In 2019, I made over $13,000 from my side hustles. During the year, I rented out rooms in my house, performed statistical consulting, and helped small businesses with their websites. In this post, I’m going to share with you my thoughts on each of these side hustles and talk about how you can start a side hustle this year to earn more money.
In 2019, I was busy and had a great year side hustling. During the year, I made $13,416 from my side hustles.
This was a fantastic year in terms of hustling, and helped me on my path to building a solid financial foundation for my future.
The reason I side hustle is because I want to speed up the time to reach financial freedom.
While some weeks and months can get very busy, this extra income has helped me pay off debt, build my emergency fund, and invest in my future.
My three side hustles I did in 2019 was house hacking, statistical consulting, and freelance web design.
Each side hustle is different and unique in what I did, but also how I got started. Below I’ll talk more about these differences and how I’ve grown these hustles over time.
Side hustling isn’t for everyone, but I definitely recommend it if you are looking to improve your financial situation.
For me, this was my third year of seriously hustling. One thing I’ve learned is balance is very important in life. What I mean is that I don’t recommend having 3 side hustles – I’ll get into this more though later on.
In this post, I’m going to talk about the side hustles I performed in 2019, give you some side hustle ideas for 2020, and hopefully inspire you in your hustles.
Finally, note, I’m not including any money I’ve made from this website in this article. In 2019, I brought in a few thousand dollars, but spent more than I made on this site. You can see this in my three year blogging anniversary post.
How I Earned Over $10,000 in Side Hustle Income Last Year
As I mentioned above, in 2019, I earned $13,416 from side hustling.
First, let’s take a look at the numbers.
You can see below my side hustle income by month:
This was a great year, and I’m very fortunate and blessed that I have the free time to do these hustles.
The most lucrative side hustle is my statistical consulting side hustle. In 2019, I made $8,691 from my statistics side hustle. I’ve been doing this side hustle for 3 years now, and spend a handful of hours a month helping dog doctors and veterinarians with their statistical research.
The second side hustle from 2019 I performed was house hacking. For the first five months of 2019, I rented out space in my house and collected $3,050 in rent (I stopped house hacking because I sold my house in July).
The third side hustle from 2019 I performed was freelance web design. During 2019, I worked with a few different small businesses.
With these businesses, I helped build and design their websites in WordPress, and helped with other website related tasks (email forms, theme customization, site migrations, etc.) to help push those businesses along. For my web design contracting work, I made $1,675 over the entire year.
For the rest of the post, I’m going to talk about each of these side hustles in greater detail.
By going into more detail, you can learn more about each side hustle and see if they might make sense for you! 🙂
Making Money By Helping Dog Doctors with Statistical Studies
My first side hustle is consulting for dog doctors. Three years ago, an former co-worker of mine approached me with an opportunity to help do some statistical consulting.
For $85 an hour, I help these dog doctors perform statistical analysis, and these analyses work their way into published manuscripts.
The work I’m doing isn’t rocket science, but it’s necessary to get the results required these doctors want.
For example, I run a lot of simple regressions, ANOVA analyses, chi square tests, and look for cases of statistical significance.
Most of this is college level statistics, but it’s not anything someone with a background in numbers couldn’t learn.
In this case though, I was able to leverage my connections and previous work to secure this side hustle.
By showing my worth, I was able to connect with a former co-worker, and now, I’ve been able to bring in about $20,000 over the last three years with this hustle.
You never know who could be valuable at work, so it’s important not to burn bridges!
Renting Out My Rooms and House Hacking to Make More Money
Back in the summer of 2015, I bought a three bedroom house and rented out the other rooms to my friends.
For four years, I house hacked, and was able to make passive income every month with the rental income.
House hacking is a fantastic way for someone in their 20’s to make extra money every month.
If you can afford it, buying a house and renting out your extra space can be very beneficial for improving your financial situation.
As I mentioned, I sold my house in July because I wanted more flexibility and the price was right.
But before the sale, this side hustle was mostly passive and helped me with my mortgage payments.
Housing is one of the biggest expenses you will have on a monthly basis, and with house hacking, you can reduce this expense drastically.
For the most part, house hacking isn’t that much of a time commitment. At the same time, owning a house can be a lot of work, and this is where things can get expensive.
However, if you are going to have a house and extra space, why not rent it out?
House hacking changed my life, and through house hacking, I was able to make $3,050 this past year. I’m definitely thankful for this and am excited to get into real estate again in the future.
Helping Small Businesses with their Websites through Web Design
The third side hustle I did in 2019 was freelance web design for small businesses.
When I started this blog at the end of 2016, I didn’t know anything about HTML, CSS, php, or Javascript.
After taking some free courses on Code Academy, I started to make customizations on this website and learning more about these different web programming languages.
Use and action is so important to learning a new language – programming or foreign!
During my first year of blogging, I kept learning more and more about web design.
After a year, and after meeting a lot of different bloggers at FinCon 2017, I connected with a few people needing website updates.
As I grew my portfolio, I was able to get more clients and exposure through word of mouth.
Now, I’m comfortable with:
- front-end design
- back-end development
- integrating with different web services (email, payments, automation)
- and many other things WordPress
These are all skills I love using and in 2019, I was able to leverage these skills to help others.
By providing value to others, I can make a little money and help others who need a technical hand.
This one is probably my favorite side hustle, but it’s quite time consuming to find clients.
Now, I want to talk about other side hustle ideas that you could use to make some more money in 2020. But first, I’m going to talk about what is the best side hustle.
What’s the Best Side Hustle?
When starting on your side hustle journey, you might ask, “what’s the best side hustle?”
In my opinion, the best side hustle is providing value to another person or company and doing what you want with your free time outside of your day job.
There are a number of possibilities to choose the best side hustle. The best side hustle might be the one that makes a ton of money. Maybe it’s one that brings new opportunities and helps you in your day job. Perhaps it’s one that brings passive income and allows you to retire early!
Really though, the best side hustle comes back to doing what you enjoy – without necessarily caring about the profit potential of the endeavor.
We all have limited time on this Earth.
Let’s say you love teaching yoga (or some other athletic class). When you teach, you make $100 a session. Even though you only do a few sessions a week, you still love it and have had a ton of great experiences through your teaching.
This side hustle might not be the most lucrative (though a few hundred bucks a week is pretty good), you are doing what you want and enjoying your life.
Again, in my opinion, the best side hustle is doing what you want with you time and potentially making money in these endeavors.
But really, my opinion is just my opinion. You are entitled to your own opinion and can decide what the best side hustle is for you!
Now, let’s get into the list of side hustle ideas you can consider for this next year to increase your side hustle income.
18 Side Hustle Ideas You Can Consider This Year to Earn More Money
In the world, there are hundreds of ways to make extra money each month to further your financial situation.
In the following list, I tried to focus on ways you can make money in the real world.
When searching for “how to make more money”, you will find a lot of spam and “get rich quick” schemes.
I prefer to focus on providing value to those around and you to help others directly.
While I do believe you can help others through a platform or through passive actions over time, some of the best side hustles come from doing the work yourself and directly interacting with your customers.
Below is a list of 18 side hustle ideas you can think about to make money on the side of your day job.
- Tutor Students
- Help with Yard Work
- Edit Audio or Videos for Others
- Build Furniture or Make Household Items
- Referee Sporting Events
- Start a Business
- Help Others with their Businesses
- Bookkeeping
- Web Design
- Social Media Marketing
- Freelance Writing
- Content Creation
- Graphic Design
- Rent Out Your Spare Things
- Sell Your Stuff and Become a Merchant
- Help Move People Out of their House
- Edit Resumes
- Invest in Income Producing Assets
- Deliver Things in Your Car or Bike
While these side hustle ideas are great, like I said, there are hundreds of other ways you can make more money in the world.
I have just scratched the surface of what you could possibly to do make money.
A side hustle could possibly be created by thinking of the following questions:
- What do you love doing?
- Is there anyway you can turn that into a hustle?
- How can you help others and provide value to make a little more money on the side?
These are all questions you can think about as you decide whether or not you can and will start a hustle this year.
Real World Examples of Side Hustlers and Side Jobs
On The Mastermind Within, I’ve had the pleasure and honor to feature some amazing side hustlers in my Side Hustle Spotlight series.
These side hustlers are making great money on the side of their day job. Here is a list of the side hustle interviews I’ve featured so far:
- Tutoring
- Consignment Store Flipping
- eBay and Online Marketplace Flipping
- Musician
- Food Tour Guide
- Sports Press Box Worker
Hopefully, these amazing interviews give you inspiration to start your own side hustle (and if you do, I’d love to hear about your side hustle!!)
Are You Going to Side Hustle This Year to Improve Your Financial Situation?
2019 was a great year for me and my side hustles. I was able to make more than $10,000 on the side of my day job, and use this money to improve my financial situation.
For me though, I don’t think I’d recommend doing multiple side hustles at once – especially if they are active and take up your time.
It’s important to have balance in life and to not burn yourself out.
Three side hustles, a day job, and other goals is too much for me, and in 2020, I’m only going to actively pursue my consulting gig. If people ask me to help with their website, I’ll do this, but I’m not going to be looking for clients.
As I mentioned, there is more to life than hustling and trying to push and push and push. Family, health, learning, goals, faith, friends, etc. – all of these things are important as well to consider before diving into a hustle.
Now, it’s your turn.
Do you have any financial goals for this year? Are you looking to make smarter financial decisions, save more money, or pay down some debt?
How would a side hustle play into this? What would a few hundred dollars do for your bank account?
I hope this article has been interesting and inspiring for you.
Hopefully we both can make 2020 a lucrative year and crush our financial goals!
Thanks for reading and happy side hustling!
Readers: what’s your side hustle? Are you looking to start or continue a side hustle in 2020? What are some other questions you have about side hustling?
