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. Even though you don’t have to be a certified teacher, the site suggests that you have at least two years of experience coaching, mentoring, tutoring, or teaching.
You can teach online from anywhere, and the service provides the curriculum, lesson plans, and materials 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 and 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 best way to make money on the side is to let someone else or something else do all the work while you get paid. If you used to commute to work but now work from home, have a second car, or don’t drive that much, put your idle wheels to work and get paid.
P2P car-rental services like Turo let travellers who need a ride rent directly from people like you instead of from expensive and annoying rental car companies. With 14 million prescreened users, there’s a huge demand, especially now that the chip shortage has made new cars, used cars, and rental cars so expensive and limited in choice.
You don’t have to worry about insurance because every car approved by Turo is covered by a $750,000 Travelers policy. The average side hustler with one car to rent out earns an average of $10,516 per year, which is actually what their car earns for them.
Sell your smartphone photos
You probably have thousands or tens of thousands of pictures on your phone or in the cloud, just like most people. If you are good at taking photos and can wow your Instagram followers with them, why not let your artistic side pay off?
Over the last 15 years, Shutterstock has paid its contributors more than $1 billion, but it’s far from the only service that pays well for good photos and videos. Stock image sites like Shutterstock, Getty Images, iStock, and others are used by newspapers, websites, magazines, TV shows, billboards, ads, and other types of media.
Every time someone buys one of your photos, which they can do over and over again, you can expect to get between 15% and 40% of the price. Good photographers can make money from a single photo or video for as long as they want.