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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4 Side Hustles for Teachers

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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?

Taking your Side Hustle Mobile

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This post has been brought to you by: SumUp (opinions are still mine though!)

If you’re like me (and you likely are if you’re reading this post), you’ve always got a side hustle or two running at once. You’re always looking for something to augment your income and help you pay off debt (or pay for that extra vacation). This blog is one of mine. I’ve also got a few things that I’ve got posted on my Etsy store. Nearly everything that I do is online. I don’t have to carry inventory, or attend swap meets, or anything of the like. But that’s not the case for all of you.

SumUp EMV card reader
photo credit: SumUp

For some of you, there’s a very good chance that you’ve got to be mobile, and you’ve got to accept payments wherever your customer meets you. In the past, that has meant carrying a bit of cash around to make change with, and when the day has been good, carrying even more cash back with you.  That can be dangerous.  The other issue you will likely run into is that you’re likely to have a few customers like me who rarely carry more than a few dollars of cash, and want to pay for their purchase with their debit or credit card.

If you are one of those who makes sales while on the go, you need some way to process credit or debit transactions.  Not only is it safer than carrying around a bunch of cash, but it will save you a heck of a lot of time and energy when doing your accounting at the end of the day. There are plenty of companies that offer these kinds of services.  One that offers up both a super portable card reader and a portable cash register, is a company called SumUp. Unlike some of their competitors, their device connects to an app on your phone (iOS or Android) via bluetooth, getting rid of the dongle approach that can easily break. And there’s a couple of ways that you can accept cards through the device.

Magstripe transactions

This is the old fashioned way of taking a credit transaction. The magnetic strip on the back of the cards holds all the card data.  A quick swipe, and the reader reads that data, and processes the transaction.  Easy peasy. Most of us are super used to transactions that work this way.

EMV chip transactions

Magstripe is the tried and true transaction process. But it’s also the one that makes it super easy for fraudsters to copy the data from the stripe and use it to perform fraudulent transactions. The EMV chip is the new technology that is meant to help prevent all of that. The chip is embedded in the new cards, and needs to be inserted into the reader. It has to be physically present to work, and it’s not as easily copied. It’s more secure, and it works well.

SumUp’s fees and limits match or best their competition, and their design is pretty cool too. Watch this video to see what it’s all about.

At the end of the day, if you’ve got a side hustle that has to be mobile, you need some sort of mobile card terminal. There are several options out there, and SumUp is just one of those. As the hustler, I would expect you to do your due diligence and make a decision based on what your business needs are. The only thing I can really tell you is that if you don’t have a way to process these sorts of transactions, you’re leaving money on the proverbial table. Don’t do that.