Creating New Income Streams through Side Hustles

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casciani.

Greetings to everyone today joining us for our podcast. You're listening to the Living to 100 Club, and I'm your host, Joe Casciani. You can find this conversation and all past recordings on our website. In addition to my podcasting, I'm a public speaker and I present to community organizations and senior groups on topics related to aging well and managing setbacks. I also offer a free 30-minute healthy lifestyle audit that looks at current lifestyle practices and uncovers age-related challenges that you or a family member may be facing. With the findings from this audit, we can decide if individual coaching would help. If interested, set up a free call from the option on my website. I also provide consulting and training on clinical topics like depression and dementia. Now onto our podcast where we discuss successful aging, staying positive, and making more informed decision. Today's guest is one of the leading authorities on side hustles, the practice of building job-free income. Nick Loper is the creator and owner of Side Hustle Nation, a resource of tips and ideas on finding income-earning opportunities outside of traditional jobs. We're a population that is living longer and healthier with loads of talent and creative energies, but where are the side gigs that we hear so much about, particularly that the younger generations are gravitating toward? Where can I contribute in my post-retirement years? How can I find side hustles that do not require a huge initial investment or even any special skills? First, a little background. Nick Loper helps people earn money outside of their day job. He's an author, online entrepreneur, and host of the award-winning Side Hustle Show podcast, which features new part-time business ideas each week. As Chief Side Hustler at sidehustlernation.com, he loves deconstructing the tactics and strategies behind building extra income streams. Nick, welcome to our podcast today.

Joe, thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, you're very welcome. I always like to open by asking our guests to tell us just briefly about the journey that took you to where you are today.

Let me see if I can give you the 2-minute version here. I was bit and was very grateful to have been bit by the entrepreneurial bug in college, where I took this house painting internship where they assign you a zip code territory and say, "All right, roam free, little one, you know, go knock on doors, see if you can sell some paint jobs." And that was my first real taste of being in charge of a crew and being in charge of a job from start to finish and working for profits and not wages. A very eye-opening and at times stressful but really rewarding experience. From there, I did take a corporate job post-graduation, but my side hustle, my original side hustle, was a footwear comparison shopping site which would bring in the catalogs from Zappos and Amazon and all these other online footwear retailers that— and it would tell you where you can find the best price on your next pair of shoes. And that's how I earned money as an affiliate. Like, if somebody bought shoes through the site, it would get a small commission on that. Ran that, you know, that was the thing that let me quit my corporate job after 3 years of nights and weekends. Several years deep into running that, started to rebrand my personal blog that I'd been running at the time into Side Hustle Nation and ordered this podcast mic and was like, okay, let's, let's see if anybody will tune into the Side Hustle Show. And within a year and a half, it kind of became the main focus for me. I've always had side projects on the side from it. But really, the last 8, 9 years, the Side Hustle Show has been the main thing.

So you quit a traditional job. Other people in recent years, we hear a lot about resignations. People are living, shifting away from traditional employment. Is it just freedom that people want, getting away from that 9 to 5, or what's your take?

Well, it's freedom and flexibility, and it's kind of shift that is going on, and maybe COVID accelerated it, but it was this shift from A 30-year career at the same company and this stable thing, I'm going to climb the corporate ladder and I'm going to be happy with that, to all of a sudden, well, if I can make a diagonal move somewhere else, all of a sudden, oh, that was a $10,000 salary bump instead of a 3% raise. So you see a lot of people kind of— the Great Resignation is kind of a misnomer because it's more like the Great Leveling Up because people still need to pay their rent, they still need to pay their mortgage. It's not like we're just quitting our jobs and lounging around on the beach. It's like, okay, no, we were finding bigger and better opportunities or more flexible opportunities that fit the life that we want to lead. And so that was kind of a broader trend anyways, this trend towards freelancing and flexibility, which on the employer side, employers like it because they're like, oh, we don't have to pay benefits anymore. And the workers are cool with this. I don't particularly care if you show up between 9 and 5, if you're going to get your work done and this works for you, okay. And it's the same thing as an employer myself now employ a lot of on-demand specialists in various areas where I don't necessarily need a full-time person, but, you know, if you can handle this in a few hours a week, that's perfect for me. So we saw a lot of people going in that direction as their own side hustle.

Wow. Yeah. So you mentioned when we talked earlier that about one-third of the millennial generation is involved in entrepreneurial activities, and this is what you're talking about, the freedom and the flexibility.

I mean, that's the positive way to look at it. The, the more pessimistic way to look at it is in response to minuscule wage growth over the past generation that hasn't really kept pace with the rising cost of living in terms of the big three, like housing, healthcare, education. There's a lot of people having a hard time making ends meet, and so they're approaching the side hustle like, freedom and flexibility, that's a great ideal, it's a great place to play, but I kind of need to make rent next month. And so a lot of people approaching it really from both sides. We see people's highlight reels on social media of what is possible, what is out there to achieve, and kind of coupled with this necessity and oftentimes really back against the wall, like, well, this current income isn't going to cut it, there's only so many expenses that I can cut before I'm living in a cardboard box, and now it's time to go out and address the revenue side of the equation.

Yeah, hence the term hustle, right? That's where we really have to move, and we can't just wait for the paychecks to come in every other Friday. It's really a matter of our taking that step and that initiative and finding new ways to earn some extra money.

It's true. It comes, at least in the context that I use it, comes from an old baseball coach of mine who said, look, you're going to have bad days at the plate, you're going to have bad days in the field, but hustle never slumps. It's like this one element of your game that you can control. And there's been, in fairness, there's been some backlash against hustle culture, you know, rise and grind 24/7. And that kind of makes me a little bit wary too, because you can't realistically burn the candle at both ends for very long. We've heard from some people who like kind of approach it as a sprint, say, okay, it's gonna suck for a month or two, but I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. And like, okay, you know, if you have a vision of how you're going to get out of that sprint phase, fine. But if you're constantly gasping for air and not sleeping enough and not taking care of yourself, that's not a great viable way to live either.

Yeah. May not be the best alternative. Yeah. I like that expression. You can have bad days at the plate. You can have bad days in the field, but hustle never slumps. That's good. That kind of says it all. There's always that drive, that fire, that determination that can keep us moving. Yeah. So I think, as I told you already, I think there's an opportunity for the seniors, for the boomers, for people 50+, 60+. To look at these non-traditional positions. And, you know, the senior demographic, certainly there's a lot of people that are after, you know, post-retirement and living longer means having more time for these extra pursuits. Mention the term longevity bonus, which I just heard this week from Ken Dyckwald. I think that's great. We have so many more years and now we have some bonus time. So as you just said, a bonus round. What do you think? Is there a whole opportunity here for senior population?

I think you're right. I don't think that side hustling is necessarily a generational thing, although maybe the millennials have branded it. And it's like, you know, the pessimists will say, well, the necessity for a second job doesn't need to be glamorized. But there's this— there's this entrepreneurial connotation with the side hustle that it has some upside beyond just, you know, bartending or delivering pizzas, where in generations past maybe it was called moonlighting. And it's— there's subtle difference between just taking on a second job. But I like this longevity bonus. My brother has got t-shirts that say, you know, every day is a bonus day, after he had this near-death experience of falling off a skiing cliff accident. His every day is a bonus day, kind of a little bit of a reframe. But absolutely, lots of opportunities for people in every age group to go out there and make something happen and have something that you're working towards progress-wise, I think, is I think it's Freud, right? He's like, you know, what are the two ingredients for happiness? Love and work. And Tony Robbins added a third, and the third was progress. So love and work, and then this sense of progress, like advancing the ball and making, you know, feeling like you're better today than you were yesterday in, in any area of your life. I think that's really important.

Yeah, I like that. I agree 100%. Small steps. We're not comparing ourselves to others, we're comparing ourselves to Where we were yesterday, right? Small steps, turtle steps forward. And that's what builds that confidence and success and keeps that reinforcement going. So let's talk about some of the specifics here. I, I, I love your website, Side Hustle Nation. You have 100 general ideas plus specific jobs like online businesses and freelancing. So can you help us understand what are the main categories of these part-time jobs or side hustles?

Absolutely. So the big 3 categories that not just side hustles, but pretty much any business in the world is going to fall under would be selling a product, selling a service, and then selling content or like building an audience. I'll call it an audience-based business. And all 3 of those center around some sort of pain or problem in most cases. Like, what problem do you solve? What pain do you take away? Much easier to sell pain pills than it is to sell vitamins. And You think about a dirty house as a common pain point or a common problem that people face in the product category. You could go out and buy a Roomba robot vacuum or the latest Swiffer, you know, something you can buy cleaning products to solve that problem. You can hire cleaning services to solve that problem, like hire up some cleaning service to come on by and take care of this. Or you can go on and watch, like my kids, they've been really into like this Home Edit show, this organizing show. And there's a bunch of content on YouTube surrounding this too, like how to organize your space, how to clean more efficiently. So there's a bunch of different businesses tackling the same problem from different angles, but the big 3 are that product, service, and content.

So fulfilling some pain, answering some problem, you're either selling a product, a service, or, uh, content, as you say. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the examples. What are some, some of these side— is it okay to use the word hustle, or should we call them gigs?

Or yeah, side hustle, side gigs, small businesses. Where we see a lot of people get started, especially if you want to, you know, have that endorphin hit, that motivation of seeing some quick wins. You see a lot of people get started in the freelancing or consulting space, this service-based business space where you can either say, I am the expert, I know how to solve this problem for you, or you could say, I am going to put on my matchmaker hat and I'm going to find people who already know how to solve this problem with people who need this problem solved. And we've seen some really fun examples of people doing that in the home cleaning space as one example to say, I was looking at the Yelp reviews for home cleaners and nobody complains about the cleaning itself. They complained that it was hard to get a quote, that it was, you know, nobody answered the phone and just all this other kind of like administrative stuff. Like, oh shoot, I could be a pretty good operator. I could play that game and I can go find people who already know how to clean and I can connect the dots there. That's one thing on the service side of things. Couple examples from my own family. So my dad is a retired chemical engineer. Now he occasionally gets calls from past colleagues asking him to bid on different consulting projects, and sometimes they're from his old employer, right? So see people going down that consulting path as a, as a quick win side hustle. You've built up this career's worth of expertise. There are other people who would love to tap into that. My wife, uh, or my aunt rather, is a travel agent. As her kind of post-retirement gig, although she's been doing it for a while because she loved to travel. Like, oh, I can get paid to put these big, you know, group tours together? Sure, you know. And she's excited that travel is finally returning after 2 years of calling everybody to tell them that their tour has been canceled or postponed because of COVID But, you know, so there's kind of a couple ways to go. And in her case, pairing an interest and passion with an actual business.

Yeah, so if we have some career in a certain field— accounting or engineering or whatever education, we can often find organizations that want to hire us back to do some consulting or training.

I was gonna say, one of my favorite consulting models to speak of is to piggyback on the popularity of, of an existing software product, and bonus points if you can be an early adopter. There's some nuance to that, but we even saw with a woman recently who started making demo videos on how to use Excel better, and I was like, this software has been around for 35 years or 45 years. It's like, it's not anything new. She's not an early adopter. It was created before she was born, but she tapped into a new audience and was able to sell actually an online course program, like full, like, here's how to be better at Excel. It's just going crazy with that stuff. But we've seen other people do similar with kind of hitching your cart to a particular software product and create— maybe you create YouTube content on that, like, here's how to do fill in the blank in this particular software. And you can introduce yourself, hey, I'm Nick, I'm a consultant on Fill in the blank, XYZ. And today we're gonna talk about how to do this in this. Like, that's a really cool side hustle because you're building this YouTube content, you're building up an audience there, and eventually you can monetize that. But people like my friend who was doing this saw that people would come to the video and say, that was really cool. Could you come in and do a training for our team on this? Like, mm-hmm. You didn't have to be in person. We'll pay you to do it remotely. And oh, okay. Oh, sure. How do I— how much do I charge for that? And it's kind of off to the races.

Yeah, repurposing that video or that, that instruction, that expertise, and not only on in a video but also in person, online, or for a company. Yeah. So are there other outfits out there that we can go to and, you know, say, hey, I've got this expertise in childhood education or whatever, um, they'll hire me, or what?

There is a specialized marketplace for just about everything these days. And so you've got a couple options. You can go find one of those and create your listing. And like, in the, like, caregiving space, like Care.com, for example, would be one place to kind of stick your flag in the sand, create your profile. Even tutoring, to a certain extent, there's, I think, Tutor.com or Wyzant.com, W-Y-Z-A-N-T dot com. Where you can create a profile and then people are already searching on these platforms to go find a tutor, go find a caregiver. And so that's a— that's one way to go. And then the other way to go is the full freelance solopreneur, like I'm gonna go create my own Google My Business listing, I'm going to create the video content, I'm going to put my name out there, I'm going to put, you know, flyers around the neighborhood, I'm going to do that side of the marketing game too.

So do you recommend people stay within their area of expertise or career, or should we shift 180 80 degrees and go in another direction? That's probably hard to answer, I'm sure.

Yeah, that's the beauty of it, is it's your gig. Easier starting out to say, well, I have some credibility, you know, I've got a couple decades of experience in this industry. And that's fine if you enjoyed it, if you thought it was fun, by all means. If you were kind of like, that's the last thing I would ever consider doing as a side hustle, like, that's probably a good sign to pivot to something else that may interest you.

Sure. Any other hot areas? What are some of the busier side hustles coming on online these days?

Well, I recently talked to a pair of retirees in the Orlando area, and their side hustle, or their kind of retirement business now— they have gone pretty serious into it— was just flipping products, buying low, selling high. And they would build relationships with people who were putting on estate sales and, you know, these local sellers groups. And they're trying to find— they describe their model as low inventory, high margin. So we're like, we're not interested in flipping, you know, thrift store dresses for, you know, $15 worth of profit. Like, we're interested in flipping forklifts and seats out of Mercedes Sprinter vans. And an inversion table was another example that they get, like, kind of bigger, bulkier stuff, but you make hundreds of dollars per item. And so it's like low volume, high margin. It's like, okay, that's really interesting side hustle. There's inventory, undervalued inventory, to go out locally and then open it up to a broader audience nationwide on eBay.

Wow, that seems pretty creative, pretty innovative. I mean, not entirely new, but not a typical kind of side gig.

Yeah.

Any others that come to mind? I mean, any other with some buzz on them?

There's a couple that's not in the typical demographic, but we've had people doing kind of like handyman, handy person services. Locally, talked about kind of local marketing ideas with him. One thing that was kind of cool was creating an afterschool program. So we had a, actually a high school dean outside of Chicago who was teaching chess, and he was like a former math teacher, and he had built up this local community of kids and parents that were interested in chess and started hosting these, you know, weekly classes. And then he started hosting them online, and then he started hiring other sub teachers underneath him, and It ended up creating this really valuable ecosystem where he started out training chess at this summer camp and doing this. He was like making $17 an hour at this summer camp. And he's like, well, what if I had 8 or 10 kids in one class? We cover the same kind of material. All of a sudden the hourly rate just explodes. So I like that as a way both to give back to the community and maybe you teach art classes or some other skill or interest of yours that could be of value to parents and kids.

So do you have kind of instruction on your website on how to go about becoming this freelancer, or are you mostly focused on here are the organizations that are hiring?

Yeah, my approach has mostly been to teach through case studies and pointing the mic at somebody else and letting them kind of explain their step-by-step. Well, how did you do this? You know, how'd you go about getting your first customers? I love that part of the equation. I think it's so much easier to go from 1 to 10 than it is from 0 to 1. So we spend a lot of time on that 0 to 1, like, wait a minute, how did you get— how do people find out about this? How much did you figure out how to charge? Like, how did that work? So spent a lot of time on that in the, in the podcast archives and in the blog archives.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So that's more helpful too. I can see that where people can go and actually follow the thinking process, the step somebody took, the entrepreneur took. Yeah, great. How about baking and making jams and jellies and things? Is that— does that work?

It can work, and it can work— I mean, maybe it's easier to start locally. Like, a friend of mine in, in Livermore, where we used to live, she ran So Here's the Dough, and it was like these custom, nicely decorated sugar cookies, and it was built over the practice of batch after batch after batch of repetition that she got really good at this. But she's— now she sells these cookies for like $50+ per dozen, and she sells out in minutes. The audience is almost entirely built of other moms on Instagram. And it was like, I can't ship, there's a limit because I have this cottage kitchen license, there's a limit on how much I can do per year. So her business has some natural ceilings to it, but that's perfectly fine for her because it's kind of this side hustle the kids are in on and they enjoy helping out with. And it's, you know, this is what mom does, she makes— she's a cookie machine.

Yeah, yeah. So locally, like at a swap meet or a local bake sale or communities, that's, that's one thing because you're not facing shipping problems and storage and all that.

So yeah, another fun one was a knife sharpening business where this was a military guy and he was looking for something to do with his hands and taught himself YouTube how to sharpen knives and practiced on friends and families first to make sure he wasn't screwing this up for any customers. But it's like, oh, this is actually kind of enjoyable and pretty lucrative work. And you're going out to the local— a lot of farm equipment, like you can sharpen your shears and your mower blades and all this stuff, but also residential customers. Every house in the town is a potential customer of his. And so he set up the little booth at the farmer's market and, you know, got the grinding wheel. I think, you know, so lots of different ways to get it done. I thought that was kind of a cool example. He's like, yeah, you know, make $30 an hour in my spare time. It's pretty fun.

Sure. How about the mobile ovens? Like, I've seen the people advertising their pizza— they bring their pizza ovens to parties and they can do that. There's probably some expenses in that too. I— that may be closer to a franchise too.

I'm not sure, but it's definitely a viable option. Like if, you know, a food truck or a cart like that, you know, the wood-fired pizza or something that pulls behind your truck, it's definitely lower startup costs than starting a restaurant. So there's— it's all on your— what's your scale of risk tolerance.

Sure. So when people go to your website, how would you orient them to make the most use of it?

That's a good question because it is overwhelming. Like I tried to put together at sidehustlenation.com/ideas this big old laundry list of ideas over there, no email opt-in required. And the goal there is to hopefully just get the creative juices flowing. You know, maybe you have 8 or 10 different browser tabs open at the end of that session, have to scroll down to the bottom and say, well, that sounds interesting. I'd like to learn more about that. And a lot of those will link to deeper content on the site, whether it's an interview, whether it's a blog post that explains that in a little bit more. And so It's designed to be like the tip of the iceberg in terms of your extra income research. And then you can dive deeper from there.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's a beautiful website. I've been there a few times. There's so much information, so many good ideas and suggestions. I think it's great. Yeah. So there really is a whole world of opportunity out there, isn't there? I mean, it's wide open. If, if it's not there yet, we can always create it and be the first. So a lot of freedom, a lot of flexibility, opportunity for greater income. There must be some downsides. To side hustles, right?

Well, downsides, you know, burning yourself out. Nobody needs a second job that they hate, especially in retirement where you're like, this is— I'm supposed to be enjoying this time, right? So, you know, hopefully you're approaching it from a nice-to-have versus a must-have, and that kind of position it in your head as an experiment. I'm gonna throw some proverbial spaghetti at the wall, ready to, you know, throw my hat back in the ring into the business world. Let's see what happens. Because I think that lessens the sting of the inevitable failures and obstacles and challenges that come along the way. Because I would hate for somebody to have the first thing that they try not work out and then think to themselves, well, it's just not meant to be. I guess I can't do this, right? It's almost unlikely to have that first thing that you try be a hit. And it's like, okay, I think about the scientist. If the proverbial test tube blows up in her face, it's not, oh my gosh, I'm a horrible scientist. I'm an abject failure. Okay, hypothesis disproved, onto the next thing. Right. And what can I, what can I learn from that?

Yeah. So a lot of that has to do with our attitudes about success and being willing to handle frustration and setbacks and not get thrown. I mean, I talk about that all the time when we have our setbacks and we get knocked down and we want to get back up, but at some point this is not a good idea, right? I mean, this isn't gonna fly and I've been at it for X number of months or years and we recognize it's time to find a new position.

Yeah, for me, it's the decision of when to quit or when to pause is kind of the combination of things. If I'm not seeing any traction and I've come to dread the work, those are kind of a red flag for me to say, okay, let's reevaluate these things. Friends on the podcast, you could turn around and ask the same question, like, in those early days, like, what kept you going when relatively speaking, nobody was tuning in, nobody was paying any attention, there was no revenue? And sometimes they would say, I would punt myself out a quit date, you know, maybe 3 months from now, maybe 6 months from now, and just, I'm not even gonna think about it until that quit date comes. And on the quit date, I have to ask myself, well, is this something I still enjoy doing? And then if so, yes, you know, continue and punt it out another 3 months. And I think it kind of gives yourself permission to not sweat it day to day, say like, look, I'm gonna follow this plan, I'm gonna execute on this. And I think it's also really important to have something that you look forward to when you wake up in the morning, looking forward to working on something. And like we talked about, moving that ball forward, seeing a sense of progress. That you— I mean, you've heard probably too many stories of people who, you know, work their 40-year career and then within 3 months of retirement they are either upset or they're dead because they just didn't have anything to live for anymore. So it's like, that's one— I'm not saying a side hustle has to be that thing. Like, my dad is become obsessed with golf in his retirement, and it's something that he can see progress toward. Like, oh, I, you know, I shot a 94 today, and, you know, that was better than 100 last week. So, I mean, you know, seeing improvement in other areas, but something that you can work towards, I think, is really— and look forward to, I think, is really important.

Yeah. Oh, that's really good. I'm glad you brought that up, because the sense of purpose and kind of a hobby or passion, whatever it is, we know that allows people to live longer for a variety of reasons. But we know the oldest of the old, the centenarians, are always showing that they have this kind of connection to some service or community or some, some hobby that allows them to wake up in the morning, as you say, put a smile on their face and say, I've got some things to do today.

That's right.

And I love the tip too about giving yourself that 2-month or maybe a 3-month deadline and put it out of your mind. And when that 3 months comes along, are you feeling the same way? Okay, maybe it's time to hang it up, but maybe not. Maybe you've had a couple little successes and you can maybe give yourself another 3 months, kick the can down the road a little bit more.

That's right. If it's something that you enjoy doing and it's not burning through your savings, then, you know, why not keep at it?

Yeah. It's that sense of purpose. I think that's really so critical. Makes a big difference. Now you've written a number of books, I think 6 or 7. What are these books about, Nick? Tell us.

Well, we talked a little bit about these, you know, mini marketplaces like the caregiving and the tutoring and, you know, all these. So one of the earlier books was called Buy Buttons, and that was the thesis of that. You know, if you want to make extra money, go where the cash is already flowing. Get in front of customers where they already expect to search for somebody selling what you sell, and they expect to spend money there. So that's the thesis of Buy Buttons. The most recent project was called 1K 100 Ways, which features 100 members of the Side Hustle Nation community on how they made an extra $1,000. In some cases, $1,000 a month or more. In some cases, you know, it might have taken 6 or 7 months to get to that threshold. But that one is told in parallel in the words of the community. You know, how did you come up with your idea? How did you find your first customers? What else has worked to market the business? If you had to start over, what would you do differently? What mistakes did you make along the way? And again, you can compare really some fun examples of different side businesses, page by page, in that, in that book.

So case studies, uh, $100K in— or $1K, did you say $1K? Yeah, $1K.

Yes, $1,000, 100 Ways. Kind of, okay, not the most elegant title, but I was— I had like registered the domain for it years and years ago, and the project was always on the back burner. But 1k100ways.com is the redirect there.

Is that the most recent book?

Yes.

Yeah, good. It's selling, I bet. I'm sure it's selling pretty well.

It does well, and it was really cool. Even more than like the author royalties, because truth be told, you know, that's a small piece of the pie, but it's a way for new people to get introduced to the community and this brand of entrepreneurship. And it was a really cool way to showcase a bunch of members of the community who maybe had been listening for years but never had, you know, reason to really connect. And so it was really fun to kind of compile these stories together and massage it into book format.

Yeah, that's great. You gave them a little audience to explain what they did and feel good about what they did. That's great. So you have a free 5-day $500 challenge. What is that about?

That's right. This is at sidehustlenation.com/500, and this is 5 days to add an extra $500 to your bottom line. We walk through some really quick ways, hopefully quick wins, to go ahead and get that done. Some of the businesses that we talked about today, whether it's just decluttering your garage, whether it's doing consumer research studies, but some of these quick side hustle wins, you can hopefully start to feel some positive momentum and say, all right, I'm in, what else you got?

So it's just a challenge, there's no investment in this, or what is it?

Yeah, that's right, totally just a free challenge to join in exchange for an email.

Okay, you're putting your name on the line and you're saying, this is what I'm going to do, and $500, and I'll show you how. Okay, I like that. Yeah, this is great. Any other opportunities that come to mind before we wrap up?

You just reminded me with the 1K 100 Ways book, one of my favorite stories in there is a high school teacher out of New York, and his business, his side business, is renting out portable hot tubs, which I never knew was a thing. My idea of a rental business was go buy a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house, and if you can hit 1% of the purchase price in monthly rent, then that's a good deal, like go for that. But his math penciled out quite a bit differently. He's like, okay, well, if I can buy these things used for $2,500, get them cleaned up, fixed if they need to be, and then I can rent them out for $500 a month, like, all of a sudden my breakeven math is so much, so much more interesting than traditional rental real estate. And we've seen from him doing— and he had a fleet of like 25 or 30 of these hot tubs.

Wow.

And I was like, Steve, where do you, where do you keep these things? They're just like stacked up in your garage? You got a storage unit? He's like, That's the crazy thing. They're all rented out. You know, maybe at one time I got 2 or 3, you know, I got 2 or 3 of these things like, you know, in my side yard, but other than that, they're always rented out. And I thought that was a really inspiring, unconventional rental business. And it made me think, well, what else? Yeah. What else is out there?

Yeah. Well, that's creative. I'm sure there's a lot of things. That's flipping hot tubs, right? I mean, yeah. Yeah. Buy low and renting them out. Yeah. That's great. That's great. So, we have run out of time. I wonder what you'd like our listeners to take away from today's conversation, Nick. What's the takeaway?

Just that there are a million and one opportunities out there and educate yourself on what's out there. Think of what you might like to do, what you might find enjoyment in, that you could find that sense of progress in. And at the end of the day, if there's a little bit of cash reward, cash incentive for doing so, then that is awesome as a good second act, a retirement gig. To have it be play money, hopefully, and have some fun with it because there's—

that's great advice. Great advice. Yeah, we'll come back in a minute to get your contact information, but before we wrap up, I just want to remind our listeners about a co-sponsor for our program, A Mighty Good Time. Hey, looking for ways to engage and stay active? Check out almightygoodtime.com. It's a one-stop shop for events and activities for those 15 and over. It's free to search and it's free to post. Amightygoodtime.com. And be sure to visit the Living to 100 Club website to sign up for our weekly podcast announcements and monthly newsletters. And while you're there, be sure to download a free copy of my 9 Tips for Living Longer. Lastly, pick up a copy of my book, Living Longer Is the New Normal, all about maintaining a positive mindset in all we do, on Amazon as an ebook or hard copy. We've been talking today with Nick Loper. Nick, for those who might want to contact you, what's the best way to do that?

Uh, nick@sidehustlenation.com is my email. The social media most active on is the Side Hustle Nation Facebook group. sidehustlenation.com/fb will redirect you over there. We're closing in on 50,000 members, really active community of people asking, answering questions, sharing their side hustles, sharing their wins, and just generally being supportive and cool place to hang out.

50,000. That's great. That's quite a following. Yeah, you've got some great content to share. I'm really glad you came on our podcast and, you know, we just touched the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure, but I really encourage our listeners to go to SideHustleNation.com. You'll see a wealth of information, ideas, and maybe it'll spark some of our own creativity. So thanks very much for being on our program and thanks to everyone for tuning in today. Hope to see you next time.

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