Findependence Canada

Finding financial independence from scratch

The secret behind the side hustle

So many people are looking for side hustle ideas, we’re among them, I for example, do freelance work on the side of my full-time job.

In our previous blogs we alluded to the affluence of the region we live in, so I was surprised to hear that one of our close friends was working a side job to supplement his $100,000 income with a food delivery job for a popular app.

He told me that he pays his rent and bills with the money from the side job and banks the rest. 100% into his savings that’s roughly $75k a year, to save/invest…burn, whatever he wants to do with it. I couldn’t believe it, this made no sense, to me, it was like a lawyer moonlighting as a cab driver.(nothing wrong with driving a cab but after spending 12 hours lawyering, I can’t imagine you’d be wanting too spend the next eight hours doing the airport run for so much less than you’d made that day being a lawyer)

Anyway, I asked him why he did it, and his reason was one I’d never personally heard of (so apologies if this is common knowledge and I’m just new to the game!) He told me that he earns roughly $200-$250 a week, working between three and four shifts a week, each shift being about three or four hours. To me that didn’t exactly seem worth it. He explained to me that working for this well-known brand as an individual made him an “owner-operator”. 

This is when the penny dropped for me, my friend was earning money AND expensing everything her, such as getting his vehicle serviced, as it was essential to performing his job, his fuel, even his shoes he wears for work. When I thought he was penny-pinching and assumed he must be struggling for money- he was actually making his side-job work for him.

This certainly made me think differently about work- if you’re already working full-time, any side-work, hustle or job, needs to work for you.