If you’re thinking about jumping into a side hustle — or if you’ve already taken the plunge — you’re not alone! According to a study reported on Side Hustle Nation (www.sidehustlenation.com/side-hustle-statistics), 45 percent of working Americans — around 70 million people! — had at least one side hustle going. Even better: Another 60 million were thinking about jumping into the side-hustle game.
Side hustles aren’t only popular in the United States either. According to an article paid for by GoDaddy appearing on the USA Today website (www.usatoday.com/story/sponsor-story/godaddy/2017/12/12/how-people-side-hustling-around-globe/108532604), 54 percent of people in the United Kingdom, another 54 percent of people in Singapore, and an astounding 77 percent of people in the Philippines had side hustles.
Side hustles are all the rage, all around the world. But what exactly is a side hustle?
Getting Clear on What a Side Hustle Is
If you were to put ten people in a room and ask them to define the term side hustle, you would probably get 15 different answers. Instead of having some precise, everyone-is-in-agreement definition for the term, we have a lot of shades of gray and wiggle room in defining what is — and what isn’t — a side hustle.
Some people think that a side hustle is limited to activity in the so-called gig economy (see “Seeing the Connection between Side Hustles and the Gig Economy,” later in this chapter), filling a services industry type of role on a contract basis, with self-set flexible hours — for example, shuttling passengers in your own car for Lyft or Uber, delivering packages in your spare time for Amazon, shopping and delivering groceries for Instacart, or delivering restaurant meals for DoorDash or Grubhub.
Some people limit the world of side hustles to part-time roles in businesses that operate under the multi-level marketing (MLM) structure. Anything else is, well, something else, but not necessarily a side hustle. (See Chapter 3 for a discussion of MLMs.)
Other people think of a side hustle as being limited to anything where you’re compensated on a non-employee basis rather than as a salaried employee. In the United States, that means you file a W-9 form and have your income reported on a 1099 form, rather than being paid a salary (even a part-time salary) on a W-2 basis. To their way of thinking, if you’re paid as part of someone else’s payroll and receive a W-2 at the end of the year, then whatever you’re doing isn’t a side hustle. (See Chapter 8 for a discussion of the various business structures for your side hustle.)
Which of these perspectives is correct? Well, a better question to ask is this: Are any of these perspectives too narrow? The answer: Yes, they are all too narrow — not necessarily wrong, just too limiting in attempting to define what is and isn’t a side hustle.
Now consider a few examples:
Meghan is a financial analyst for a Denver-based insurance company. She lives in the south suburbs of the Denver metro area but works downtown. Three or four times a week, if she doesn’t need to be back home after work by a certain time, Meghan signs in to an app and becomes an Uber driver, earning a little bit of extra money during her evening commute. Sure, she and her car don’t exactly take the most direct route back from downtown to the south suburbs, but a song from way back in the late 1970s by the rock group Supertramp perfect describes Meghan’s journey on those Uber-enabled evening drives: She takes the long way home!
Jack is a software developer for an app development company based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Jack’s employer supports both flexible hours and working from home. As long as Jack and his coworkers meet their deadlines for assigned work, they have a great deal of autonomy for how they manage their time. Taking advantage of his employer’s flexibility, Jack teaches a programming class two afternoons each week at a community college campus about 5 miles from his apartment.
Bhavna graduated with top honors from a leading engineering school and works as a mechanical engineer at an aerospace company in Seattle. She’s very good at her job, but after a couple of years, Bhavna is becoming disenchanted with the aerospace industry and even her chosen engineering profession! If she had a time machine, Bhavna would go back to her college days and study what she belatedly discovered she’s really interested in: the world of fashion and retail. No worries, though: Last year, Bhavna started a small online boutique, selling clothing and accessories. She spends a couple evenings a week, not to mention most of her weekends, on a range of tasks for her boutique: finding and buying new products, packing and shipping orders, and doing all sorts of general business management functions. Soon — maybe very soon — Bhavna plans to ditch her full-time job and devote all her energies to her boutique.
Eric and Brittany had been single-mindedly focused on their respective full-time careers, both before they met as well as after they began dating and eventually got married. Eric is a high school teacher, while Brittany is a drug sales rep for a large pharmaceutical company. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, however, both of their professional worlds turned upside down. Eric continued teaching but solely online because his high school switched over to all-online courses. Brittany’s job was eliminated as part of the pharmaceutical company’s cutbacks, and she began working 15 to 20 hours a week shopping and delivering groceries for Instacart. As the months went by, Brittany also began delivering meals for both Grubhub and Uber Eats, as well as occasionally driving for Lyft. Eric began doing college entrance exam tutoring on the side, in addition to his full-time teaching. Eric is now wondering if he should quit his full-time teaching job and not only do even more SAT and ACT tutoring, but maybe even do some Lyft or Uber driving.
Pop quiz time!
From the blurbs above, who is in the side-hustle game? Meghan and her Uber driving? Jack and his community college teaching? Bhavna and her online boutique? Brittany and her portfolio of gig-economy jobs? Eric and his college entrance exam tutoring?
If you answered “all of the above,” you’re absolutely correct. Even though the particulars for what Meghan, Jack, Bhavna, Eric, and Brittany are doing vary at least a little bit from one person to the next, each one of them has already jumped onto the side-hustle bandwagon.
Some side hustles are actually part-time jobs rather than a small business or some gig-economy side work. In fact, you get paid for your side hustle through a regular paycheck — just like most day jobs — rather than in the less-than-predictable