How to Make More Money

Picture a bathtub you are trying to fill with water. There are two taps. The first tap is the money coming in - your salary, your side work, whatever you earn. The second tap is really a drain plug at the bottom, and it stands for the money going out - rent, food, the mobile bill, everything you spend. The water that stays in the tub, slowly rising, is your savings. That rising water is the whole point. The more of it you keep, the closer you are to being free of money worry.

Now, most people who want a fuller tub focus almost entirely on the drain. "Spend less," they say. "Close the plug tighter. Waste nothing." And that is genuinely good advice, up to a point. Every rupee you stop letting out is a rupee that stays in the tub. But here is the catch that this chapter is built around: the drain has a floor. You can close it partway, you can close it a lot, but you can never close it past zero. No one can spend less than nothing. There is a hard bottom under how tight you can pull that plug, and once you are near it, twisting harder gives you almost nothing and just makes you miserable.

The tap at the top is different. It has no ceiling. There is no rule of nature that says your earning can only rise so far and no further. You can learn a skill and earn more. You can take on extra work and earn more. You can get better at what you already do and earn more. The water coming in can grow and grow. So the real secret of a full tub is not just to guard the drain. It is to also open the top tap wider. Cutting spending can only ever save you what you were spending, but there is no upper limit to how much you can earn, so growing your income is the side of the ledger with room to keep growing.

Let us be fair to the drain-plug people first, because they are not wrong. When you have never watched your spending at all, tightening it is the fastest, surest win there is. A family that suddenly stops paying for four subscriptions they never use, cooks at home instead of ordering in every night, and drops one expensive habit can free up a large sum in a single month. That money was leaking out for nothing. Plugging it takes no special skill and no permission from a boss. So yes - the first move for almost everyone is to close the obvious leaks. Nobody should skip that.

But now follow what happens if that is your only move. Say a young man named Rohan earns ₹40,000 a month and, when he first looks honestly at his spending, he is saving nothing at all. He gets serious. He cuts and cuts. In the first month he finds ₹5,000 of pure waste - gone, easy. The next month he squeezes out ₹3,000 more with a bit of effort. The month after, he manages another ₹1,500, but now it hurts a little. Then ₹800. Then ₹400. Do you see the shape of it? Each round of cutting gives him less than the round before, and each one costs him more comfort. He is scraping the bottom of the tub. Very soon he is arguing with himself over ten-rupee decisions, exhausted, and there is simply no more water to stop losing. He has hit the floor.

And that floor is closer than people think, because a lot of spending is not waste at all - it is life. Rent has to be paid. Food has to be bought. His parents' medicine, his sister's school fees, the bus to work: these are not luxuries he can twist away. Below a certain line, cutting stops being smart and starts being harmful - skipping meals, ignoring a health problem, never seeing a friend. That is not freedom; that is a smaller, sadder cage. So the sober truth is that saving, all by itself, can carry you a good distance and then it quietly runs out of road.

There is one more quiet problem with leaning only on the drain, and it is about your mood over the long run. Cutting is a game of subtraction - every win is something you took away from yourself. Do that for years with no other lever, and money starts to feel like a thing that shrinks your life a little more each month. Many people give up on saving entirely, not because they are lazy, but because pure cutting feels like a slow punishment with no end and no reward. Opening the income tap changes the whole feeling, because now money is a game of addition - you are building something, learning something, growing something. The same person who could not bear to cut one more rupee will happily spend an evening learning a skill that pays. So working the top tap is not only more powerful in the long run; it is also far easier to keep doing, and the thing you can keep doing for years is the thing that actually gets you there.

The reason this matters so much is that the other road has no such end. If Rohan spends the same effort learning to earn ₹45,000, then ₹55,000, then ₹70,000 over a few years, the water coming in keeps rising with no floor to stop it. That is why this chapter insists you work both taps - pull the plug tight and open the top wide - but it puts the real long-term hope on the top. Because the drain can only give you back what you were losing, while the tap can keep giving you more and more.

Let us make the difference easy to see. Think of your money life as having two levers you can push on. One lever lowers your spending. The other raises your income. Both push more water into the tub - both increase your savings - but they behave completely differently as you keep pushing.

The spending lever hits a wall. Every push moves it a little less, and after a while it simply cannot go further, because you have reached the true cost of a decent life. The income lever has no wall in front of it. It may be hard to push - often harder than the spending lever - but there is nothing blocking it from moving further and further.

Read the picture slowly. On the left, the spending bars step down fast at first and then flatten against the dashed floor line - that floor is the real, unavoidable cost of living, and you can never push below it. On the right, the income bars just keep climbing, and the little arrow at the top shows there is open sky above them. This is the entire idea in one image: one lever runs out, the other does not. So a wise person leans on the left lever early, to get the quick guaranteed wins, and then puts their long-term weight on the right lever, where the growth actually lives.

Let us put real rupees down and watch the floor arrive. illustrative

Meet Arjun, who earns ₹50,000 a month and, embarrassingly, saves nothing. He decides to fix it purely by cutting. Month one is glorious. He cancels three streaming plans, stops the daily food delivery, and drops an expensive gym he never visits. Just like that, he is saving ₹8,000. He feels powerful, and rightly so - that was ₹8,000 of pure leak, sealed in a weekend.

Month two is harder but still good. He starts carrying lunch from home, switches to a cheaper mobile plan, and walks short distances instead of booking cabs. Another ₹3,500. Now he is saving ₹11,500 a month. Month three, he really has to hunt. He buys unbranded groceries, skips a friend's birthday dinner, and stops buying books. He scrapes out ₹1,500 more. Month four he manages just ₹600, and it costs him a genuinely joyless month - no outings, no small treats, a low grey mood.

Look at what happened. His savings went ₹8,000, then ₹3,500, then ₹1,500, then ₹600 - each step smaller, each step more painful. He is now near his true floor: the rent, his mother's medicine, honest food, transport to work. He cannot cut those without hurting his actual life. If he keeps twisting the plug, he will start harming himself for pocket change. Arjun has run out of drain. Total, he freed up about ₹13,600 a month - a real and valuable win - but the well is now dry, and everything below this line is life, not waste.

Here is the lesson in one line: cutting is a wonderful first move that gives fast, guaranteed money, but it is a ladder with a top rung. Arjun climbed it well. Now, if he wants to keep rising, he has to step onto the other ladder - the one with no top.

Now let us watch Arjun step onto the second ladder, and see how differently it behaves. illustrative

Having squeezed his spending as far as it sensibly goes, Arjun turns to his income. This is slower and it feels less certain - there is no guaranteed ₹8,000 waiting in a weekend. But he starts. He spends his evenings for six months getting genuinely good at a skill his work values - let us say he becomes the person in his office who can actually fix the accounting software when it breaks. At his next review he asks for more, backed by real proof of his worth, and his salary moves from ₹50,000 to ₹58,000. That is ₹8,000 a month more - the same size as his best cutting month, except this one did not cost him a single comfort.

He does not stop. Over the next year he takes a small weekend project for a neighbouring shop, tidying their books, and earns ₹6,000 a month on the side. A year after that, the skill he built lands him a better job at ₹75,000. Watch the shape now: his income went ₹50,000, then ₹58,000, then ₹64,000 counting the side work, then ₹81,000. Unlike the cutting steps, these are not shrinking. There is no floor pushing back. He could keep climbing for years.

And notice the quiet magic of combining the two. He is still living on the tight, sensible spending he learned in the cutting phase - his costs stayed near, say, ₹36,000. So almost every rupee of new income falls straight into the tub. When he earned ₹50,000 and spent ₹36,000, he saved ₹14,000. Now he earns ₹81,000 and still spends about ₹38,000, so he saves ₹43,000 a month. His saving didn't just grow - it tripled - and it did so without any new pain, because he raised the tap instead of scraping the drain. What truly decides how fast your wealth grows is the gap between what you earn and what you spend - widen that gap from either side, and every extra rupee of the gap is fuel.

Put the two phases next to each other and the difference in feel is striking. In the cutting phase, each new rupee of saving was smaller and more painful than the last - ₹8,000, then ₹3,500, then ₹1,500, shrinking toward nothing. In the earning phase, each new rupee of saving was bigger than the last and cost him no comfort at all - a raise, then a side income, then a better job, climbing with no floor pushing back. Same man, same goal, two completely opposite shapes. That is the practical heart of this chapter: once you have plugged the obvious leaks, the drain has almost nothing left to give you, while the tap has barely started. Every serious hour of your effort is worth far more spent on the tap than on the drain from that point on. Arjun spent his first month on the drain, wisely - and then spent the next two years on the tap, even more wisely.

Here is where the chapter's idea becomes genuinely powerful, and where a lot of people take a wrong turn. When your income rises and your savings swell, you are suddenly holding a much bigger monthly sum. The exciting-sounding question people ask is: "Now that I have more money to invest, shouldn't I get cleverer about where it goes? Hunt for the hot stock, the tip, the flashy scheme?" It feels like the natural next step. It is usually a mistake.

Think about what actually moves the final number. There are two knobs you can turn on your investing. One is how clever your picks are - the return you squeeze out per rupee. The other is how many rupees you put in. Most people obsess over the first knob and ignore the second, but the second is the one you can actually control, and it is the one a rising income lets you crank hard. A bigger contribution, poured steadily into a plain, cheap, wide basket of shares - the kind of low-cost index fund that simply owns a slice of hundreds of India's companies at once - will usually beat a clever pick fed by a smaller contribution. You do not need a genius boat. You need a bigger river flowing into an ordinary, sturdy one.

Let us prove it with rupees. illustrative Take two savers, both putting money into the exact same plain index fund, both earning the same steady market return of about 11% a year. Aarvi keeps her income flat and invests ₹10,000 a month. Aman grows his income the way Arjun did and, over the years, lifts his monthly investment to an average of ₹30,000 by living on his old tight budget. After twenty years, Aarvi's ₹10,000-a-month has grown into roughly ₹86 lakh - a fine result. Aman's larger flow, into the very same fund, at the very same return, has grown to roughly ₹2.6 crore. Aman did not find a better fund. He did not out-pick anyone. He simply fed a bigger river into the same ordinary boat, and the ending is three times larger. The clever-picking knob barely mattered; the how-much-you-put-in knob decided almost everything. That is the whole reason to grow your income: it lets you turn the one knob that actually works.

There is a belief that quietly stops people from ever touching the income lever: the idea that how much you earn is fixed by luck or birth - your degree, your family, the job you happened to land - and that trying to change it is like trying to grow taller. If you believe that, you will pour all your effort into the drain plug, because it feels like the only lever you are allowed to touch. That belief is wrong, and letting go of it may be the most valuable thing in this whole chapter.

Earning more is a set of skills, and skills can be learned by ordinary people through ordinary practice. Becoming so good at your work that your employer cannot afford to lose you is a skill. Learning to speak up and ask for a raise, with evidence, at the right moment is a skill. Picking up an extra ability that people will pay for - coding, tidy accounting, decent writing, fixing machines, teaching - is a skill. Building a small side income in your spare hours is a skill. None of these needs a special gift. They need someone willing to be a beginner for a while, to practise badly before practising well, and to keep going. The ability to earn more is not luck handed out at birth; it is a set of practical skills that any ordinary person can practise and steadily get better at.

Here is why seeing it this way changes everything. If income is fixed, your money story has a hard ending - you save what you can and that is that. If income is a skill you can grow, your money story has no fixed ending at all, because the top tap has no ceiling and you are allowed to keep opening it. The person who cuts costs is playing a game they can win only up to the floor. The person who also builds earning skills is playing a game with no upper wall. Consider a schoolteacher named Haridya who felt stuck at her salary for years. She spent her evenings learning to make good study videos, started tutoring a handful of students online on weekends, and within two years had added a second income that eventually grew past her main one. She did not get lucky. She treated earning as something to practise, and it answered.

And skills have a lovely feature that spending cuts do not: they stack and last. When you cut a subscription, you save that money once a month and that is the end of it - there is no growing return on the act of cancelling. But when you learn a skill, it stays with you and it compounds. The accounting software Arjun mastered did not just win him one raise; it made him the obvious choice for the better job, and it will keep paying every year he uses it. Haridya's teaching-on-video skill did not vanish after her first weekend - it got sharper, brought more students, and opened doors she could not see at the start. A skill you build this year is a tool you own for life, and it keeps earning long after the evening you spent learning it. That is another reason the tap beats the drain over a lifetime: cutting is a one-time coin, but a skill is a machine that keeps printing.

It also helps to make the learning small and steady rather than heroic. Nobody becomes valuable overnight, and waiting until you have a spare year to "really focus" means you never start. The people who lift their income are usually the ones who gave it a plain, boring hour most evenings - one hour of practising the thing, badly at first, then less badly, then well. An hour a day is nothing next to a life, but stacked across a year it is enough to turn a beginner into someone worth paying more. You do not need talent or luck to start. You need a small, repeatable habit and the patience to be bad at something for a while.

The trap here is sneaky, because it wears the mask of success. It is called lifestyle inflation, and it undoes the whole plan quietly.

Here is how it works on you. You do the hard, admirable thing - you grow your income. Your salary jumps from ₹50,000 to ₹80,000. And then, almost without deciding to, you let your spending rise to match. A nicer flat, a newer phone, dinners out because "I earn well now, I deserve it." Within a few months your ₹30,000 raise has been completely eaten by ₹30,000 of new spending, and your tub is filling no faster than before. You worked so hard to widen the top tap, and then you quietly widened the drain by exactly the same amount. All that effort, and the water level didn't move.

Now the honest cautions, because "just earn more" can be pushed until it breaks or turns unkind.

First, "income has no ceiling" is true in principle, but it does not mean earning more is easy, quick, or guaranteed. Cutting a wasteful subscription is certain and instant; getting a raise or building a side income is uncertain and slow, and some months of effort will pay nothing at all. That is exactly why you do not abandon the drain plug. The wise plan uses both levers together - take the fast, sure savings from cutting the real waste, and work patiently on the slower, bigger prize of earning more. Anyone who tells you to ignore your spending because "you should just earn more" is handing you a fantasy. Do both.

Second, chasing more income has its own floor of a different kind - your health, your relationships, your sleep, your peace. A person who takes on so much extra work that they never see their family, never rest, and wear their body out has not won; they have simply traded one kind of poverty for another. The goal of all this is a calmer, freer life, not a life swallowed by hustle. If growing your income is costing you the very things the money was meant to protect, you have pushed the lever too far.

Third, remember that earning more is only half the machine. The extra rupees do nothing on their own - they matter only because you feed them, steadily and without cleverness, into a plain, cheap, wide investment and leave them to compound for years. Grow the income but then let it rot in a cupboard, or gamble it on hot tips, and you have wasted the hardest part. And a final honesty: none of this is a stock recommendation or a promise of returns. The market rises and falls, the 11% in our examples is an illustration and not a guarantee, and real life is bumpier than a smooth curve. The durable truth underneath it all is simply this - the gap between earning and spending is the engine, growing your income is the side of that gap with the most room, and a bigger steady contribution into an ordinary fund beats a cleverer pick almost every time.