part-time job

Ways to Make Extra Money

February 22, 2016 By Alexa Mason 1 Comment

Tax refund season is here and there will be plenty of people with some extra cash in their pockets. However, you may not have to wait until the spring of every year to have that extra cash. It is possible to do a few things to have extra cash in your pockets at all times and it can change the way that you live your life. You can use the extra money to save for retirement, pay off debts, save for vacation and maybe even provide yourself a sense of freedom with your current work position.

Whether you are looking to just spend an hour or two a week, a day or a month trying to make a little extra money, there are probably some options out there for you. Of course, full time employment is ideal and these ideas are simply only to supplement your current income and provide extra money for saving, etc.

Side Business

One option to get a little extra money in your pockets is to start a side business (self-owned). This can also lead to a full-time career and make it possible to feel a little bit more free in your work (because it’s yours and no one else’s work). This doesn’t mean you start your own lawn maintenance business (though it may mean that), it means you can take something you enjoy or something you find easy to do and spin it so that it makes you money. You can do this by doing the following (and many other things):

Become a babysitter/nanny
Clean houses
Clean cars (inside and out)
Help people move furniture
Help people paint
Become an Uber driver
House sitting
Pet sitting
Training pets
Grooming pets
Dog walking
Become a tutor
Teach people something you’re good at
Maintain yards and beautifying years
Start a blog
Surveys (there are a ton of these online)
Snow shoveling (not for the cold-blooded)
Photography (if you have the knack for it)

Find Something Part-Time

In addition to starting your own small business, you can also simply find a part-time or side job. These will only take up to 20 hours a week (maybe less) and can provide a significant amount of additional income. These can be seasonal, on the weekends, over the summer, at night. Whatever time works for you is when you can work your part-time job. If you can’t think of anything you would like to do part-time, here are a few ideas:

Waitressing (tips can be great)
Bartend
Work at a hotel
Summer jobs
Winter holiday jobs (seasonal mall positions, delivery, etc)
Retail
Become a substitute teacher
Referee sporting events (pays pretty well)
Guide tours (if you know your hometown well, this can be easy)
Lifeguard (better in the summer)
Deliveries (newspapers, delivery driver, etc)
Lending a helping hand through an agency to someone disabled

There are many other ways you can make extra money as well. Some of them not as straight forward and many may even be considered a bit unorthodox. However you want to pull in extra money, be sure to get what you want done with the extra cash. Whether it be save, pay off debts or aiming for a brand new car, keep your goals in mind when looking for ways to grab some extra cash.

Photo: Flickr: Steven Depolo

The Benefits of Being a Freelancer

May 7, 2015 By Lilian Nwa 3 Comments

There are countless articles written about the “9-to-5 grind” and likewise, how to manage the psychological dissatisfaction and disillusionment people often feel traversing to work Monday morning. If you work as a freelancer, however, such complaints might very well sound like a foreign language to you. Yes, we have article deadlines and “bosses” in the forms of clients and editors, but the life of a freelancer can offer individuals more freedom, control and perhaps even happiness than the life of a “regular” worker bee.

On of the easiest ways to start is to sign up with a website like Fiverr. This site lets you advertise small freelance gigs for $5, and it can be a good way to break into the area of freelance you want in your spare time doing your chosen skill at its most basic form. All you need to do is take whatever freelance work you want to do, break it down into a simple service which you offer for $5 and then fulfil any requests you get in your spare time. Doing this will give you the opportunity to test out the market in the freelance area you’re interested in, let you get creative in your offerings, and it’s an easy way to get your freelance career started. Even if you aren’t completely sure what you would like to do in your spare time, you can get some great ideas here. Why do want to do this? Here are four specific benefits of being a freelancer.

Take as much (or as little) work as you desire

In the beginning, it might be difficult to find a steady gig, but if you scour the Craigslists of many cities, you might find that with a decent portfolio, you can assemble an array of clients. In this case, you can decide to take on more work at certain times, or decrease your workload at other times. This kind of flexibility is unheard of in a more traditional job because, in essence, as a freelancer, you’ve become your own boss.

Work when you want, where you want

One of the most unpleasant aspects of the “9-to-5 grind” is the commute, both to the workplace and back home. As a freelancer, you can choose to work from home and as such, can decide to work in the early morning or in the dead of night. Most importantly, not only can you decide when to work, you can also decide what to work in. Instead of stifling ties and too tight pencil skirts, as a freelancer you can choose to work in your pajamas avoiding the unnecessary drama (and discomfort) related to choosing an outfit or wearing it. .

Charge what you’re worth

At a more traditional job, you earn more when you are promoted and you are promoted when your boss or supervisor deems you “worthy.” Now, for some, the criteria for worthiness is clear, but at many other jobs the criteria can be more vague and seem strangely aligned to whomever a supervisor likes. As a freelancer, you set your own rates and can pocket the profits. You have flexiility with what you charge so what you make isn’t capped by an hourly rate or a salary.

Avoid office politics — and unpleasant people

Sometimes the worst part of working in a traditional setting is not necessarily the job, but the individuals you might be forced to work with. As a freelancer, you can work from the comfort of your dining room table and interact with those you choose to talk to. In this way, you avoid office politics and the unpleasantry of interacting with people you would rather never see again.

These are just some of the benefits of being a freelancing and a simple Google search will unearth many more (with a list of disadvantages as well). In general, the key to success in freelancing is to take on projects that interest you and with the many people interested in hiring others to perform a specific project for them, there is bound to be something (perhaps even many things) to pique your interest and sustain your checking account. Good luck!

The above post is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Fiverr in partnership with Kasai Media. All opinions in the article are 100% mine.

Building Facebook Pages for T-Shirts Sales: Day 9

March 20, 2015 By Jeffrey Strain 13 Comments

As I went back to study up on marketing Teespring and Teechip T-shirts to help me reach my goal of making $10,000 in my spare time, I realized that one way to better your chances of success with T-shirts is to have a large and active Facebook fan page on a topic. This will allow you to post different T-shirt designs to it on a regular basis. This makes even more sense if you are going to primarily do your advertising for the T-shirts through Facebook ads.

When you put together a Facebook ad, you have to choose a Facebook page to sponsor the ad. This means if you don’t have one which accurately reflects the T-shirt design you want to promote, you have to create a new one. When I created the gluten free T-shirt, I didn’t have a page that fit well, so I created a Gluten Free Families Facebook page. When I made the Hello Knitty T-shirt, I created a Hello Kitty Fanatics Facebook page.

As part of the Facebook ads, there is a button on the advertisement to “like” the page sponsoring the ad in the top right corner:

While the gluten free page only received a few likes, the Hello Kitty page received 19 likes. My guess, and what I am hoping to show during this challenge, is that in addition to selling T-shirts, you can also begin to build communities where you can sell other T-shirts down the line. This process will likely take more time than I have for this challenge, but for those who are selling, this is a good to keep in mind. If you find a T-shirt design which sells, there’s a good chance you will have the opportunity to build a thriving Facebook page without spending any money to do it, since the T-shirt sales are covering the costs. On the other side of the coin, even if your T-shirt fails, you still will gain a small benefit for the money you spent by helping to build the fan page.

I think this would actually have been the best way to begin with T-shirts. As the Hello Knitty campaign showed, pitching to a community which already has a high interest in the topic makes it a lot easier to sell. If you create the pages about themes you’re already interested in, they should be easy and enjoyable to maintain while creating a community you can sell to down the road.

One of the things that I have started doing is filling in the new pages I create with some content so they don’t look like they were just created. An convenient tool to do this with is called Instapost (use access code “teespy” to get it for free). This quickly pulls up a popular image on whatever topic you input so you don’t have to spend a lot of time researching. If you want three or four great images, just hit the “generate post” button a few times. This will make the new fan page look more active to attract even more people to like it.

Gluten Free T-shirt: Day 6

March 16, 2015 By Jeffrey Strain 1 Comment

As part of my earning $10,000 spare time challenge using Teechip and Teespring T-shirt generation platforms, I placed my first T-shirt design up with moderate hopes it would do well. I knew coming in that the vast majority of T-shirt designs fail, but the idea I had in mind met all the criteria I wanted for a T-shirt design to make a successful launch. This is how the first attempt at making money with T-shirts went.

The process for choosing the design was pretty simple. I thought about groups who in my experience seemed pretty passionate about their topic of interest. I then looked up quotes and sayings on those particular topics. If I saw a quote or saying I liked, I did a Google search to see if there were already T-shirts out there with that saying on them. If not, I looked at other at the general offerings of T-shirts on that topic. I had done this on several subjects when I searched “gluten free.” I know from writing articles on this site those eating gluten free could be passionate, and while there were a lot of T-shirts which said things like “100% Gluten Free” and “Gluten Free Makes Me Happy,” I didn’t think these got to the core of why people go gluten free, and wondered if I could create something a bit more specific and personal.

I remembered overhearing a gluten free friend’s response when someone asked her how she could eat food that didn’t taste all that great. She replied that eating gluten free made her body feel better than any food could ever taste. I thought this might make a perfect T-shirt.

I sent the idea to one of the graphic design artists I hired off of Craigslist (Michael from @MindLightMedia), and he came back with the following design:

I uploaded it to Teechip, and I thought it looked pretty good on a number of differnet colored T-shirts. After seeing the design on the T-shirt, I was hopeful I could sell at least a few.

I went into Facebook ad manager and created a simple ad. I decided my budget for these attempts will be $10, and hopefully within that time period I’ll be able to make at least a couple of sales. If I can’t, then in most cases it won’t we worthwhile keeping the ad running. I checked how the campaign was going and found the following stats:

The stats were quite disappointing. The click through rate was less than 5% (4.299%), and my guess is it would need to be closer to 10% for the T-shirt to have a chance to make a profit. The cost of the reach was also quite expensive. The reach (435) was costing me $0.25 a click. The reach really needed to be 3 to 4 times that for what I was paying to give me a chance to sell some T-shirts and make a profit. I ended the ad buy.

While disappointing, it wasn’t all bad. The page with the shirt received 119 facebook likes, so the message resonated at least to some degree. It just wasn’t enough to get the people who saw it to pull the trigger and purchase it.

My guess is my main failure was the target audience was too broad. I’ll have to see if I can narrow it down a bit and possibly give this T-shirt a try again when I feel a bit more confident with my targeting.

Amount spent: $14.80 ($4.80 ad buy and $10 T-shirt design)
Amount made: $0.00

Current total: -$14.80

Is Teespring Legit or Is Teespring a Scam?

February 14, 2015 By Jeffrey Strain 27 Comments

There are a lot of people who are looking to make money online, but there are so many money making scams out there that most look at any opportunity which appears it may be legit with some amount of skepticism. This isn’t a bad thing. Being skeptical can save you from wasting time and money. This skepticism is especially strong when there is a claim of what initially appears to be too good to be true, such as no upfront costs needed to begin the business. Teespring is one of these companies that almost seems too good to be true.

Is Teespring Legit?

The first question is whether or not Teespring is legit. The company has been around for a few years now, and has even produced a number of millionaires and hundreds of people making six figures according to Forbes. In order to ascertain if Teespring is legit, it’s important to understand how they make money.

How Teespring Works

Teespring is rather ingenious by making it a win-win situation for all. Instead of creating a design, paying a T Shirt company to create the T Shirts and then hoping you can sell all of them to make a profit, Teespring has you create a T Shirt and set a goal of how many T Shirts you will sell. The more you think you will sell, the more money you’ll make if you reach the goal. If you don’t reach the stated goal, then the T Shirts are never produced and no money ever changes hands.

This is how Teespring is able to not charge an upfront fee. If you don’t hit the stated sales goal, they don’t have to produce the shirts so they don’t lose money. If you do reach the stated sales goal, a profit for you and the company have already been factored in so they produce the shirts and are guaranteed a profit.

Is Teespring Safe?

There is no real financial risk to using Teespring, therefore making the company safe. Since you don’t need to give any upfront money when using Teespring, you aren’t risking losing your hard-earned money. The real investment is your time. If you create campaigns that don’t reach their sales goals, you don’t earn anything.

What are Teespring Risks?

The biggest risk is costs you may incur when creating and trying to sell the T shirts. If you pay someone to design a logo or other image (you don’t have to, you can do this on your own), you may lose these costs if you don’t ultimately sell the T shirts you have set as a goal. The same can be true if you spend money to try and promote the T shirts. This money is gone and you don’t get anything for your investment in the advertising if you don’t reach the T shirt sales goal.

You also have a slight risk with the number of T shirts you think you can sell. The more you place as your goal, the more you will make for each shirt sold. The problem is that if you don’t reach the goal, then you get nothing. For example, if you set a goal of 50 shirts and sell only 49, the shirts are never produced and you get nothing. If, however, your set the goal at 10 T shirts and sell 49, you would get paid a commision for all the sales since you met the goal, but that commision would be less than if you had said you could sell 40 T shirts. Attempting to accurately estimate how many T shirts you can sell without overestimating is important to get the most money for your efforts.

Is Teespring a Scam?

Teespring is definitely not a scam. It’s a legit business. There are some risks, so it’s important to understand how the company works so you know what you’re getting into, but it’s a legit opportunity to make money without having to pay any upfront costs. If you think you are creative enough to come up with some T shirt designs which you could sell to others, you may want to check out Teespring as a possible way to make some extra money in your spare time.

For how to make a success of selling this business as well as other side businesses check out these articles.

Building Facebook Pages for T-Shirts Sales
How to Mix Investing and Small-Business Ownership
Side Jobs to Grow Your Bank Account

(Image courtesy of Teespring)

The Minimum Wage Millionaire Excerpt: The Game of Life

June 19, 2014 By Guest Writer 2 Comments

Editor’s Note: The Minimum Wage Millionaire: How A Part-Time After School Job Can Change Your Financial Life is a book aimed at teenagers and parents of teenagers who want to better understand how money works. The book puts forth practical approaches on ways for teens with part-time jobs to accumulate wealth. By using simple analogies anyone can understand, the book is able to explain complex financial concepts in such a way that teens can understand the importance of early investment, and how to build wealth beginning with their first paycheck. By starting early in their earning career, and following the simple six-year plan, they’ll create a small nest-egg which will grow into approximately $1 million, by the time they reach the age of 65. Below is an excerpt from the book with one of the many analogies he uses to help teens better understand wealth building concepts.

The Game of Life

Have you ever played the game called Life? At the beginning of the game, each player picks out a playing piece shaped like a car and puts a little stick figure (pink for girls and blue for boys) in the driver seat. Throughout the course of the game, your car moves around the board, and the spaces on the board try to simulate the highlights, or in some cases lowlights, of the average person’s life. You get a career, get married, buy a house, possibly have kids, buy insurance, and you can even play the stock market. Plus, there’s a wonderful assortment of random life events.

The objective of the game is to accumulate money and end up at Millionaire Acres.

Here’s a plan to get you to Millionaire Acres.

We talked earlier about part-time jobs in high school and getting “earned income.” Let’s start there. If you don’t have a savings account, open one. Have automatic payroll deposit set up so your money goes directly to the bank. Now you will work, get paid, and the money will automatically show up in your savings account.

As soon as you get a paycheck, open a Roth. If you’re under 18, you will need your parents’ help, but get it done. At the end of the book, I have some suggestions for companies that have low or no fees, indexed funds, and require a low initial investment. Set up an automatic transfer from your savings account into your Roth. All of the steps I just listed are important for your future.

You can decide for yourself, but I’d suggest you have $100 per week go directly into the Roth. If you’re paid biweekly, then the first $200 from each paycheck goes into the Roth. Through your last two years of high school, you’ll be able to save and invest about $10,000. Remember, as of

2014 there’s a $5,500 limit on how much you can save in a Roth. At the end of the year, you’ll be close to the limit. If you can max it out, go for it.

Those first two years may be a little rough, it may seem like all work and no play, but you’ll have $10,000 or more in a great wealth-building account. If you add no more money, with an annual return of 8 percent, you’ll have close to $350,000 tax-free by age 65. So you are over a third of the way to Millionaire Acres, and you’re just getting out of high school!

How about that? We haven’t even started the game of Life yet, and you’re over a third of the way to Millionaire Acres. Congratulations!

Getting back to the game for a minute, the first decision in the game is whether to move your car down the path to college or not. Regardless of which way you choose, maintaining a steady part-time or fulltime job with a weekly contribution to your Roth is critical. If you don’t go to college, you get off to a faster start in the game, but your career options are limited. Either way, you can still make it to the promised land of Millionaire Acres.

I know that not everyone reading this book is going to college. Some will choose the military, a trade school, a fast-track career program, take time off from school and work, or start a nondegree career. Whatever you choose, let’s look at how to get to Millionaire Acres.

As the author of The Minimum Wage Millionaire: How A Part-Time After School Job Can Change Your Financial Life, Bill Edgar has a passion for helping teens understand how they can become wealthy. You can find out more about him at Goodreads and follow him on Twitter.