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June 13, 2019How to Make Extra Income on the Side While You Grow Your Business
Owning a business is hard work. Budgeting your personal cash flow around your business’s expected revenue can be even harder. Oftentimes, entrepreneurs forfeit their owner’s draw or their paychecks to make sure the business has enough cash in its budget. Sure, you can employ your spouse or hire your children from your business. However, if your business is struggling or if you need to keep your resources in your business instead of in your pocket for a time, you may need fast cash. Thus, I want to give you four ways to make extra income on the side while you’re growing your business.
Podcast Time Index for “How To Help Your Family – Make Quick Income”:
- 00:51 – How To Help Your Family Make Quick Income
- 03:31 – Use Your Current Assets
- 05:37 – Manufacture a Product
- 07:58 – Use Your Skills in Your Spare Time
- 09:36 – Create a Resale Environment
- 11:05 – Summary
4 Ways to Make Extra Income
#1 – Use Your Current Assets
The first thing you can do to make extra money is to use your assets. I talked about renting your house to your business in lines with IRC 280A(g), but you can also rent your house while you’re away on business trips or vacations. Perhaps, you use a company like Vacation Rentals by Owner (VRBO) or Airbnb to help you rent your house.
Similarly, maybe you have a motor home or a boat that’s just sitting in your carport or driveway. You probably don’t use them every weekend. Why don’t you let somebody rent your RV or your boat? You provide the vehicle, and they’ll provide the fuel.
Maybe you have a piece of property or raw land. Is it good hunting land? Can you collect rent from people who want to hunt on your land? Can you create a cheap tourist attraction on the land, or is there a feature in the land that people would pay money to see? Does your property overlook the lake? Perhaps you can create a private camping area on your land that people would pay to use.
Essentially, what I’m trying to show you is that you might have an asset that’s not being utilized right now. It’s something you’ve already paid for that you can rent out or that can create rental income for you. I’ve even seen places online where you can rent your power tools or tractors to others while you’re not using them. So, get creative. You could rent your assets and turn it into quick cash.
#2 – Manufacture a Product
Another thing you can do to make quick income while you’re growing your business is to manufacture a product. You can use a hobby you, your spouse, or your children love and turn it into a side business. Burt’s Bees® actually started that way. It started as a hobby and went big. So, theoretically, you could do that.
Last year, my little girl wanted to go to New York on a mission trip with our church. I wanted her to go, but I also wanted her to realize what an expense a trip like that was to our family. Therefore, I asked her to raise the money for the trip herself. Well, she loves to make bath bombs, so she started making them and selling them to others. We helped her buy the products, and she manufactured them. Then, we went with her to sell them at county fairs and craft fairs. She ended up making over $2,000 in gross sales, and her net income was enough to pay for her trip and leave her money left over!
Maybe your family likes to do things like that. You could manufacture and sell. So that’s an idea you could bring to fruition to make a quick buck.
#3 – Use Your Skills in Your Spare Time
Third, you could use your skills in your spare time. Well, if you’re working in your business 70, 80, 90 hours a week, maybe your spouse or your kids could use their skills. One of the biggest things the business world uses right now is virtual assistants. Maybe your spouse can be a virtual assistant. Maybe he or she could write a blog or transcribe for somebody. Can you split wood? Can you or your son cut grass? Maybe your spouse or children could tutor, pet sit, or babysit.
I remember my parents teaching us kids the value of entrepreneurship in their spare time. They both worked full time, but when they were not at work, they drove us around to cut grass and bring in some extra income to our family. Maybe you could do that. Who knows… It could turn into your kids’ first business like it did for my brother and me.
#4 – Create a Resale Environment
Finally, you could buy and sell. My wife loves to buy. She hates to resell. However, she could do it (Just don’t tell her I told you this!). She finds lots of items at yard sales and pays next to nothing for them. If she wanted to, she could put those items on Facebook Marketplace or on Craigslist and sell them for more than she paid for them.
Maybe your spouse is an avid couponer, and you buy retail items for next to nothing. You could resale those items under retail prices and still make more money than you paid for them. I’ve even seen people buy wholesale items in bulk from other countries and resale them on FaceBook pages through buy groups. Maybe that’s for you and your family. Maybe it’s not.
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Helping Make Ends Meet
Maybe you’re a business owner who’s been in business 15, 20, 30 years now, and you’re in a slump. Or maybe you’ve been in business a/ short period of time, and you’re trying to figure out how to get your feet off the ground. Friends, I was with you. Whenever I entered the financial world, I was studying for tests, and my wife was making minimum wage working for a charity. I’m not ashamed to tell you that I went to work picking up cigarette butts for a landscaping company. I did whatever it took to make extra income and increase cash flow in our lives. You may need to do the same. Do whatever you have to do to secure your family’s future.