For a long time, you may have been told that if you work hard at life, you will succeed. To most degrees, that is true. If you succeed in your field, you can provide for yourself and your family and hopefully leave a little behind. If you want to really build wealth, however, it’s time to learn that your career isn’t enough.

Find a side hustle

If you’re working a part-time or full-time job, the first thing to do is start looking for money you can free up. There’s a good chance that you might not be able to find the room for seed money from your wages, so instead look at side hustles that you can earn extra cash from. This might mean providing freelancing services online, reviewing websites, joining Uber and driving for money, or something entirely different. The main point is that you need to start earning cash that isn’t immediately going to be swallowed up by your expenses.

Get involved in investing

What do you do with the money that you’re not investing? Saving it all isn’t the right answer. That’s not much different than sitting on it. Instead, you need to start looking at investment platforms. You can learn spread betting for high-risk high-reward investment potential while balancing it with bonds and other less volatile markets. Build a portfolio that gets your money to start working for you while ensuring you diversify it enough that your money is protected to some degree. Diversifying investments means that if you suffer losses in one market, you can be certain it won’t affect the profitability of investments in another.

Start a blog

Making money from a blog isn’t easy but if you have the time, the dedication to learning a craft, and enough interest in a subject, it’s far from impossible. Blogs that produce valuable content are loved by marketing teams for companies of all kinds. You can start affiliate partnerships that earn you a little profit every time you’re able to link a blog visitor to a partner’s website. There are other ways to monetise a blog, such as selling ebooks or using ads, too, so find the method that works best for you.

Get in on the ground floor

Your career may very well involve running your own business which could take up most of your time and money. Beyond investing in the markets, however, you can also invest directly in other businesses. If you know enough about your field or industry, you may be able to use that insight to judge which companies to invest in by their business plan and return potential. There are always startups looking for angel investors, you just need to learn to choose the right one to back.

Your career is important but it’s only the first stepping stone on the road to true wealth. Finding other potential sources of revenue, from investments to other people’s businesses, is how you go from having a salary to having a range of returns that can provide real financial independence and security.