Side Hustles, ah yes, the sides hustles. A topic we, and so many others in the early retirement community, discuss constantly. In our journey to retire early and spend the rest of our lives pursuing our dreams or living life ON OUR TERMS, we look to scrape together every dollar. Why? Every dollar, every hustle, puts us one step closer to the end of the journey. For the first time ever, the two of us decided to hold ourselves accountable and publish our own “side hustle” report to provide some additional disclosure about the products, apps, and methods we use to earn an extra dollar or cut down our expenses. Time to check out our June Side Hustle Report from the double D, Dividend Diplomats.
Just a quick note, this side hustle report will contain some affiliate links to the products we use. It is important for us to note this and mention that we are only including links for services or products that help us out on a day to day basis and truly adds value to our lives. We would not do that in any other way, so please I hope you guys all know that! These sites/apps have helped us tremendously and we hope that you do sign up to try them out and let us know what you think, as well as – share the wealth with others around you. We Now let’s see how well we performed during the month!
Ebates – We’re pretty sure most people are familiar with Ebates, the website that offers cash back and coupon codes for nearly all major online retails, travel sites and the like, click that blue hyperlink, yes the first one haha. You also can receive a free $10 gift card upon sign up, yes affiliate plug, but always nice to try something out! We don’t ever purchase a good online without first stopping by Ebates to see if we can earn cash back by visiting the website through Ebates. It is easy money for a simple additional step in the online shopping experience, one that maybe adds 10 seconds to your transaction.
- Lanny – $1.06 – Love rental cars, but man, that doesn’t give me too much bang back for my buck! This was fine, as every dollar counts and it was a one day rental. However, similar to Bert below, I have a TON in pending. However, in total I have received over $297, see below:
- Bert – $3.22 – It should have been higher, but a lot of my Ebates credits are still pending. For some reason, it takes forever for a credit to post to your account if you book a hotel or car reservation through Ebates. Oh well, I guess the rewards will be captured in my July passive income report!
Swagbucks – Ah, Swagbucks. One of our longest tenured side hustles. For those of you that are not familiar with Swagbucks, it is a website the provides gift card or cash rewards for performing activities on the website, such as using their search engine, answering surveys, answering polls, watching videos, etc. Here is our referral link if you would like to give it a try as well!
- Lanny – > 2,595 swagbucks, $25.95 – THERE WE GO! Getting the cash out of $25.00 to Paypal baby!! Proof of the cash out:
- Bert – 0 Swagbucks, $0. Okay, I like using Swagbucks, but I’m not the ultra user that Lanny is. Typically, in a busy month, this is usually the first activity that falls by the wayside. In June, I spent a lot of time on the road. Plus, on the weekends, I have been focusing on housing items and clearing out my apartment’s clutter when I’m not on the blog, so there hasn’t been a ton of excess time to spread around to Swagbucks. Maybe I’ll start to pick it up again in July.
Ibotta – Ibotta is one of our favorite apps because it is so easy to use, first you can get $5.00 to sign up! Before shopping, you scan the available rebates on Ibotta. Some example of rebates that may be available any given week are $0.25 for purchasing bananas, $0.25 for any milk brand, $1.00 for purchasing a certain type of coffee, or $3.00 for purchasing Bud Light (Bert’s go-to, so nasty, but glad he is sitting next to me drinking a better beer, cheers Bert!). The discounts don’t just apply to goods that are impossible to find or are very expensive, there are always a few name brands to choose from. Hell, even a $1.00 back on your Uber trips are in there and who doesn’t use that every now and again? Then, after your trip, you simply scan the receipt and receive the credit within 24 hours. If you would like to try the app, we included a referral link in the banner below our monthly summary.
- Lanny – $4.50 – C’Mon Bert! Well, not a big banger here for me and I’ve earned over $123.00 in cash back from the website. However, I highly URGE you to sign up, yes, sadly we do get a referral kick back, but this is by far the EASIEST way to get cash back. Further, the beer, wine categories make it fairly simply to rack up (usually $1.00 – $3.00 for a 6-pack and/or bottle of wine, eh, I’m Italian and Irish). Additionally – supplements like vitamins are a bigger cash back piece as well. My best month, though, was in April at $16.25.
- Bert – $2.00 – Well, I have earned over $80 lifetime (less than a year) using Ibotta. But June was a pretty slow month for me since I traveled a ton for work. I didn’t buy as many groceries on the app and even the groceries my wife purchased were not eligible for that many rebates. Oh well, I should be home more in July, so I expect this amount to climb a lot more in the month to come. But I’m jealous of Lanny’s success here.
Selling Household Items
- Lanny – $19.66, net of fees and shipping – I have sold 2 items, so far, on eBay, trying to get rid of “stuff”, we’ll come out with more on getting rid of stuff later, but I know I own too much crap in my life that is consuming space, time and resources. The two items I sold on eBay were a pair of Skeletoes Fila shoes I never worn, talk about a trend and the last item was my 1997 Toyota Celica owner’s manual. Why did I hold on to that? Nostalgia and memories more than likely. Well… she gone, I made money and I have a few less items. Further – more things are on eBay this month and OfferUp, very excited to shed more “things”…
- Bert – $44.75– As I started packing up my apartment, I started to find all kind of things that I could potentially sell or trade in for cash. Well, one of the things I found was an old Apple Store gift card that I received when I redeemed credit card points. At the time, I was hoping to purchase a Macbook. However, I eventually decided to not purchase a Mac and instead try to stretch a few more years out of my brick (aka Asus). I’m looking to buy a laptop, but it won’t be a Macbook. So I checked about 10 gift card exchange websites, along with Ebay, and ultimately decided that the best offer was to trade in my $50 gift card for cash deposited to my Paypal account. I could have had a few dollars more for an Amazon gift card, but with this transaction, I was looking to receive cold, hard, cash to use on other purchases.
Donations – Okay, so donations do not produce cash flow immediately. But it serves two HUGE purposes. First, now that we are both homeowners and itemize our deductions come tax time (Damn you Uncle Sam), we will be able to receive the maximum benefit from donations on our tax returns. Second, heck, we received some a ton of motivation from attending The Minimalists show in Cleveland a week ago at the end of June. We are also receiving the benefit of purely getting rid of stuff that adds no value, but hopefully can add values to others in hopes that they may appreciate them more than we do. That being said, here is an inventory of the goods we donated this month.
- Lanny – In June, I donated over 11 pieces of clothing, but not including the others earlier in the year. I believe last year I easily clipsed the 100 pieces of clothing. Think about that, holy crap – I actually owned over 100 pieces of clothing and in fact – I know I still have more than that. More work to be done here. I have a rule of thumb, as well. If I know I shouldn’t sell it, goes right to donation. If I think I should sell it, then it goes to eBay for a month. If it doesn’t sell, donate. Easy as cake. The 11 pieces were 4 polos, a sweater worn, pajama pants never worn, a long sleeve shirt, an unused warm track jacet and a few other items. I do think there are quite a few people that will benefit from these items!
- Bert – 30 articles of clothing and 20 books. Not a ton, but should produce a pretty decent dollar value. Plus, I’m excited to get those books off of my shelf so they can stop collecting dust and hopefully end up in an interested reader’s hands.
What’s crazy….theses are just a few of the many, many different ways that anyone can side hustle and cleaning our hands of “stuff”. Side hustles can come in all shapes and sizes. The important thing is that you put in the hard work, keep fighting, keep scraping, and turn your words/thoughts into ACTION. If you want extra income, it is at your finger tips. Guess what, the two of us have a TON of room for improvement and will look to continue adding more to our side hustle reports. We are excited to begin sharing our side hustle stories with you and holding ourselves accountable. So now, let’s get back to work. It is time to JUST GO FOR IT!
*Note, you’ll notice one item missing from our side hustle report. That is our Dividend Diplomats blog-related income. I believe that is going to be time for a real screamer of an article to write for everyone, to provide the real insight to see if these two 20 something guys are even receiving a coinage of Abraham Lincoln. More to come soon!
What do you think of our side hustles? What are your monthly side hustles? Are they producing the results that you want? If not, whats your plan of attack? Are you selling your items online or do you do other things, such as Facebook, Craigslist or OfferUp? Very curious here. What other side hustles would you recommend? Thanks everyone, get after it and pursue your passions!
-Lanny & Bert, The Dividend Diplomats