Hi Y'all,
I am a self-employed professional.
First the good news: I have a lot of self-determination and autonomy, and can run my business from home and a rent-a-cube. I have been able to travel and take my work with me. It's low overhead. It's cyclical, meaning sometimes I put in tons of hours, followed by a more relaxed phase.
Now the griping: It's stressful. The amount of stress involved causes me to limit the amount of work I take on, which limits my income. This is kind of a quality problem; I do pretty well. But, I sometimes think I'd like to eventually phase out of this super stressful work into something less stressful before hitting FI. I am about halfway there. I have been having trouble finding a suitable replacement for my income, so I just keep plugging away. I've accepted that my best shot at making enough money to hit FI is to keep doing what I'm doing. But, I am not really able to do any more than I already do in a given week or year, so if I want to hit FI faster, I need a side hustle.
I have explored things like creating and selling online educational courses through a blog, and just found that stuff triggers my "ick, scammy spam" reflex way too much. (When something kinda reminds me of Trump University, do I want to be selling it? Aw, hell no.) I've thought about personal coaching, but after a long day of dealing with people and their problems, bless them, the last thing you want to do is deal with more people and their problems. I have attempted to promote a blog, but found that even a little social media involvement on my part presented a lot of conflicts with my main business, and actually took away from the energy I had for the business that was making more money. I have thought about selling handcrafted items, but based on multiple past experiences doing this, it's quite a bit of labor for a relatively small return. I have looked at buying a rental house and crunched a lot of numbers, but my market is in a ridiculous bubble phase and it just doesn't make any sense right now. I have to be patient on that one. I do a little contract work on the side, but it has been hard to find and make it consistent.
So my question is: During the lulls, I would like to do some kind of non-spammy, non-scammy, digital and portable side hustle to make more money. What have I not considered? Where do I look? Or, should I just resign myself to a less accelerated path to the FI number, and learn to more deeply appreciate my free time while I wait for the real estate market to chill out?
