Momentum is a huge motivator when it comes to getting debt free and financially independent.
As I’ve written before, for us luck and circumstance had a lot to do with us becoming debt free. Dave Ramsey advocates something called the debt snowball. With the debt snowball, you tackle your smallest debt first as a means of gaining momentum and freeing up cash to pay off larger debts.
I tend to disagree with this approach because financially it makes more sense to pay off higher interest debt first. It’s more costly to ignore.
But emotionally I think he’s onto something. The debt snowball creates momentum. Just like starting any new habit or journey, it begins with a single step. If that step isn’t far enough, or fast enough, your journey is likely to end.
To that end, when we decided to aggressively attack our debt, we explored a myriad of side hustles in order to earn extra income. We were so used to our standard pay checks coming in that we became complacent with them going toward some debt. The added $20, $30, and $100 a month we got from side hustles was pure excess.
In down times we used this money for leisure as a pick-me-up. But otherwise it predominantly went towards our debt, and it was a great motivator to see the process of payment get accelerated.
Not everyone will have the time, patience or opportunity for side hustles. At the time we didn’t have any kids. We had 2 cats an 2 dogs which were for the most part low maintenance, and so we found opportunities to earn extra income. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t going to be enough to pay the bills, so to speak. It’s just enough to give you a kick and a little spark to light the kindling.
Here is a list of the two main online side hustles we took on to earn some extra money. Sometimes we earmarked it for other expenses that we knew we’d have, like Christmas gifts, which still served the same benefit by freeing up extra money to pay into our debt up front.
Swagbucks
Swagbucks was the first side hustle site I joined. I had heard of taking online surveys before but this was the first time I’d signed up for a service. Swagbucks is great because it offers a lot more than just surveys.
I spent a lot of time doing their paid surveys. It’s kind of a luck of the draw as to whether you get one that’s worth its time. Some surveys could take 20 minutes and only pay $1 (note, Swagbucks doesn’t actually pay cash; it awards “Swagbucks” which can be redeemed for things like gift cards, PayPal, etc.). I tried to avoid those but ultimately it was a crapshoot. Nevertheless, I was earning about $20 per month just doing surveys in my limited spare time.
Swagbucks also had offers for products and services, to which you could sign up and earn points. Whether you use the services or not is up to you, and it’s especially useful if it’s something you’re interested in signing up for anyway. Otherwise (I don’t advise this, necessarily), you can sign up for the products/services and just ignore the offer and still often get the points.
In addition to this, the site offers a great referral program where you can get points for referring friends to the service. If you use the Swagbucks search bar you earn points on searches you’d be making anyway through Google.
And the last way I earned with Swagbucks was with their video offers. There is a cap on how much you can earn each day with this, but it was very easy to just load the video playlists and let them play in the background while I worked or did something else, earning points as I went.
At my peak of Swagbucks’ing I was earning between $4 and $8 extra per day. That came out to about $100-$240 per month in extra cash! For a period of time, we were using Swagbucks income through PayPal to pay the entire minimum payment of one of our federal student loans!
I was hooked.
Join Swagbucks here if you’re interested. You don’t have to invest nearly as much time as I did to get that motivational spark. Even $1 a day ($30 a month) is enough to pay most of your internet bill!
Mechanical Turk
Ok, so Swagbucks got me super motivated about side hustles. I did it for about 5 or 6 months by itself before I discovered my favorite online side hustle: Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (or mTurk). Mechanical Turk is a platform designed for what are called Human Intelligence Tasks or HIT’s. These are tasks, surveys and other data gather processes that simply cannot be delegated to computers by companies.
These tasks include paid surveys, data analysis, transcription, and a multitude of other tasks. Some are incredibly fun. Some are very tedious. The great thing is you know exactly what you’re getting into with each HIT.
Every HIT will tell you how much it pays (most are pennies, some are dollars) and give estimates about how long they should take to complete.
Using browser extensions like TurkOpticon can streamline your Turking process by giving you additional data about each HIT and the person requesting it. This ensures that you know what you’re getting into with each HIT you accept, and also helps you plan your time to make the most money.
Once I really got my groove on with mTurk, I was easily making $5 per day in half the time I was making it on Swagbucks. I used sites like HITs Worth Turking For on Reddit to get recommended HITs that paid well for proportionately less time.
With my discovery of mTurk, my Swagbucks’ing took the backseat. I still watched videos on Swagbucks while I did HITs in my spare time, but my paid survey days on Swagbucks were largely over unless I found one I really liked that paid well.
mTurk was my front runner in online side hustles, and I still use it today to make an extra couple bucks per day or more. Realistically you can push $600-$1000 per year without a whole lot of effort as long as you get a solid system down. The more HITs you do, the more you’ll be qualified for, as well.
It’s a great system and I highly recommend it.
Other Side Hustles
I’ll continue to add more of the side hustles we took on here as I get time to write about them.
Some other sites we used for surveys were Inbox Dollars and Survey Savvy. Neither of them netted us as much as Swagbucks or mTurk, so I don’t have a lot to say about them. Inbox Dollars is fairly basic and similar to Swagbucks, but we did not find its execution and payouts to be as consistent. Survey Savvy’s surveys tend to pay more and be more geared toward your personal profile, but there are not as many and they tend to take longer.
You can try some outside of the box options as well such as:
- Secret shopper programs
- Driving for Uber (for the brief time I drove for Uber, I was earning about $28/hour!)
- Selling on eBay, Craigslist or Amazon
- Writing a blog (although this hasn’t proven to be profitable for us… yet)
- Writing an eBook. Got something worth sharing with the world? Have some good design fundamentals? Creating an selling an eBook on Amazon’s Kindle store is remarkably easy, and if priced right you are sure to find at least a few buyers.
These side hustles alone would have been nowhere near enough for us to make ends meet. They merely provided that kick we needed to keep our heads on straight and know that we were stretched too thin.
What other side hustles have you used to pile on some extra cash?