How Having Confidence Has Made Me Money

It’s amazing how having a little self-confidence can go a long way in helping you to be more successful in life. Over the years, I’ve found that being confident, but not necessarily overly so, has helped me make decisions and try things that I might not have tried otherwise, moves that have sometimes lead to saving or earning money.

Here are a few of the areas in which confidence has helped me make more money.

My Near Resignation

I’m willing to work hard, and I realize that you often have to start at the bottom and work your way up, but I was really getting the short end of the stick at my first “real” job after graduating from college. Upon the release of our department director due to performance issues, I was charged with maintaining the entire department while remaining the lowest paid manager on staff.

After speaking with higher-ups several times regarding compensation for my additional duties (which for a time required seven day work weeks, with days often stretching 10-12 hours), I decided I should try my hand elsewhere and submitted my resignation (suspecting that it would be what it took to rattle their cage enough to get things rolling toward a pay raise).

While I definitely don’t recommend that everyone start doing this, especially since the job market was much better then than it is currently and everyone’s work situation is different, my confidence in myself and my ability to get another job if necessary allowed me to take a calculated risk based upon what I knew of the situation (my employer really had no one else but me to run the department). Still, I did so in a respectful way so that it didn’t appear I was being overly pushy. I just stated the facts as they were and that I felt my abilities might be better appreciated with another organization.

The end result was about a $5,000 raise to stay with the company, which I did for another five years until moving into a self-employed role.

Doing My Own Taxes

Not everyone has the confidence to do their own taxes. I admit that the threat of the IRS coming calling due to an error is not a fun one. However, I have confidence in my abilities to follow the tax code and am able to support the numbers I provide on my tax filings with documentation, so why should I pay someone else $250 or more to do the same thing?

By having the confidence to do my own taxes over the past 18 years, at an average savings of around $250 a year, this confidence has saved me about $4,500.

Childcare

I’ve discovered that raising a child is no easy task. Nor was it an easy decision when I made the move into self-employment to also undertake the raising of our newborn son. However, confidence in my abilities as a caregiver as well as my experience as a manager in the working world (where I had to deal with all sorts of unexpected and unforeseen situations that I often had no prior experience with) provided me with the nerve to go ahead and add childcare provider to my resume.

Factoring in expenses of around $250 a week, 50 weeks a year (subtracting two weeks each year for vacation), had I worked outside the home over the last five years, we would have incurred somewhere in the area of $62,500 in childcare costs.

Resale

Sometimes readers scoff when I write that we shop resale occasionally, though this practice has gradually been becoming more commonly accepted these days after the effects of “The Great Recession”.

Even some of my own extended family doesn’t really understand or appreciate our shopping resale, and I’ve taken my fair share of knocks for writing about our resale purchases. Yet our confidence in knowing that we are doing what’s right for our family and our finances allows us to continue to find great deals and save hundreds of dollars each year by shopping resale for things like clothes, furniture, toys, household goods, and similar items.

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