Become a Medical Detective
In the strange-but-true side department, gigs are medical detective — like the show “House,” only in real life and starring you. If you have a passion and a knack for solving the root cause of medical ailments and symptoms, consider signing up with CrowdMed.
You don’t have to be a doctor or medical professional to get your detective’s badge and magnifying glass. However, 90% of the site’s private healthcare eyes work in or study medicine. It doesn’t take long to sign up, and once you do, you can pick cases that interest you and start collaborating with other medical detectives who chose the same issue — there are hundreds of active topics at any given time.
The more helpful you are in cracking the case, your reputation will grow, and you’ll earn more money. During one of its fundraising runs, CrowdMed said the average detective makes $400 per solved case.
Teach English Online
Just as you don’t have to be an MD to solve medical cases, you don’t have to be a teacher to make money teaching English to students overseas. You don’t even have to be bilingual, either.
You must have a four-year bachelor’s degree to sign up with sites like VIPKid, but it can be in any major or field. While you aren’t required to be a professional educator, the site recommends two years of experience in coaching, mentoring, tutoring, or teaching.
You can teach online from anywhere, and the service provides the curriculum, lesson plans, and material you’ll need. One of the things that makes it such a good side hustle is that you can set your schedule and work for as many or as few hours as you like with no minimum required. That’s side hustle gold right there. The pay isn’t bad either — VIPKid teachers can expect to earn $14-$18 per hour.
Corral Wayward Scooters
Scooter ridership is way up in locations where services like Lime and Bird rent their two-wheeled vehicles, but when riders get to where they’re going, the electric scooters they ride on are often out of place or out of batteries.
That’s where “Lime Juicers” and “Bird Flyers” come in. If you choose this as your side hustle, you’ll find, charge, relocate and release far-flung scooters for the next customer to rent. You take the gigs you want, say no thanks to those you don’t, and get paid the same day you do the work.
You’ll start at a lower level with lower-level tasks and work your way up to higher levels with better gigs and better pay. Lime pays between $5 and $12 per scooter for an average of about $8, according to Gridwise, which estimates Lime Juicers can expect to earn between $20 and $30 an hour.
Shop and Deliver, or Just Shop
Every side hustler knows about delivering food for Uber Eats, DoorDash or GrubHub, but you might be better served to provide food that hasn’t been prepared and cooked yet — or not to deliver at all.
If you sign up with Shipt, you can expect to earn good money — up to $27 an hour — shopping and delivering grocery orders in the community where you live. As with all great side hustles, you can work as much or as little as you want, full-time or part-time, and set your schedule.
You are required to own a car to work for Shipt but not for Instacart, which has options for in-store shoppers as well as for shoppers/drivers. Drivers keep 100% of tips, and in-store shoppers can work up to 29 hours per week.
Go Into the Car Rental Business
The most significant side hustle of all is letting someone else — or something else — do all the hustling for you while you collect the payoff. If you’re a reformed commuter who joined the remote workforce revolution, have a second car, or don’t drive that much, put your idle wheels to work and collect on the payout.
P2P car-rental services like Turo let travelers in need of a ride bypass expensive and frustrating rental car companies and rent directly from people like you. With 14 million prescreened users, there’s incredible demand, especially now that the chip shortage has made new cars, used cars, and rentals so expensive and limited in selection.
You don’t have to worry about insurance — a $750,000 Travelers policy covers each car approved by Turo. The average side hustler with one car to rent out earns an average of $10,516 annually — actually, their vehicle earns it for them.
Sell Your Smartphone Photos
Like most people, you probably have thousands or tens of thousands of pictures on your phone or in the Cloud. If you can dazzle your followers on Instagram with your photographic finesse, why not make your artistic streak pay?
Shutterstock has paid more than $1 billion to its contributors over the last 15 years, and that’s hardly the only service paying good money for good images and videos. Newspapers, websites, magazines, TV productions, billboards, advertisements, and media of all stripes rely on stock image sites like those from not just ShuttShutterstock andGetty Images, iStock, and more.
Generally, you can expect to earn between 15% and 40% of the selling price every time someone buys one of your photos, which they can do over and over again. Good photographers can collect royalties indefinitely from a single image or video.