As a full time entrepreneur of sorts, I’m constantly brainstorming for new ideas. I try to come up with ways to make money on the side, think outside the box. To me, making money really adds up to a game of sorts. The easiest method for most people is simply to find a job that pays reasonably well, stick to their career path like glue, and hope that the economy doesn’t swat them down into poverty if their industry takes a hit due to unfavorable conditions.
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But that’s no fun.
I try to break every income stream into a daily income measurement. If I do X activity for Y hours, I’ll make $Z per day. Add all of those little projects, side jobs, and fun stuff together, and you have my current annual income. There is, as you might expect, a certain amount of volatility to the calculation. Many of my writing gigs come and go, some are project based, and others are simply one-off articles. I have consistent income as a base, but everything else fluctuates.
One easy way to make extra money is to pick up a part time job, but from what I’ve seen, most part time gigs are unskilled, menial work. I should note that there’s nothing wrong with such work, as money is money, and I’m never one to turn that down when the opportunity presents itself. My wife and I have been dreaming of doing some more traveling this year, but we also have some repairs queued up for the house that we are saving for. That got me to thinking that maybe we could pick up some side work to fund those travel plans and have a more enjoyable year.
This is a bit of a tradeoff. I already have full-time employment through my “hydra” of income sources, so this would keep me extra busy. If I stayed with it too long, I’d simply get burnt out, so the work would have to be temporary. So we looked around and sure enough, there are a number of places hiring for the holiday season, This would mean an extra 15 or so hours a week of work for each of us, but only for a few short months. The pay isn’t great, but we are hoping to get to work together, and even a small hourly wage will still end up being a couple thousand dollars well all is said and done.
That means we get to travel, the house gets fixed, and we aren’t bogged down to something we’d hate doing for a long time. Sounds like a win-win to me.