Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

4 Side Hustles for Teachers

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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?

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?

You Need a New Money Mindset

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At last count, there were roughly 4.7 gazillion blogs(*give or take a few) covering money, saving, and wealth – this one included. And with great minds giving all-out efforts to helping people save up for retirement, stick to a budget, buy their first home, or find ways to save, there’s a message and a solution for everyone out there.

So, what gives? Why is it that over three-quarters of Americans are still living hand to mouth? With little or no savings to bolster their budget, they’re living in fear of what will happen when they lose work or have a sudden need for a large chunk of cash.

Why Your Money Mindset Must Change

Personal finance blogs proliferate because they can work. It doesn’t matter how far behind you are in the area of personal finance: it can be fixed and you can reach your goals with the right approach and a little guidance.

The problem is: too many people focus on the wrong things when they try and solve their money issues. The solution isn’t going to be found in cutting coupons or setting budgets aimed at whittling down debt a tiny bit at a time.

What has to happen, if you really want to improve your financial standing in the world, is you have to adopt a new mindset when it comes to money. That’s a behavioral change, and it ain’t easy. If it were, everyone would be debt-free, flush with cash, and right on track for retirement.

What a Difference the Right Money Mindset Can Make

The trick to winning at personal finance isn’t actually a trick. Rather, it’s a mind-change that starts with realizing what money is really for. I’ve known people who make almost six figures, and can’t figure out where all the money goes, and can’t pay their bills. Some of them don’t even have any kids!

On the other side of the spectrum, I have an artist friend who makes an annual salary in the low-$30s and he manages to max out his IRA contributions every year ($5,500 for 2016 but he’s 53 so he gets to put in $6,500) as well as live a debt-free, totally happy life.

What’s the difference? If you look at how my high-earning friends are spending their money, it’s pretty clear: their spending is out of control. They buy brand-new cars, for starters. Plus, they buy expensive cars- and most of them live right in NYC, where you don’t even need to own a car!

What is Money Really For?

Those are just examples- the things we buy, for the most part, are what bring us down, financially. Unfortunately, though, consumerism is built into our culture. We crave the new thing and we show status by displaying our nice things, whether it’s designer heels, a fancy car, or a home in the best neighborhood. We are what we own.

How to Adopt a New ‘Money Mindset’

Not everyone has to live that way, and in fact not everyone does. The people who figure this out early on in life are the ones who usually end up more financially secure, no matter what their salaries are.

Buying things is also a fast road to buying more things. People buy stuff and they enjoy the initial rush of pleasure they get from having something new. Then after a while they get used to the stuff and they want to experience that (temporary) happiness again. So they go out and buy more stuff.

Scientists have a name for that: “Adaptation level theory”. Recognizing this phenomenon in yourself is the first step towards developing the right money mindset. Once you master that, everything else is cake. You’ll have more money to put toward the important things in life like travel, retirement, emergency funds, living well, and even maybe someday leaving a legacy to your heirs.

Instead of buying “things” why not invest in yourself like learning more about financials, taking a course in trading, going to night college to gain a new skill to further your career.