I’ve been eyeing side hustles for some time. I like the idea of having some income coming in on the side that I can put towards investing to turbo charge my path to FI. My ideal side hustle would be something that I enjoy doing and could do whenever I have free time. Given, free time has been a premium lately (which readers can probably tell by the reduced blog output these past couple months). But, I anticipate getting more free time back in the future, and it never hurts to plan/dream. I eventually want to be making $1000 monthly in side hustle income, but I have a long way to go!
Side Hustle 1: This Blog
In recent months I’ve made an attempt to monetize this blog. First, I signed up to be an Amazon affiliate. However, even though I’ve plugged my favorite personal finance books with affiliate links, I have exactly $0 in commissions. Hopefully maybe one of you will be inspired to gain some financial knowledge in book form (or give them as a Christmas present!) before the holidays are over.
Other than that, I finally became eligible for Google Adsense. That’s why you now see banner ads at the bottom of the screen. I turned off the most intrusive ads that appear in the middle of the content. Reading the blog would have become a worse experience and I didn’t want that. So every time one of you clicks on the ad, I get a small amount of money. So far, I have made 38 cents from folks clicking on ads. Obviously this blog has a really long way to go before it makes $1000/month.
Side Hustle 2: Selling Sports Cards
When my wife and I got married, I moved some of my old stuff into our attic. Included in this lot was the remainder of my baseball and football cards. Since they were just gathering dust, I decided to try to sell them (like I mentioned in a monthly memory). I sold a good number of them and maybe made $75. I never bought the higher end cards when I collected them as a teenager so it’s not a shock that they didn’t fetch top dollar. I had a lot of fun looking through my old cards. So I decided to try to buy, organize, and sell someone’s card collection. In late September I did just that. As of writing, I’ve made about half my money back. I haven’t sold the most valuable part of the collection yet either.
But is this scalable? Acquiring more inventory is the biggest problem. After the current collection is all sold, I should have a decent profit. But it won’t be enough to buy a seriously large/valuable collection, even if I could find one. I could continue to search out and buy smaller collections and reinvest the profits until I’m able to buy larger collections. Another option that I’m considering is to make a YouTube channel about sports cards. It would be part reviews, part storytelling about what I’m selling, and part card history. Between the different sources, maybe I could eventually get to $1000/month.
What Other Side Hustle Should I Try?
There are seemingly endless sources of side hustle inspiration out there. I enjoy listening to the Side Hustle Show, who’s host has a new book out called $1k 100 Ways (affiliate link). It’s partially the inspiration of this post. And I have other ideas that could manifest themselves in the future. For now, are there any side hustles that you enjoy doing? Leave a comment and let me know!
Hey Jon! If you don’t already listen to him, I’d highly recommend Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income podcast/YouTube channel. He’s awesome. You can search through his podcasts to see if there’s anything particularly relevant to what you want to do. I’ve learned a lot by listening to his interviews. And I love how he really seems family-oriented and interested in helping people, as his top priorities. https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/shows/spi/ Great blog by the way! – Liz (from Corpus Christi parish 🙂