percentage by the total amount available to determine how much money your course earned that month.
Monetizing yourself
You’ve probably seen videos on YouTube or Vimeo where someone builds content that is, basically, that person doing or saying something to grab your attention: singing (sometimes pretty badly!) or lip-synching popular songs, for example. Or maybe you’ve seen videos where someone shows off their latest expensive fashion purchases. And of course the Internet is filled with dogs, cats, and other animals acting silly or just looking adorable.
All these types of videos, and thousands of others, are built around the premise of grabbing and holding your attention, and then getting you to follow or subscribe to the YouTube channel. Along the way, the creative people who uploaded that content can make money from ads placed along with their videos.
Mark and Miguel, both of whom plan to enter the side-hustle game with videos that they hope to monetize, have another co-worker named Max who is also intensely interested in creating and uploading video content. But although Mark and Miguel both intend to create videos that convey information (small business accounting for Mark, and bartending for Miguel), Max intends to monetize, well, himself.
Max decided that he’s going to record himself walking or biking all over Boston and sharing his observations about interesting people he notices, the buildings that he passes, and whatever else he feels like talking about. Will his videos build a following to the point where Max can make a little bit of money from them? He thinks so. Max is a pretty funny guy, and his running commentary will basically be a standup comedy routine — at least that’s what he intends.
Monetizing an asset for your side hustle
If you own real estate, you can turn that asset into a side hustle. You can also monetize other assets into side-hustle money:
Renting your boat (anywhere from a fishing boat to a yacht!) to vacationers
Renting your luxury sports car to someone looking to put the finishing touches on an extra-special occasion
Cindy and Tasha plan to earn money from their respective side hustles from what they do (bartending in Cindy’s case, and personal shopping for Tasha). Breanna and Sarah will make money from what they sell. Miguel and Mark will make money from what they know and communicate. Max’s side-hustle goal is to monetize himself. Hu and Min, however, plan to make side-hustle money from what they own.
Hu and Min have been married for 20 years. Ten years ago, Min received a ginormous financial windfall when the software company where she worked at the time went public, and her stock options were suddenly worth a whole lot of money. Hu and Min talked it over, and decided to buy a vacation house in northern Arizona after she cashed out her stock windfall. Fortunately, both of their jobs allowed them to work remotely, so every summer they would pack up their house in Phoenix and escape the 110-degree temperatures for a few months.
Five years ago, Hu received a job offer based out of New York City that he couldn’t turn down, so the family moved across the country. They kept the house in northern Arizona, however; they just don’t spend summers there anymore. Instead, they decided to turn that vacation house into rental property. Initially, they worked through a northern Arizona real-estate agent who would list their house for rent for the entire summer. Eventually, though, they decided to list the house on Airbnb for rentals lasting anywhere from one day to an entire month — and year-round now, because their vacation home was close to one of northern Arizona’s ski areas for winter rentals and near some spectacular hiking trails for spring and summer rentals.
The part-time job side hustle
In Chapter 1, I introduce you to Jack, a software developer in Scottsdale, Arizona, who decides to do a little bit of side hustling alongside his full-time job. Unlike Brian and Keith, Jack doesn’t want to actually start a small side-hustle business. Jack’s side hustle is teaching programming classes two afternoons each week at the nearby community college campus.
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN ASSET AND AN INVESTMENT?
Is real estate an investment or a side hustle? Answer: Either or both!
What about cryptocurrency: An investment or a side hustle? Another answer: Once again, either or both!
Sometimes you’ll find a very fine line between investments and side hustles. Take real estate, for example. If you invest in a property that you plan to rent out, either for someone to live there or for a constantly revolving parade of guests courtesy of Airbnb or Vrbo, then:
You are definitely investing in real estate.
You are also doing a side hustle that will involve time and effort but will also earn you money.
Suppose, though, that you plop some of your investment money into a real-estate investment trust (REIT; basically, using your money and other investors’ money to buy real-estate assets) that will become part of your portfolio. You certainly want to keep an eye on the value of that REIT investment, but — and here’s the important part — unlike a house or condo that you buy and then rent out, an investment in a REIT is mostly “passive.” Until you decide to cash in that REIT, it’s just another asset in your portfolio rather than an investment that you actively do something with.
Or suppose that you buy a second vacation home up in the mountains or near a beach, but you have enough money that you don’t need to rent out that vacation home or otherwise try to monetize that real-estate asset while you own it. You may sell the vacation home at some point down the road, or maybe you’ll keep it in the family and pass it down to your children or grandchildren. But along the way, only you, your family, and your friends will visit and stay there. In this case, a vacation home is definitely a real-estate investment, but it doesn’t really fill the bill as a side hustle.
What about cryptocurrency? Suppose you really like the investment potential of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies, and you decide to allocate around 5 percent of your investment portfolio to crypto. Investment? Sure! Side hustle? Nope!
Now suppose you also start recording and uploading videos in which you offer your thoughts about the cryptocurrency market, the underlying blockchain technology, the world of decentralized finance (DEFI) that includes blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, and similar
