Are you tired of living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to make ends meet? Or are you currently going through rough times, have debt, and want some extra cash to help you push through them? Here are seven side hustle ideas that don’t require a lot of skill, meaning that anyone can do them.
You can use these side hustles ideas to make some extra cash in your free time, or turn them into a full-time business if you want to.
Flipping Shoes
Flipping items is one of the oldest side hustle ideas ever. Basically, you buy stuff at a low price and sell them at a higher price, and the way you can really get good at this is by having a lot of knowledge and expertise in whatever things you’re flipping. You can flip anything from houses, cars, to old furniture, and make a lot of money doing that. But, an easy way to get into the flipping business is by flipping shoes. If you follow fashion trends, you’d know that sneakers are a hot commodity. In fact, the sneaker resale industry is estimated to be worth more than $2 billion in the U.S. alone.
There are people who make $10,000 a month just by flipping shoes, like JV Ortiz who posted an article about his journey on sidehustlenation.com. He said that he made a plan to piggyback on the popularity of existing brands, instead of building a brand from the ground up. If you want to flip shoes, you need to do a bit of market research to see what brands sell better. For example, the best selling sneaker in 2023 was the Nike Dunk Low Retro White Black Panda, with 206,875 units sold. Its retail price is $115, and its average resale price is $137, so that’s a profit of $22, and you can make much more if you buy it for cheaper from thrift stores or local discount clothing stores.
To get an idea of what would sell well, follow sneaker and fashion publishers like Hypebeast or High Snobiety, and immerse yourself in your sneaker communities by attending a sneaker convention and getting an idea of what people are wearing and what people are talking about. Then, you can check aftermarket prices online and calculate your estimated profit.
If you sell the shoes on a platform like eBay, people interested in buying them can start bidding for them, and the price you put down, let’s say, $200, can quickly go up to $1,000 thanks to these bidding wars. Just keep in mind that eBay takes a 10% fee on each sale. You could even increase your profitability by taking advantage of credit card rewards programs, because if you’re buying inventory to flip, it’ll be easier for you to hit the minimum spending requirements for sign-up bonuses and big rewards.
But, before you decide to get into this business, you need to be aware of the potential risks, like buying a fake pair of sneakers and getting scammed. As you might expect with shoes that sell for $1,000, there’s a thriving black market for counterfeit sneakers, so you need to be very cautious before you make a purchase. If you’re buying a pair of sneakers from someone online, you can ask for pictures of a written proof of ownership, or the day and time on a piece of paper next to the shoe in each picture to make sure the person you’re buying from is legit, then compare the pictures to the numerous tutorials on YouTube or on sneaker forums that will give you a good idea of whether they’re authentic or not.
Amazon Flex
This is basically where you deliver packages for Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), and there are examples of people making $1,000 a month doing this, so you can make a lot of good extra income, as well as get an employee discount on your Amazon purchases. Keep in mind that the amount of money you make will depend on things like your location, any tips you receive, and how long it takes you to complete the deliveries. In general, most drivers for Amazon earn from $18 to $25 per hour.
Another thing that you should keep in mind is that Amazon doesn’t give its drivers any kind of reimbursement for the costs of gas or miles spent while delivering for the company, since the company considers drivers independent contractors, meaning that they’re responsible for all of the costs associated with their cars, including the cost of gasoline. A good tip to save money on that is by tracking the miles you drive and the money you spend on gas, and then write it off as a business expense when you file for taxes, which can help you save a lot of money on taxes each year.
If you’re a more social person, you can drive for companies like Lyft (NASDAQ: LYFT) or Uber (NYSE: UBER), and you might even get a sign-on bonus of $1,000 immediately from these companies, depending on the areas where you drive. Usually, drivers for Uber and Lyft make from $15 to $30 per hour.
Mobile Car Wash
This is also one of the most popular side hustle ideas. It’s basically where you go wash someone’s car at their home, and some people are willing to pay for this because they don’t want to spend an hour or more at a car dealership or gas station waiting for their cars to be cleaned. A basic mobile car wash service can go from $20 to $50, and you don’t even need to account for a lot of costs as your clients might let you use their water hoses to wash the car.
You can advertise for your services by going door to door in well-off neighborhoods where you think people would be willing to pay for something like that, and if this isn’t something you want to do, you can just use Google Ads (NASDAQ: GOOG) or Facebook Ads (NASDAQ: META), which allow you to target a certain area with your ads, or you can even print out fliers that say what you do, for how much, and your phone number, and then spread them around the neighborhood.
You could even talk to the mailers in your area and ask them to send your fliers with the people’s mail and they’ll charge you anywhere from $0.30 to more than $10 per person, depending on the amount of mail and where you’re located.
Taskrabbit
You can download an app called Taskrabbit. This is an app where you can find random people who need some tasks done for them, and you can select the tasks that match what you can do and do them to earn money.
For example, if someone’s moving houses and needs some help with packing, they can put out a request on Taskrabbit, and if you take that request, you help them and they pay you the amount that was in the listing of the task. Some people get paid up to $30 per hour just by helping people move on Taskrabbit, and if you’re lucky, the person you’re helping might pay for your breakfast or lunch as well. There are plenty of things you can do on Taskrabbit, and helping people move is one of the easiest things, but things like window washing is also very easy and doesn’t require a lot of skill to do.
Training AI
This is one of the side hustle ideas that could become increasingly popular as more and more businesses shift to using AI for automation and saving money. A lot of AI companies are now paying people to complete tasks that can be as simple as identifying people in photos, and cars on maps, so they can use that to train their AI apps and make them smarter and more efficient.
Of course, these tasks can get extremely complicated, and if you have any experience in coding or programming, you might be able to do a lot of the tasks easily and earn more than $40 per task. But, you need to be very careful about scam websites that make you do the tasks and end up not paying you.
A legit website for training AI is Data Annotation Tech, which people on Reddit used to earn anywhere from $20 to $40 per hour. But, they all said that tasks that give out a lot of money can get really hard, so you need to prepare yourself to do some hard work. You should also be aware that this is a fairly new thing, so you might not be assigned tasks right away and you could go a long time after signing up to get tasks, so it’s a good side hustle but nothing you should depend on for constant income.
Virtual Assistant
This is one of the side hustle ideas that can be turned into a full-time job, and it is exactly what it sounds like; you do administrative work and things like managing a business’ social media accounts, customer service, and basic bookkeeping, in return for cash.
The easiest way to get clients is to sign up with a virtual assistant website that automatically matches you with people that need online personal assistants, so you don’t have to do any marketing yourself. These websites include belaysolutions.com, Fiverr, or fancyhands.com, but this website is available for people living in the U.S. only. If you live in the U.K., you can use Virtalent, and all these websites are free to apply on. According to CNBC, you can make around $18 per hour with this side hustle.
User Research Studies
You can participate in user research studies by using a free user research studies website called Dscout. This website pays people money for participating in research studies that companies do, and some of its clients include big names like Google, Airbnb, and JPMorgan, so it’s clearly legit.
Some of the things you can do in Dscout is track yourself doing an activity that you already do for free, like playing video games, and this can get you up to $100. You can also get on video calls with other participants and talk about how you manage your health, and you can get $50 from that. There are also much quicker surveys that can get you anything from $2 to $5, but keep in mind that there’s a selection process for you to be accepted into one of these programs, so you should increase your chances of being selected by answering the application’s questions thoroughly.
The Bottom Line
There are a lot of side hustles ideas that you can do to earn some extra cash, and we tried to give you some of the lesser-known side hustle ideas that anyone can do as they require very little skill, but they can also be extremely lucrative if you put some effort into them.
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