Shortly after starting my site in 2014, I wrote a Money Manifesto, which was a bunch of money related bullet points that I intended to try to live my life by. …and then I largely forgot about it. This series looks at each of those bullet points and assesses how well I did with it and whether or not that point has really mattered over the last decade.

In many ways, this goal has probably been one of the most profound.

The main equation to personal finance is spend less than you earn.

Like a lot of folks, I started with the spend less side of the equation. If you’re coming to personal finance from a pretty average, middle of the road background and income, you may find you can improve your cash flow by just improving your frugality a bit.

It certainly helped me and I appreciate having the skills on how to really tighten my belt, if I have to, but really, the golden part of this equation is to up the earning.

Which genuinely had a bit of a mental barrier for me at first.

Ages ago, I wrote a post called 114 Side Hustles: Ways to Make More Money and while doing the research for it, I learned about so many side hustles. Odds are good there’s one lurking out there somewhere that can work for you too.

But a key slant to this blog is also things that work for stage managers and heaven knows we have weird schedules and many of us are essentially vagrants and not a lot of personal finance advice is geared towards working with those limitations.

So here are several of my favorite side hustles I’ve done over the years.

Substitute Teaching

I hesitated to call this a favorite because I actually, genuinely, hate substitute teaching. I don’t really like small children and the high schoolers are essentially feral. However. It is number one on this list because I was a substitute teacher for 14 years and it provided decent income and perfect flexibility when I needed it. I started subbing when I was a sophomore at university. Sometimes in college, my classes would line up so I would have Tuesday/Thursday or Fridays off and I could sub.

After I graduated, subbing was great for gaps between contracts. By all means, just take the time off, but sometimes when I worked on ships I’d been home for 2-3 months straight and even if I had enough cash, that was a long time to sit at home while everyone else worked during the day. In New Jersey, a human being would call me first thing thing in the morning and I’d have to notify them when I was unavailable and when I returned. In Virginia, I never even spoke with a human after orientation – a robot computer system would ring me in the morning and assign me a place to go. I could literally just roll over and ignore the phone if I didn’t want to sub with no repercussions.

There are two main catches the subbing. You may have to pay to get fingerprinted and for a substitute teaching certificate (which covers a background check, etc.). I want to say in New Jersey it was about $200 and I’m not even sure I had to do either of those things for Virginia. I made it back in a week and I believe it never expires. However, in the district I subbed in in New Jersey, they would send a sheet out at the end of each year asking if you wanted to remain on the sub list and I would always check yes and send it back, because who knows how the year will go, right? I forgot one year, which nullified my substituting certificate and when I did want to sub again, I had to go get it renewed.

Catch number two is that you can’t exactly decide to start subbing tomorrow. I feel like if I’m remembering correctly, in Virginia (where I subbed from 2006-2008), they did hire me pretty quickly and without much rigamarole. In New Jersey, I had to be approved by the board of education, so I had to wait until their next meeting which was generally quarterly.

If you’re still interested, you can read some more about my substitute teaching experiences here – which I wrote back when I was still occasionally subbing.

For substitute teaching, you need to check your state’s requirements. I was very lucky that New Jersey and Virginia both only required a few college credits or a high school degree. Some states require that you have a college degree and a teaching license.

This Blog

This blog has been one of my most lucrative side hustles but if you actually divided it down into a per hour rate since I started, it would probably be a very sad number. That being said, the blog does bring in a few hundred dollars a month through sponsored posts and advertising fairly consistently.

Funny enough, I have noticed that if I have a rough income month from whatever my main stream of income is, I almost certainly will have a very low income month with the blog too – and if I have an unusually high income month in my regular stream of income, the blog has like a banner month. I have never understood this madness.

Unlike substitute teaching, where you show up at a set time, for a set rate, all the responsibility for everything with this blog really falls on me. I paid to set it up. I put in as much time as I want working on it. And then I reap whatever rewards there are. To be fair, I started it more as a money diary for me than anything else. And then I learned a bit about monetizing it and here we are.

For the first year, I made essentially nothing. Since then it has brought in a bit most months. I never really went all in with it, so the income has always been firmly side hustle level. However, I suppose it is also an asset that I could try to scale up.

If you want a really detailed look at how I make money as a blogger, you can check out this post here which talks about the hows and the exact numbers from my first three years of blogging. I plan to go over the numbers and write a post in July to celebrate the 10 years of blogging that provides an update on that but I can tell you it did go up for years, with income peaking in 2016-2018 and then decreasing a bit as I took the gas off the pedal of social media, networking, and community building because I just had too much going on in my regular career. And lately the income is pretty low because my traffic is much lower. Possibly in part because I went from three posts a week for the first 8 years to 1 post a week since mid-2021.

However I think this income drop is worth it for my sanity because I was in full screen burnout during the pandemic.

And if you’re wondering exactly how you can start a blog, this post outlines the steps to setting up your own. I will say that I have outsourced basic back end upkeep since the beginning and for the last year I have used a $37 monthly subscription package with iMark Interactive, a basic tech service run by a blogger who understands bloggers.

I will also say if I could go back to being an undergrad, knowing what I know now, I would’ve minored in computer science and learned how to do the backed stuff of websites because bloggers will pay you fairly large sums of money just for knowing where the right thing to click on the back end of a WordPress website. I think it would be an excellent side hustle for a stage manager.

Transcription Work

This is another side hustle I love to hate. It’s easy to get started. It pays out quickly. It’s really not the most fun. I used Rev during my time doing transcriptions, though there are a few companies out there.

At one magic point in 2017, a tour I was supposed to go on fell apart the night before we flew out. My suitcase was packed. I was literally in line grabbing dinner while running my last pre-tour errands when they called to tell me. And I found myself unemployed for about six weeks while I tried to figure out what I was going to do next.

I transcribed for a large portion of those weeks (and worked as a substitute teacher). This matters because you get a rating based on your transcription work and when you first start, you are last in line to get the transcription jobs. So you get the ones with the worst audio quality or the thickest accents, which majorly slows down how long it takes you to transcribe – and results in your marking several spots as not transcribable, which gives you negative marks on your score and it becomes a bit of cycle to move past this first level of transcription work. Which I personally found to be a nightmare.

However, after a little over a week of this, I made it to the next level of transcription, and the difference was astounding. I could literally transcribe twice as many things in the same amount of time – which essentially doubles your pay. And at one point, I transcribed a theology lecture and did so well that the professor who submitted it requested me for all his other lectures, which was quite nice as I have a theology degree, so I did so well because I was already familiar with all the words he was using. And the topic was interesting to me to listen to.

Sometimes you get to transcribe things that are really interesting. Sometimes you transcribe the most boring meeting minutes in the world.

If you’re interested in transcription, you can read a more detailed review of my time with Rev here.

Freelance Writing

Freelance writing was a lot like the blog. It was entirely up to me to hunt down the work and then figure out how to scale up – which I never quite mastered, to be honest. The highest I was ever paid for articles anywhere other than my own blog was $50/post.

My blog was actually the springboard for freelance writing. It provided writing samples to direct potential employers to. In the early days, most of my writing work came from other personal finance bloggers. Our community is actually kind of small and it especially back then it felt like everyone knew everyone. If someone started a new site and needed some articles, they would put out a call. At one point I wrote quite a few travel articles for $20 a pop. Those were very easy when I was writing about places I’d been and not really worth $20 when I was writing about places I hadn’t been. The research to write those took quite a while.

I have a Work with Me section on brokeGIRLrich that I use from time to time when I apply for a writing job. Overall, for me, this hasn’t been one I pursue very often. These days it’s more likely that I write something if the opportunity just falls in my lap.

However, quite a few other bloggers I know who started around the same time I did make a good living now as freelance writers, especially those who have made the jump from the blog circuit to larger publications.

UserTesting

This is my absolute favorite little side hustle. On this site you get $10 for every website you review. As opportunities pop up, you take a quick little survey to see if you qualify to do the review.

This is not a major income stream by any means, but if you have a flexible schedule and can leave it just running behind whatever else you’re doing, you can bring in a few dollars here and there very easily.

I find that once in a while the website can take up to 30 minutes to review but that’s super rare. I’d say it’s about 10 minutes on average and sometime shorter. Additionally, there are sometimes video call reviews of website you can do while someone asks you questions that are between $30-60. They last 30-60 minutes (and they likely will last that long), but if your schedule is clear, that can be a nice little boost.

Ages ago, I really wanted a pair of Tieks (sort of fancy flats) but they were just under $200 and that seemed crazy to me. So I decided if I made $200 on UserTesting, I could get them. I did and they are my favorite flats. I wore them for 4 years constantly until they fell apart and then I bought another pair of the same shoe. They are the only flats I can sightsee in all day and it’s totally fine (after they are broken in – it does take a bit to break them in). Anyway, this post isn’t an add for Tieks. Only to say UserTesting is a lovely little side hustle.

You can read more about how to make money evaluating websites here.

Travel Rewards Cards

Speaking of paying for #15, it feels remiss not to mention that the main way I’ve knocked a lot of money off my travel bills is using rewards cards. I hesitate to put it as a side hustle, but it does take some research time and organizing time to rewards card churn well.

If you do not pay off your balance in full on your credit cards every month, this side hustle is not for you yet. It is essentially impossible to get enough from the rewards if you are paying interest on a rewards credit card. Their interest rates are very high and you are exactly who that rewards credit card company is preying on to help finance the folks who claim all the rewards and don’t pay a penny of interest ever.

On that note, I will leave this topic with a list of posts about rewards cards and just move on.

• How Do You Use Your Credit Card Rewards?
• My Credit Card Churning Journey
• How I Travel Hacked Hawaii (In three months)
• Hawaii Savings – Juggling Money Like a Boss
• How I Travel Hacked Eastern Europe
• The Cost of Five Days in Iceland

In closing, here are a few other side hustles I’ve done over the last decade:

• Prop Shopping and Building
• Radio Voice Work
• Brand Ambassador
• Cashback Apps (Honey, Rakuten, CapitalOne Shopping)
• eBay
• Mystery Shopping
• Build a Game

It is definitely possible to build a web of side hustles, even if your main work schedule is unpredictable and weird. Maybe someday we’ll all be paid enough that one job will actually cover everything we need, but until then, everything above are things that have helped me at some point or another.

What side hustles have you done?

If you’re interested in seeing how the other goals on my Money Manifesto are going, you can read those posts here:

1. ) I will pay off all my debt. 
2. ) I will tithe 10%
3. ) I will save at least 15%
4. ) I will build up a $10,000 emergency fund.
5. ) I will max out my IRA every year.
6. ) I will put effort into learning how the stock market works better.
7. ) Then I’ll invest in it.
8. ) I’ll put effort into learning how REITS work.
9. ) And then I’ll invest in it. 
10. ) I will own a home and it will not be a McMansion. 
11. ) I will pay for cars up front, in cash.
12. ) I will write a book. About a little man named Jorge who lives in a jar in an antique shop. He has a mustache. 
13. ) I will keep on learning thrifty and frugal ways to live and then actually use them.
14. ) I will make good decisions about how to spend my money, but I also won’t sacrifice all of the now for later.
15. ) I will travel. A lot. All 7 continents someday.