Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Is a Side Hustle Worth the Family Sacrifice?

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Side Hustle Worth the Family Sacrifice

When our kids were young, my husband and I struggled financially. My husband was getting his Ph.D. and worked as a graduate assistant. I had just quit my full-time job because the cost of daycare in Chicago for two kids under two plus after-school care for our oldest would cost me as much as I was taking home each week. We survived for three years like this until my husband graduated and started working a regular job and a side hustle. I also worked a part-time job from home. Now that we’re 10 years removed from that situation, we recently discussed if a side hustle is worth the family sacrifice.

Some Times You Have No Choice

I want to acknowledge that sometimes, you have no choice. Sometimes you have to work as much as you can to cover rent, buy groceries, and care for your family. For my husband and I, the first few years after he graduated were like this. We were in debt because we had lived off his graduate assistantship and student loans those last three years, and we needed side hustles to try to get out of the hole we were in. However, we should have set a limit for how long we would work our side hustles.

Dave Ramsey’s Influence

Fifteen years ago, I loved listening to Dave Ramsey, and I bought into the idea that we should “live like no one else so later we can live like no one else.” I accepted the sacrifice that side hustles required because I was sure that if we worked hard, we’d end up on the other side, able to check off the baby steps.

Is A Side Hustle Worth the Family Sacrifice?

We are now at the point where we’ve completed baby steps 1, 2, and are on baby step 3. However, we’re also at the point where our kids are now 18, 13.5, and 12. We lost a lot of our kids’ lives to side hustles.

Is a side hustle worth the family sacrifice? As a parent with older children, I can answer for us, it was not worth it.

What We Sacrificed for the Side Hustle

Side hustles have a dark side that most people don’t talk about. For us, these were the major drawbacks:

We Were Exhausted

Is a Side Hustle Worth the Family Sacrifice?

After my husband got home from his regular job and side hustle, I would start my work after being with the kids all day. I would often work until midnight and get up at 5 or 6 a.m. That was not enough sleep.

My husband and I were both exhausted all the time.

We Were Grouchy

Because we were working so hard and exhausted, we were also grouchy. Raising young children can be challenging under the best circumstances, but when you’re exhausted and grouchy, it’s not good for anyone.

Final Thoughts

Is a side hustle worth the family sacrifice? For us, the answer was no. Rather than following Dave Ramsey’s advice to hustle until you’re completely out of debt, we should have set a limited time frame for our side hustle. We hustled for far too long, and I’m sorry we missed out on some opportunities to spend enjoyable time with our kids when they were little because of that.

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Teach Your Child About Finances With This Book

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As a mom and personal finance blogger, I get the opportunity to review many books.  One that I just reviewed that I can’t recommend highly enough is Sunny Lee’s book, Is Your Child a Money Master or a Money Monster?

Money Master or Money Monster?

Sunny Lee is a financial advisor, and she has taken the time to teach her twin sons about money.  In fact, her strategy has worked so well that she’s sharing all her techniques in this book.

Lee has a variety of strategies for teaching kids about money in a fun, incentive-filled way.

Offer rewards.  Lee’s strategy of offering her children rewards helps shape their behavior in a positive direction.  For instance, when her sons were in 1st grade, Lee developed the Morning Stuff Allowance Project.  Each morning, her kids had to get up when their alarms went off, tidy their rooms, get dressed, pack their backpacks, and make and eat their own breakfast and get to school on time.  If they did this every day, they earned $3 a week.

While the kids were motivated by the money, they were also unknowingly developing skills that would help them through the rest of their lives.  Even better, Lee didn’t have to fight with her boys in the morning to get up and get their chores done.  Everyone in her household could enjoy a more peaceful morning.

Play games.  As the boys got older, part of Lee’s strategy to teach them about money was to give them a safe place to experiment.  She did this by finding a variety of free, money based games online.  Her boys experimented online with running a coffee shop.  They had to decide when to discount their coffee based on the season, how much inventory to buy, etc.

Try out your skills in the real world.  Finally, Lee let her sons experiment and try their money skills in the real world.  An important component of this was to let them fail in small ways.  One son spent a large sum of money on a hat, which he loved, but then he didn’t have money available for a while after that.  Her other son learned from his brother and bought a hat at a discounted market so he wouldn’t use all of his money on one item.

Lee’s book contains seven strategies to teach your kids about money (and as a byproduct, teach them personal responsibility).  One thing I loved about the book and her strategy is that she keeps adding layers to her plan.  For instance, after her kids mastered the Morning Stuff Allowance Project, that remained in place, but Lee added on the Special Incentive Project.  If her boys chose to, they could earn additional money throughout the week by completing a book report, doing an art project, etc.  Again, she helped her children grow academically and artistically through an incentive.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to not only give their children a strong financial footing, but also a strong work ethic.

Have you read this book?  What is your favorite book to teach kids about money?

The New Retirement

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I recently had the chance to chat with Todd Tresidder.  If you don’t know the name, don’t worry.  Up until about a year ago, I didn’t either.  But, the short of it is that the guy is retired.  In fact, he retired much earlier than most will.  At the ripe “old” age of 35, he retired.  Which must mean he’s off golfing around in the Arizona heat, right?  Or down, sipping OJ at some southern Florida retirement village?  Not likely.

Todd is retired in the sense that he doesn’t report to a boss.  He does what he wants, when he wants to.  One of the things that he wants to do is write books that help people like you and I become better financially.  He’s got several that he’s written so far, and I’m sure he’s working on more.  During that first meeting, Todd and I spoke for a while on retirement.  Speaking with another financially minded person, I usually expect to hear people talk about 401(k)s, IRAs, and stock purchasing.  I don’t discount those tools, but I just don’t feel that, like Social Security, you should be depending on them for your whole retirement.  Surprisingly, Todd agrees.  The longer we spoke, the more we found that we agreed on.  At the end of our conversations, Todd offered me a copy of his book on retirement. I accepted.

How Much Money do I need to retireLong story short, I finally read it.  It took me a while, but I’m glad I got around to it.

If there’s anything that stands out about the book, is that Todd knows what he’s talking about.  He’s got the experience behind him to talk about the subject in an informed and educational manner, and technically, probably knows more about some of his subject matter than I ever will.  He spends the first several chapters of the book dispelling a few myths about retirement, and about the way in which most people tend to think about it.  He then takes off on a few chapters of some of the math and logic behind the different ways of calculating your retirement needs, and calculating that mythical “number” that everyone seems to be seeking out that will indicate that they’ve saved all that they need to save for retirement.  Not only does that one perfect number not exist, he argues, but the calculations that we make to arrive at it are completely flawed.

The rest of the book is focused on what I like to call the New Retirement.  He goes into detail on the ways to properly estimate your income needs for the future, and then into ways that he believes (and I agree) that a properly diversified retirement “portfolio” should be structured.  I don’t want to spoil too much of the book so I won’t say much more.  What I will say is that the book isn’t terribly long.  It’s not a deeply structured manual on all the different retirement accounts.  And it’s not terribly expensive.  It’s $4.99 on the Kindle (free for Prime members), and about $10 in paperback.

Pick up a copy of How Much Money do I need to Retire at Amazon.  You can check out Todd’s site as well as the other books he’s written at FinancialMentor.com.