Well, this is like a "how do I lose weight?" question, to which the answer is always "eat right and exercise."

How do you get better on your instruments? Get a really good instructor for each instrument. Practice as much as you can (several hours per day, ideally).

But you don't have money to take lessons. Hmmm. That makes it much harder.

Can you read music? Start there. Learn to read music. Then get a book of tunes such as O'Neill's Music of Ireland and start learning them, one at a time, until you're confident playing each at various tempos. (Start iwth the ones with fewer 8th notes of course).

For the guitar, what really helped me was a book called Beginning Fingerstyle Blues Guitar -- it assumes you know the basic chords, and gets you into picking patterns, hammer-ons and pull-offs, and all that.

I'm sure others will have great ideas as well; here's my thoughts anyway.

Alex