Side Hustle Exhibition
Side Hustle Exhibition
I am a big fan of proof of concept. We bloggers are great at talking about financial independence, investing, and side hustles. Our advice holds hollow, however, if we can’t metaphorically put our money where our mouth is. We owe it to the audience to not only preach about the best way to do things, but give real life examples. I have tried to do that in the past with my income reports. Everyone knows that I have a ridiculous love affair of side hustles. But I rarely take the time to enumerate my actual daily activities. Today’s side hustle exhibition will not be an attempt at braggadocious self-aggrandizement, but rather the kind of proof of concept I believe necessary to add weight to some of the arguments this blog makes.
As I have written before, side hustles come in three flavors.
Lazy Side Hustles
Lazy side hustles utilize skills and education already paid for by one’s main hustle. As a physician, the skills and training I have received over ten years of schooling naturally become low picking fruit in the side gig economy. These types of extras are not limited to medicine. Anyone one who has specialized knowledge accrued over years in their main W2 can monetize this mastery.
In the interest of full disclosure for this side hustle exhibition, I am currently engaged in many of these “lazy” activities. I am a consultant for a hospice and palliative care company, and help run five distinct hospice teams averaging a census of 300 patients total.
Recently, I have been hired by a nurse practitioner company to help supervise and provide education for a primary care practice. I am also a medical director of a nursing home.
My skill set and knowledge of internal medicine has made me a great candidate for medical expert witness work.
Fat Side Hustles
In some ways, these are my least favorite side hustles. Who wants to put money down for risky returns? Because of the risk profile, I am very careful before jumping into these ventures.
Real estate, by far, has had the highest cost of entrance of any side hustle. I fully own and rent four condos in the Chicagoland area. It cost me several hundred thousand dollars to enter the world of landlording but I feel that is a nice way to diversify by uncorrelating with the stock market. I cash flow mid six-figures yearly with the benefit of depreciation deferring my taxes.
A less successful but still important fat side hustle is book writing. I have written two self published books that provide a trickle of income every month. I spent about $5k to edit and produce the books and probably will do slightly better than breaking even.
Lean Side Hustles
Lean start up principles have revolutionized business building and revenue generation. At the time of this writing, it cost me a few hundred dollars to start this blog and I will probably clear about 7K this year. The majority of profits will go to blog related travel like CampFI and FinCon.
Public speaking is one of my newer ventures. Although I have given keynote speeches for medical conferences in the past, I am now signed up for a popular speakers bureau and have two events already lined up for the near future. Public speaking can be daunting but is also fun for a story-teller like me.
Past Side Hustles
For many years I owned and ran a website selling popular art work. I eventually dropped this gig when I started my own medical practice.
As a kid I bought and sold baseball cards through magazine ads.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to giving advice on the internet, words only mean so much. The audience deserves proof of concept. This side hustle exhibition was meant to describe some of the real life side gigs that I take part in.
I don’t only write about revenue generation opportunities, I try to practice what I preach.
Like wow DocG. You are one productive guy. No matter how you talk about bursting etc, this takes a lot of energy to accomplish.
I do almost nothing and am weirdly pleased about that. In fact I am trying to do even less if that were possible.
I have no idea how I finished Medicine alongside folks such as yourself who have such ambition and drive.
I seriously lack all ambition.
I think there are just different types of people. i tend to get involved in a million things. Others don’t. To make it to the level of economic security you have, I highly doubt that you truly lack ambition.
Wow. 7k for the blog?! That’s impressive. Congrats!
Sponsors help.
I help run a hospice and a low income medical clinic as a volunteer board chairman and we employ side hustle doctors at both of those to work with APN’s and to be medical directors. I’ve wondered at times what was in it for them, this blog post has given me some useful perspective, thanks. As a retired engineer I have two steady lazy hustles that rely on my past career technical knowledge and political contacts and three more intermittent lazy hustles I only do when old friends seek me out. No fat or lean ones though as I don’t enjoy real estate and only blog for fun.
As a physician, these side hustles create income uncorrelated to medicare payments as well as patient volume. this is very beneficial.
I think it’s also important to point out that some of these side hustles are not simple and require work. I’ve had a few friends that have attempted side hustles and didn’t receive the return they wanted (in a short period of time) and dropped it.
I’m impressed by all your side hustles! I hope to see more as time goes on.
-FSD
I call them “lazy” but they do require time, patience, and skill.
I like that you put some meat on the “side hustle bone” with actual experience. So much of the boilerplate about side hustle is theoretical and how it’s OH SO Easy and doesn’t describe the downside. Real estate, nice cash flow but high ticket entry cost. Medical expert you have to deal with lawyers and their schedules and it’s boom or bust. I’m sure your medical directing has its downside as well given the rising corporate medicine MBA culture . It’s part of what sent me out the door. A Blog can be a task master for sure and as soon as you slip from purity of content to worrying about click bait and metrics, your motive becomes obvious and the experience leaves a BAD TASTE. None of it is a steady paycheck and all of it requires real attention. On the other hand it can be a Gas. When I was an engineer I also had a band. My engineering gig gave me access to a recording studio so I learned something about production and recording, at weird hours like 2 AM. I liked the knowledge I gained at how to build a song. I studied my butt off for the MCAT and got a huge score. This turned into a gig teaching MCAT review courses to undergrads. In college I taught Physics while in grad school and later Electronics at a Community College when I was engineering, and enjoyed the heck out of teaching so teaching pre-meds was natural and fun and worth the time involved. When the same jokes started showing up at the same point in my lectures I knew it was time to move on to something else. In my Anesthesia life I had a side helping of pain management on my plate. I pleasantly have none of that now and spend my time reading, studying and writing and thinking about all kinds of stuff. Still a side hustle but no commerce involved.
There is no question. Side hustles are no panacea. But they do give us a measure of freedom and control.