Hello folks! Just wanted to recap my July side hustle report. This is an ongoing series that I plan to do each month to document my side hustle earnings through the sharing economy.
As detailed in my first side hustle report from June 2016, I have several side hustles that I perform using sharing economy websites. These side hustles are great because they are super flexible, yet can still bring in a significant income. I recommend saving that side hustle money and using it to turbocharge your savings.
I primarily have four sources of side hustle income:
- Renting out a spare guest room using Airbnb
- Dogsitting using DogVacay or Rover
- Making deliveries using Postmates or Caviar
- Selling things I find in the trash using Craigslist or OfferUp
To simplify the math, I calculate side hustle income based on payout date. So if I perform the side hustle in June but get paid for it in July, I count July as the date the income was earned.
For July, my side hustle income was:
- Airbnb = $1210
- DogVacay and Rover = $63.75
- Postmates and Caviar = $198.77
- Trash Finds = $60
Total Side Hustle Income for July 2016 = $1,532.52
This month was particularly Airbnb heavy. There’s a couple of reasons for the heavy imbalance this month. First, I was out of town for the first two weekends of July, so I had to block out those days for potential dog sitting clients. Since summer is typically busy, blocking out those weekends likely cost me at least $150 or so. I also had a longer stay through DogVacay that began near the end of July and lasted until August 1st, so that dog sitting income will actually appear on the August side hustle report.
As you can see, one of the great things about doing side gigs using sharing economy websites is the freedom to work on your own time. If you aren’t going to be available for some period, all you have to do is simply block out certain days on your calendar. It’s work I choose to do if I want to do it. And it costs me nothing to set up my side hustle business other than a few hours of time.
A little more background on how I earned this money:
Airbnb
We had our college intern staying with us again for this month. He paid (or his mom paid) our nightly Airbnb rate, which ended up costing him $1210 per month. After this experiment, I think Ms. Panther and I will no longer accept long term Airbnb guests like this. While it does save time in having to clean and flip the room for the next guest, the issue with having a long term guest is that they become a roommate, rather than a traveler. There’s too much idle time. I much prefer the short term stay of a traveler.
DogVacay and Rover
We actually watched two dogs this month, but one of our stays didn’t pay out until August, so for purposes of this side hustle report, only our single weekend stay with our favorite guest pup, named Brewksi, appears. As I noted before, I was out of town for the first two weekends in July, so we didn’t watch any dogs during those first two weekends, which likely cost us a decent sum of money.
Here’s a picture of our dog Charlotte (on the right) with her buddy Brewksi. Not a bad way to make a little extra cash.
Postmates and Caviar
I love biking and getting exercise, and have been having a blast biking around town making deliveries. It’s an easy way to make some money and get some exercise – basically kill two birds with one stone. Unfortunately, Caviar shut down at the beginning of July, so going forward, I have to rely fully on Postmates to satisfy my delivery/biking urges. This figure is about what I expect to make considering I don’t do that many deliveries per month.
Trash
We sold a bunch of stuff we found in the street this month. This included a solid condition Samsonite suitcase we found by a dumpster of an apartment building in our neighborhood, a coffee table our neighbor across the street tossed when he was moving, a TV stand I found on the sidewalk, and a small drawer thing I found by a trash can. This stuff was essentially $60 in cash I found in the street.
There is gold out there people! You just gotta keep your eyes open.
And that concludes the July Side Hustle Report. It’s pretty sweet to be able to make some decent money on the side without having to invest significant money into building a business.Until next month…
Kevin is an attorney and the blogger behind Financial Panther, a blog about personal finance, travel hacking, and side hustling using the sharing economy. He paid off $87,000 worth of student loans in just 2.5 years by choosing not to live like a big shot lawyer.
Kevin is passionate about earning money using the sharing economy and you can see all the ways he makes extra income every month in his side hustle reports.
Kevin is also big on using the latest fintech apps to improve his finances. Some of Kevin's favorite fintech apps include:
- Personal Capital. One of best free apps you can use to monitor your portfolio and track your net worth. This is one of the apps Kevin uses to track his financial accounts.
- SoFi Money. A really good checking account with absolutely no fees. It also reimburses all ATM fees worldwide. Even better, you'll get a $25 welcome bonus if you open an account and fund it with at least $500.
- M1 Finance. This is a great robo-advisor that has no fees and allows you to create a customized portfolio based on your risk tolerance. You also get $10 for opening an account.
- Dobot. This is a great microsaving app that monitors the cash flow in your bank account and saves away small amounts for you each week. It's free and you'll get $5 when you use it.
- Credit Karma. A free credit monitoring app that everyone should use. It'll notify you of any changes to your credit report and is the best credit monitoring app out there.
Feel free to send Kevin a message here.
I also live in a college town and am amazed at what the students throw out during the year! Great job selling all your finds!
For your Airbnb-do you share space with your guests or is it more private? We renovated our walk out basement and made it a completely private guest suite. We also have guests staying with us for an entire month and I can’t believe they were willing to pay the outrageous nightly sum for a whole month.
Thanks Jax! It’s moving season right now and we’ve just been grabbing tons of stuff we see as we’re walking by. I’m working on a post right now about how I made over $1000 in a year selling things I found out of a single dumpster. I think it’ll be an interesting story.
As for Airbnb, we list a guest room in our house. We suffer from the “having a house that’s too big for us” problem, so we decided to throw up a room on Airbnb to have less of that space be wasted. It’s been fun so far. (see Money Wizard’s recent post for more information about this big house problem: http://mymoneywizard.com/millennials-home-prices-today/)
Is the demand for your Airbnb high? I never thought our place would be a high demand spot, but I underestimated how much demand there is to stay near a large college campus. Lots of conferences and things like that going on.
We were also surprised about how high the demand was. We knew graduation weekend would get booked because the hotels around us book 2 years in advance. We started in November 2015 and our second booking was for graduation weekend in May. We already have 2017’s booked, too. Every month we make at least our mortgage and property tax payment. Some months have been more. We get a lot of parents visiting their kids, researchers and alumni that want come back for a visit. And then there are basketball and football weekends. Sometimes we block out dates just to have a breather-what a problem to have! 🙂
I am looking forward to hearing your dumpster story! I used to be much better at reselling finds and want to get back into it.
Add me to the list awaiting the the dumpster story! That’s crazy!