Side Hustles For Dummies. Alan R. Simon

Matching up your side hustle with your full-time job or other side hustles

      

Tallying your financial considerations

      

Zeroing in on your time commitments

      

Identifying any special side-hustle skills or licensing

      

Coming up with your side-hustle short list

      You’re all-in on the side hustle game — or at least the concept. But how do you even get started?

      You can do an online search for “best side hustles” or “side-hustle ideas” or a similar term, and you’ll wind up with hundreds of results, many containing dozens of ideas. How do you make sense out of this information overload? How do you find the needle in the haystack: the side hustle that’s a great fit for you?

Fortunately, you can follow a methodical, step-by-step process that will help you narrow down thousands of different side-hustle ideas into a small subset that matches your interests, abilities, and goals. Specifically, you need to consider and evaluate

       Various topical areas available to you to focus on for your side hustle

       How to flesh out and add substance to your initial topical area

       Various venues or formats through which you can enter the side-hustle game

       How your side hustle should relate to your full-time job or career or possibly other side hustles that you already have underway

       Financial considerations on both the moneymaking and money-spending side of your side hustle

       Time considerations, including the highly valued — and often misunderstood — concept of “passive income”

       Whether you need special skills, training, or licensing for your side hustle

      You can then mash the results of each of these areas together, and — presto — that overwhelming list of hundreds or thousands of side-hustle ideas is now magically narrowed down for you to make your final side-hustle decisions.

Your Side-Hustle Topical Area

      Cooking!

      Photography!

      Fashion!

      Baseball cards and sports memorabilia!

      Gig-economy work, such as delivering takeout meals, providing rideshare services, or shopping and delivering groceries or other items!

      Sports and exercise!

      Travel!

      Finance!

You have hundreds, maybe even thousands, of different topical areas — think in terms of “subjects” or “focal points” — available to you for your side hustle. Before you even think about making other critical decisions such as whether you should try to actually sell products or services versus make money from free content accompanied by online advertising, or whether you should do your side hustle on your own or partner up with somebody else, you first need to decide what topic or subject you want to use as the foundation for your side hustle.

      Ask yourself some very basic questions:

       What am I interested in?

       What do I know a lot about?

       Is there something that I know only a little about right now, but would like to learn a lot more about and maybe make some money from that new knowledge?

       Besides what I’m interested in and know, is there some sort of generic activity that I can spend time doing just to make some extra money?

      

In general, side hustles fall into two major “buckets” that you should consider:

       Side hustles built around an area of interest to you that you’d like to monetize (make money from), at least to some extent

       Side hustles that aren’t necessarily interesting or exciting to you, but that still present a way for you to earn extra money beyond what you earn from your full-time job or other side hustles that you already have going

      Cindy majored in mechanical engineering in college. These days, she lives in Seattle and works for an aerospace company. She enjoys her full-time career, but on the weekends she really wants to forget her day job and enjoy the Seattle party and music scene. While Cindy was in college, she worked weekends as a bartender in one of the most popular bars near campus. Just because Cindy graduated and now has a “grown-up job” as a mechanical engineer doesn’t mean that her bartending days need to be in the past. Cindy makes an important decision: She’s going to do some sort of side hustle related to bartending!

      Miguel was an accounting major during his college days in Boston. He stayed in Boston after graduating and is now a staff accountant at a large consumer products company. If you were to look at Miguel’s and Cindy’s résumés, at first glance the two of them would seem to have very little in common other than being fairly recent college graduates. But if you were to get to know Miguel and Cindy, you would learn that just like Cindy, Miguel also worked as a bartender during college and, likewise, has a continuing passion for the “mixology arts.”

      Miguel, like Cindy, has a pretty straightforward 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday work schedule. With his evenings and weekends almost always free, Miguel makes an important decision just like Cindy did: He’s going to do some sort of side hustle related to bartending.

Will Miguel wind up doing the same sort of bartending-related side hustle in Boston that Cindy does in Seattle? No! Why? Stay tuned, because selecting “bartending” as their respective side-hustle interest is only the first of many key decision points along the pathway toward finalizing all the specifics of a side hustle.

      In the meantime, Cindy’s father, Sandy, has been a sports fanatic for his entire life. When Sandy was growing up many years ago, he played baseball, soccer, football, and basketball year-round. He also collected sports cards and memorabilia all the way from elementary school through high school. Eventually, though, Sandy’s interests shifted, and he stuffed all his baseball cards, football cards, autographs, and other sports collectibles into a dozen cardboard boxes. Originally, those cardboard boxes were stashed in the basement of his childhood home, but eventually they wound up in the attic of his current house, all still sealed tightly. In fact, Sandy hadn’t even looked at any of his old sports cards or other collectibles for years — until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when all of a sudden sports cards became wildly popular again. Now working from home, Sandy went up to the attic one Saturday, brushed away a bunch of cobwebs, and found and opened all those long-ignored boxes — and he was instantly overcome by a flood of nostalgia. Cindy had told her father about her own side-hustle ideas, which sparked a few of their own in Sandy’s mind. Cindy may be thinking about a side hustle related to bartending, but Sandy has a few ideas for side hustles related to baseball