My Side Hustle is making over $82 per hour
I’ve been doing a side hustle for a while now. I started selling things on Ebay back in 1998, mostly as a way to get a bit more money from the things I no longer wanted. It was a better return than putting in the time and effort of a rummage sale and hoping to get 50 cents per item.
But over the years I’ve added more and more items that I’ve found at resale shops, liquidations, auctions and rummage sales to my online selling, and it’s certainly added to the profits.
I have to admit that I haven’t been the best at record keeping with online selling over the years. In fact, until 2015 I didn’t keep any records of what I was selling. For many years, Ebay was only to get rid of excess items. It wasn’t until 2015 that I even realized that what I was doing was generating an income. I had always thought of it as a little hobby that was interesting.
Now, we call it a side hustle.
But even though I’ve changed my mindset on “what” this is, I haven’t really changed the effort that I’ve been putting into it. And while I’ve started to keep track of my profit and loss, I haven’t really tracked my hours that go along with this side hustle.
I estimate that I probably put about an hour per week into online selling. Between Ebay, Facebook Marketplace, Amazon Seller and Craigslist, I do a bare minimum to put listings up and fulfill them. Some weeks I don’t do anything at all (sometimes for an entire month), and some weeks I might put in 5 hours. In any case, it’s not a lot of time, and it’s not consistent.
So taking my sales and profit each year since 2015, and putting in about 52 hours a year, the breakdown looks like this:
Gross is before expenses, like cost of goods and shipping costs. Net is after those costs are removed.
This does not put any value on my time as a cost.
Also, I should note that I didn’t put in 52 hours in 2015, in fact it was far less. And I may have gone over 52 hours in one or more of those years. It’s an estimate only.
This is only an accounting exercise that I did over my lunch hour at my day job.
The best part of this, though, is when I told it to my significant other.
“Honey, guess how much I made over the last seven years selling online.”
“I don’t know. A thousand dollars?” she replied.
“Well,” said I, “it was a bit more than that. I took in almost $50,000 and the profit was over $25,000.”
Silence from her.
“In fact, if I averaged the hours I put into it, I’m making over $82 per hour.”
Pause.
Said she, “Why don’t you do more of that.”
She didn’t say it as a question. It was a statement.
Silence from me.
Pause.
“Well…” I said.
Pause.
And I thought to myself, “Why don’t I do that?”
