Monthly Archives: February 2011

10 Side Hustles to Keep the Wolf from the Door

Posted on by  at  10:05 am
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This post originally appeared back in October 2008, just about the time the bottom was falling out of the market. At the time, I hoped it might provide a few ideas to families worried about the reliability of their full-time income. Over two years later, we’re stuck with the same worries, so the post seems even more relevant today. I’ve added a few new ideas to the original seven.

 Dog Walker by NinaZed on Flickr

Besides having a solid emergency fund, one of the best ways to hedge against financial ruin while surviving a layoff is to have one or two (or three) side hustles. Side hustles are a little different from traditional part time jobs in that they generally involve you starting up something on your own. They can range in complexity from selling yard sale finds on eBay to starting your own small business.

1. Dog walker. On the way to work each morning I pass a lady walking five or six dogs, usually three leashes in each hand. She carries a small shovel like a sword strapped to her waist, and has quite a few plastic grocery bags stuffed in each pocket. I’ve never seen them in action, but I assume these tools are for performing the neighborly deed of removing dog poop from lawns along the way.

  • Pros: You are getting exercise; your own dog can tag along and get exercise
  • Cons: Clean up (need I say more); untangling twisted leashes

2. “Date-night” sitting service. This is an idea we kicked around a few months ago when we were looking for ways to boost our income, without being away from the kids. A date-night sitting service is basically a Friday and/or Saturday night in-home service where neighbors and friends drop off their kids for a few hours while the parents enjoy a “date night.” Hosts charge a little less than a single babysitter would, but make a little more because they have more than one child to watch. Kids can play games, watch movies, and hosts usually order up some cheap pizza, or grill hotdogs and hamburgers (always a crowd favorite).

  • Pros: Your kids can participate in the fun; hourly earnings typically higher than retail job
  • Cons: Liability issues; five extra kids running around the house; no date night of your own

3. Survey participant. Anyone who has been on the web any length of time knows opportunities abound for participants to earn money completing surveys. What is less known is that there are only a small handful of reputable companies offering this service, in a space crowded by many scams. I have personal experience working with CashCrate, where I used to net $40-$60 a month working surveys a few minutes each day. Over time, I’ve managed to take advantage of their lucrative referral system and I now make a couple hundred dollars a month. It won’t make me rich, but it does add a little to the grocery budget each month.

  • Pros: No costs to participate; can be done from home
  • Cons: Email box full of offers (use a separate email account if you sign up)

4. Blogging. I’ve been writing for nearly a year now (three years, as of this update), but if I read this myself this time last year I wouldn’t have believed being a blogger could actually become an income-earning opportunity. The money comes very slowly, but for those with patience it can actually add up to become a nice supplemental income. It is not completely passive income, as there is a lot of writing, editing and behind-the-scenes administration that goes along with being a blogger. Still, if there is a subject you are passionate about it is worth a try.

  • Pros: Work at your own pace; minimal startup costs; interacting with readers and other bloggers
  • Cons: Time consuming; requires mental effort tough to conjure up at the end of a long day at your full-time job

5. House sitter. I have family member that recently graduated high school. He is headed into one of the military services, but his enlistment was delayed. Instead of hunting down a place to rent, he got the opportunity to house-sit for a couple that would be away from their home for a few months. While this job doesn’t pay an income, money saved is money earned. Rather than shelling out several hundred dollars for a half-year lease, now he gets to live rent free and pocket earnings from his job.

  • Pros: Free rent; take advantage of amenities (pool, home gyms, etc.)
  • Cons: No place for your own things; wondering when you’ll be asked to move out

6. Lawn painter. No, that’s not a typo. Painting houses has always been a nice way to make a few extra bucks, but in times of dry climate and numerous foreclosures, greening up lawns with paint is in high demand. Realtors would much rather show a “green” home than one with a brown yard. But the benefits of a green lawn don’t stop with curb appeal. A green lawn makes the house looked lived in, lessening the chances of the home being vandalized, or squatters taking up residence.

  • Pros: High demand (especially in winter months when grass goes dormant)
  • Cons: Product costs; green legs and shoes

7. Holiday Decorations Installer. This one is seasonal, obviously, but with the holiday season approaching (or just behind us) I’ve heard of many enterprising people advertising their services to install or remove Christmas decorations. Many homeowners enjoy adding icicle lights and yard decorations, but don’t have the time, energy, or know-how to set them up themselves. That’s where you come in. Charge a flat fee based on the amount of decorations the owner wants displayed, and offer a discounted fee to come back after the holidays and take down the decorations and pack them away for next year. Who knows…you might earn a little extra Christmas shopping money by helping out your neighbors!

  • Pros: Minimal equipment needed (maybe just a ladder, scaffold, etc.); set your own schedule
  • Cons: A lot of patience needed (ever try to unwind a 100ft strand of tangled Christmas lights?)

8. Tutor. Many states are struggling to keep up funding for local school systems, and unfortunately, teachers feel the brunt of budget cuts in the form of layoffs, furlough days or frozen salaries. Class sizes are increasing, and in many areas, test scores are dropping. To combat this, many parents are turning to tutors to supplement what their children are learning in school. If you have particular training in a certain area, can speak a second language, or maybe used to be a teacher yourself, opportunities should be fairly easy to come by.

  • Pros: Generally, you can set your own schedule with appointments beginning right after school and into the early evening.
  • Cons: You must have patience and have “the heart of a teacher.” Not everyone does. Just because you are smart, doesn’t mean you can teach.

9. Spring Cleanup Yard Service. OK, so maybe you aren’t up for a full-time gig mowing lawns, but this time of year opportunities abound for someone to provide a “spring cleanup.” Offer to trim small trees, rake leaves, trim hedges, put down fresh pinestraw or mulch, or edge paved areas where winter grass has crept out of bounds, etc. I just spent an entire Saturday trimming trees and hauling limbs to the street. I would have gladly paid someone to do it.

*Bonus, talk with a local Realtor about offering this service for their properties. If owners have moved on, or the house is foreclosed, they might be willing to pay for a quick spruce up to improve their property’s curb appeal.

  • Pros: No great skill or intellect needed, just a strong work ethic
  • Cons: May need to invest in some equipment if you don’t already own an edger, trimmer, shears, etc. Check yard sales advertising yard or gardening equipment.

10. Curb painting. A few weekends ago someone came by our house offering to paint our house number on the curb using an attractive template that is highly visible at night. This is especially helpful to people making deliveries, emergency services personnel, etc. What a great way to make a few extra bucks on a Saturday.

  • Pros: Highly profitable, just need a stencil kit and paint
  • Cons: Check for any neighborhood covenants or homeowner association rules that might prevent either the solicitation or painting

Do you have any additional side hustle ideas to share with fellow readers?

A Grocery-Shopping Hiatus: How Long Can You Eat from the Pantry?

Posted on by  at  5:00 am
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The following post is from contributing author Laurel Gray.

I have a confession to make. I am a food hoarder. I love to cook, and I try out new recipes almost every day. In the process, I accumulate a lot of food.

To give you an idea of what my pantry looks like, right now I have three kinds of tapioca pearls, six types of dried beans, four kinds of flour, and various partly used bags of barley, quinoa, red lentils, mung beans, dried shitakes, bulgur wheat, and so on. I have stockpiles of canned goods, and over 50 spices.

Taking Back the Pantry

I think it’s time for a shopping hiatus. I recently read an article about a couple trying to go one month without shopping—and I am inspired to give it a shot myself.

According to ConsumerReports.org, the average family of four spends $500 a month on groceries. I don’t know if I can last a whole month, but I intend to whittle down my stores significantly, and lower (or eliminate!) my monthly grocery bill in the process.

There are many good reasons to skip the grocery store run for a while:

  • To free up money in your monthly budget to pay down debt or to handle an unexpected expense such as a car repair.
  • To survive a period of unemployment or underemployment
  • To reduce pantry clutter and use up supplies before they expire
  • To combat food inflation

Take the Challenge

Starting today, I am going on my own shopping hiatus to see how long I can last without going to the supermarket. Frugal Dad has decided to take up the gauntlet starting March 1.

If you are considering and attack on your own pantry, here are some ground rules to follow:

  • Take Inventory—Take a moment to sort through your food stores, unearth buried items in cupboards, and identify the contents of those mystery packages in the freezer. Discard any items that are unusable or spoiled.
  • Research—Using a list of the items you have on hand, hit the internet or scan your cookbook indices for recipes that call for the items you have available.
  • Plan ahead—Make a list of dishes that you can prepare using ingredients on hand. Prepare food on weekends so you won’t be tempted to stop by the store after work when you lack motivation.
  • Improvise—Make creative substitutions in recipes to use up the supplies you have on hand.
  • Shun Dominos—Don’t succumb to expensive delivery or take-out meals in order to supplement your restricted diet. This will defeat your thrifty goals, and thwart your efforts at de-cluttering.
  • If All Else Fails—Make Soup! Soup is a great way to use of a hodgepodge of ingredients such as pasta, dried beans, canned vegetables, and dried legumes and grains.

I’ll be reporting back with details of my effort to use up my languishing pantry products. I hope you will be inspired to join me in the shopping hiatus challenge and share your stories. So…Tapioca Soup, anyone?

Weekly Roundup – Inflation or No Inflation Edition

Posted on by  at  5:00 am
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Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently told us again that there is little evidence of inflation. Sometimes I wonder if I’m on a different planet than the people inside the beltway. My grocery bill is higher. It costs more to fill my car. My utilities are going up.

There’s also growing concern over food shortages. There are more foreclosures to come. We’re still down about 7 million jobs from when this downturn started. We’ve spent (borrowed) an insane amount of money in the last decade. I’m no economist, but surely this has to catch up with us in the form of inflation.

The Frugal Roundup

The Less You Need, the More You Have. Managing wants and harnessing contentment are two keys to living within your means.

Nine Lessons in Wealth-Building from The Millionaire Next Door. As a fan of the book, I really enjoyed this post.

10 Tricks Burglars Use. When the economy goes down, crime rates typically pick up. With that in mind, here are some great tips for making your home look like less of a target. (via The Daily Crux)

How to Take Time Off from Work. Are you as intentional about taking time away from work as you are about going to work?

When Faced With Financial Disaster, Can You Live Without These Things? What could you give up (and not give up) if things hit the fan?

What Is A Dividend? I like to think of dividends as supplements to capital gains and hedges against losses.

Sewing without electricity. Sewing is something I’d like to learn…to fix buttons, make small things like caps, etc.

Best of the Rest

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The War on Debt: The Battle Begins at Home

Posted on by  at  5:00 am
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Lots in the news lately about our national deficit. While the national debt is an issue I am concerned with, I decided some time ago that I needed to clean up my own household before worrying about the country’s budget.

This was the serenity prayer for finances in action. I needed to focus on the things I could change, rather than worrying over the things I can’t (or at least not directly).

For too long I carried credit card debt on a handful of plastic cards that controlled every aspect of my life. The debt represented years of poor financial management followed by more years of sticking my head in the sand and ignoring the debt that had accumulated.

It wasn’t unusual for me to sit down on a Friday evening and send off half  of my take home pay to banks and credit card companies in the form of minimum payments and car loans. You would think seeing 50% of my income disappear would have motivated me to get out of debt sooner, but it didn’t. In fact, a dangerous pattern began to emerge.

Using Frugality as an Excuse to Stay in Debt

Stay with me here.

Because we were living on half of my income, we became masters at frugality. We clipped coupons, reused towels, ate every meal at home, skipped vacations, canceled the cable and on and on. It became sort of a game to see how little we could live on. We got so used to it we became complacent.

It was easy just to send along my monthly payments to the credit card company and live on the rest. Sure, we weren’t making much of a dent in our debt, but we weren’t hurting either. We had plenty of food, a (rented) roof over our heads, a decent car, etc.

Our resourcefulness was now our downfall. Because we were comfortable, there was no push to become debt free. If nothing had changed, we’d still be in the same debt trap we were back then – cash in from paychecks, cash out to credit cards, charge monthly expenses on credit card because we had no cash. Repeat…over and over again, month after month.

Unfortunately, as the debt continued to grow, and the minimum payments consumed more and more of my paycheck, we soon found ourselves not so comfortable.

The breaking point finally came a few years ago when I found myself eating a soggy hot dog from a convenience store on my lunch break because my checking account was overdrawn, my credit card was maxed out, and my wallet was empty. I had to rely on a gas card to buy my lunch. Had I really gotten to that point? Yes.

But it wasn’t just the soggy hot dog that got me to see the light.

It was years of lying awake in bed thinking about what it would feel like to be debt free.
It was the years of getting up every single morning dreading my day at a crappy job that I only stayed at because I felt I had no options.
It was the realization that our debts were taking an emotional toll on our family. I was unhappy. My wife was worried. And our kids could feel it.

We became debt free several months ago now and haven’t looked back. Our family motto is “never again.” As in never again will we go back into credit card debt. From this point forward we will finance our own emergencies, education and occasional luxuries.

If you’re reading this and are in the same state of complacency I found myself in a few years ago, don’t wait for a soggy hot dog to awaken you. Get fired up about getting out of debt.

Back to the national economy. Of course, there is no way for me to predict what might happen to our economy in the next few years. I’d like to think we’ll pull ourselves out of this dive, tighten our belts once prosperous, and begin to repay our obligations. I also recognize this is probably overly optimistic given the hole we’ve dug and the steepness of the climb ahead.

No matter what happens, if your household is a debt free one you’ll weather the storm better than your neighbor who is drowning in credit card debt, paying for a mortgage he can’t afford, and has no savings.

With no debt, and some cash in the bank for emergencies, you can keep the lights on and put food on the table even if you have no income for a while. With no debt you can take advantage of the opportunities that show themselves in tough times.

So sit down today, develop a game plan and get busy becoming debt free.

Save with Smart Meters and Appliance Timers

Posted on by  at  5:00 am
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The following post is from contributing author Laurel Gray.

Variable electricity rates may be coming to your neighborhood in the near future. Nationwide, many utility companies are rolling out “smart meter” programs that are designed to measure and report their customers’ usage throughout the day. The goals of such smart grid systems are to better track demand and usage and also enlist consumers’ help in reducing demand on the system during peak hours.

In some places, smart meter programs are voluntary and in others participation is mandatory. Even if your state or area is not talking about smart meters yet, the writing is on the wall. According to the The Edison Foundation’s Institute for Electric Efficiency, by the end of the decade there could be as many as 65 million smart meters in use nationwide.

Even though smart grid programs may start out only tracking peak-hour usage, you can bet that eventually these programs will aim to reduce overall peak-hour usage by charging more for electricity during high-demand periods. According to a New York Times article:

“Using digital technology and computer networking, smart meters can transmit real-time data that is supposed to enable utilities to conserve electricity and better allocate power during parts of the day when overall demand is high. Utilities can also then vary the price for power, by time of day or time of year, based on when it is being used; some are already offering this option to customers.”

One way to charge more for power based on time of day is with a time-of-use (TOU) meter. A TOU meter charges customers a higher rate for designated peak hours and a reduced rate for off-peak hours. Conversion to a TOU meter can be a good idea for consumers who are aware of the rules and are able to alter their consumption patterns to maximize plan benefits.

Outside the U.S., it’s not uncommon for utility companies to charge more per kilowatt hour during high-demand periods. In Costa Rica where I live, customers have the option to install a smart meter that charges different rates for peak, valley, and nighttime usage.

While the peak rate is more than double the rate charged to customers with the old-fashioned meters, the valley rate is 9% cheaper than the standard rate and the nighttime rate is a whopping 63% cheaper.

We decided to switch to the new meter and to try to modify our consumption to align with off-peak hours. By running the dishwasher, washing machine and clothes dryer only after 8 p.m., we were able to lower our overall monthly bill while still consuming roughly the same number of kilowatt hours.

Appliance Timers vs. Energy Hogging Appliances

Even though we modified our behavior to lower our bill, we still had too many kilowatt hours during the peak period. So the next step was to modify the behavior of our appliances. Figuring that the refrigerator was probably the biggest peak-hour energy hog in the house, my frugal husband went online to research appliance timers.

Appliance timers are relatively inexpensive (models on Amazon range from $10-20) and range from simple mechanical units with a single stop-start function, to more sophisticated digital models with multiple on and off settings that can be programmed by the day or week.

The model we use was actually marketed as an aquarium timer. We set it to turn the refrigerator off during the costly peak hours between 10 a.m.-12 p.m. and between 5:30 – 8 p.m. During each power-off interval, we set the timer to turn the refrigerator back on for 15 minutes to ensure that the temperature inside stays low.

Keeping the fridge off during the spike period made a measurable drop in our peak kilowatt hour usage, and knocked our bill down another few dollars per month.

Think Outside the (Ice) Box

Even if your region is not transitioning to a smart meter system, appliance timers can quickly pay for themselves. While the refrigerator is the most obvious candidate for an appliance timer, consider using a timer on any electrical device that is running (or even just plugged in) when no one is home or when not in use.

Items such as printers and other office equipment, kitchen appliances, heating and cooling devices, hot water heaters, and aquariums can all be placed on timers to help save on electric bills.