Beating Broke

4 Side Hustles for Teachers

April 15, 2019 By MelissaB Leave a Comment

If you’re currently a teacher, you likely know that while this occupation can be rewarding, it doesn’t pay very well. You may be looking to supplement your income in the evenings or the weekend.

If you’re a former teacher who is now staying home with your kids, you may be looking for a way to bring in money utilizing your teaching skills. However, you’ll need flexibility so that you can do your work when your children are sleeping at night or napping.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways to earn a side gig with your skills as a teacher.

Private Tutor

Teacher Hustles — Make Money as a Teacher

One of my friends worked at Nielsen, became a high school math teacher, and then stayed home when she had children. For the last 10 years, she has been a private math tutor. She gets her clients from referrals from her former colleagues and through word of mouth thanks to satisfied customers. She makes several hundred dollars a month and enjoys being able to still teach even though she is no longer working full-time.

VIPKID Tutor

If you have a bachelor’s degree, you can get apply for a job at VIPKID teaching children in China how to speak English. Most of the available tutoring hours are very early in the morning or late in the evening when your kids are likely already in bed. You can set your own schedule and decide how many hours you want to work each week.

Depending on your experience, VIPKID may pay up to $22 per hour.

Curriculum Developer

Many former teachers make a nice income developing curriculum and selling it on Teachers Pay Teachers. Other teachers are always looking for quality curriculum material and homeschoolers also take advantage of the site.

Online Teacher for Gifted Students

A number of prestigious colleges such as Johns Hopkins, Duke, and Northwestern offer online classes for gifted children. You can teach here, and the schedule offers flexibility as you can decide what semesters to teach and what classes to teach. You’ll be able to challenge gifted students, and you’ll have students who will likely challenge you, too.

If you don’t want to work with gifted students, you can also look at the many online schools available for K-12 students. You can teach from home, and you may have to have a live course or tutoring once a week. My kids were enrolled in an online school this year, and every time they had a tutoring session or interacted with their teachers, the teachers always worked from home, which provides a great deal of flexibility.

If you’re a teacher looking for extra income, you can see that there are a variety of ways to do that, and this list isn’t exhaustive. Here’s another list of ways to make extra money that’s not focused on teachers, but could certainly apply to teachers. If you’re a teacher who opted to stay home with kids, there are many ways you can work from home using your skills and keeping current so you’ll be able to reenter the teaching workforce should you decide to in the future.

If you’re a teacher or were a teacher, have you found ways to turn your skills into a side gig or part-time income stream? If so, what do you do?

Get Your Phone Service for Less with These Two Programs

April 8, 2019 By MelissaB Leave a Comment

Phones. They’re a necessity for keeping in contact with others, having access to emergency services, and getting directions when you’re lost. Yet, if you aren’t careful, the convenience of a phone can cost you anywhere from $50 to more than $200 a month.

My husband and I have cut corners with our phone service, and we couldn’t be happier.

Ooma

save money on phones — Save Money with These 2 Phone Services

We chose Ooma for our land line. Ooma is a system that operates through our internet connection. We pay $14.99 per month, which includes call waiting, caller ID, and free long distance. Oh, and that free long distance? Apparently that means anywhere because my husband has been able to call his family in Japan at no extra expense to us. Sweet!

While we love Ooma and the price we pay, there are sometimes glitches with this service. For instance, when our internet goes down, we don’t have telephone access. Occasionally the connection is not as good as I would like. However, these inconveniences are not regular occurrences, so we happily stay with Ooma.

Ting

My husband and I have had cell phones for a few years, but they were flip phones from Tracfone. While they served us well for a few years, we got frustrated with Tracfone’s customer service whenever we had an issue. We also wanted to upgrade to smartphones.

When I won a giveaway for a free Ting smartphone, we decided to also get my husband one and switch our service over to Ting.

Ting is a unique company that charges based on the services that you use. Our average bill is $34 a month for both of us to use our smartphones. I love that price!

Billing is based on how much you use.

Each line costs $6 a month.

Up to 100 minutes a month costs $3. One hundred to 500 minutes is $5 per month. (This goes all the way up to $35 for 2100 minutes.)

Up to 100 text messages a month is $3. Up to 1000 is $5. (My husband and I primarily keep in touch during the day through texting, and we never get close to 1000 texts.)

Date is $3 for 100MB, $10 for 500MB, all the way to $20 for 2GB.

In addition, you can set limits on how much usage is available. I imagine this is very important if you’re on a budget or if you have a teen with a phone. You can ask for notifications when you reach a certain level of minutes, texts, or data. You can also choose to suspend service when you hit a certain limit or someone else on your bill reaches that point.

The best point? There is no contract with Ting.

We’ve had our phones for about 6 months now, and we’re pleased. In addition, any time I’ve had questions, their customer service has been fantastic.

Ting has also branched out to providing Internet service at the same great value. Unfortunately, that services is only available in a handful of towns in five different states. I hope my location is available for Internet service soon!

Have you tried either of these services? Did you like or dislike them? What do you do to keep your phone bill low?

Save Money on the Grocery Budget by Reducing Food Waste

March 25, 2019 By MelissaB 1 Comment

Behind a mortgage, groceries are often the second most expensive line item in the budget. If you’re looking to save more money this year, a good place to look is to reduce the grocery budget. But don’t stop there. Make sure to also look at the other side of the grocery budget—reducing food waste.

Whenever you waste food, you’re essentially dropping money into the garbage. Instead, learn to reduce your food waste to stretch your grocery budget even further. Here are some of my favorite strategies:

Look at your calendar before you shop. Do you have a busy week coming up? If so, don’t plan labor intensive meals; you just won’t have time to make them and you’ll likely have food go bad before you have time to cook it. Instead, make some meals on the weekend to eat during the week when you’re busy or plan simple recipes and buy simple ingredients. Rachael Ray’s Week in a Day is a great springboard for finding recipes you can make on the weekend to enjoy all week long.

Alternatively, you can choose simple meals to make on busy weeknights. Fresh spinach can be sautéed in minutes. Paired with a microwaved baked potato and a simple meat like a polish sausage that can be cooked quickly, and you have a fairly healthy, inexpensive meal. Another option is to keep frozen vegetables on hand to cook quickly and pair with an easy meat and minute rice.

Buy foods your family likes. Too often, people buy a bargain that turns out to be a waste of money because their family won’t eat it. Buy the foods that your family will eat, not the foods that are a bargain.

Use leftovers! Do you eat leftovers? Some people don’t like them, but I love leftovers because they offer me one meal I don’t have to cook! Eating leftovers can be a great way to stretch your food dollars. If your family refuses leftovers, try to cook only as much as your family will eat in a meal so you don’t waste extras.

Create new meals with the leftovers. Another idea is to creatively repurpose leftovers. For instance, if you cook a whole chicken or buy a rotisserie chicken, keep the leftovers to turn into other meals like chicken enchiladas or chicken noodle soup. Thanks to the Internet, you can find plenty of recipes for reusing leftovers. Some chefs, like Robin Miller of the Food Network, specifically look to make meals out of leftovers to help you better utilize your time and food.

Utilize the freezer. One of my favorite ways to reduce food waste is to use the freezer. We recently bought a large box of individual serve guacamole. I still had 8 left close to the expiration date, so I put them in the freezer, and now we just pull them out as we need them. Many meals that you make and don’t want to eat all at once can be frozen for later use.

What are your favorite strategies for avoiding food waste? Do you waste a lot of food or a minimal amount?