7 Hassle-Free Side Hustle Ideas For Summer Fun Funds
Managing fun and funds on a single income can feel like a challenging feat. Having multiple sources of income comes in handy when you want to pay down debt or splurge on trips and expenses without making a dent in your account for your real-life necessities.
That's where side hustles come in, and while it's great to have a hustle you love, there are still ways you can gain financial stability while flexing your skills or time to make room for your passion projects.
1.Uber
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While reports on Uber as a lucrative full-time job is questionable (an average of 60 rides a week = $50,000 annually), it's still one of the easiest and most accessible side hustles if you have a car. Uber automatically takes 25% of drivers' fares, so to make the most of your coin, drive in high traffic areas during peak times, or in areas where big events are taking place.
2.DoorDash
If you like the idea of driving around and making your own hours but don't necessarily want to chauffeur people, then DoorDash may be for you. With a driver's license and valid insurance, you can become a "Dasher" and deliver food from restaurants to the customer's doorsteps. DoorDash offers a flat payment for every delivery made on a weekly basis. Each order has a guaranteed minimum based on driving distance, if the order is placed in person, wait time, the size of order, traffic, parking and more.
3.Fiverr
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Fiverr is a freelancing website that lets you monetize off of just about any online freelance skills, from graphic design to recording voice overs. Create a profile of your service and list the prices and services you offer from basic to premium. Hundreds of people are already on Fiverr, so make your services stand out you'll have to put work into creating a search engine-friendly profile.
4.Virtual Assistant
Working as a virtual assistant is a great option if you're in between careers and want something that can be done at home while you juggle other projects. Virtual assistant jobs are typically done as part-time, contractual work and can vary in function from administrative to bookkeeping, transcribing and more. You can find jobs on Belay Solutions, Remote.Co and Fancy Hands.
5.Amazon Services and Amazon Flex
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Are you a licensed professional or business owner and want to sell your services? Amazon Services helps to put your work out there and connects your services to their customers located in your area. No, Amazon will not promote your work as you the brand/business, but when customers in your area search for products that are related to your service, your service will appear with related products.
Typically this is for services like an assemblyman, handyman and home cleaning services as these are sought after services for most purchases like TVs and furniture. But Amazon does allow you to submit other profession services like health and beauty services and event services.
Another Amazon side hustle in the works is Amazon Flex, a package delivery service that lets you up packages from an Amazon delivery station and deliver to customers. It is currently available in select locations, but if your region is not listed, you can include it to hear of when the service will be offered in your area.
6.Paid Surveys
This is an easy way to stack coins while on your lunch break or during your down time. Paid surveys on sites like Survey Junkie are based on different values. Typically, the longer the survey, the more points you rack up. When you earn enough points, you can then cash out your rewards through gift cards or actual cash.
The major key is answering questions thoughtfully to ensure you actually get points. If your answers aren't of value, then you may not receive any.
7.Electric Scooter Charging
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Bird electric scooters and Lime scooters are another form of ridesharing and are in many major cities. You can make money simply from charging a scooter. By downloading the Bird or Lime app, you can locate a scooter that needs to be charged on the app map, unlock the scooter to pick it up and take it home, charge it and return it to the directed drop off location. The catch is, the scooters need to be dropped off in the mornings, just in time for commuters to use them. The base rate of scooters is $5.00 each, but increases based on how difficult it is to reach a scooter (jumping over a fence, in an odd area etc.) and can go up to $25 each. This is a bit of grunt work, but can be worthwhile considering there's little brain work needed.
What side hustle are you working on this summer?
Want more stories like this? Sign up for our newsletter here and check out the related reads below:
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I Spent An Hour On My Side Hustle Every Day For A Month
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Beyond Burnout: Nicole Walters' Blueprint For Achieving Career Success On Your Own Terms
Nicole Walters has always been known for two things: her ambition and her ability to recognize when life’s challenges can also double as an inspiring, lucrative brand.
This was first evident more than a decade ago when she quit her job as the corporate executive of a Fortune 500 company during a Periscope livestream. “I’m not sure if there’s an alignment of [our] future trajectory. I’m going to work for myself. I'm promoting myself to work for myself,” she said at the time before flashing a smile at the viewing audience. As she resigned on camera, a constant stream of encouraging messages floated upwards on the screen.
By 2021, she’d fashioned her work as a corporate consultant and her personal life with her husband and three adopted daughters into a reality show, She’s The Boss, for USA Network. This year, she released the New York Times bestselling memoir Nothing Is Missing, written as she was in the process of getting a divorce and dealing with her eldest daughter’s struggles with substance use.
Convinced that there’s no way the 39-year-old has achieved all of this without intentional strategic planning, I asked her about it when we spoke less than a week before Christmas. I’d seen videos on social media of her working on 2024 planning for other brands, and I wanted to know what that looked like following her own year of success.
She listed a number of goals, including ensuring that the projects she takes on in the new year align with her identity “as a Black woman, as an African woman, as a mother, as someone who has lived a [rebuilding] season and is now trying to live boldly and entirely as themselves.” But, I was shocked by how much of her business planning also prioritized rest.
Despite the bestselling book, a self-titled podcast, and working with numerous corporations, Walters said she’s been taking Fridays off. This year, she doesn’t want to work on Mondays, either.
“A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement,” she said, noting that she’ll check in with herself around March to see how successful this plan has been. The goal, Walters said, is to only be working on Tuesdays and Thursdays by sometime in 2025. “It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to have happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change.”
"A lot of us think we work hard until retirement hits. I want to progress towards retirement... It is intentionally building out what I know I would like to happen and not waiting for exhaustion to be the trigger of change."
Walters said the decision to progressively work less was partially in response to her previously held notions about her career, especially as an entrepreneur. “When I first started, I thought burnout was a part of it,” she said. “What I didn’t realize is that even if you’re able to bounce out of burnout or get back to it, there’s a cumulative impact on your body. If you think of your body as a tree and every time you go through burnout, you are taking a hack out of your trunk, yes, that trunk will heal over, and the tree will continue to grow, but it doesn't mean that you don’t have a weakened stem.”
But, the desire for increased rest was also in response to the major shifts that occurred three years ago when she was experiencing major changes in her family and realized her metaphorical tree was “bending all the way over.”
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“One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity,” she added. “That is some language that I think is just now starting to really get unpacked.” In recent years, there’s been an increased awareness of achieving balance in life, with Tricia Hersey’s “The Nap Ministry” gaining attention based on the idea that rest, especially for Black women, is a form of resistance. Even online phrases such as “soft life” and “quiet quitting” have hinted at a cultural shift in prioritizing leisure over professional ambition.
"One of the things we have to recognize, especially as Black women, is that there is this engrained, societal, systemic notion that our worth is built around our productivity."
If companies are lining up to consult with Walters about their brands and products, then women have been looking to her for guidance on starting over since she invited them to livestream her resignation 12 years ago. As viewers continue to demand more from content creators in the form of intimate, personal details, Walters has navigated her personal brand with a sense of transparency without oversharing the vulnerable details about her life, especially when it comes to her family.
The entrepreneur said she’d been approached to write a book for several years and was initially convinced she was finally ready to write one about business. “I started to do that, and then I went through my divorce. When that happened, I said, why would I write a book telling people to get the life that I have when I’m not sure about the life that I have,” she said.
Instead, she decided to write Nothing Is Missing and provide a closer look at her life, starting with being born to immigrant Ghanaian parents (“You need to know my childhood to know why I’m passionate about entrepreneurship.”) through the adoption of her three daughters and eventual divorce. Despite her desire to share, however, she said she felt protective of the privacy of her family, including her ex-husband.
When discussing this with me, Walters said she was reminded of a lesson she learned from actress Kerry Washington, who released her own memoir, Thicker Than Water, just a week before Walters’ book release. Washington’s memoir grapples with family secrets, too, specifically the fact that she was conceived using a sperm donor and didn’t learn about it until she was already a successful TV star. While Washington reflects on how the decision and subsequent deception impacted her, she’s also careful to hold space for her parents’ experiences, too. “A lot of things she said was that she had to recognize where she was the supporting character and where she was the main character,” Walter said.
This is something Walter worked to do in Nothing Is Missing when discussing her daughter’s struggles with addiction. “I was very intentional about making sure that I did not reveal more than what was required,” she said. “If I say something about someone’s addiction, I don’t need to go into the list of the substances they used, how they used them, what I found. [I don’t need to] walk into a room and paint a picture of what it looked like for people to understand.”
Walters said some of the most vulnerable moments in the book barely made a ripple once it was released. She was extremely nervous to write about getting an abortion, she said. But no one has asked her about this in the months since the book was released. Instead, people have been more interested in quirkier revelations, such as the fact that she once appeared on Wheel of Fortune.
“I have bared my soul about this thing I went through in my youth that has changed me for people, and people are like, ‘So how heavy was the wheel when you spun it?’” she said, chuckling. “It just goes to show that people never worry about the thing that you worry about.”
With the success of Nothing Is Missing, Walters said she still isn’t planning to release a business book at the moment. But, as she navigates parenting a teenager and two adult children while also navigating a relationship with her new fiancé, Walters said she believes she has at least one or two more books to write about her personal journey. “There is sort of an arc of where my life has gone that I know I’ve got something more to say about this that I think is important, relevant and necessary,” she said.
In just three years, Walters’ life has undergone a major transformation. There’s no telling what the next three years will have in store for her, but it seems likely she’ll retain an inspired audience wherever life takes her.
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My mother says that the reason why she didn’t send us to the dentist as consistently as she should have was because she had her own fear of seeing them. Hmph. I think that her stuff ended up getting projected onto me because if there is one thing that I loathe, it’s making a dental appointment. Still, it really is an unnecessary evil, especially as you age, because the reality is that, over time, enamel gets thinner, teeth become weaker, and all kinds of oral-issue-hell can break loose if you’re not proactive about your oral health needs.
Okay, but what do you do if you know that you’ve been a bit more negligent when it comes to your teeth than you care to admit? Are there proven, all-natural things that you can do to restore your enamel, heal your cavities, and even remineralize your teeth?
Listen, you need to see your dentist on an annual basis; there’s no way around that. At the same time, the dental industry is still a business, so it’s important you know that there are things that you can do to make seeing your dentist less painful when it comes to your mouth and your wallet.
Read on for 10 ways that you can get your teeth back into the condition that you’d like with a bit of know-how, patience, and consistency.
1. Eat Calcium-Enriched Foods
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Something that you probably learned in elementary school is that if you want your teeth to remain healthy and strong, you need to get some calcium into your diet. However, what you may not be aware of is the fact that calcium is a nutrient that your body does not naturally produce, which is why you have to be proactive and intentional about getting it into your diet.
Otherwise, not only could the enamel of your teeth weaken, but you could also end up experiencing muscle aches and cramps, fatigue, brittle nails, extreme PMS, and depression symptoms. That’s why it’s a good idea to consume foods that are rich in calcium, like lentils, dark leafy greens, canned salmon (salmon croquettes, anyone?), yogurt, cheese, and chia seeds.
2. Consume Some Bone Broth Too
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Another food that I’ve been getting into more and more often over the past several years is bone broth. It’s pretty much what it sounds like broth made from meat bones that have simmered for many hours.
Some of the benefits that come from bone broth include its ability to promote gut health, boost immunity, reduce joint stiffness, and even promote a good night’s rest. Since bone broth also helps your system to produce more collagen and collagen not only fights signs of aging but also helps to prevent tooth decay — if you’ve never tried bone broth before, now is just as good a time as any, right?
By the way, if you happen to be vegan, there are alternative recipes like mushroom bone broth that you can try. One of them is here.
3. Drink Mineral-Rich Water
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If you’re looking for the kind of water that can help lower your blood pressure, prevent heart disease, and relieve constipation, mineral water can make that happen for you. Between the natural carbonation that it oftentimes provides (because mineral water typically comes from springs) and the minerals like calcium and fluoride that are in it, I’m pretty sure you get how it can help with your overall oral health and well-being.
In fact, there are studies to support that women who drink mineral water on a fairly consistent basis end up with higher bone mass density than those who don’t. Just something to think about next time you’re at the grocery store, and you’re considering picking up some sort of bottled water. Mineral water is beneficial on a few levels.
4. Also, Drink Juice Through a Straw
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Acids and teeth enamel are not exactly the best of friends — and that’s putting it mildly. The reality is that a lot of people end up experiencing tooth decay because they underestimate what the acidic levels of soda, coffee, and even juice can do to their teeth over time. Now, no one is saying that you should only drink water for the rest of your life. However, if you do want to get a leg up on keeping your enamel nice and strong, try to drink acidic stuff through a straw as much as possible. It’s a small move that can make a big difference over time.
5. Take a Vitamin D Supplement
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Vitamin D is essential to your overall health and well-being for a few different reasons and on a few different levels. It supports your immune system. It helps to regulate your moods. Studies reveal that those who struggle with weight loss tend to have less vitamin D in their system than they should. During cold and flu season, it can reduce your chances of coming down with either one. And as you probably already know, vitamin D helps to keep your bones healthy — as well as your teeth.
To take it a step further, the dentin that helps to support your teeth’s enamel can sometimes repair itself if you’ve got enough vitamin D in your body. So, since we, as Black women, tend to have a lower amount of vitamin D in our system than other demographics, aside from being intentional about eating vitamin D-rich foods like mushrooms, eggs, and fatty fish, it can never hurt to take a vitamin D supplement on the side too.
6. Brush with “Artificial Enamel”
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As far as toothpaste goes, the kind that seems to be gaining quite a bit of traction these days has the technical name of “biomimetic hydroxyapatite.” Its nickname? Artificial enamel. From what I’ve briefly read and researched, artificial enamel is slowly yet surely becoming a favorite over fluoride because it is able to “mimic” enamel which helps with strengthening weak teeth. If you’re interested in giving this type of toothpaste a shot, a brand that appears to be pretty well-liked on Amazon is Bioniq. You can look more into it here.
7. Or DIY a Remineralizing Toothpaste
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Your teeth have minerals like calcium and phosphate in them. However, as you eat and drink throughout the day and if you don’t take care of your teeth daily, that can cause your teeth to lose minerals — and that can ultimately lead to weakened enamel and tooth decay. That’s the bad news. The good news is you can actually remineralize your teeth. No, it doesn’t happen overnight, yet it can indeed happen with the help of eating less sugar, chewing more gum (saliva carries some of the minerals that your teeth need), drinking more water (to remove acid from your teeth), brushing and flossing consistently — and using a homemade remineralizing toothpaste. Two recipes that are relatively simple to follow are found here and here.
8. Do Some Oil Pulling
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If you’re familiar with the term “oil pulling,” yet you’ve always wondered where it came from, it’s most popular in Ayurvedic medicine. Basically, what you do is put some oil in your mouth and swish it around in order to “pull out toxins” from your teeth. Although coconut is probably the most popular oil that’s used, sesame, peppermint, and extra virgin olive oil are good options, too.
Simply put a teaspoon of the oil of your choice into your mouth and swish it around for 10-20 minutes. Then rinse. Even though you’ve been using an oil, you’ll be amazed by how squeaky clean your teeth feel once you are done with the oil pulling process.
9. Apply a Mixture of Pure Aloe Vera Gel and Tea Tree Oil
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Gingivitis is basically a common and mild form of gum disease. When plaque and tartar build-up get onto the teeth and gumline, it can lead to swollen and bleeding gums, bad breath, and gums that are darker than usual. That said, even though tea tree oil isn’t pleasing to the taste buds by any stretch, research reveals that if you use tea tree oil as a main ingredient for a DIY mouthwash (don’t swallow it), it is pretty darn effective at getting rid of gingivitis.
As far as aloe vera gel goes, it might be surprising to know that studies indicate that it contains properties that actually help to prevent the bacteria that lead to tooth decay from growing. That’s why it would make all the sense in the world that if you add a drop of tea tree oil to a teaspoon of 100 percent aloe vera gel and then apply it to your gum line, it could help to heal your gums and prevent gingivitis from increasing in your mouth.
10. Snack on Some Licorice Root
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It might not be something that you hear about every day, but listen here: if you’ve got digestive issues, get yourself some licorice root. Trying to get over a bacterial or viral infection, get yourself some licorice root. Menopause driving you up the wall, yep — licorice root to the rescue. Also, look into it if you’re trying to prevent or heal an ulcer or if you want to get some of your weight down.
As far as your oral health goes, licorice root is a wonder because its potent antioxidant, antimicrobial, and anti-inflammatory properties can help to reduce acid reflux (which can also play a role in damaging tooth enamel) as well as keep cavities from forming in the first place. So, take it in supplement form, sip on some licorice root tea, and suck on some licorice root sticks. It’s just one more all-natural way to get your teeth back into superior shape and condition. Enjoy!
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