path: root/book--how-to-travel/book.txt

## Get a side hustle.

There are literally thousands, tens of thousands of ways to make a little extra money on the side. Hit up Google for a few thousand examples. Except that copying someone else's side hustle doesn't always work out for you the way it did for them. Markets change, early movers -- i.e. the people whose ideas you're thinking of copying -- have advantages you do not. Markets mature and pricing tends to decline over time. Once upon a time you could make a boatload of cash drop shipping Miracle Fruit (that berry you eat that makes lemons taste sweet). It was a novelty that no one was really importing. Then 1000 people were and the proverbial bottom dropped out.

The takeaway isn't that side hustles therefore are impossible, rather than copying someone else's side hustle isn't always a good idea. 

That said there are some patterns or types of side hustles that you can copy. I'm going to tell about two that helped earn my family and I an average of about $300 extra a month and required about 4 hours or so a week of effort (I say average because there are $50 months and there are $500 months). We could in fact have made much more than that if we'd been willing to put in more time, but we weren't.

### Master Ebay/Craiglist 

Ebay, Craiglsist and others that offer simple ways to sell things are a gold mine for making money on the side. They require almost no effort on your part and formula is very simple: buy low, sell high.

The bit question is *what* should you sell. The answer is, pick a market that either is appealing enough for you to do research on or that you already know well enough to know what's low and what's high.

My wife buys and sells children's shoes and brings in about $100-$300 a month doing so. The process is pretty simple, she goes to the local thrift stores and second hand clothing stores and buys shoes for about $1-$3 and then sells them on Ebay for $10-$20 plus shipping. The net profit then is anywhere from $7 - $19, occasionally more. It's not earth shattering, but she spends about 3 hours a week on it, an hour at the thrift store, a couple hours taking photos and listing everything. She sells about 5 pairs a week, bringing in an average of $50 week (I know this because I averaged it out using the Paypal admin). It's not paying the bills, that's why I call it a side hustle, but an extra $1000 to $3000 a year is 25 percent of our annual living expenses on the road. If you're single $3000 can last you six months in many parts of the world. 

And remember this is just one thing that took about four hours a week. Doubling out input time would have doubled the output (I know this because for three months we did double the input time and the income did in fact double), though after that there are probably diminishing returns. In other words 4x the input would not be earning us $12,000 a year.

Now I know what you're thinking. *Okay, that's great, but I know nothing about children's shoes...* Me either, so this might not be the best choice for you or I. Again, it's the idea, no the details that I want you to focus on.

That said, it's worth pointing out that my wife didn't know much about children's shoes when she started. In fact our kids weren't even wearing shoes yet when she started. Corrinne came up with idea because she was in a Facebook group of parents buying and selling kids clothes and toys and stuff. She was getting things cheap for our girls and in course of doing that she noticed that parents spend absurd amounts of money on children's shoes. 

My wife is much smarter than me so where I just made fun of people for wasting their money on something their kids would out grow in six months, she saw an opportunity.

Because kids outgrow shoes very quickly the shoes typically have very little wear. However, people who spend $60 on kids shoes that will last three months also seem to not make much effort to re-sell them. Apparently if you have that kinds of money you just chuck them in the donate pile and send them off. That means thrift stores often have very popular shoes with almost no wear and tear at rock bottom prices. 

AT the same time there are lots of parents around the country who do not buy expensive new shoes, but still want their kids to have to the "coolest" shoes. These parent haunt eBay and are willing to spend roughly 50-60% of retail value.

So you buy low at the thrift stores and used clothing shops and then turn around and sell high on eBay. The spread is yours to squirrel away for plane tickets to Buenos Aires.

When Corrinne started she bought and sold brands she already new, Converse and other big names like that, but as she got more involved in the market she began to pick up other names and now she knows what to look for, what can turn the biggest profit and what to avoid. As an added bonus our kids have very cool shoes, not that they care, but if you ever see photos on luxagraf rest assured the shoes were bought used on th super cheap.

What's the take away? Simple: buy low, sell high.

In many cases you can do the entire buy low, sell high on eBay. As I was writing this chapter my wife yelled from the other room to tell me a a pair of shoes she bought on eBay for $11 just re-sold for $23. Technically "flipping" these shoes was not the plan, they were in fact for our daughter Olivia, but they didn't end up fitting so my wife relisted to recoup the money and ended up more than doubling her money. 

There are ways to buy low and sell high all within eBay, no leaving the house necessary. Sometimes you just get lucky, as my wife just did, but there are actually some tricks you can use to increase your luck. One great way to do this is to search common misspellings of the items you want to flip. Because these listing have typos they don't show up in searches, get very few bids and (sometimes) that means they sell well below their actual value. There are dozens of sites you can use to automate this process, but I use [TypoHound](http://typohound.com/). It's pretty simple, you just enter a search term and it generates a link to an eBay search based on common misspellings and typos. You can then follow that search on eBay and keep track of items that are misspelled. I don't actually flip things this way, but I do use this whenever I buy something for my own use.

If you want to try something similar start by shopping for something on eBay or Craigslst. Ebay is more useful at this stage because you can look at finished auctions to get an idea of what things actually sell for. Don't forget that you can ask anything on eBay, the only thing that matters is what people actually pay and to see that you only want to look at finished auctions.

Once you have a niche selected and general idea of what the high price is, the question is can you get it for less? One of the great advantages of Ebay over craigslist is that Ebay reaches a national audience. That means you can leverage the fact that your town's thrift stores are stuffed full of old Patagonia rain gear and people in San Francisco will pay top dollar for those jackets (I made that example up, but you get the idea). One persons junk is another person's treasure and you if you can connect those two people and make the spread you will make money.

Another approach if you're a handy person is to buy things that are broken and then fix them and sell for a profit. There's more effort involved in this and there's ahigher potential risk (if it turns out you can't fix it, you're screwed), but there's a correspondingly higher payoff as well. The internet abounds with people who've made many thousands of dollars flipping things on eBay and Craigslist. I find [Ryan Finlay's ReCraigslist.com](http://recraigslist.com/) to be one of the most helpful. He even has an entire [online course](http://applianceschool.com/) on how to flip appliances like he did.

That's not an endorsement by the way, just an example of how a little side hustle can actually turn into a very lucrative income. Now our goal isn;t to build a brick and morter business, pretty much the opposite in fact, but it is certainly possible to make a tone of money this way.

That said, one thing I hate about overly enthusiastic sales pitches is that they pick a few (possibly outlier) examples and make it seem like you can do it to, you plunk down the money and then... nothing. You fail. What's wrong with you? Nothing really, I failed too.

Before I get all pep talkish on you and lay out the excercises for this chapter, let me tell you a little bit about my failure to make money on ebay. I used to collect books. I lived in western Masschusetts for three years (three loooong winters) and as anyone who lives in NEw England can tell you that area is a treasure trove of used book stores. AT one point I had something in the neighborhood of 1000 volumes. I sold about half of them before I traveled around the world the first time, but I stored the rest and still had them when we were getting ready to make the move to our current mobile lifestyle. 

Watching my wife bring in tidy sums of money on shoes I thought, hey, no problem, I'll just unload all these books. Except that no bought my book. I listed them at pretty good deal, then at great deals, then, just to see what happned I listed a few a $.99. Not one sale. Why? I don't know. And that's why I failed. I did no research, I didn't know the market, I didn't even check to see if there was a market for books on eBay (turns out, not really). I ended up having a book sale in front of our house and did quite well there, so it was not a total loss, but I recount it hear to illustrate a point: do not assume you understand a market, get out there and do your research, watch auctions, look at finished auctions and find the selling price. Then look for the lowest possible buying price. 

### Exercises

1) Go sign up for an ebay account and a paypal account. Connect them up so you're ready to sell.

2) Find something in your house that's 



## Side Hustle #2: Use your skills.