With the ups and downs…and a little bit more up…and then a little down…of the economy today, achieving goals for saving for retirement may seem to you to be light years away. This is especially true if you’re watching your 401k dip downward more than it skyrockets upward. And downright depressing if you were hoping to retire within the next five years.

But there are ways to increase your retirement nest egg despite the sluggish economy, and despite the ornery stock market. These strategies require a paradigm shift, however, and may cause you to seriously stretch your thinking. But they are valid, low-risk methods that have already worked for numerous people.

Here are five such methods.

1. Buy low, sell high.

I’m not talking stocks here. I’m talking garage sale gems. They are everywhere, just waiting for an entrepreneur garage-saler to snatch them up. An antique dresser with a $10 price tag. A $15 wedding gown in great condition. A box of gently used stuffed animas for $3.00.

Spend a few hours every weekend buying cheap items that are still in good condition, and that you’re sure other people would buy. Then, sell them on craigslist.org for five to ten times the price that you bought them for.

2. Start a business in network marketing.

If you’ve tried MLM before and failed, try again. This time, build your business online. By blogging, article marketing, and uploading videos to YouTube and Vimeo you will have people coming to you to buy your products and join your team. You’ll never have to call a lead of bug friends and family again.

3. Build a niche website.

Set up a bog about a particular evergreen topic, such as health, cars or dating. Write two or three posts per week, which have Adsense code embedded and/or which promote e-books from clickbank.com. Learn basic SEO to generate traffic to your sit. If you do it right, you could be making an extra four to five figures per month in six months to a year.

4. Become a coach or consultant.

What is your area of expertise? You may be able to set this up as a consulting or coaching business on the side. Life, wellness, marriage, financial, etc. coaching can be done a couple hours every evening. You may do nutritional or time-management or any other sort of consulting on weekends or days off from your regular job. Both coaches and consultants can expect to get paid anywhere from $100 an hour to several thousand dollars per project.

5. Freelance write for magazines.

If you’re a good writer and you know it, you could probably make at least an extra $500 per month spending five hours per week or so researching and writing articles on a topic of interest to you. If you constantly have at least a dozen submissions floating around at one time, and you’ve been careful to follow the writer’s guidelines for each magazine, chances are good that you’ll get at least a few articles published every month.

None of these ways to boost your retirement savings is as easy as simply throwing money into a mutual fund. But one or more of the ways could help you to retire much richer and/or earlier than you may have otherwise.

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