These 10 side hustles can be a great way to bring in extra money on the weekends! They’re certainly not get-rich-quick methods, but these side hustles are a good way to bring in a few hundred or even a few thousand extra dollars without committing all of your free time to them. These side hustles aren’t a waste of time like surveys, and you can do them even if you don’t live in a large metropolitan area.
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Why is this a good side hustle? High quality blades are expensive. For most people it’s more economical to pay someone who knows how to properly sharpen them than it is to replace them.
Get creative with this and see who you can approach to potentially get recurring customers. Sure, you could sharpen your neighbor’s kitchen knives, but what if you start sharpening blades for local restaurants or woodshops? They go through more blades a lot quicker than your neighbor does. That means more business and more money for you.
2. Growing Succulents/House Plants/or Cacti
With side hustles you have to find ways to capitalize on current trends, and right now succulents and houseplants are still very popular.
If you have room to propagate houseplants, you can resell them at local farmers markets or fairs. Even easier – you can open up an Etsy store and sell them to anyone.
The great thing about this side hustle is that it doesn’t require your active attention. You can just plant your plants, and (as long as you can keep them alive) you just let them grow and do their thing until you’re ready to sell them.
If you don’t want to grow or ship entire plants, you can even just sell cuttings. That would be even less work for you! If you’re primarily selling online, cuttings are cheaper and easier to ship.
3. Tutoring or Teaching
The great thing about tutoring is that is totally dependent on what you’re good at and what you enjoy doing.
You can teach any subject at whatever level you’re comfortable with! If that’s 3rd grade math, great! If that’s organic chemistry, perfect! There are people looking for tutors in every subject.
Tip: When schools get into testing season, there’s high demand for SAT and ACT tutors. So be on the lookout for those opportunities!
If you don’t want to go the academic route, people are always looking for music teachers. If you have experience with playing piano, guitar, or singing, teaching music lessons could be the perfect side hustle for you!
If you live in an area where tutoring isn’t in as high demand, or people don’t want to pay for it. You can also teach English online to foreign children with businesses like VipKid. It’s a great way to become a tutor without having to find your own clients. You do need to have a college degree to be able to become a teacher with them, but there are plenty of other online platforms that allow you to become a English tutor.
4. Flipping Items on Craigslist or Etsy (from home, online, or antique stores)
When you think of flipping items on Craigslist, you may think of selling random items from home, or from garage sales – and it’s fine if that’s what you want to do. But flipping items can be much more profitable if you narrow down what you sell! (Especially if you have excessive knowledge of a small niche with high demand.)
The goal of this side hustle is to find undervalued items with a nice potential profit margin, and resell them. If you can become really knowledgeable in one area, flipping those items can be very lucrative.
Flipping Ideas: iPhones, watches, camera lenses. You can really do it with anything. But with higher ticket items like watches, you can definitely make a few hundred or a few thousand extra dollars a month.
Related Article: 9 Side Hustles to Make Extra Money in 2019
5. Flipping vehicles like Cars/Boats/Tractor Equipment
If you have a bit more money to work with, you can get into flipping vehicles.
You can flip any vehicle from a Honda to a McLaren, as long as you know what kind of deal you’re looking for, how to identify damages and costs, and how to estimate your potential profit margin.
Don’t want to flip cars? If you live near a lake you can flip boats or jet skis. If you live out in the country you can flip tractor or farming equipment.
Even though it requires a larger chunk of money upfront, you can have really good profit margins flipping vehicles and large equipment.
6. Selling Political Themed Items
The key to selling any type of merchandise is to sell things that people are either very passionate about, or very opinionated about. And people are very passionate and opinionated about politics. Selling political themed items can be the perfect side hustle during election season.
Anytime within the next year will be a great time to do this. Presidential campaigns are going to start ramping up. Regardless of who or what you support, you can take the middle road and make money by selling political merchandise.
Think about the items you see around election time. Bumper stickers are popular, maybe mugs. On college campuses students put stickers on their laptops or pins on their backpacks.
Also consider what items people have when they go to campaign speeches or protests – shirts, hats, water bottles. Just get creative with what you sell, and sell items that are in demand!
7. Campaigns for Local Elections
You can potentially get paid to help out with local elections! This could be for city government, district attorney, the school board, or other committees that your neighborhood or city has.
If you know web design you could make their websites.
If you’re good at videography you could help film campaign material.
If you’re a writer or graphic designer you could produce content for brochures, handouts, online articles, etc. You could design any marketing materials, like those informational door hangers, or the signs that they stick in the ground at voting locations!
Related Article: 5 Ways to Make Passive Income as an Artist
8. Helping out Elderly people
A lot of times with elderly people, their families don’t live nearby, or their family members are at work during the day.
Many families will pay for someone to help out when they can’t take care of their elderly family members.
A huge need is meal prepping. Most older people have very specific dietary restrictions and need meals made according to what they can and cannot eat. You could also get paid to do anything from running errands or doing housework, to making sure they take their medicines on time.
It’s nice because you get to help someone out and make a little money doing it too!
9. Selling Textbooks on Amazon
I did this as a side hustle both in high school and in college. At the end of the school year, I’d buy textbooks off of people for anywhere between $20-$50. Sometimes they’d give me the textbooks for free if they just wanted to get rid of them.
I’d sit on the textbooks for a few months, then sell them on Amazon for between $100-$300 when school was starting.
The strategy for flipping textbooks is all about timing. Books are usually cheapest at the end of the school year or beginning of the summer. You can make the most profit when school is starting up again. Even better, sometimes you can make an even larger profit a week or two after school has started. The procrastinators haven’t bought their required books, and the school bookstores are sold out. The only option they have left is buying your textbook!
10. Photographing Raw Land
This one may be a little odd, but it’s definitely in demand. Real estate photography is pretty competitive, but seeing photographs with raw land listings isn’t as common. If you can start photographing raw land as your side hustle, it can be very lucrative.
Most raw land listings are accompanied by a blurry screenshot from Google Earth. Even if you aren’t a professional photographer, you can probably take pictures that look better than these screenshots!
If you have a drone and you can take some aerial pictures of the land, that’s even better!