Side Hustles: An extra $100, $200, $400 per month?

What would you do with an extra $100, $200 or $400 per month?  I have a myriad of ideas, but I won’t go into that now.  What I will talk about in this post is my quest to generate extra income to create a monthly income buffer to start building up savings.

With my dream job salary being so low (but worth it — at this point) I am going to outline my successes, AND my failures, in generating extra income.

About 7 or 8 months ago, I approached my landlord with the idea of doing some extra work for him in exchange for lowering my rent.  He is an ANCIENT guy of 93 who still runs his own apartment complex.  Anyway, At first he seemed into the idea.  He wanted me to help him with his recycling and managing the tenants in the building (It is a Zero Waste Building.)  We negotiated $20 an hour upfront, in exchange for 5 to 10 hours of my time each month.  I thought I was a shoe-in for saving $100 to $200 each month.  I was wrong.

The first couple months, I meticulously kept track of the hours I labored.  And it wasn’t easy work, sorting bottles, cans, using my design skills to create posters about the environment, print out lease letters, etc.  At the end of each month I let him know how many hours I had worked, and I just knocked it off the monthly rent.  The first couple months my strategy to save money on my biggest expense, rent, was working.

However, I did not anticipate that my landlord would become finicky with the arrangement.  Eventually he told me he didn’t feel comfortable paying me what I was earning, and also he didn’t want me paying a lower rent for tax reasons.  So, after just a few months, the side hustle ended.  I did end up with a free parking spot, but the extra break on rent was no longer available.

This experience reenforced what I had known all along:  every job is temporary.  No matter how sweet of a set-up you think you have, it can be gone in an instant.  I didn’t dwell on my landlord’s sudden change of heart.  Instead I continued to brainstorm new ways to generate extra income.  I have come up with:

*Teaching guitar lessons from my home.

*Be a driver in ride-share in a startups like Uber, Sidecar, or Lyft.  You get to essentially use your car as a taxi while setting your own schedule.

*Become a writer from home, writing content for websites.  I have done this before and it is a nice way to earn a couple hundred extra dollars per month.  It has its plusses and minuses, like any job.

*Make money from this blog.  Full disclosure.  My goal is to eventually make some money off of this blog.  I am very impressed by the finance blog Yes I am Cheap.  She discusses how she earns $400 to $1000 per month in this post here.  In a nutshell, she does it by ads, pay-per-clicks, and also by writing good, useable content.  It must also be explained that it took her YEARS of blogging to get to this point.  My blog is yet to be filled with ads but eventually it may be as a teaching tool.  My goal to start out is to make $40 per month off my blog.  This will definitely take a lot of time, patience, and effort.

I will be documenting the successes and failures of all of these extra ideas in the coming months, as well as graphing my progress of raising my monthly income.

Finally, the obvious.  Asking (and getting!) a raise.  This is an artform all in itself.  By working extremely hard at my job, taking on extra projects, and increasing my skills and talents, my goal is to get to a higher salary in the next 6 to 18 months.