Side Hustles

Side Hustles are, quite simply, things that you are doing to make money outside of your day job.

They are one of the simplest ways to take action towards more income every month to accelerate your goals, and they can take so many different forms. I have friends that run photography businesses as a side hustle, some that build picture frames, some that do something within the gig economy, and some that have joined an MLM company.

What might be a good side hustle for you?

This entirely depends a lot on your skills and what your personality is. What works for me might not work the same way for you, but you might have gifts and talents that far surpass me in certain fields. But one of our goals at To Build Fire is to deliberately try out a bunch of popular side hustle strategies, as well as a number of creative ideas, so that we can share the pros and cons of each side hustle according out our experience.

To start figuring out what side hustle might be a good fit for you, I want to challenge you to ask yourself the following question:

If you had to come up with $1000 extra in the next month, what things would you do?

I did this exercise at some point in early 2020 and i was able to come up some very interesting answers, and some of them were simple shifts I could do, and some were very involved processes. I’ll write a blog sometime soon about the things that I came up with during that exercise.

If you spend time with this question, I’d LOVE to hear your answers. Feel free to email us at tobuildfire@gmail.com

Two Families of Side Hustles.

One of the things I’d like to distinguish between different side hustles is whether or not you’re getting paid directly for each hour you’re working, or whether or not you’re building something that can provide a relatively passive income stream over time.

One family is not necessarily better than the other, THERE’S NO WRONG ANSWER HERE. There’s something unbelievably sexy about the idea of passive income, but chances are that by the time you’ve established a passive income stream, you likely could have made thousands by just providing an hourly service for someone.

Dollars per Hour.

This family of side hustles is pretty straightforward: what is something you can do for a set amount of time and be paid for that time. Examples of this inclue

• Driving for Uber or Shipt, grocery or meal delivery, or whatever else exists out there in the gig economy.
• Freelance work: Photography, Copy Writing,
• Building something and selling it. (pottery, furniture, candles)
• Flipping items on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace
• Dave Ramsey’s Famous Delivering Pizzas, or any other part time job you’re doing on the side.

Income Streams

This family of side hustles involves building an asset rather than just simply trading time for money. The hope here is to create income streams that can continually put money into your pocket!

• House Hacking (renting rooms in your house) Justin and I have both experimented with this
• Start a blog or affiliate marketing site.
• Digital Downloads : Etsy has a giant marketplace of things for sale, and if you create useful digital products, they can lead to a relatively passive income source.
• Online Courses — Do you have a skillset that you could package up and sell to people interested in learning?
• Youtube — This is a dream of so many right? Talk into a camera and get paid by your millions of adoring fans.

It’s my plan to come back to this article and adjust each of these lists and include links to our own articles about our experiments with these ideas, so keep locked on this.