Todd had another idea. Sure, there were already lots of podcasts and YouTube channels about sports card collecting and investing. But he had some interesting and unique ideas about topics that he didn’t see covered anywhere else. By the time baseball season was underway, Todd’s YouTube channel was up and running. Several months later, Todd had more than 1,500 subscribers. At that point, he applied for YouTube’s Partner Program so he could begin monetizing his YouTube presence. (Just in case you’re not familiar with the term monetizing, it means “to make money from” and it’s a key element to many side hustles.)
Fast-forward six months to October and World Series time. Each of Todd’s videos was now generating a large number of views, and he was pulling in a couple thousand dollars a month from ad placement revenue.
Todd had taken his newly rediscovered passion — sports card collecting — and turned it into not one, but two side hustles: sports card investing and flipping, and also monetized videos about the hobby he had rejoined after being away for 20 years.
Playing defense
The signals are crystal clear: Your job is in jeopardy!
Maybe the overall national economy hasn’t been that great for the past six months and seems to be slipping into recession. Or maybe the economy is just fine, but your employer made a couple of serious missteps and profits are way, way down — and rumors of layoffs are swirling through the office.
Whatever the reason, you can read the writing on the wall: Losing your job may be in your near-term future — and even though you’ve been a top-notch performer, there’s nothing you can do about it.
Or is there?
A side hustle can help you “play defense” and cushion the blow of being laid off, should that unfortunate turn of events actually come to pass. If you’re already doing something on the side, great! You can ratchet up your efforts and try to earn even more money from your side hustle than you already are. Driving 10 or 15 hours a week for Uber? Ramp that up to 20 or 25 hours, if you can make the schedule work with your full-time job. And then if you wind up getting laid off, you can immediately start driving 40 or 50 hours a week to help make up for the loss of your full-time salary.
Or maybe you’ve already maxed out the number of hours or level of effort you can put into your current side hustle, but you can add another side hustle if your schedule has — unfortunately — been “freed up.”
Activating your financial emergency response plan
The worst has happened: You’ve lost your job, for one reason or another. Even more than that: You now find the traditional world of full-time employment so distasteful that you cringe every time you think about heading out on the interview trail. Even the thought of receiving and accepting a job offer, rejoining the same grind that you just left, makes you queasy. Maybe this isn’t the first time you lost your job, and in your mind, you’re about to jump right back onto the same treadmill that inevitably ends with your being whooshed off the back, tumbling onto the floor. If so, a side hustle may be just the ticket: a way to earn money while being your own boss.
Seeing the Connection between Side Hustles and the Gig Economy
According to Investopedia (www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gig-economy.asp), the term gig economy refers to an economic climate where “temporary, flexible jobs are commonplace and companies tend to hire independent contractors and freelancers instead of full-time employees.” (Investopedia also goes so far as to claim that “a gig economy undermines the traditional economy of full-time workers who often focus on their career development.”)
What’s relevant in this definition for understanding the concept of side hustles is the reference to “independent contractors and freelancers.” When Meghan takes the long way home from downtown Denver because she goes on the clock with Uber, she’s functioning as an independent contractor rather than as an employee of Uber. If you take a step back and look at the big picture of the ride-sharing business, one of the points of contention is that Lyft, Uber, and other ride-sharing companies use independent contractors to compete with taxi companies, limousine services, and airport shuttles.
From Meghan’s sort-of-microeconomic point of view, she has a little side hustle going a couple times a week to earn a little extra money. From the big-picture, macroeconomic view, however, Meghan’s side hustle “enables” the gig-economy concept and has helped disrupt longstanding business models.
THE “GREAT RESIGNATION” AND SIDE HUSTLES
A somewhat surprising byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disruption of global business has been the so-called “Great Resignation” of 2020 and 2021.
The early stages of the pandemic, in spring and early summer of 2020, saw massive job loss in the United States and around the world. U.S. unemployment peaked at 13 percent in May 2020 and may actually have been a point or two higher than what was officially reported (www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/11/unemployment-rose-higher-in-three-months-of-covid-19-than-it-did-in-two-years-of-the-great-recession) before beginning to drop back to more “normal” levels in the latter part of 2020 and into 2021.
Normally, high unemployment levels lead to workers exhibiting three perfectly natural behaviors:
Those who are lucky enough to avoid being laid off often cling to the security of their current jobs for dear life, doing everything they can to avoid joining the ranks of the unemployed.
When an economic recovery arrives and picks up steam, many people continue to cling to their jobs. Maybe they do so out of gratitude for being able to keep their jobs, or perhaps they saw the financial and personal toll on others who weren’t as fortunate and did lose their jobs.
Many of those who do find themselves unemployed — temporarily, they hope — do everything they can to find new jobs and then likewise cling to those jobs and do everything in their power not to again lose that job security.
But 2020 was different. Maybe the extreme safety net measures taken by governments all around the world made this severe downturn different from previous ones. In the United States, for example, state-level unemployment payments were boosted by additional federal government money that came through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program. The bottom line was that for many people, unemployment during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic wasn’t as disruptive and painful on a personal or family basis as it might otherwise have been.
With some of the lost-my-job pressure reduced, many of those newly unemployed workers started dabbling in a little bit of this or a little bit of that during their now-free time. Others who kept their jobs were working at home with far greater schedule flexibility than they had ever had before. Many people enjoyed another