Side Hustlin' Mommy

The only way to really escape the rat-race and attempt to beat the economy is to work for yourself. Self-employment is the way to go and I have found that with a little bit of effort in your spare time outside of your day job, should there ever come a day when you’re laid-off or unemployed, you won’t be in as big of a rut as I am at this particular moment in time. I’ve had a significant reduction in hours and have spent the majority of the past nearly three weeks at home, looking for ways to make enough money online within the next two weeks to supplement my unemployment check to have enough to pay the rent. My online earnings have increased, though not as much as it could have because I had gotten used to my paycheck from my full-time job. Unfortunately, I don’t have that now, so I’ve got to do something. Here are some steps I am taking now (that I wish I had taken several months ago because they probably would be paying off now):

• Writing for residual income - Until this past week I had written three product reviews and submitted them to Epinions.com, a website where you can read and write product reviews and make a little extra money. From those three reviews that I wrote almost a year ago I have earned a little more than $6. When I first joined the site I told myself that I would submit at least one review every week. Payments are made monthly once your account reaches $10. Let’s do the math. Four reviews every month for ten months equals 40 reviews. Three reviews have earned me $6 in ten months, which isn’t much, but with 40 reviews I should have at least been able to make the minimum of $10 a month for product reviews I would never have to write again because those reviews would continue to make me money for a very long time. So, from now on I’m going to write at least three product reviews/articles per month and publish them on websites that would give me some residual/passive income.

• Paid surveys - I’ll do more posts about paid surveys in the future, but long story made short, I am a member of more than twenty survey sites and my email inbox is flooded with survey invitations. If I answered all of them and earned a combined total of at least $5 a day five days a week, then I would have around $125 of extra cash in my pocket every month.

• Mystery shopping - I’m already a mystery shopper for several companies and the more I shop, the more I make. The past two months have been pretty slow for me because I didn’t schedule any shops around my full-time job, but since I’ve been laid off, my shopping schedule has been a lot more full than it was. The company that I work with most often can easily earn me an extra $50 a month.

The downside to these three points is that they won’t necessarily help my short-term problem, but with the extra $200 a month from these three activities combined, they’ll help me a great deal in the long run. Do you want to check out some of these sites and try to earn a little extra cash? Visit my useful links page to see all of my tools and moneymakers!