Have you ever wondered how a side hustle could lead you to financial autonomy and a life by design? That's the bag-o-tricks Susan and Annie unpack in this episode, where they weave personal stories with actionable strategies to unveil how turning passions into profit isn't just a dream. From transforming a rental property into a duplex to the birth of Goodegg Investments, learn about the highs and lows of your potential side hustle. Bolster your bank account during the foundational stages of wealth building by taking action on your side hustle idea – it's not your average part-time job, but an entrepreneurial leap that could pave your way to financial freedom.
Thanks for listening, and until next time, keep investing for good!
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00:03 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
That was my original side hustle. We bought our first rental property. We turned it into a duplex, so that was like managing everything on the side as if it were a business, and I think that we can. We need to treat it as a business. Whatever type of investing that we're doing. This is a business that's generating income. Ideally, it's more and more passive. That's the best kind of investing.
00:21 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
Hey everyone, I'm Annie Dickerson and, on behalf of the entire Good Egg Investments team, I wanted to welcome you to this episode of the Life and Money Show, the show where we talk about everything from investing to financial freedom, to parenting, traveling, creating a life by design and everything in between. Today, we're talking about one of my favorite things, which is side hustles. I'm here with my amazing co-host, susan Elliott. Susan, how are you today?
00:47 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
I'm doing really well on this fine Tuesday. We record on Tuesdays and it's a nice day to connect with the whole team and connect with investors at our popover event. It's a fun energy to the day on Tuesdays.
01:01 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
I know you've had experience with side hustles and I have two, outside of real estate even, and so we're going to get into all of that, and this is actually the first part of a two-part series that we're going to do on side hustles, because there's just so much to talk about. So in this episode we're going to talk about our personal experience around side hustles, and then in the second part, on the next episode, we're going to talk about all the hows how to get your own side hustle off the ground. But first I just wanted to hear from you in your viewpoint, what is a side hustle? Anyway? People throw around this term to you what is a side hustle?
01:42 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
Yeah, a side hustle is anything you're doing outside of the stream of income that you're doing outside of the stream of income that you're using to support the majority of your life. Usually, typically, that's your nine to five job, your W-2 income, but I think that even outside of your primary role so as a stay-at-home parent you might have a side hustle but also not have a full-time job. But this is something that you're I don't know. I think of it more as like am I squeezing this in in different places that it's irregular a little bit, maybe it's. It requires maybe more time in the beginning, less time as you go.
02:17
It's not a part-time job. It's like very much, much more irregular than another, just a part-time side job. And then I think the hustle part of it is also what separates it from the part-time job, because it's something that you are creating. It's not like I'm going to go out and be a barista on the weekends. That is someone else's business that I'm working for. That is a job. So the hustle part to me implies that this is my own creation. What about you? Do you have any other distinctions on, like, what is a side hustle?
02:55 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
No, I think that's a great. Those are great thoughts around, like it's something that you're building, that you're creating something like getting a second job. That's a second job. Some people think of that as a side hustle, but I think what we're talking about here is really that passion project or that you know, testing out a business idea and trying that on the side before you fully get it off the ground as its own thing, and doing it on the side. And the reason we're talking about this is because it relates to your overall wealth picture and so early on in the wealth creation stages, as you're going toward financial freedom, you've got to figure out ways to accumulate money, accumulate capital and savings. People do this through their full-time jobs and that's a great way to do it, and you're getting promotions along the way and salary increases. That's great.
03:45
But side hustles can be a great way to think outside the box and to add fuel to the fire If I'm mixing my metaphors here a little bit. But you're adding more to your savings so that the more that you build up front, then the more that you can move into the next phase, which is the investing phase, which helps you to grow that initial income and the savings that you have. And then finally, once you've gotten to a good place, you've reached financial freedom, you've gotten to that lifestyle. Then it's about maintaining and protecting and preserving. So this whole journey to financial freedom. There's lots of different phases to it but this side hustle really fits in very nicely to that early phase of really accumulating wealth. But we're going to get into all of that and we're going to talk about our own experiences.
04:42
But first for the listener, if this is interesting to you or if you have questions about this or about anything that we talk about on this podcast or any other podcast, we have a great drop-in session every week. We call it affectionately our Good Egg Popover. It's almost like an office hours where you get to come and meet our team. You get to meet others in the good egg community and you can be a fly on the wall. We've had plenty of people who are just like I, don't have questions, just want to listen in. Or if you have burning questions, whether it's about a broad topic like financial freedom and wealth building and your investing goals, or it's a very niche question about a specific deal that we have or how to become accredited, what accredited means. Any and all of those questions are welcome. We love all those questions. Susan, I know you're on the popover every single week.
05:40 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
It's one of my favorite time blocks of the whole week because it's so casual. It's like one I don't have to prep to go into it. In that way it's like. It's kind of like an unknown. What are people going to bring to the table today? Who's there? What are we going to talk about?
05:54
I get to know the people that are out there just like me on this path, on this journey and so much of being on this long-term wealth building journey towards financial freedom, towards creating a life that we love. Along the way towards financial freedom a life by design it needs to be grounded in community and connecting with the other people who are doing this too. There's so much amplification and power in that. That's why there's meetups, that's why there's retreats, that's why there's these community groups, and this is the way that you can get this like weekly dose of just hearing from other people who are on this path, asking any question that might come to you and um, and a great way to talk to us about our deals. So much of real estate investing is understanding who you're working with and, um, who they are as a person. So come on in and join us.
06:46 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
Yeah, and it reminds me of Tony.
06:49
Robbins always says the quality of your life is the quality of the questions that you're asking, and the same goes with investing and building wealth, and financial freedom is your path to that.
07:00
Financial freedom comes down to the quality of the questions that you're asking, by vetting the sponsors that you're working with, determining your investing goals. And this is a great way to hear those questions from other people, questions you might not even be thinking about. And so our popovers are every Tuesday at 11 am Pacific, and Susan does this amazing recap of the popover every week, recapping all the questions in depth, and that goes out as an email. And so if you're listening to this and you're thinking of dropping in, or you just want to get the recaps every week just to further your own education, you can go to goodeginvestmentscom slash popover P-O-P-OP O P O V E R, pop over and you can sign up to attend. And again, it's just a drop in. So no pressure, no need to RSVP. All right, now we have the basics of what a side hustle is and how it kind of fits in to the overall wealth picture. I want to hear about your experience, susan, with side hustles.
08:11 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
I'm glad you went there, because I wanted to almost be like put on the brakes with our side conversation, because I wanted to get out this big misconception right away and that is that like side hustles have to be done in the wee hours of the morning and the late hours of the night, spending all of your weekends, because I think that that idea of side hustles is a step into burnout culture For me. I think my experience started with, like I was an engineer, training as an engineer, working nine to five. I had my first child. I found real estate investing. I realized engineering is not going to get me to financial freedom, like I need to find other ways. I need to be investing more, and in order to do that I need to make more money. And so I wait, hold on.
08:52 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
How did you know? Because that's what they all tell us, right? Society tells us you work your nine to five, you save up, you get to retire. How did you know that, wait, this isn't the path, this isn't going to get me there.
09:05 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
I kind of looked at the trajectory of the type of engineering that I was in, which is much more an environmental, civil engineering pathway. I was doing river restoration projects and so it wasn't like oil and gas engineering, which has a higher level of salaries that I could reach up to, but even then, you know, I had this salary. I was the one working full time. My husband was starting his own business and had some income coming in, but in living in our town we could just barely make ends meet and I I'm still going back all the time to create a budget and to live within my means. And it's interesting because we are not overspenders. And so every time I do this work of looking into our spending and our earning because the whole name of this game is increasing the spread between what you spend and what you make so that you can save and invest the difference we were just like constantly at that threshold of spending everything we were making. And I'm telling you this like we were living in like a one bedroom apartment with our daughter on the like the food stamps and here in Washington I say food stamps but it was like the breastfeeding program where I got supplemented food, I mean like we were not spending a lot of money. Where I'm travel hacking to be able to go see grandparents for holidays, like, like, just not spenders. So there is a fundamentally thing here that I'm barely able to make ends meet in this town that I'm living in. So I have to find a different path and luckily that did lead me to real estate investing. I found actually a new passion for work in general and that's creating content, connecting with people, helping educate people about investing, because I found it so powerful for my own life.
10:44
But at the time I was like, okay, I'm going to be an engineer and I'm going to do this on the side, but it quickly did lead to burnout.
10:50
So I think the one thing that I want to start out with as I start to talk about my journey is that I want everybody, as they develop side hustles, to really think about it. Like, does this bring me joy, does this uplift me? And in that way it's not just about the monetary gain. It might be that I'm starting the side hustle because it's fun, it's a passion project, it's actually more of my life by design plan than it is my financial freedom plan. But I also encourage you to be like how can I monetize this? Because I think that the more we think about doing things we love and that we're really good at and that other people want, those are going to be the things that we can monetize even more down the road. I sometimes even still I'm like what are these side hustles, what are these side businesses? But it does bring me joy, the ones that I do. Now I'm like oh okay, I have fun doing this.
11:36 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
So yeah, I'm so glad you said that because that's so important? Because if you go after the, just the monetary piece, you might get some success for a little bit, but then the likelihood of you burning out is going to be much greater because you're not going to love it and so at a certain point you're just going to reach that ceiling. Okay, so you figured out that you were hitting a wall and, as our good friend Dustin Heiner of Master Passive Income talks about it's your J-O-B just over broke, and so you realized you were breaking even. This isn't the lifestyle you wanted. You're working hard as an engineer, you have a young child, so at that point you eventually got into real estate. But what were the steps in the early days? How did you even start to think about trying to make money outside of your primary job?
12:30 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
Getting into real estate as the path that most people are exposed to is like buying a rental property, and we do our best to tell people that you don't have to start that way, because it does take a lot of your time and energy. So that was my original side hustle. We bought our first rental property. We turned it into a duplex, so that was like managing everything on the side as if it were a business, and I think that we can. We need to treat it as a business to whatever type of investing that we're doing. This is a business that's generating income. Ideally, it's more and more passive. That's the best kind of investing. But even just learning about real estate investing was like in my mind. I was like this is my side hustle, I need to learn about this stuff so that I can leverage it more. And then I realized I loved it so much that I kind of wanted to create a business around it, and so then the side hustle became creating this investing business with several of my friends where we were purchasing non-performing notes. So we learned how to do that. We hired a mentor and a coach, built this whole system and unfortunately, my partners pivoted away from that. So that side hustle kind of just paused midair without doing much. And I look back and looking back at your side hustle and seeing how it hasn't gained you much and you've put so much into it can be really let the wind out of your sails. You can say Demoralizing, exactly Demoralizing. So I think you know, as you develop a side hustle to being prepared for things like that, it's just anytime you're starting a business as an entrepreneur that can happen, and it certainly happened to me. But what was wonderful is that it brought me to good egg and that now you know, looking back on it, it was like opposite of being a failure Cause now I've working in a job that I love and it doesn't feel like a job. So it shifted things in ways that I could have never expected. So, but that was my original side hustle. But the other side hustle that I did was getting our house prepared for Airbnb.
14:14
So we travel and I treat this as a side hustle because I have to file taxes, right, I have to have a P&L, I have to submit it every year. This is a side business that I do on the outside of my work and it's only a certain part of the year which makes it feel really nice. I'm not trying to fit in all this work all year long. I don't do it every year. We're not going to do it this year, kind of strategically, and so that's my other one. And then, finally, my current side hustle is that I actually have been approached to do some engineering work that combines my long history of river guiding and teaching kayaking, and so people want these projects evaluated for the impact to the recreation that's happening. So it was like that. One just fell in my lap. It's interesting how, when you open the door to side hustles or to what you're good at and what you like doing, that this is just one of those clear examples of like it can actually come to you too.
15:09 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
And it's not funny how you've basically swapped places. I want to pull this out for the listener, because this is oh, wow, I didn't think about that. Yeah, most people think of side hustles as a great way to generate extra income, supplement their savings, all that stuff. And it is. It absolutely is, and it can be a great way to augment your job mobility, because I can see how it would have been hard.
15:36
You were in this engineering job, you had no professional real estate experience, and for you to then apply for jobs within the world of real estate would have been probably pretty challenging, because they would have said, well, what experience you have? All? You don't have any experience. But so this was a great way for you to kind of strike out on your own.
15:56
You didn't have to have that prior experience, you just had that passion, that burning passion within you which makes it all the better, because then you pour everything you have into it. So you're, you're testing things out, you're trying different things, you're trying to make it work. Through that experience, then you've gained a ton of experience and you have a ton of value to then eventually add. If you decide to pivot and then move into that different field, which you ultimately did, and now engineering has become your side hustle, which I think is just so. It's so perfect because now you're doing as your main job the thing that you're most passionate about, and on the side, you can supplement with this thing that you have great experience in and you still care about, so it worked out great.
16:42 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
That's a great way to filter through, like, what could I be doing as a side hustle? So if you think about why am I looking for side hustles? And one of those reasons is that you want to get out of your W-2 or your job, and it's not just like I want to make a little bit extra more to be able to travel, to be able to put an extra $10,000 into my investments this year, cause you've seen my awesome charts that I talk about all the time. Like look at the power of just $10,000 a year for 10 years to your net worth. If it's more than that, think about the skills that you could be developing along the way, how to monetize them.
17:17
That's a great lever to pull here and that you're learning a lot and the drive for you to be teaching it to yourself with the goal of monetizing it is even more than that skill itself. So maybe that skill is that like graphic design, and you're actually creating designs to sell on Etsy. Maybe we can talk about Etsy here in a moment through your journey. But it's not just the like I can create cool graphics. Someone is looking at that and saying they like figured out how to put that up, how to get it out, how to market, how to talk to people about it. There's so much more to creating a side hustle than there is to just like learning a single skill and getting the job that you do that skill in.
17:56 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
Yeah, what's really most exciting to me about side hustles is it's the opportunity to put on an entrepreneur hat and think outside the box, and you could do this with anything, even with your example around being a barista or, let's say, driving for Uber or Lyft At the outset it might not seem like that's a full on business in and of itself. However, and this is why I'm so glad you brought up the passion and the joy piece, because if you're passionate about it, then you can go all sorts of different directions with that. I mean, look at, you know, with Uber and Lyft I forget the name of the I'm sure there's lots of YouTube channels and Instagram about how to maximize your side hustle as a Lyft or Uber driver. Right, and these are people who started off as drivers themselves and they figured out the secret sauce. They're doing amazing things, and so now they're paying it forward and teaching others, and so that creates another stream of income through them teaching on YouTube or Instagram or getting sponsorships or whatever. So if you follow that passion, then it can lead to lots of great things.
19:04
I tried that. You tried Lyft oh, my husband tried Lyft for a bit, but I could never fathom I'm stressed enough just driving on my own trying to follow directions. If I had a stranger in the back of my car trying to make conversation with me, I'm trying to follow the directions. I don't know where we'd end up. That's another thing is right the self-awareness to know which side hustles are right for you, so for me. We had invested in real estate for quite some number of years before I started this side hustle, but I didn't really consider, I don't know for whatever reason. Real estate was just on in the back of my mind. It was never like something I took seriously as a business until much more recently.
19:47
But my first side hustle I consider to be my Etsy shop, so it was called uncanny creations. I created all sorts of print designs, blankets, pillows for, like, baby's rooms or for the home and general home decor, and what I loved about this was I wanted it to be a way for me, because I was working in the design world as a creative director. When that's your job, you have certain things that your projects, that you're doing at work, and you have to do it according to the clients or the business's specifications. You can't just go and create whatever creative thing that you want, and so this was kind of it started out as my outlet for that.
20:34
I wanted to put this Etsy shop up just for me to have some accountability, to keep putting up my own designs, to play and to explore and to put something up. So it started out great. I had a goal at that point. I was like my goal for this year is to make $1,000 with my Etsy shop. That was my grand goal was $1,000. Super grand and, spoiler alert, I did not make it Real super bummer, but I learned a lot and I had a lot of fun doing that part, the creating part. Where my downfall came was when people actually ordered the product.
21:16
Part of the business part, which is the whole point of being on Etsy and the whole point of the side hustle, right. But I would see an order come in. I'd be like, oh God, now I have to go and make the order. I have to like make sure that the because they could order it in different sizes I got to make sure it ships at the right date. I had to work with a drop shipper. You know all these like these operational things that were not my strong suit, but it taught me a lot about where I'm strong, where what I'm passionate about and the things that had. I wanted to continue to grow that Etsy shop.
21:52
This was many years ago, before virtual assistants became a thing. But now if I had realized that I could be like, okay, well, let me work out the system and then let me hire a virtual assistant and every time I get an order I will ping them and they will do all that production stuff. But back then it was my first quote, unquote business, so I didn't even. I wasn't even thinking about leveraging other talent or bringing other people or building systems. I was just having fun creating the designs. And so ultimately, that side hustle flopped, I closed down that shop. Ultimately, that side hustle flopped. I closed down that shop, but the lessons that I learned were way more valuable than the.
22:36
I think I made like 600 bucks in the end, pre-tax.
22:38 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
Go out for a nice dinner.
22:40 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
Right, exactly, but I learned so much.
22:43 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
I like that. So evaluating the success of our side hustles, remember the skills you're building, what you're learning along the way, and there's so much value to these that's beyond the monetary stuff.
22:56 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
And then Good Egg started as a side hustle, and it started as a side hustle for both Julie and me, but separately. So when Julie and I first met, we met at a conference in Denver back in. When Julie and I first met, we met at a conference in Denver back in I think it was February of 2018. It was literally the week right after I had quit my full-time job to go into real estate, so it was a side hustle for a lot longer for Julie. She was working a full-time job in the legal field and she was raising capital and doing these syndications on the side for, I think, six, seven, eight months prior to when we had met. So this was really and truly a side hustle for her because she was working her full-time job and she was having success raising capital, and so this was a great separate stream of income for her. When we met, she hadn't yet made that leap, and that's something that we'll talk about on.
23:51
The next episode is when you know it's time to make that leap, and it's different for everybody, but it's important to know. Kind of well, I guess it's your exit strategy from your full-time job to figure out if and when you ultimately want to make that jump. Maybe you never want to, maybe it's always going to be your side hustle, maybe you want to make it your full-time thing, and for me that was something that I wanted. I hadn't raised any capital, I hadn't done any syndications when I quit my job this is why Julie and I are so complimentary is we think very differently, but we're, you know, we have the same kind of mission, vision and values. And so she had been doing this on the side because she wanted that safety, security, stability, and she wanted to get to a certain point before she was going to quit her job. And I was like, forget it, I'll jump without the net, it'll appear midair, I'll just figure it out somewhere along the way.
24:43 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
Different strategies, both can work Right.
24:46 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
Different strategies you need a different attitude going in Absolutely. So I had kind of just I had taken a course in syndications and I kind of saw the path and I was like, if I'm going to make this work, I know myself, and that's the other key is that self-awareness? I said I know myself. If I only do this on nights and weekends, it's only going to be half, if not less than that, of what it truly could be. In order for me to give this a full chance, I knew that for me personally, I had to give it a hundred percent of my time and bandwidth. So that's what I did.
25:25 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
That's a great filter too for looking at side hustles. Like is this actually a side hustle? Am I going to get to where I want to go with this side hustle if I only do it for five hours a week or less? And you may realize that like, oh, I can do it up to a certain point, but if I actually want this to take off, then I do need to make a commitment to it in a different way.
25:49 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
Yeah, so I did. I ultimately I quit my job in January of 2018, having had no real true syndication experience. Thankfully, the universe was like okay, here's your net. We got you, met Julie and you know I. We kind of we didn't partner up right away. We kind of were building our own businesses separately for a few months before we partnered up. For me personally, I do think that in those early months, even though I wasn't making any money from this, it wasn't really my side hustle, it was my full-time hustle, but I didn't make any money. Probably that whole first year after we launched the business, I don't think we took anything out of that business. There just wasn't enough income and so we made enough to break even to keep going. But that's the other important thing is to have that runway and that backup plan just in case, because you know, with a side hustle, it can take some ramp up time before you get to a point where it's going to be producing a steady stream of income for you.
26:58 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
Yeah, those are essential to like deciding to make that leap and that, your exit strategy that we'll get into next week, of what kinds of things are you are you going to be thinking about as you want to, as you want to switch? And and two I want to bring up. I know that at least I hear about your partnerships with Julie and the complimentary aspects, and I think about that as in my just my marriage and how my husband and I have these very complimentary views of finances and income, and so this is also sometimes a whole partnership decision. If you are part of a unit of a family household, you know we've got kids. That definitely changes our security decisions here, but I would say that it doesn't mean that, like I have to just grind it out in a W-2 that I don't love. There's creative ways to live and adjust your spending in so many ways.
27:41
So that you can do that side hustle so that you can do what you love and work towards making big lifestyle changes like that. But sometimes, not sometimes I would say you should always communicate with your spouse or your partner whoever you're you know walking this life with to be able to make sure that you're both kind of in line with the vision of what that means and where you're going. Yeah all great advice.
28:04 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
I know we're going to dive into different side hustle ideas and how to get a side hustle off the ground in the upcoming episode, but any last words of wisdom or advice, even cautions against side hustles, anything you want to share before we wrap up, I would say again ground into what it is that you like, what is the most fun way that you could be spending your time that could lead to making money too.
28:31 - Susan Elliott (Co-host)
Or maybe even just start like what do I love to do, and to start to think of ways that could turn into a business, instead of going and like Googling, going to YouTube and saying, like best passive income streams for 2024, you may be able to get some nice ways to monetize your passion that way. But start with your passion, start with something you love to do and then do a little bit of research into turning that into a business. I think about that's kind of how it's led to that for me. But then sometimes it's just luck too, and really like putting the intention out there that, like I'm going to try to make an extra $10,000 this year, and sometimes you just don't even know how that's going to happen. But if you keep on exposing yourself to ways that that could happen, then eventually the things will start clicking and moving forward. How about you? Any one final takeaway for the listeners, yeah.
29:19 - Annie Dickerson (Host)
I'll add on top that there is no failure, only feedback. When you step out and take on a side hustle, you're being so incredibly brave. Most people don't ever even consider a side hustle. They just keep their heads down, blinders on and they trudge forward with their W-2 job. The fact that you're even listening to this and considering a side hustle puts you way ahead of so many others, and it takes a ton of courage. But just know that, susan, you've had side hustles that haven't worked out as intended. I've had the same. You know it's not about getting to that end goal necessarily that one that you set out at the beginning but just seeing what happens and knowing that each side hustle that you embark on will teach you something new about yourself and it may open up new opportunities, new partnerships, new relationships that you wouldn't have otherwise had access to. So if you're considering it, we salute you, we're in your corner and we're here to support you every step of the way. And then, of course, next episode, we're going to dive into the specifics.
30:30
You know we mentioned side hustles can be a great way to accumulate wealth. It can also be a great way to amplify If you're in the investing stage, where you're starting to invest pockets of capital here and there and you're like this isn't happening fast enough. I want more. So this can be a great way to amplify that and to have more capital to invest, and so if you're interested in learning more about potentially investing with us, you can go to goodaginvestmentscom. Slash invest. That's our show for today.
31:04
Thank you so much for listening to the Life and Money Show. The show all about helping you to create a meaningful and intentional life by design. For show notes or to listen to previous episodes, go to lifeandmoneyshowcom and for more information on how to invest with us and create passive income and build wealth for your family, go to goodegginvestmentscom. If you enjoyed this episode, it would mean so much to us If you would subscribe, share this podcast with a friend and leave us a five-star review so we can continue to bring you incredible new conversations all about life and money. Tune in next time for our second part in our conversation about side hustles and until then, remember that your financial journey is a lifelong adventure and we're here with you every step of the way. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.