics or business degrees will all result in jobs that garner higher salaries than creative arts and media subjects. If you think you might be in the wrong career it’s not too late to retrain and change to something else. Just don’t tell everyone about that ‘Anthropology with Interpretive Dance’ degree you have.

The whole idea of ‘do what you love’ is great until you need to ‘do something that also pays’. In an ideal world you’d love your job and it will be well paid but then we don’t all live in an ideal world do we?

What do I mean ‘the right employer’? Confession time: I’ve made some poor career choices in the past. Ultimately it’s worked out great. But in between, I’ve been in some sucky and truly dead-end jobs.

The problem with a salaried position is that your salary is fixed. So your earning potential is fixed. If you work for a government department, you have no means of improving on your salary. Unless you move up the ladder that is. You have one income stream: your salary.

But, if you work for a company that pays you a salary and a performance related bonus, profit share and stock options you’ve just quadrupled your potential options for furthering yourself. If you work in sales, your commission might be 20–50 percent on top of your basic salary.

Some employers also offer other bonuses such as referral schemes, rewards for finding new hires. Those are the kind of places I want to work.

Stocks in your employer can make you a rich man. Early employees of Facebook cleaned up because they were partly paid in stock. Have a look around your industry — are you employed by the right company. Could you try and get a job somewhere else with better pay and better career progression.

A few years ago I absolutely devoured the book ‘The Rich Employee’ by James Altucher (sponsored link). The main premise of the book is that you can be an entrepreneur and an employee — an employeneur? — anyway, employers that value and reward the entrepreneurial spirit are the ones to go for.

In the UK in 2017, around 85% of the workforce was employed by someone else. But at the same time, the number of full time self-employed people rose by 25%.

The drivers towards this self-employed exodus are uncertain but the rise of the ‘gig economy’ (where people take advantage of opportunities such as Uber, Upwork and Deliveroo for their main income) is seen as a factor.

Can you make the jump to self -employed? More people are doing it now than ever before. It’s certainly worth considering isn’t it? I know a lot of people who used to work in their industry but have since left their employer to be a self employed consultant. There are risks and benefits involved in that approach but could it be the right one for you?

A ‘Side Hustle’ is a little business or work you do alongside your regular employment. Most people would think about online business as a side hustle but you could just as easily be a personal trainer, dog walker or even work in a bar. When I wrote the first version of this article in 2017, the idea of a ‘side hustle’ hadn’t quite broken into the mainstream.

Fast forward nine years and in 2025, an American study (imaginatively called the Side Hustle Survey) showed that 27% of people in the US have some kind of side business. The average income for these hustles was $885 per month (around £700).

Since I was a student, I’ve had various side hustles going at different times including:

Plus a few more.

The advantage with a side income is that you can cream that extra income right off into savings or investments (more on this later).

A few years ago, I made a decent pile of cash on affiliate marketing websites. Affiliate marketing is when you sell someone elses products and they pay you a commission for those sales.

These brought in a modest regular income each month which I reinvested into other assets and investments. One website paid me in Bitcoin! You don’t to make a big change to make a modest monthly income from affiliate sales. I also wrote a book which I published on Kindle and Paperback formats that brought in a modest amount of regular income.

A successful side hustle can also turn into a fully fledged business where you are the business owner.

Something to remember is that ‘side hustle’ does not equal ‘get rich quick scheme’. The only people who make money from such schemes are the people selling them. Hustle means ‘hard work’ — if you want to make money, you need to provide a good or service that someone will pay you for.

So you’re earning. Now you need to know how to make more money with the same amount of time? And are the simple ways to focus your time and efforts into making you an efficient money making machine? Keep reading if you want the answers.

Want to know the problem with being paid $1000 an hour? The maximum amount of money you can make in one day is $24,000. Not bad work if you can get it, but no one can go flat out twenty four-seven for 365 days of the year. Selling your work for time isn’t scalable. But what does ‘scaling’ mean (hint: it’s got nothing to do with fish or weighing yourself).

This is the point at which I’d quote a popular article or quote with a definition of scalability. Except the ones I found suck. No one cares about “the potential to multiply revenue with minimal incremental cost.” We want to make money over here, not play Scrabble.

So instead, here is my one stop, super quick guide to what it means to be scalable using the medium of a car washing business. Let’s say you wash cars and charge by $5 hour. It takes you half an hour to wash one car.

Then you start charging $5 per car. Now you’re scaling because you’ve doubled your money: 2x cars in one hour at $5 each works out at $10 per car.

But you’re not finished. You employ one of your mates to wash cars at $5 each and you pay him $5 per hour. So for every 2 cars he washes, you make an extra $5. Then you employ another friend and he washes cars at the same rate. Now you make $10 per hour for your time plus $10 for your car-washing friends. Now imagine if you had ten friends, or 100 friends all washing cars for you. You could give up washing cars yourself and go do something else instead.

That’s scalability. That’s “the potential to multiply revenue with minimal incremental cost.” If you can find a way to make money that doesn’t depend on you being around to make the money, then you’re golden.

Otherwise, enjoy the 9–5, you might be there a while.

Scaling You is the next stage once you’ve learned how to harness scalability. I learned the idea of ‘Me, Inc’ from a book by Gene Simmons — the bassist in the rock band KISS (affiliate link). The basic premise is this: Whatever you know about, make money from that. KISS were a fairly average rock outfit but they were successful because they created an incredible brand. Simmons and his bandmates understood business this allowed the to create something that has made them all very rich men.

Here’s me:

So guess how I make my money? (hint: it’s not by writing articles on Medium — lol)

What are you good at? What do you know a lot about? There are people who will pay for even the most niche information. Become an expert or authority in your chosen field and you’ll be in a position to scale ‘You, Inc’.

If you work a day job, what is the fastest way to increase your income? If you answered ‘rob a bank’, you’re a bad, bad man. The real answer is this:

Get a job that pays better than the one you’re in.

Think about your bills — electricity, gas, sewerage , cell phone— these are all pretty much fixed. Yes you can save a bit here and there by switching to different providers but you’re still going to pay roughly the same amount. If you search hard enough you could maybe save $300 a year. The author and podcaster Craig Ballantyne calls that applying level 10 effort to a level 1 problem.

Here’s another way of looking at it — how easy would it be for you to earn an extra $300 a year? Easy? Probably. What about an extra $300 a month.

What about if you got a promotion that pays you an extra $3,600 per year. Guess what? You just made $300 per month more than you used to.

Now which problem deserves more of your effort? Finding the best electricity deal, or finding the best job?

Makes sense doesn’t it? If you’re prepared to play the long game, the right career move could set you up for life. Levelling up your job can be one of the biggest boosts to your regular income.

In 2016, I read another James Altucher book Reinvent Yourself. In it, he says that the average multi-millionaire has seven separate streams of income. SEVEN. And that’s just an average. Clearly many of them have many more!

That’s something the YouTuber Mark Tilbury speaks a lot about. He’s a man with multiple sources of income through having multiple businesses, investments and a very successful YouTube channel.

So it makes sense for you to do the same. But how? Here are a few ideas:

The trick with having additional sources of income is not spending it on your lifestyle. Lifestyle creep is when you raise your living standards to meet your income. That’s why you never feel better off! Instead, smart people leverage extra income so that it makes them more money. Which leads us nicely onto the next section which is….

In the 1980’s the singer Whitney Houston was the biggest star on the planet. The movie ‘The Bodyguard’ grossed over $400 million and she signed a record deal with Sony worth $100 million. But 30 years later, at the time of her death, Houston’s net worth had spiralled to negative 20 million dollars. She died with colossal and crippling debts.

It safe to say that Whitney Houston was as good as losing money as she was making it. This should be a cautionary tale to all of us: it doesn’t matter how much you make, it’s how much money you keep that matters. That’s what this next section is about — keeping hold of that money once you get it.

Everyone wants to talk about investing. It’s cool, it’s sexy and there are loads of adverts out there begging you to sign up for this stock trading platform or this ETF. But as Dr John DeMartini says — you need to earn the right to sit at that table.

This is crucial to your approach to saving. Straight-up, you need to figure out how much you can afford to save. There’s no hard and fast rule for this — 5%, 10%, 2% (2 percent? Really???). My rule of thumb is that it should hurt a teeny little bit. If you don’t notice the money going out, then you probably aren’t saving enough.

Right now I’m at about 12% across all savings and investments. That’s just the right amount for now but if my circumstances changed for the better, I’d have no issue putting that number higher. When I was newly married, we were dirt poor. But we made a habit of saving £65 a month. Sometimes it was a real stretch but that habit paid off in the long run.

There’s no risk in saving. Saving is a ‘zero-risk’ activity because the worst case scenario is that you have a bill you can’t pay and you need to use your savings to cover it. What did you lose? Nothing.

If you have a predetermined amount set aside for saving, you are more likely to stick to that number. Studies have also shown that when you habitually put money into savings, you are more likely to have self control over your spending.

Once you’ve mastered saving, then you can look at more risky things like investments in the stock market. But don’t run before you can walk.

This leads on from the last point — when you get paid, where does the money go? If you’re like most people you pay everyone else first:

But what if you paid yourself first? What I mean is this: on the day you get paid, you take that amount you’ve decided on and pay that into your savings account. You set it up automatically so you don’t even notice it going out. You take emotion out of the equation and the computer just does it for you. Watch this for more:

Do you know what a habit is? It’s something you do regularly. The habit loop devised by a study at MIT broke this loop into three stages: Cue, Routine, Reward. Sounds great. But how do you make this fit into saving your money regularly?

Step 1: As soon as you get paid (Cue), put your designated amount into your chosen savings or investments (Routine).

Step 2: Check your investment or savings accounts to see the money go in. You could keep track of how much is in there with a nice graph or chart (Reward). This visual reward will go a long way to reinforcing you routine of saving. You could buy yourself a small treat for saving at the end of the year. After all, you achieved something that the majority of the people on planet earth haven’t done — saved some of their money.

For more on the subject, check out The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.

So you’re making good money with a bit of surplus and you’ve cracked the habit of saving daily. Now what? You want your money to work as hard as possible. The problem is most finance listicles have basic advice like

Open a cash ISA or other tax efficient savings account
Pay off credit card debt
Stop drinking Lattes

And so on.

That’s all good advice, but what (if like me) you want to go deeper. I have no intention of having to work until 65, 66, 67… I may choose to but it should be exactly that — a conscious choice. I’m not going to ‘paper bag’ or Nespresso my way to an early retirement.

If I’m going to realise that vision, that means putting my money to work. And I’m not talking about having it flip burgers in a fast food restaurant either. My cash is sentenced to thirty years hard labour. Here’s what I mean:

Compounding interest is a wonderful thing. You really can double or even triple your money with just a modest rate of interest. But how does it work? Here’s my simple (ish) explanation.

In year one you have $1000 and you get 3.5% interest. This means that by year two, you have $1035. By year three you have $1071.22 until year six you have $1108.71.

Check out what happens to $1000 over these three interest rates:

This graph shows what can happen to your investments over a ten year period. Notice how the 11.5% return nearly tripled the original investment of £1000 (Getting an eleven percent return on an investment would be pretty stellar but 6–8% is achievable over the long term).

Compounding looks slow to begin with but if you’re prepared to play the long game, you can turn a modest sum into some big gains — provided you can protect them against inflation (this reduces the value of your investments over time).

The prolific investor and thinker Mohnish Parbrai talks about how life is all about ‘doubles’ in this interview. Compounding makes the doubles, the more doubles you get, the better you off you will be, the closer you will be to financial freedom.

Once you’ve got your head around savings and compounding and into the habit of paying yourself first, what might be the next logical step? Investing in the stock and bond markets isn’t just for investment pros or even the avid armchair investor. (I’ve bought investments from my armchair. And my sofa. And I bought gold while in bed one time.)

You can easily invest in the stock market through something called ‘Index funds’. These are funds that group lots of stocks or shares (a share is a little slice of a company like Apple) from an Index — a list of different companies.

Index funds own a weighted average of all of the stocks in that list and automatically invest your funds in all of those companies so any risk is spread across hundreds or sometimes thousands of different companies.

Here’s the thing you won’t read in the London Times Money supplement — few ‘managed’ funds (Mutual funds that are managed by a team of analysts and stock brokers) beat the market over time. And good luck finding the ones that do. That’s not to say they aren’t out there — they are. It’s just that how do you know the funds that outperform the market over time unless you have a time machine that can go ten years into the future. And if you do, what are you doing reading this book?

Most managed funds will charge you a hefty management fee, up to 1.5% of your total amount invested. So if you had $1000, your fund manager gets $15. Doesn’t sound like much. But there are two BIG problems with this:

He makes money even if you don’t. Yes, you read that right. If the market plummets and your fund manager loses 25% of your cash, guess who still gets paid his 1.5%?

Big charges also eat away at your returns. Trust me on this (or do the sums yourself) — the difference between a 4% return minus a 1.5% charge vs 0.1% charge over 20 years (remember compounding?) is mahoosive.

Thankfully there’s an alternative that’s cheaper and performs well: Index linked funds. These allow you to buy across a whole index (the FTSE 100 is an index, so is the S&P 500). Then when the market’s up, you’re up too. The charges on these funds are generally low, normally a fraction of 1 per cent.

Don’t believe me? Here’s what the UK finance site This is Money had to say:

The question is — who gets that nearly £4000. You? Or the guy in the pink and blue woven silk tie on the cover of your annual managed funds report?

An earlier version of this post, I had this tip titled ‘Buy some Bitcoin’. But now I’m older, wiser, I’ve added ‘don’t’ and I’m happy with the results.

People who invested in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies early on made stacks of money. I made around 1200% on my Bitcoin and other crypto investments and it was a wild ride. But I invested small amounts that I was prepared to lose if it all went to ‘zero’.

The same goes for investing in CFDs (a vehicle which allows you to borrow money to buy shares), prediction markets (essentially gambling) racehorses, friends start-ups — the list goes on.

The lesson is that you should be looking for opportunities to invest but you shouldn’t be looking for ways to lose your money and if you aren’t a confident investor, you have no place at the high stakes table of the speculative investments.

So you’ve got your index linked fund set up (after mastering the savings habit of course) and you’ve decided to invest 8% of your post tax salary (smart move, you’ve been paying attention). What’s the best way to do this?

Cost averaging.

This is a complicated term for ‘buying a little bit each month’. Cost averaging means you buy when the market is high and low. The result is you get a better return on average than if you invested it all at once or tried to ‘ride’ the market. Here’s an example:

You put your 8% (say $200) of your post-tax salary a month into the index linked funds. Every month you put the same money in. When the markets are up you do well and get more for your money, when they’re higher you get a little less. But over time (and that’s the key — this is a long term strategy) you are likely to grow your investment more than if you put big chunks of $2000 in every year.

In terms of where to put your investments, I’m not going to name specific funds. What I would say is that you should aim to have a spread of different investments and asset classes (stocks, bonds, commodities, cash, gold) and be buying regular to semi regularly into these. That way your risk is lower than if you just had stocks or gold.

There are few other books that changed my thinking on personal finance as much as this, apart from this one.

I bought the Kindle edition but I’d recommend buying the paperback and taking notes/buying lots of book marks. It might be the most important $20 you spend.

Sure, some of it’s a bit cheesy and Robbins really wants you to download his app. But when you cut through all of that, there’s an incredible wealth of knowledge and information there.

Here’s an example:

Robbins interviews the top experts in finance. One gives him THE ULTIMATE WAY TO PROTECT ALL YOUR MONEY RIGHT NOW. (It’s possible I’m paraphrasing but when Tony speaks to me, it’s always in CAPS.)

It’s basically a way to divide up your investments eg: 30% stocks, 40% bonds, 6% gold etc. Any I’ve followed this since for the core part of my investment portfolio — easy, vanilla Index funds, a bit of gold, some bonds and some commodities. So. Freaking. Simple.

Seriously though, this book is good. And there are other good books out there on money. If you read the top 10 books on personal finance on Amazon right now, you’d be miles ahead of the average person in terms of financial knowledge.

You can get ‘Money: Master the Game Here’ and if you do, I’ll get a small commission which is a bit like a ‘tip’ for the time and experience I’ve put into this blog post.

“Schools should teach kids more about money.”

WRONG!

Fathers should teach kids more about money. Before Dads spent their free time watching Netflix boxsets or gaming, we used to teach our children about life.

Imagine!!?

A good place to start is teaching your kids where money comes from and how you get more of it.

Teach them how to save up for things like toys they want and reward them financially for doing chores around the house.

Teach them about tithing and giving to charity.

Teach them about taxes, what they are, how to pay them. How to avoid paying them.

The best academic education in the world doesn’t mean Jack if they can’t manage their personal finances. And it’s your job to teach them how.

If you’ve read to the end, then firstly, well done. This post took me several hours to write and research so hopefully the last eleven and a half minutes were enlightening.

If you’ve read this and are now determined to give your finances a facelift then great.

But how do you make sure they are more Tom Cruise than Mickey Rourke? (does this reference still work 9 years after I first wrote this post — comment below!)

What would happen if you started slowly and small and build up your knowledge? If you see some word or term you don’t understand, research it until you do.

Read the books mentioned in this post and be prepared to put time into your money and put what you learn into practice.

Think about it as an investment in you and your family’s future.

If you liked this post then give it a hand clap or leave a comment telling me what you liked.

If you didn’t like it, leave me a comment too — and share it with all of your friends, telling them that it’s a terrible post and they shouldn’t read it (remember to include a link if you do this).

Much love and prayers.

Neil