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If time is money, then your side hustle needs to be worth it. Because lots of us want to make more money, but there are only so many hours in a day.
These ways to make money might be more worth your time than others.
🕴️1. Start a freelance consulting business
Freelancing can be a great gig for the skilled and strategic-minded individual. Is being a marketing professional your day job? Advising and supporting clients as a freelancer could be a path to extra income and your eventual own business.
Platforms: Upwork, Fiverr and Freelancer.com are popular platforms and offer opportunities to do lots of jobs, like writing, programming, design, marketing, virtual assistant work and others.
First step: Make a profile on one of the popular freelance platforms and see what happens. It takes Upwork 48 hours to approve your profile, for example, and after that, you can pitch clients.
“The key is using skills you already have — instead of starting from scratch learning something new,” Chelsea Ransom-Cooper, a certified financial planner based in New York, said in an email interview.
It’s a common strategy of her clients, she said, even among the higher earners who want to hit their financial goals sooner.
“With rising costs and home prices, many HENRYs feel priced out of lifestyles they thought they could afford,” Ransom-Cooper said. “Using skills from their day job for freelance work can bridge that gap.”
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👖2. Sell your gently used clothes
This can be big business for side hustlers. Start offline with local consignment shops to make money faster, or use national selling sites to find buyers from all over. When listing items online, be sure to take clear, well-lit photos of your pieces and research similar items to set competitive prices. Get tips on how to sell your clothing.
Platforms: The RealReal, Vestiaire Collective, Poshmark and ThredUp are some national online options. If you want to list locally, consider OfferUp and Facebook Marketplace. You can also try a brick-and-mortar consignment store, such as Plato's Closet, to get cash on the spot.
First step: Cleaning out the closet. This might be the hardest part. Once you’ve picked out what you’re willing to part with, you can simply go to a consignment shop or fill a box with clothes and send it in. Also, save yourself time and energy by researching the clothing brands that do best on the resell market before first.
Need help? Take our quiz to find the right side hustle ⬇️
Answer some questions, find your gig destiny
🏘️ 3. Rent out your vacation home on Airbnb
You’re going to need a spare — or at least sometimes vacant — property for this one, but what an aspiration to work towards. Buying real estate to rent or sell is the epitome of passive income. Just ask the “Rich Dad Poor Dad” guy. It’s not easy to achieve, but it’s a great way to put your savings to work, or supplement the cost of a property.
Platforms: Airbnb and Vrbo are synonymous with short-term rentals. You can use local rental companies, too.
First step: As mentioned, you need a spare or vacant place to rent. But you can create listings and accept reservations on the same day once you’re ready to list. Be prepared to spend some money to clean and keep up the property, replace home goods and pay toward service fees. And scrutinize your rental agreement, HOA rules and zoning or other restrictions before you get started. Learn more about how to start an Airbnb business.
🚗 4. Rent out your car with Turo
Have a ride you don’t use that much because you work from home? Your BMW 3 Series could be just the touch of luxury a renter in your town is looking for. The proceeds could help you cover the car payment or add to your savings.
Platforms: Getaround and Turo are two services that let you rent out your car by the hour or day. You take home the majority of those earnings, while each service takes a cut for protecting your car while it’s being rented.
🤖 5. Learn to use and monetize AI tools
Generative artificial intelligence is so hot right now. Research from PwC estimates that the North American economy will see a $3.7 trillion impact by 2030, thanks to the AI market . You can integrate AI tools as a freelancer to create or enhance digital products, come up with ideas and strategies, and even generate code.
Platforms: OpenAI’s ChatGPT is already a household name. There’s a host more generative AI tools, including Perplexity, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini.
First step: Start by experimenting with free versions of generative AIs available on the web to explore how you can leverage them for your work. Then, seek tutorials on how to effectively compose prompts that maximize the results you get from text-to-text and text-to-image AI tools.
🖌️ 6. Sell digital products
Create a quality downloadable digital product — like an e-book, cookbook, weekly planner or self-help guide — and post it online.
Platforms: You can use a site like Canva to make original designs with the help of free templates. Sell your own final product on Etsy or a digital product marketplace like Gumroad. You can use Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing to sell your e-books on the Kindle store.
First step: Conceptualize and research. Is there a need for what you want to make and can you do it well enough to sell it online? Do you have a couple-hundred-page book in your head, ready to be written? Look on Amazon, Etsy and Gumroad for what’s selling before you get to work.
This gig won’t pay right away, but it could in time. You may enjoy creating content for public consumption if you have something to say, teach or show. Gain enough readers, watchers and/or followers and you can earn ad revenue.
Platforms: You can use Google’s AdSense, the same ad platform on YouTube, to put relevant ads on your blog or website for earning potential.
First step: Signing up for AdSense is pretty easy, but to earn through ads on videos with YouTube, you’ll need 1,000 subscribers. You can slap ads on a blog, but you need readers willing to click them. To start: Make your website and write your first blog or open your selfie cam and press record. Hopefully you enjoy the process enough to do it until you get paid.
📸 8. Sell photography or other digital assets
Here’s a fulfilling hobby that could pay. One method is to sell your unique shots on a stock photo site. Alternatively, you can sell prints to clients. The key component is quality, original work.
We used AI analyze a host of photography-related Reddit threads. According to Redditors, success selling photos requires both high-quality content and a bit of business savvy around rights management and pricing. A general theme is that you may do better by forming direct relationships with buyers than purely relying on stock sites.
Platforms: Sites like Alamy and 500px let you license your images for stock photo sales. Fine Art America is a service that lets you upload your images to sell as prints, T-shirts, phone cases and more. Other marketplaces for photographers include SmugMug and PhotoShelter. Some sites require a subscription.
First step: Learn about what types of photos stock sites will buy and how the process works. Then — you guessed it — start shooting.
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- 1. PwC. Sizing the prize What’s the real value of AI for your business and how can you capitalise?. Accessed Mar 18, 2026.
