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The Side Hustle Snowball: How to “Erase” Your Expenses with Extra Income Streams (Greatest Hits)
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Nick Loper
Here's an oldie but a goodie from the archives from the Side Hustle Show Greatest Hits collection. What's up, what's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle show because when your non job income exceeds your monthly expenses, you're free. And it's exactly that freedom that I want to talk about today. Except we're going to tackle it a little bit differently. Often the case on the show is exploring one specific business model and then reverse engineering the path it took to earn 5, 10, 20 grand a month. Today I actually want to start a little bit smaller and use side hustles broadly defined here, since not everything I'll talk about is super entrepreneurial in the traditional sense. But using side hustles to erase your expenses, how do we zero out your personal expenses with extra income streams? Of course, that's the end game for a lot of side hustlers. Like how do I build something up to the point where I can leave this soul sucking job? And I think that's a worthy goal, especially if your job really is of the soul sucking variety. But that can also kind of be an intimidating place to start from. So what I want to propose instead as an alternative path is what I call the Side Hustle Snowball. How this works, and this might sound familiar to Dave Ramsey fans, is listing out your monthly expenses from smallest to largest. For example, you might have things like Netflix or your cell phone bill toward the top of the list and you might have things like your rent, your mortgage or childcare or property taxes down at the bottom. In this episode, I want to walk through some real life examples of how you can start erasing expenses. First to allow yourself to celebrate those mini wins along the way. Like instead of, well, shoot, I only made 50 bucks this month. It can be reframed as awesome. I made my car insurance free this month and and second, to build some positive momentum, hopefully we get this little snowball rolling for you and it turns into this income avalanche. Think of those like fundraising bar charts where you know they get filled in as more and more people donate and you can watch the progress until it's overflowing out of the goal number at the top. I think you can do the same thing with your income, your expenses in this side Hustle Snowball framework. This one little reframe is definitely helpful in our house. It's something we talk about all the time and I hope it is for you too. Notes and links to all the resources mentioned are@side hustlenation.com Snowball ready? Let's do it. So we're going to go from smallest to largest in this episode with some personal examples. And in making this list, I was reviewing our credit card statements and bank statements. I'm looking for, okay, what are the recurring costs that we have? And one of the smallest ones that I could find was my Dollar Shave Club membership. I gotta keep this head looking smooth here, but it's like $7.65. But it only ships every three or four months, so I'm gonna round it up and call it a $2 like monthly expense. And yeah, I said, you know, we're gonna start small, so how can we erase this $2, starting with very low dollar amounts? One easy way is with cashback apps. I've got several of these on my phone, including Fetch, Ibotta Dosh. They all have funny names and it's super easy to accumulate cash. Couple bucks worth of points every month to erase that dollar Shave Club in my case. Next on my list of expenses is Netflix. This is 13.99 for us. This has crept up a little bit over the years. And don't tell Netflix this, but I know they can see our data. And the kids watching, you know, their octonauts every afternoon, they could realistically charge way more before we'd even start to shop around or blink. But one way that I like to mentally cover small expenses like this is to buy shares of dividend paying stocks. Now, of course, none of this is investment advice. Do your own due diligence, all of that legal stuff. But I've been building what I call my cash flow portfolio over the last five or six years. And it started with this snowball idea. Jeremy from GoCurryCracker.com, he's on the podcast, years and years ago about his early retirement stuff, he had this article called Free coffee for life, Free Starbucks for life, or something like that. And the punchline was to go buy enough stock in the company to cover your habit. I thought that was a really cool framework. We've done the same thing for Target, actually. So how you do the math on Netflix, and I don't think Netflix pays a dividend, but you can just substitute some other company that does. So you could say, okay, 14 bucks a month, 168 bucks a year, then go look for some dividend paying stocks. And I've got a personal bias toward those companies with a long history of not only paying, but growing their dividends over time. And then if you divide the expense you're trying to raise 168 bucks for Netflix, in this case by the forward dividend, I think it's called. Basically, what does this pay per share on an annual basis? It will tell you how many shares you need to buy. And of course, dividends are always subject to change. There's a lot more to this than I have the expertise or qualifications to explain, but I will say this has become a growing source of household revenue, which again started with the goal of just making some of these small little expenses disappear. It's been really motivating to watch that grow over time. And if you're looking for a better yield, like oftentimes dividend yields are in the 1 to 4% range. If you're looking for a better yield, I've got a whole list of other interesting alternative investment options for you on side Hustle Nation, with varying degrees of liquidity on those. I'll link up that for you in the show notes for this episode@sidehustlenation.com Snowball our next recurring monthly expense is life insurance. And even though I fully trust Bryn is going to be just fine financially without me, I did set up this policy before our first Little Hustler was born. It's a super small policy. It's like $14 a month. There's this old Jeff Foxworthy bit about life insurance. So he says, okay, you want to make sure that you have enough that your loved ones are taken care of, but not so much that you've got a bounty on your head. I'm probably erring on the low side here, but I can almost guarantee you've got something lying around in the garage, in the attic, in the closet that is probably worth $14 or whatever your premium is to somebody on ebay or Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace. Over the years we've sold books and cooking supplies and clothes we don't wear anymore and furniture and toys and other baby stuff that they outgrew a standing desk. Recently, I think that was on Facebook Marketplace. Now one rule that I have that I'm admittedly not always great about enforcing is that every time Amazon shows up at the front door, there needs to be an equal and opposite sale or donation out the back door. And of course, you can scale this up all you want. I mean, check out my interview with Stacy Gallego from last fall. She shared all about her flea market flipping business where she sources inventory, how she finds inexpensive ways to ship really bulky stuff. She had earned, I think, 7,000 bucks in profit the month before we recorded as episode 406 of the side Hustle show or Sidehustlenation.com flip it. But taking advantage of this declutter and profit thing to cover some small expense on your budget. The next expense on my list is our cell phones, which are at 20 bucks per line per month with Mint Mobile. So first of all, there's this substitution game you can play with some of these expenses. When you go through your list you might find, oh, do we really need that? Or do we really need to be spending so much on that? Like we have switched mobile providers from Verizon several years ago to Ting and then in the last year or year and a half to Mint and each time saw a significant cost savings. And actually, I don't know, our costs on Ting kind of kept creeping up, mostly based on data usage. So that's where Mint has definitely been a cost saver. Sidehustlenation.com MintMobile is my referral link for that. I think I get four gigs a month or something for 20 bucks. I don't know, I use just a small fraction of that. But how do we pay for it? Well, one of the longest running snowball income streams for me is Fiverr F I V E R R and lately have been averaging 20 to 50 bucks a month over there, mostly from digital product sales gigs I created years ago. And it's 100% organic. I don't do anything to promote these gigs. We've got several excellent Fiverr episodes in the archives. But what's cool about the platform is how you can rapidly test different offers, which is something that Mike Zima talked about in episode 375. I think we called it rapid gig prototyping. Rapid side hustle prototyping. Fiverr forces you to think in terms of many productized services. Like what's one deliverable that you might be able to help someone out with if you have this broad menu of different offerings like okay, how do I peel off just one little item from that? So it's probably not about coming up with some, you know, grand marketing strategy, this long term consulting thing, but maybe it's about setting up Google Analytics for somebody, which I think was maybe one of Mike's first gigs. And because there's always new software, new trends, new demands, the search volume on Fiverr is constantly shifting. So it's easy to put up different gigs, test where the demand, see what kind of reaction you get. You can take a look at the navigation categories. They've got a bunch of different kind of freelance categories for some inspiration there. I think Fiverr is still worth a look it's definitely come a long way from being the $5 Marketplace. You know, that it maybe was eight or ten years ago. Lots of room to command premium prices on there and still tap into this big established audience of buyers. We don't have any car payments, thankfully, but we do have some vehicle related expenses, including gas and insurance. Gas is around 50 bucks a month for me, maybe double that if I include Bryn's car. One cool way to make this disappear? Well, one cool way would be to buy an electric car. And there's actually probably some math to do on that front. As a side Note, I'm over 1150 miles on my E bike now and that's in just under three years. Mostly transportation miles to and from school, to and from downtown as opposed to recreation miles. That's been a great purchase. I know I'm not at the break even point on gas savings yet, but I'm getting closer with every trip and it's a lot of fun too. But with the car, how do we make up this $5200 monthly gas expense? How do we make that go away? One interesting way that's accessible to almost everybody is market research studies. I've got a full list of companies that facilitate in person and online focus groups, paid research studies. And these are often in the 50 to $200 an hour range. So pretty decent hourly rate for just giving your opinion. And a lot of that depends on kind of like the level of industry expertise that the researchers are looking for. Because naturally a study targeting, you know, some super specific job role, it's going to be harder to find those people. So they're going to pay more than general population consumer study. I'll link up that list in the show notes for you this episode. Sidehustlenation.com Snowball A couple of my favorites off the top of my head are userinterviews.com and respondent respondent IO just this month I did a user interviews study about my video editing process and earned 50 bucks in the form of an Amazon gift card which like, okay, we know we're going to spend it so it's about as good as cash. I've done a few studies like this. I don't know, they're always interesting conversations. I think it's a fun way to help shape new products and get paid in the process. Now a lot of these expenses have definitely changed since this original 2021 recording, but the broad strategies and the tactics to erase them, I think they held up pretty well. Now we're going to keep that side hustle snowball rolling right after this. The next vehicle related expense is the car insurance expense, which for us is around 90 bucks a month for two cars. And yes, 15 minutes did save us 15% or more. But again, on the substitution game, check out Gabby G A B I as a quick and easy way to compare rates. Sidehustlenation.com Gabby G A B I is my affiliate link for that. Users report saving an average of 960 bucks a year or something crazy like that. And they don't sell your information to third parties. This is like the dirty secret of the car insurance industry. Your cars are worth less every year because they keep depreciating, but the insurance company keeps charging you the same amount as if nothing ever happened. The side hustle that erases this in our house is Print on Demand. Two platforms that we're playing on right now are Merch, by Amazon and Redbubble. There are full episodes dedicated to this topic. But on a high level, how it works is you upload a design. In our case, mostly T shirts and I say are because Bryn's really taken the lead on this. But you upload your design, you create this listing, and after that everything else is hands off. When somebody else orders Amazon or whichever other company you're listed with, they handle the printing, the shipping, the fulfillment, the customer support, everything. And then you earn a little royalty that you get to set up front on that sale. Merch has paid us between 50 and $400 every month this year. And what's kind of fun is now Brand has a reputation for doing this among our friends and family. So she'll get like custom design requests. Definitely a fun little side hustle that helps erase some expenses. The challenge that I see with Merch is how quickly copycats can come in. Even if you have an original idea, if it sells, it's not going to take long before some software sniffs that out and creates an almost identical looking product. So the people that I see having the most success here in really taking it beyond a hobby level are the ones like Michael essick from episode 402, who they've got thousands of designs and he was even working on some offline licensing deals to expand his distribution. TV and Internet is next for us. Comcast. Oh man, people like to hate on Comcast. I don't know, man. I think it's a pretty reliable isp. I couldn't run my business without them, so I'm not going to badmouth them here. For us, at 75 bucks a month, I think you could erase that with one freelance gig, one small freelance gig. I didn't do a ton of this, but I did some freelance writing. A few years ago. I made $75 for articles that were in the 750 to 1000 word range. Could you do something similar? Could you set it up as a recurring monthly assignment? Could you do an article a week and blow past this expense number? Could you do something local? I mean, we've had awesome episodes about mobile detailing, knife sharpening, cleaning services, pet waste removal. Members of the side Hustle nation community are doing pressure washing, lawn mowing, gutter cleaning. Shoot. Dustin Riechman, who was on episode 391, he sent me this video about how his kids made 850 bucks in a few weeks cleaning out garbage cans in their neighborhood, pet sitting, dog walking. There's no shortage of opportunity out there, maybe even learn a new skill. We have heard from lots of community members who listened to episode 286, took action, got their notary license, loan signing agents can make this $75 Comcast bill go away in one signing. And then you've got this skill. You can choose to put to work the rest of the month or not. It's up to you. The next expense I'm trying to erase are our utilities. This is gas and electric, water, garbage, and for us, this is in the range of $150 to $200 a month. All combined in the way that I have covered this historically, or at least this year is with self publishing, the combination of Kindle, paperback and audiobook royalties is usually around this level or higher during promotion periods. And speaking of promotion periods, you can grab my latest book, 1K 100 Ways, at 1K100ways.com. This features 100 members of the side Hustle nation community on how they're making extra money, how they came up with their ideas, how they found their initial traction, and how long it took them to reach that thousand dollars profit milestone again. 1k100ways.com now, self publishing comes in a lot of different flavors. I have been focused on the nonfiction space where outside of a few blockbusters, it's kind of an authority building play. It's an audience discovery play, it's a portfolio play rather than, oh, I'm going to make a fortune off book royalties. And we've heard from others in the children's publishing space. Matt Ralph was a guest recently. And even the so called low content publishing publishing space, which could be journals, notebooks, logbooks, workbooks, you know, all designed for a niche audience and all print on demand. But again, it's a business model I like because I can create the asset once and it serves people and it works for you for years down the road. I ran this report recently in kdp, my Kindle direct publishing dashboard, and it now lets you run like a lifetime report and it showed $66,000 in lifetime estimated author royalties since 2011. So on an annual basis, you know, it's not huge, but I'm not going to turn it down. And top of that, you know, it's a lot of fun and it adds up to some significant cash over time. Now, if writing isn't your thing, maybe you make an online course. Even though it's been almost seven years since I created my primary Udemy course, which actually is on the topic of self publishing, it still brings in 50 to 130 bucks a month. U d e m d y dot com it's this peer to peer education marketplace. Millions and millions of students on there. Again, thinking of these like mini search engines. Udemy being one of them, Fiverr being another one of them. Where can I put my buy buttons? Where can I make it easy for people to do business with me? Where can I go where the cash is already flowing? All right, the expenses are getting a little bit bigger here. We're going up to groceries now, which are in the range of 600 to $800 a month for us. For a family of four for me, I would love to snowball this expense away with YouTube ads. I'm currently around 500 bucks a month, but it's been as high as $1200 a month. And I haven't done a great job of prioritizing YouTube and building dedicated systems around producing consistent content. But that's almost what's crazier here. Even with my current half hearted, lackluster, admittedly not super cinematic YouTube effort, it still brings in hundreds of dollars a month. And it feels like free money because I would probably do it anyway. Don't tell YouTube that. I like doing the quick interviews. I like trying to make videos to complement existing articles. I like throwing podcast episodes up there and when revenue comes back, that's like an awesome bonus. So trying to erase the grocery expense with the with the YouTube ad money. The next expense on my list here is preschool daycare. For us, that's been for most of this year we've been paying around 1,200 bucks a month for two kids to go a couple days a week. We found that to be a good combination of focus. Time for me to do work, because again, I like doing this stuff and they get some peer socialization time as well. When I first drafted the Side Hustle Snowball post in 2016 that this episode is based on, I mentioned podcast sponsorships were my daycare eraser. And at that time I noted that the show was earning around 300 bucks a week after production costs. And it's really rewarding to revisit that now five years later, because even though production costs have remained similar, the revenue has grown by quite a bit over that time, you know, more than enough to cover the cost of preschool. Of course, if you need to make money quickly, starting a podcast would be pretty low on my list of recommended actions. But if you have a little bit of a longer time horizon, I still think there's a tremendous opportunity in the world of podcasting to reach your target market to build a business from these helpful conversations. Silver lining on the preschool expenses, that should be a line item that's going down when our oldest starts kindergarten this fall, which is just nuts that he's starting kindergarten already. Time seriously does fly. Alternatively, we could look at Bryn's photography business here and say that every wedding that she and Brooke shoots, that covers a month and a half of preschool or something like that, maybe two months. And that's a common reframe in the personal finance space. Instead of looking at the price of an item in dollars, instead consider the price of the item in time. So if you make $25 an hour and you're contemplating this $100 purchase, yeah, you can afford it. But is it really worth trading four hours of your life for? Or even more when you take taxes into consideration? Sticklers will notice I've been ignoring taxes this whole time, so if you want to get really technical about it, yes, you're going to need to factor in your marginal tax rates and all that jazz. But put another way, this was actually in Tanya Hester's book Work Optional. Every extra dollar that you add to your monthly budget in expenses is another $300 that you need to save for in retirement to cover that expense in perpetuity. Definitely makes you think twice about these seemingly innocent little lifestyle inflation decisions that we make every month. And the last expense on this list, this is the big one. This is rent. Maybe it's surprising that we're renting right now. It's actually been, I think, a very profitable move for us on a lot of fronts for the last seven, eight years. We talked a little bit about some reasons why that might make sense in 10 unconventional money rules, which was my episode with Rich Jones from Paychecks and Balances last fall. Now, for personal and emotional reasons much more than financial ones, we're buying a house. It's actually supposed to close at the end of the month. This is going to be a big move for us. Excited about it? I'm nervous about it, but we're looking forward to starting a new chapter. It's going to be tough to say goodbye to this place. I mean, this is where we brought our babies home. This is where we started our businesses. That little corner of the living room is where the side Hustle show started, you know, but for almost everyone, this is going to be the biggest line item on your budget. So let's say you're trying to, again, side hustle, snowball your way up to eliminate this rent or mortgage expense. One distinct advantage of buying over renting is that eventually that mortgage does go away. Property taxes, another story. And how much in cash it costs to make that mortgage go away, another story. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak. Now, on the side Hustle show and on side Hustle Nation, you've heard dozens of ways to earn 2,300 bucks a month or more. Whatever your mortgage or rent is, it could be selling printables, driving for Instacart, teaching online classes, real estate investing, renting out portable hot tubs. You name it, we've covered it. But if you break down all of those different business models, the most common denominator I think you're going to find is that they help other people in some meaningful way. You can get everything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want. Zig Ziglar. Right at the rent, slash mortgage level of income, or rather level of expense. You know, we're solidly in the entrepreneurship territory here versus, you know, downloading a cashback app where we started this episode. And that means thinking about who you can help and how you can help them fall in love with the problem, right? Not necessarily the solution, because the solutions might change. So if I'm trying to get to the, you know, $2,000 plus level of income today, and I need to do it quickly, I'm thinking about freelancing, consulting. I'm thinking about the software with a service model we talked about with Brad rice in episode 441. If I'm okay with a longer time horizon, I'm thinking about the drop servicing model we talked about with Anthony and Janelka hartzog in episode 438. Their residential cleaning service was bringing in 25 grand a month in revenue without them doing the cleaning. Built to grow, built to scale from the beginning. I think the same model could be applied across a ton of other local fragmented home services niches. I'm thinking about starting a newsletter. I'm thinking starting a YouTube channel. I'm working in public. I'm thinking about starting a new website, you know, probably from an aged or already established domain. But if I've got a longer time horizon, I've got a few more options. And in my case, I'm really grateful to cover the rent with affiliate marketing. This has been my bread and butter of side hustle income going back to even before I quit my job. Affiliate marketing is a fancy way of saying helping other companies sell their products or services online and helping customers find the best product or service for their needs. You're in the middle, you're playing matchmaker there. Check out our episodes with Tammy Smith with Debbie Gartner, with Alex and Healy from Finn Vs Fin all getting paid to essentially answer people's questions online. There's a lot of technical stuff. There's this SEO learning curve, there's this strategy to learn, but that's what a lot of it comes down to, helping people make informed decisions. As an example, an affiliate example, I wrote a post originally years ago promoting Udemy's New Year's sale. So every year they've got this big discount at the start of the year. Start the year off right, get your learning on, get a big discount. And anticipating that, I compiled a list of the courses that I thought would be most helpful and most relevant for my audience. Some of these were guests on the show, some of these were things they had already bought through the magic of affiliate link tracking. And on the surface, this post was a pretty blatant affiliate play. Probably had, you know, 100, 200 affiliate links in there. Some of them were doubled up, which I openly admitted. Yet I had people thanking me in the comments. And why is that? Because it was helpful to them. And I didn't call it Udemy's New Year's sale. I called it the much more clickable and content heavy, you know, the 101 best Udemy courses for entrepreneurs, freelancers and side hustlers. And over the course of now, five plus years of that post's life, it's earned $30,000, $40,000. The reports inside of Rakuten Link share, whatever it's called now, like don't even let you go back that far, but it has been a significant asset for the business, and it's been helpful for the people who visited that page as well, helping people make informed decisions. Now, as you're contemplating the extra income stream that's eventually going to erase your rent or your mortgage, you got to ask yourself, what does success look like? If I pursue the thing that I'm thinking of pursuing and it goes well, what does life realistically look like three to five years down the road? And I think the best lens into that future is to find somebody who's already done that thing, who has been reasonably successful at it, and see what their day to day looks like. What are they stressed out about? What interviews have they done? I love to soak up the information from people who are just a little bit ahead of me because they know what's coming. They know what's coming down the road. I hope this episode gets your Side Hustle Snowball rolling, picking up some steam and turning into that income avalanche. Because covering your expenses is of course, just the beginning. I want you to have some financial margin in your life, some financial breathing room for the unexpected bumps in the road, and we've certainly seen our share of those lately. But you're awesome. You've got this. There's this whole community of other side hustlers and entrepreneurs who've got your back, so you don't have to go at it alone. If you have found this helpful, tell a friend. That's the best way to spread the word. And if you can, convince someone else to take action now you've got a direct accountability partner for your journey. Once again, you'll find links to all the resources mentioned in this episode@side hustlenation.com Snowball that's it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.