12 Best Side Hustle Ideas to Make Extra Money - The Humble Penny (2024)

12 Best Side Hustle Ideas to Make Extra Money

Today we’re exploring practical side hustles ideas for making extra money.

In dictionary speak, a “side hustle” is a noun and is defined as:

“A secondary business or job that brings in, or has the potential to bring in extra income”

According to research by Henley Business School on the Side Hustle Economy, around 25% of ALL UK adults are now ‘side hustling’.

Professor Chris Brooks (Professor of Finance and Director of Research) had this to say:

“The way we work is changing.

For many people the days of having a single 9-5 job for life are gone. Flexibility is the buzzword.

Firms want employees who are adaptable to their changing and 24/7 business needs, and employees want the flexibility to fit their work around other aspects of their lives, such as family commitments, a second job or a personal interest or passion project.

The technological and communications revolution has made it easier for small businesses to be established from home and to thrive.

This has been helped further by the rise of online retailers such as eBay and Amazon Marketplace and other developments including online publishing, website development, crowdfunding and the growth of blogging/vlogging.

A key component of this trend is for workers to have more than one role – for example, two or more part-time jobs, or one main job and a ‘side’ business.”

This topic of side hustles is so significant, that the research shows that it generates around £72 billion for the UK, or around 3.6% of UK GDP.

It also identified that on average, 20% of people’s incomes are generated from side hustles.

Here are some stats on Side hustles in the UK by age (source: Side Hustle Economy) –

Here are some stats on Side hustles in the UK by location (source: Side Hustle Economy) –

Read more on the Henley Business school Side Hustle Economy research here.

This topic of side hustles helped me and my family family get to a life of financial independence a lot quicker.

It essentially helps you create a life of options away from just making an income from your day job.

I typically get two kinds of oppositions from people when I talk about side hustles.

The first opposition is that people typically say to me – “We just don't have the time for any side hustles”.

And when I say to them, do you have time to watch TV or what your favorite TV shows, people always have an answer.

What you find there is that people have their priorities kind of misplaced.

People spend a lot more time watching TV, yet they want to make more money and say they don't have the time for it.

The second opposition I get is that people say, “we just don't know what the ideas are”.

What should we be doing to make some side hustle income?

So today we're going to explore 12 best side hustle ideas that you can explore today for yourself.

I've tried to make this to be quite balanced so you have online ideas as well as offline ideas that you can explore.

There are 2 related posts to make sure you check out:

• 27 Legit Ideas on How to Make Money Online
• 85 Ways to Make Extra Money Today

Now, let’s walk through these 12 best side hustle ideas…

12 Best Side Hustle Ideas

Below are some of the best side hustle ideas that you can explore for some side income today:

1. Airbnb

I love Airbnb because there are two ways in which you can go by making money from it as a side hustle.

i. You can rent out an existing space in your home.

I.e. you can do short lets and people can rent them out weekly or during your holidays, for example.

Click here to earn money as an Air bnb host

ii. Rent to Rent / Let to Let

Essentially what you do here is to take out a lease on a property and agree with the landlord that you're going to sublet that property to somebody else.

Say, you rented a property for £1k, for example, and you sublet today and over a period of, say, a month, you made £2.5k.

In that scenario you'd be making a profit of £1.5k before other expenses and taxes.

2. Uber

I love this idea because anyone can do it, whether you're a man or you're a woman or whether you've got a car or not.

You can hire cars and go about driving as an Uber driver and the key here is that you have the time to do it and you're willing to put what's required to make extra money.

You may recall Perry’s guest post on The Hard Truth About Getting Rich. He has been working towards a £300k retirement pot through driving cabs.

He drives part time, whilst also blogging part time.

So this is a really credible way for anybody to go about making extra money.

3. Blogging

This is my favourite on the list of side hustle ideas, although making videos on YouTube is fast catching up.

I love blogging because it's fun and it gives you lots of varieties as ways in which you can generate income.

You can make money via say,

• Advertising,
• Coaching,
• Sponsorships,
• Consulting,
• Affliate marketing, etc.

That list continues. You can even sell online courses as you might have noticed on our online school at Financial Joy Academy.

The thing to note about blogging is that blogging requires you to put a lot of work in.

So let nobody deceive you into thinking that this is actually quite an easy thing to do. It requires time.

I typically put in at least an hour to two hours a day every single day towards making sure that my blog is consistent in producing high quality content.

It's something that absolutely anybody can do if they’re determined enough.

A really interesting thing about a blog is that you're not just generating an income on an ongoing basis, but you're also building a real business that you can sell.

So blogs are usually valued at around 2 – 3 times the profits of that particular blog or website.

Say your blog was generating profits of say, hypothetically, £50k a year, if you were to sell it, you’d be looking at a valuation of £100k to £150k.

If you’d like to start a blog, check out our Tutorial on How to Start a Blog.

Check out this recent side hustle ideas video on how to start a blog:

4. Amazon FBA

FBA stands for Fulfilled by Amazon and is it's one of the side hustle ideas that's growing the fastest in popularity.

Amazon is the world's online Superstore for personal shopping.

You can also create an online store selling products that you are sourcing and being fulfilled by Amazon.

I.e. You're not keeping them in a warehouse somewhere in stock.

Amazon will help you fulfil those products and deliver them to the other person who's buying from you.

The beauty about doing this is that you can build your own brand i.e. A private labelled brand on Amazon and you can go on to sell.

So you're not only making money on an ongoing basis on Amazon, but potentially have a business you can sell down the line.

I know people who generate typically between £1,500 to £2,000 pounds per month in profits from selling and doing this stuff on Amazon part time.

Related post: How to Start an Amazon FBA UK Business: Step-by-Step

5. Tuition

Now you might be thinking – I don't have anything that I can teach people, right?

Absolutely everybody has something that they can teach somebody else.

There are two ways you can make money from tuition.

i) So you can either offer offline tuition

You essentially meet somebody and you're teaching them one-to-one on an hourly basis.

Or you can actually offer that same offline tuition, online via a platform like Skype or zoom.

I.e. in a group setting where you're essentially teaching say four, five, six people, even in some cases, depending on what you're teaching them all at the same time.

And everybody paying an hourly fee but via the internet.

ii) Be the person who's creating the business of tuition

So I used to do this myself where we created tuition centers.

We'd hire a building a room in a building, say at a school for say £25 an hour and we would aim to fill the class with say a dozen to 15 people learning a specific subject area.

And so long as we've covered the cost of the teacher, which might be about £20 to £25 an hour, the room of around £25 an hour, we'd been making a profit on say 2 – 3 students.

So you can see that this is something that if you did as a side hustle, part time on a Saturday, you could easily be hitting £1k – £2k per month in profits.

But there is a lot of work to be put in to get to that level.

You have to also consider whether you know this is something you can scale if scale is something you're interested in.

Related posts:

• Exploring Side Hustles: Start a Tutoring Business
• How to Make an Extra £1,000 a Month As An Online Tutor

6. Ebay Business

Typically what you're doing here is you're buying and selling and you're trying to buy and sell at different prices so you can make a profit.

I know people who do things such as buying niche areas i.e buying into niche areas such as buying stamps.

Items such as stamps work really well because you can buy and post them easily and they don’t weigh much at all.

The game here essentially is based on the volume. What you're looking to do is to buy and sell as many units as possible, as profitably as possible.

Here is a video version of the 12 Best Ideas Hustle Ideas on Our YouTube Channel:

7. Upwork

I use Upwork as a place to find people to help me to do things online, virtual assistants, etc.

You can use Upwork as well to make some money by putting your skills up and sharing your expertise.

People globally can call you and sign you up to projects and you get paid as a freelancer essentially.

It gives you the opportunity to use your existing skill sets for new customers and new markets to make extra money.

8. Property Investing

This is one of the more challenging side hustles ideas because it typically requires significant upfront capital.

What you're really looking to do here is to use debt as an instrument to acquire property and become an investor in property.

Note that the only people who should really be doing this are people who are able to analyse property deals or people who understand the economics of property investing.

It's quite easy to borrow money and get into this stuff and get trapped if you don't know what you're doing.

But the idea here is that you're building a portfolio of properties with the goal of generating cash flow.

That cash flow works to generate passive income that you hope will cover your expenses and get you towards that life of financial freedom and financial independence.

So it is actually a really good way to run a side hustle, one that is helping you actually achieve a very specific goal.

But it requires you to invest in property, which requires some learning as well as upfront savings.

9. Coaching and Consulting

This is one of the easiest side hustle ideas to get started with.

It's something that anyone can start today without any kind of massive upfront investments like investing in property, for example.

The idea here is that you're using existing knowledge, existing expertise, and you're now putting that out to people in a new environment.

I do this all the time. I use my skill sets to offer consulting to small businesses, and coaching to individuals who are starting businesses or trying to go on the journey of financial independence.

The key to doing this successfully is that people have to view you as someone they can trust and someone who has an expertise that they can use in their own personal lives.

You just need to start to present yourself in a slightly different way.

The beauty of doing this is that you can do it at anytime you want provided, you can agree with someone a time that works for both of you and you can charge absolutely whatever you want.

All depends on what you think your time is worth and your expertise is worth. But this is a really easy way to make some extra income as a side hustle.

10. Wholesale Buying and Selling

I really love this idea and I've seen my dad do this successfully.

What he does is he buys lots of raw food products, and he does two things –

He supplies them to shops and or he packages them into his own brand and sells them into shops.

The idea is the same no matter what you're selling, whether you're selling clothing, toys, books, etc.

The key thing is that you're buying wholesale and you're selling it to other businesses (B2B) and you're essentially looking to making margins.

If you buy something for say £1, you're usually looking to sell it for say, £2 or £2.50.

The B2B business is one that absolutely anybody can start, especially as we now can explore new markets i.e. You can travel to places like China or India or places in Africa, at quite low costs these days.

The goal here is to find cheaper suppliers and then supply to other people.

11. Start a YouTube Channel

YouTube is a useful platform that anybody can take advantage of to make themselves extra money.

It requires consistency, which is the one thing you require if you're going to run a blog and make money from it.

You've got to produce high quality content consistently for a community on YouTube.

I know many people making money on YouTube, whether they're making money producing content for children, or in some kind of lifestyle related activities.

You've got to have at least 1,000 subscribers to start to make money and you need about 4,000 hours of watch time to be approved to the YouTube Partnership Program (YPP).

In terms of how much you can make, a friend of mine makes at $25 a day from her YouTube channel and she's only been running for about two years.

YouTube is something that anybody can get involved with even with your mobile phone as you don't need fancy cameras.

All you need is:

• good lighting,
• use your mobile phone, which is really good enough and
• just be authentic and genuine and people will subscribe and make sure that they follow you and watch your content.

Feel free to check out Our YouTube Channel.

12. Start a Childcare Business

This sits between being a side hustle idea and being a full on business.

I know about this business because we run one as an extended family.

This business has been one of our most profitable businesses to get into because it's one that people require all the time.

Childcare is really expensive, we all know that. We've all had to pay for child care in one way or another. But what's better than paying for childcare is to become a childcare provider if you can.

We went into this without a great deal of experience. In fact, we didn't have any experience. We've had to kind of gain experience as we go along.

There are two ways in which you can explore that.

i) Starting a child care business as a pack away setting

So you find a building has to be what's called a D1 use building.

Say for example, a church building or church hall for example, or a school building or room in a school.

So you can either find one of those and do a pack away setting.

You show up, set up for a few days on Monday to Friday and then you pack up and then you move out and the people who own the hall or the building can kind of use it in the times you're not using it.

That setting is usually highly profitable because all you're doing is you're showing up, setting up and running your services where your staff members and the margins are a lot higher.

ii) Get a lease on an actual building

In this set-up, you live in that building permanently and you run your business from it.

That's a lot more costly to start, but it's a lot more, gives you a lot more of a business because you own the lease on the building and you can make some money from it.

Over time, we've done both methods.

When we started off, we actually started by getting a full lease on a building, but as we became experts in running these childcare settings and as we expanded into other settings.

This was driven by our need to do business more efficiently and more profitably as well.

We explored these pack away settings and they were more profitable and offered high quality service to lots of people.

So I know this might not be for everybody, but the point I wanted to make here is, is that you need to have some business acumen.

You also need high quality childcare staff to actually help you out in running these settings as this is a regulated environment.

So you gotta know what you're doing. Make sure you do lots of research.

Feel free to reach out to me if you want to know more about this. I'm more than happy to share some ideas about it.

In conclusion,

Side hustles are absolutely critical for giving you options beyond your day job.

Key is not to just look at them as ideas, but to be experimental and put one or two into action.

More on Side Hustle Ideas:

• 21 Passive Income Ideas For a Freedom Lifestyle
• How To Start An Amazon FBA UK Business – Step-by-Step
• 7 Guaranteed Ways On How To Make £1,000 per month

I'd love to hear from you in the comments. If you currently have a side hustle, what is your side hustle?Which of the 12 Side Hustle Ideas could you explore?

Do please share this post if you found it useful, and remember,in all things be thankful and Seek Joy.