Yes, I’m tired of being broke, so this year, 2024, I decided to get a side hustle alongside my main activity as a freelance writer. By the way, I also paint pet portraits, but painting commissions tend to be sporadic and you can’t really rely on them to have a stable income.
I see plenty of content creators on TikTok who are sharing their experiences with side hustles, mostly by necessity as they need to pay bills and because their main job, as their only source of income, is not enough to cover all their living costs.
People choose to start side hustles for a number of reasons but some of the main ones are:
to meet financial commitments such as bills and rent or paying off debt, and saving for major purchases such as a house;
to improve their career prospects by exploring projects where they can further develop their skills;
to have something creative or totally unrelated to their main job to add variety in their lives.
Here I will focus primarily on having a side hustle as a necessity to pay the bills, because that’s the situation I am in.
Bankrate, a provider of financial information and financial planning tools, reported that in the United States 39% of people have a side hustle. 33% of respondents said they needed their side hustle to pay their bills and other essentials, 12% to pay off debts, 25% to put aside in savings, while 27% said they use the earnings from their side hustle for discretionary spending. Side hustles are becoming a necessity for an increasing number of people during the current cost of living crisis. Bankrate calculated that on average people are making $810 per month on top of their salaries through side hustles. However, 28% of the people in the survey said that they make less than $50 a month with their side hustles.
The Guardian asked author Tony Tulathimutte: “Does it feel harder to make a living as a writer now than it did in the past?” and he replied: “It’s definitely harder now, with so many media companies and publication venues folding and ever fewer places to publish book-related content.” As a freelance writer myself, I couldn’t agree more.
Things I’ve tried and then abandoned to make extra money
I have the attention span of a fruit fly and get bored easily. When it comes to money, if I can’t earn enough in a bunch of hours to help pay my bills, I literally abandon the whole thing and move on to something else.
I wrote about this in a few articles over the years, with my personal best being trying a website for a day to earn some extra money working on micro tasks and then deleting my profile in a huff, bemoaning the fact that I had wasted my time without earning anything.
I had to look at my whole portfolio of articles to remind myself of the many abandoned side hustles I tried over the years.
Here’s a short recap:
Clickworker
Unbabel
Lionbridge
Peopleperhour
Remotasks.
Basically these are all websites that allocate small online projects for you to complete; sometimes your role is called “internet assessor” or “tasker” and in a nutshell you are part of the gig economy where there are no guarantees of actual earnings. Reddit and other fora are full of commenters complaining about working for free, often getting banned or similar because their work didn’t pass quality control, but when they asked for feedback their emails and messages were ignored.
It’s very easy to submit what is deemed to be a low quality task because most of the projects are insanely boring.
Currently I am using a website called OneForma, which has a variety of projects that you can apply for, ranging from checking translations to listening to audio files for accuracy. To me, it’s the variety that keeps me on this platform and the reasonable pay rates. In fact, I did email a few of the websites I had tried giving them feedback about their extremely low hourly pay. I either didn’t get a reply or, when I did, the overall message is that other people will work for that pay without batting an eyelid.
I don’t want to be part of the problem and just accept that remote workers should be underpaid and I wish I could do more to highlight this issue. For the time being, I am writing reviews about my experiences and I only choose remote projects with a decent hourly rate.
How much did I make working on a side hustle?
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