side hustle thread

as much as I hate the term 'side hustle', curious as to whether anybody makes extra money on the side doing stuff besides your regular job. for morbid curiosity and....also cos I'm looking for some lol.

things I've tried in the past

Plasma donation - the easiest and most lucrative, but I have a high resting heart rate which almost always disqualifies me

Semen donation - I signed up but squeamishly never did it. apparently pays well but I chickened out on goig

Postmates - I did one week worth and got so few deliveries after driving around for hours that I gave up. also sometimes it gives you deliveries downtown without factoring in time to park.

simply working overtime - as a trainer, on weeks I have classes, it's understood that I probably will need OT, so I usually get up to 5 hours of OT which is like a little bonus

Moderna vaccine trial - by far the most fulfilling-feeling activity I did last year to help advance the approval of the vaccine. financially it provides me about $75 a month, but paid a lot in the early months.

Opening a new checking account - y'know those little 'open a new checking account, deposit xxx dollars in 60 days get a bonus'? I've opened accounts just to get the bonus, kept it open the minimum amount of time, and closed it immediately after. $600 in two years. but it takes a while to pay off.

selling shit - I haven't got a thing worth selling anymore. but I used to make a little, once sold an In the Heights autographed playbill for $80

what are other good side hustles, what have you all tried

I sell records I find for a dollar

Some trivia app - too much pressure, cashed out at $5, delete delete delete.

Yotta - usually win a pittance every week, but won $10 over the last two. Downside: savings account where every $25 in gets you 1 perpetual lottery ticket, so requires $ to start with.

Acorns - spent more $ buying stuff to get "free money" 6 months later. Stock market based and has a monthly fee. Hated it.

Etsy shop - knitted things. I love to knit but not under pressure.

Selling stuff on eBay - so much effort required to find/list/pack/ship stuff.

Cat-sitting - I love this.

Cross-stitching samples for magazines - similar to Etsy shop except you're using patterns that no one else has ever tried making and sometimes they are just crap and ugly. Has improved now there is software designers use. Calculating your hourly rate will make you sad.

Aluminum can recycling - was cathartic to smash those fuckers, took up lots of space. It offset my Diet Coke habit.

Tutoring - hit or miss, but overall not a bad gig.

Forgot: writing SEO copy for TextBroker - did okay with it but it got old after 8 months or so

Oh and surveys! I currently do Amazon Shopper Panel (~$11/month, they also want uploads of receipts from non-Amazon purchases) and Google Rewards (pays for in-app purchases for games mostly). The first paid survey I did was for the new Tylenol packaging after that guy killed his wife with cyanide in a capsule and there were copycats. Paid $50 which was a lot at the time! My favorite one though was being on a panel for Boeing and Alaska Airlines to give feedback on new interiors - it was fun to play around in the mocked up fake planes for a few hours.

surveys! yes, I had a friend back in the days of the dot-com bust who told me about how she made ends meet on her meager unemployment benefits by doing surveys and focus groups. I've done a few. There are consumer products ones and also ones geared for people with professional experience in various areas -- Neando, based on what you do for a living, you could probably get into some of these. Intuit is really into market / product research and doing focus groups.

when I was much younger: selling single cigarettes at events and in public areas where people are likely to want to buy one cigarette.

selling single cigarettes at events and in public areas where people are likely to want to buy one cigarette.

Genius. Where were you back when I was a smoker but pretended I wasn't, you would have made bank from me.

When I was still working construction I had a sideline doing listing photos for a commercial developer/landlord I worked for a lot. I also sold photo books of the construction process to custom home owners.

I looked into getting back into it with a drone for video and residential listings but the hurdles to commercial drone use were a bit beyond me.

Genius. Where were you back when I was a smoker but pretended I wasn't, you would have made bank from me.

― lukas, Saturday, October 30, 2021 12:15 PM (fifty-eight minutes ago)

maybe we didn't go to the same clubs or parties? ... I still do it, but not with the discipline and work ethic I had when I needed the money.

Also, I cut way down on the booze in recent years

I spent my month annual leave from a call centre job one year working on a trawler, that was lucrative and interesting

Financially, design/DTP is my main gig and bartending is my side hustle. In terms of hours spent doing it, it's the reverse. Design work feels like my side hustle now. I opened a new CC account with a cash-back reward, started putting almost everything on that instead of debit and have made a few hundred.

Pretty obvious but my freelance writing work has been my side hustle as such since the late 1990s.

Xxxxps to sarahell I just signed up for a survey/study service which is what prompted the thread!

Hoping I get to do a few

I moved to la during pandemic shutdown and needed a side hustle so I started a grave yard tour and it's been pretty pretty good for pocket cash

I guess my side hustle will be ending soon. From a PayPal email
Please provide the correct Tax ID Number to meet the new January 2022 IRS requirement and avoid disruption to your account.To meet the new IRS requirements, follow these steps for each of your PayPal accounts.

Log in through the Resolve It Now button
Choose your taxpayer status from the dropdown menu
Enter your U.S. Tax ID Number, your name and your business type if it applies.

Then, if needed based on the amounts you've received, we will use the information you've provided to send you a Form 1099K in January and share this information with the IRS.

My side hustles are playing music in exchange for money, selling dance music on Bandcamp

I guess my side hustle will be ending soon. From a PayPal email

how would that disrupt your side hustle?

I don't the IRS would care that I only sell records to buy more records? If I get audited through my PayPal, the IRS could tell me back I own them back taxes for my record sales. Last week I sold two soul singles for quite a bit of money, which I used to buy cheap lounge records. I've been doing this for years. If this goes as I see it could, I'd have to sell my collection to pay taxes.

uh, you can deduct the cost of other records you buy, travel to purchase records, storage for records ... like, you don't pay tax on the total sales, only the net income from the business, which it sounds like, you can probably reduce to zero tbh

applied for a study with Cameo which pays $160, and naturally, while I finish the pre-screen and give my contact info to get in touch w/ me, I mis-key the number by one digit and don't notice until I've hit submit, and there's zero way to get back in contact w/ them now.

welp, hope they email me! lol.