IMPROVING YOUR PERSONAL PROFIT MARGIN

Was reading an article recently about becoming a millionaire.  Although that's not specifically one of my goals, it is within the realm of possibility.  Anyway, the thing that really got my attention was their advice to improve your personal profit margin.  Just like a business, we all have either a profit or loss in our personal finances, hopefully a profit.  By improving our our profit margins we free up more cash to put towards our investment goals.

There are basically two ways of doing this.  You can either cut expenses or increase your personal income.  If you've already cut expenses to the bone, then you'll have to look at ways to increase the amount of money you make.  Possibly taking on a side job or monetizing a hobby.  If you're already setting aside cash for investing, you can improve your profit margin by putting more money to work.  This month I plan on buying more shares of AOD for my ROTH IRA, which will increase my monthly cash flow from dividends by 1.5%.  That's admittedly not much of an increase, but they all add up and they all improve personal profit margins.

All this got me to thinking about what else I could do to improve my personal profit margin.  I try to keep my expenses as low as possible, but there is still room for improvement.  One idea I came up with is to use more coupons.  I use coupons regularly, but there are a lot of times I make purchases even though I could have used a coupon to get a better deal.  Coupons are like cash, you can either use them with the money budgeted for whatever you're purchasing and buy more, or you can save the amount of the coupons and put it towards increasing investment capital.  Of late, I've been doing more of the former and spending the extra cash to buy more than I normally would.  So here is an easy way for me to improve my profit margin, simply by using the coupons and buying only what I need and putting the cash I save to work, generating more income.

If you give it a little thought, there are probably a lot of little ways to improve your personal profit margin.  Individually they may not seem like much, but they all add up.