A few weeks ago I shared a post about how the old paradigm about having to work from 9 to 5 to survive has gone out of the window with the internet age. Besides just giving us the flexibility to work from home, it has also given us the option to take on odd jobs to earn extra income. The most attractive part of this flexible work is that it can be done in short stints of 1 to 5 hours. This is the beauty of the gig economy and what can turn your time outside of a traditional job into even more income.

It Was Right In Front of Me 12 Years Ago

I had a girlfriend when I first moved to New York who was a media arts designer. She could design websites and code and had a diligent schedule: work, then coming home and working on her own personal clients until late at night. She was the epitome of hustle before I had a concept of what hustling really was. In retrospect, a part of me wishes that I had gone into a profession with a skill as transferable as hers. I often see jobs like she used to take such as web design and coding on sites like Fiverr which command a premium in terms of pay to more traditional skills like copywriting and editing which I tend to excel more in.

Finance hasn’t caught up yet in terms of outsourcing on a small scale like that. It involves a lot of trust which is not won over as easily or quickly as when the job is more well defined like designing or coding a for a website.

I have come around though and saw the potential in this model that was sitting in front of me for years and I did nothing to take advantage of it. During those 12 years it has become even easier as gigs websites have proliferated on the internet. Sites like Task Rabbit, Fiverr, Postmates, Instacart and more offer a wealth of opportunities for people who want to work these as full time jobs or just make extra cash. So rather than complaining about not having enough, I have decided to embrace this opportunity and get my feet wet with a side hustle.

Source: Task Rabbit

Getting Started

Due to a domestic situation, I am in need of some more cash fast. So what is a guy to do if I want to follow my own advice of flex working outside of your regular job to make ends meet? One potential income source I already had down. During my last unemployment stint a few years ago, when my severance was running out. I decided to use my free time and a few hundred bucks to get an NYC taxi license, just in case things got desperate and I needed something to feed my family.

I don’t often use it now for a few reasons. The first is that to license my own car (cars have to have a special license and set of plates in NYC in order to be a taxi), I would be required to buy insurance that could cost anywhere from $350 to $600 per month. Given that this would be just a side gig, I would likely spend a lot of my time just trying to recoup that cost as well as the ongoing costs of the car.

Source: TLC

This being the internet age though, a few start ups have tried to solve this problem. First I learned about a company called Lacus which tries to solve the problem of unused yellow cabs. You can rent them as long as you have a TLC drivers license. However the time commitment was too great for me. I find that you have to rent them in 10-12 hour blocks and the rental was quite expensive. Initially it was $15-$16 per hour to rent the yellow cab, it has come down a bit now but still could potentially wipe out much of the income I could make.

I was then referred to a new app called Dryve. Dryve takes a different approach and rents TLC licensed “black cars” (i.e. cabs that are on call only) which can use apps like Uber and Lyft to pick up customers. The rentals are very affordable at about $6 dollars an hour and I was approved for use in about a day.

A Twist I Didn’t Expect

I had previously registered as an Uber driver before I received my TLC license from the commission. This meant though, that I could only drive in the counties outside of New York City. I had kept abreast of the news that the city government had frozen the number of TLC licensed cars at about 100,000 last year but was ready to use my drive account to rent one. To my dismay though, I learned that as of April 1, Uber, Lyft and Vía stopped accepting new drivers in NYC on their platform.

It was a deflating setback. There was an alternative though: I could deliver food through Uber Eats. In fact, as I started to think about it, this option may be even better than driving a cab. The first reason is because I don’t even have to have a car, they have an option where I can deliver by bike. The second is that not only will I make money but I will be able to exercise for that time. Many delivery people in Manhattan I notice use electric bikes to deliver so I would be a bit slower than them but it could offer the opportunity to gain incredible endurance and get in great shape.

Expanding the Scope

I don’t have to just be limited to deliveries and cab driving though. I was inspired by some recent commentary from one of my heroes Gary Vaynerchuck on this page where he tells people how to arbitrage local sale items as places like Ross and TJ Maxx by selling those items on Amazon or EBay. Gary mentions that he has seen people that are homeless and start leveraging this strategy and have thousands of dollars within a few weeks of starting it. If you think about it, it makes sense. There are tons of small local sales that end up at these stores that someone in say Iowa doesn’t have access to. By acting as the middle man, you are just performing an arbitrage from seller to buyer.

A Greater Cause

You may think this is just me being greedy and wanting more so I can invest it away and get even richer. Unfortunately this is not the case. I am going through a divorce at the moment and when faced with the fact that my wife would not move closer to me with our son, I decided to change what was within my control and rent a second apartment down the street from him to be closer to him and spend more time with him.

The extra time I will be working will be on those days I don’t have him and since I am now paying for 2 apartments, I need to be creative and think of extra ways to earn more. This however is my motivation, I’m not looking at it as another burden, it’s an opportunity to change my situation and be closer to my son.

I am facing one of the more challenging points in my life right now in terms of what is going on in my personal life and the constant worry of restructuring or layoffs which tend to be often in the financial industry. Rather than shrink from these challenges though, I have grown and become better all around. The emotional challenges have helped me better understand myself and my relationships with those around me. Meanwhile the financial challenges have awakened the true hustler and grinder in me that I lost as I moved up and got more comfortable in my daily routine and position as a professional.

This blog is a manifestation of me meeting those challenges head on and dealing with problems rather than avoiding them. I had the challenge of consistently writing and attracting followers when I started years ago and I realized that I lacked patience and the love of the task. I was focused on the dream of an outcome rather than the fulfillment that comes through pushing myself and creating daily tasks that over time tend to change the direction of your life.

In that sense what a gift this divorce has given me in the sense that it has pushed me to challenge my routine, my finances and my work ethic at a time in many peoples’ lives when they are approaching middle age and throwing in the towel on their dreams and aspirations in life. It has shown me that my character and ability not just to endure but thrive in the most difficult of times and situations is possible.

Conclusion

As I take this time to move towards making the side hustle a reality, I will keep my readers updated on the progress and will share my earnings through these side jobs to show people that it really is possible to expand your earnings potential due to the wonders of the internet in the modern age. All you have to do is have the right mindset and you can achieve amazing things.

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