In the past……
I’ve talked about the importance of earning extra income and how it can lead to financial independence.
How To Achieve FIRE While Working a 9 To 5
I’ve also talked about how a side hustle can speed your journey to financial independence.
Side Hustle Your Way To Financial Success
With the holiday season fast approaching, you might be looking to earn a little extra money to buy some nice Christmas gifts for the family, go on a trip somewhere warm in the winter, or just replenish your emergency fund.
Today, we are going to talk about ways to earn a little extra money. Earning as little as $1,000 per month can benefit your life right now. Then I’ll give you 10 ideas you can start doing today to earn that extra $1,000 a month.
How Earning a Little Extra Money Can Benefit You
Safety Net
Earning a little extra side income is a great way to build a safety net against unemployment. Unfortunately, job security is a thing of the past. When companies like Google, Apple, and Tesla can have layoffs, anyone can have layoffs.
You need to be prepared to lose your main source of income at any time.
In some ways, having a side income is better than an emergency fund because an emergency fund is not self-perpetuating. It eventually runs out.
An established side income can help if you were to lose your main job. Your side income will make that emergency fund last a lot longer or ease the financial burden in the event you lose your job.
Payoff Debt Faster
Do you have a mountain of debt to payoff? Struggling to make ends meet? Earning some side income can ease your anxiety and help pay off your debts faster.
For example, let’s say you are like most Americans and live paycheck-to-paycheck.
That extra $1,000 a month can really help to pay down your debt and right-size your finances.
I know from experience.
A few years ago,, my wife and I took up retail side jobs to help pay down our kids’ medical bills.
Each of us working just an extra 15 hours per week enabled us to bring in an additional $1,200 a month. We then took that money and put it exclusively toward our girls’ medical bills.
Working this side job for a few years enabled us to completely payoff those medical bills and rebuild our emergency fund.
If you want to learn more about how to stop living paycheck to paycheck, Alexis from Fitnancials allowed me the pleasure to guest post on her blog. Below is a link to the complete article.
How To Stop Living Paycheck To Paycheck
Build Up An Emergency Fund
If living paycheck-to-paycheck, odds on, your emergency fund probably is not where it needs to be.
Earning as little as an extra $1,000 a month can change that.
Here is an example.
Let’s say you make $52,000 per year (about $1,000 per week). With a 30% tax rate, your take home pay is $36,400.
Assuming your expenses match your take home pay, a 6-month emergency fund needs to be about $18,200.
If you earned an extra $1,000 a month (gross), have no money set aside, and assuming you are not currently savings anything towards an emergency fund, it would take you about 1 ½ years (about 19 months to be exact) to build up that 6-month emergency fund.
Not bad huh? 😊
How Can A Person Earn That Much Side Income?
It’s easier than you think.
Between the high demand for labor, inflation, and the gig economy that has developed in the past decade, it doesn’t take much effort to earn $1,000 a month.
The 10 ideas we will discuss today are quick to start, easy to implement, and have no upfront costs.
Some ideas can easily earn the $1,000 a month target and some can be done in conjunction with another idea to get you there.
The biggest investment on all these is time. However, for an extra 10-15 hours a week, I think you will be very surprised by the results.
Retail
One of the easiest things you can do right now to earning extra side income is work a retail job. While the national minimum wage average is only $7.25 per hour, many states (including mine) are paying a lot more than that.
The reason is that when COVID hit our country, a lot of people decided, for various reasons, to leave the workforce. Without a supply of workers to backfill these positions, demand for retail positions skyrocketed and drove the wages up a lot.
I have seen a lot of places where you can get a retail job at a wage rate of $15+ per hour!
Here is a sample of a few employers in my area I have seen paying its employees $15+ per hour:
- Costco
- Home Depot / Lowe’s
- Blaze Pizza
- Kohl’s
- Target
- Panda Express
There are other non-retail part-time jobs that pay at least $15 per hour. Here are a couple of examples.
- Amazon (warehouse, drivers, etc.)
- UPS
And there is a lot more I could name!
Imagine working just an extra 15-18 hours a week (3, 6-hour shifts a week) can put an extra $1,000 in your pocket!
Virtual Assistant
With the boom is online businesses, owners are finding themselves time strapped. They need help to manage their calendars, arrange travel, handle the bookkeeping, answering phone calls / emails, and even manage their social media accounts.
These busy professionals have more money than time and are willing to pay to get some of that time back.
Enter the virtual assistant.
As a virtual assistant, you do the things the busy professional doesn’t have time to do all while working virtually.
How much does it pay? It depends.
According to PayScale, the median hourly rate for a virtual assistant is $16/hour. However during my research, I saw a wide range of annual salaries. Some as low as $20,000 and some as high as $60,000. This equates to an hourly rate range of $10 – $30 per hour (assumes 40-hour work week).
The best part? It’s can also be a part-time gig that you work from the comfort of your own home.
How sweet is that?
If you’re an organized and responsive person who does not mind handling administrative tasks, this may be the job for you.
If interested in checking out, try posting your credentials online at Fiverr and Upwork. These are 2 of the more prominent online platforms for freelance-type work.
Plasma Donation
This is a new one that I just came across and am checking out for myself. I’m always interested in a good side hustle especially one with a low amount of work and setup required.
Donating plasma so far fits these criteria.
To give a plasma donation, they draw out your blood, run it through a centrifuge, and put the red blood cells back into you.
You may be asking yourself, why are people paying for plasma when most people donate blood to the Red Cross for free?
My wife who is a nurse tells me that patients who need plasma injections in the hospital can pay up to $10,000 for a single dose (well, their insurance company does! 😊)!
Since COVID, one of the things that has taken a hit has been blood donations.
The reason people are paying for it is due to the scarce supply.
And they are paying good money too.
From my research, I found that several companies in my area are having bonuses for your 1st month of donating up to $1,000. By just giving 8 doses of plasma, a person can earn that 1st $1,000 quick and easy.
Plus, if you refer others, you also get a referral bonus and the person referred can qualify for the signup bonus too.
Also from my research and after the 1st bonus month, an average person can donate plasma up to 2 times per week and the amount of money they can earn ranges from $50-$75 per visit.
If you donate the 8 times per month allowed, you can earn anywhere from $400 – $600 per month.
The initial donation visit takes about 2 hours, and each subsequent donation visit can take about 1-1 ½ hours.
For 12 hours a month of your time, you can earn from $400 – $600. That’s breaks down to about $33-$50 per hour!
Not bad for only 12 hours of monthly effort. 😊
While this doesn’t come out to the $1,000 a month, the pay rate for this procedure certainly gets you on the right track.
Plus, you can combine this side hustle with another one we will talk about next.
Answering Surveys
Taking online surveys is simple, easy to do, and free to join. Basically, you find a company to sign up with, create a profile, receive surveys, fill out surveys, and earn money.
Monetary survey rewards can vary from $1 to more than $20. Realistically, the majority of the per survey payouts fall in the $1 to $5 range.
The surveys ask you some questions and you respond honestly. Some are as simple as answering multiple choice questions while others ask you to answer questions in long form.
Plus, there is no limit to how many you can answer.
For example, let’s say you spend 1 hour per day answering surveys for 5 days a week. After awhile, you are rocking them out and can do 10 surveys an hour. Let’s assume you are paid on average $2.50 per survey. For 1 hour of work per day, you are earning $25.
By putting in 5 hours per week, you earn $125… not bad.
Over the course of a month, you can earn $500 for 20 hours of work
While you won’t hit the $1,000 mark with this alone, combining it with the above idea or one of the other ideas we will go thru can easily get you to the magic $1,000 a month mark!
If interested in checking out some legit survey companies, start with these:
Proofreader
Do you have a keen eye for catching spelling mistakes and poor grammar usage? Working as a freelance proofreader may be the side hustle for you.
Proofreaders find and fix errors in books, newspapers, magazine articles, blog posts, and any other type of writing.
Working as a freelance proofreader comes with a few perks like a flexible work schedule and location independence.
From my research, you can make, on average, around $20 per hour as a proofreader but I’ve seen the range vary from as little as $10 per hour to as much as $45 per hour (a few were even more than that!).
Assuming a $20 per hour rate, working just 12.5 hours a week gets you at the magical $1,000 a month in extra money! Not bad!
Getting started with the 1st gig may be tough, but if you want, there are courses out there that can guide you through the process such as Proofread Anywhere.
If interested, check it out.
Online Tutoring
All parents want their children to do better than they did and are willing to spend money to achieve this. Look no further than hiring a tutor.
Some kids need that little bit of extra 1 on 1 class work to either get them back on track or to excel beyond their peers.
To be a tutor, you do not need a teaching certificate to teach it. So long as you know more about the subject than the student you are helping, you can be a tutor.
If teaching technical subjects to kids is not your thing, how about teaching English as a second language? A lot of people all over the world want to learn how to speak English since it is the universal language of business. What better way to learn than from someone who is a native speaker?
The best part is you only need to be a fluent speaker to teach it. No teaching certificate or degree required.
The job also pays pretty well. According to Preply, on average, online tutors can make around $18 per hour. The range of pay is also wide and depends on the topic being taught. Rates can go as low as $10 per hour to as much as $40 per hour.
For about 12-15 hours of work a week at the average pay rate, you can achieve $1,000 a month in extra income.
To get started, there are several online tutoring companies to apply to from Princeton Review to VIPKID to Preply to Skooli and much more.
Check it out!
Deliver Groceries and Food
Food delivery has been around for years. Remember the late-night pizza delivery you ordered in college? 😊
Food delivery is even more prevalent today and has been on steroids the last 10 years.
According to Forbes, the food delivery industry is expected to achieve $200B in sales by 2025…… $200B!
Don’t believe me? Look around your neighborhood. I constantly see food delivery drivers dropping off virtually any kind of food from pizzas to sushi and everything else in-between.
Even grocery delivery has exploded in the last 5 years. We used it frequently when we were sick earlier this year.
Imagine going online to your grocery store, ordering the food you want, and paying for it online. Then someone else spends a couple of hours or so of finding it in the actual store, waiting in check out to bag it, and dropping it off. I love it! 😊
Due to this explosion is services, the food delivery jobs has grown exponentially and people are willing to pay for it.
How much can you earn?
The average online delivery driver earns about $15-$20 per hour. For a mere 12-15 hours a week of extra effort, you can earn that $1,000 a month of extra money.
Know what the best part is? You can actually do YOUR shopping at the same time as a customer’s shopping.
I’ve seen many DoorDash drivers come into Target between runs to purchase something. I’ve also seen several Shipt drivers fill up 2 shopping carts at the same time, their food and their customer’s food….. I know because I asked them about it! 😊 lol
If you want to get started, check out the following delivery services to learn more:
Ride Sharing
Think food and grocery delivery is the only delivery service people are paying for? Thank again.
People have also been buying ride sharing services for over a decade.
I’m sure you’ve heard of Uber or Lyft. These drivers have flexible work schedules, earn a decent wage (according to GoBankingRates, drivers earn on average around $15 – $18 per hour), and meet a wide range of people.
If you put the time in consistently (12-15 hours per week), you can earn easily $1,000 a month.
The trick with this side hustle is to learn when the peak hours are around the city you live in and plan your routes to coincide with peak demand times. This will take advantage of what is called surge pricing which is when higher prices are charged for peak demand times (i.e., think of people leaving a concert or sporting event).
Waitress / Bartender
Being a waitress or bartender are a couple of the original side hustles and put a lot of my friends through college! Lol 😊
While hourly wages are low, the real money is in earning tips.
If you can find a place that has either an upscale clientele or has a lot of throughput, the tips you can earn could be huge and enables you to easily earn $1,000 a month.
For example, these is a city near where I live that has a restaurant which is famous for its chicken dinners. Each meal costs on average around $25. The number of people at a sitting range from 2-8 people.
Let’s assume you have a table of 4 and the bill is $100. Assume you did a solid job and earned a $20 tip. Not bad!
But wait, there is more. This place pushes through literally hundreds of people an hour and you have at least 3-4 tables this size to serve in that same hour. You’ve just earned $80 and hour!
Do that for a couple of 5-hour shifts a week and you’ve earned a $1,000 a month!
Nanny / Babysitter
With more and more 2-income families, people need a responsible person to watch and care for their children.
When I was a kid before I could drive, I used to babysit my nieces and nephews so my siblings could get a break. I thought I was making big money when they paid $4 per hour in cash. Boy, how times have changed.
Now, nannying and babysitting is BIG money! When we used Sittercity to find a babysitter, we had sticker shock on how much people were charging to watch our kids.
The prices ranged from $15-$30 per hour and the majority charged $20 or more per hour.
At this price, working just 12.5 hours a week (a couple of nights a week) will enable you to easily earn $1,000 a month.
Is Making An Extra $1,000 A Month Doable?
You bet it is! 😊
There are a lot more ways to easily earn a $1,000 a month of extra income and we’ll go though more in a future article.
With a little help from the internet, some creativity, and some flexibility on your part, there are more ways than ever before to find a side hustle you could both enjoy, supplement your income, and even grow your skillset.
The old excuse of “I don’t earn enough money” no longer exists. Thanks to the internet, the only thing holding you back is your ability to act.
Pick a side hustle, focus on it, and make the leap today!
Keep your goals front and center to motivate you and watch the cash start rolling in!
Live The Life You Love, Want, And Deserve! 😊
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