Side Hustles That Hustled Me
If at first, you don’t succeed, get hustled again. A friendly warning that side hustles aren’t always the cash generator they first appear to be.
Every time you go online you almost always find a post or a video claiming that the author knows the way to make extra income. Whether it is the Stock Market, Drop Shipping, podcasting, or something else along those lines, they are always rubbing it in your face that if they can do it so can you.
Eventually, I decided what the heck and decided to look into some of the side hustles that seem to make everyone money. This is not a rags to riches story like the ones you normally hear but a sober reminder that we should be careful before we blindly follow others' advice.
Hustle #1 Drop-Shipping
When I first heard of drop-shipping it sounded like an amazing concept. Pick a niche, find a winning product in that niche — Profit. But that’s all it was just a concept. There were a lot of ideas that came to mind but to execute it came with hidden expenses.
The idea of not needing a warehouse to store all my inventory was very appealing to me. The fact that I can just be a middleman for the seller (Usually located in China) to potential buyers at a mark-up sounded like some easy money to me. So now it was time to pick a niche, I tried to pick something that was in season but not already shoved down our throats.
The product that I decided to choose was no other than… a Christmas Door Handle. I know it’s pretty underwhelming now that hindsight is 20–20. Though at the time I thought I was on to greatness. It was a product that was selling very well on Alibaba and the margins were good. A pack of 3 door handles cost me $4.75, add another $4.17 for shipping and we get a total of $8.92.
Now I don’t know about you guys but I don’t have a big following on any social media platform (I am talking less than 1,000 followers total on the major platforms). Let alone anyone that would click and buy the product that I posted. This gave me only one option Advertising! So I chose to advertise on Facebook since I want my product to be seen by the most amount of people possible. Facebook has 2.5 Billion active monthly users according to Statista.
I am a college student in NYC and money is a little tight sometimes, but I managed to scrape together $500 to put towards advertising my product. Now with that being said, it was time to set up my ad campaigns and find the best demographic to put this advertisement in front of!
Needless to say, I tried to make the most out of my $500. I put $71 a day for 7 days. I know some people may say “$500 is nothing to start drop-shipping you need a way bigger ad budget”. While that may be true, this was an average experiment conducted by an average person that I am sure most of you can relate to. All in all, I got out-hustled by this side hustle for $500, that was not going to stop me though as I was on a mission to find a hustle that was better suited for me!
Hustle #2 Day Trading
Yeah, yeah I know the saying, 90% of day traders lose money. Being the naive 21-year old I thought “I didn’t even try day trading on the stock market so this statistic doesn’t apply to me”. Boy how wrong I was.
So like the previous side hustle, you needed some capital to work with. Also just like the previous hustle I am still a college student in NYC and I am still low on cash… just great. Despite all this, I managed to save up $1,000 by living off ramen noodles! I was determined to make this work, this was my ticket to financial freedom, Warren Buffett is about to ask me for advice. Now came the start of the trading week Monday. It was a regular week with no holiday insight to affect my trading. So I decided to play it risky as I was investing in penny stocks.
Penny stocks for those who don’t know is any stock that trades under $5 is considered a penny stock. These types of stocks are considered High Risk as they have a low market capitalization and they don’t have liquidity. Knowing this I decided to dive right in!
This is the first-ever trade I made. I found this stock by going on google and typing “Top moving penny stocks right now”. I know very professional, but I saw this stock had a ton of backing. I went on some forums about this stock and read around, next thing you know I am a proud owner of 100 shares of Yangtze!
Woo Hoo I made an extra $34.23! Honestly, this was the proof that the stock market works for me, I just made my weekly spending money within 24 hours. With the proof of concept, I decided to ramp things up into high gear and start investing higher amounts for higher rewards. “I mastered this,” I said to myself after one trade. Now let’s not go into every trade I made as that would take too long, but what follows is the complete and utter destruction of my funds.
Yup. This was it, this was all that was left of my $1,000 deposit. Heartbreak at its finest. At this point, I decided to pull the plug on side hustles altogether and decided to ask for more hours at the job I work at. It was kind of tough telling my parents I lost my investment of $1,000. Although the only one to blame was me, I didn’t know that due diligence was important, nor did I know how to read a candle chart. All that added up to one big mess. Would I do it again after a lot of studying? Absolutely. As Warren Buffett once said:
“The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.”
Conclusion
These two side hustles took around almost three months to complete (Not three months straight). In total, I suffered a $1,429 loss, not to mention the opportunity cost if I were to take the hours I put into these hustles and put them towards my job, or learning a high-income skill. The idea of making money online was so cool to me, instead, I have to face the reality of losing money online which sucks.
Would I recommend for you all to try this? I would say it depends, if you guys have some money that you are okay with losing give it a shot! DO YOUR RESEARCH! Don’t be like me and watch a couple of successful people show you what they did on YouTube, try to find the videos with a low view count that suffered losses.
It’s easy to be tricked by someone already successful that has been doing it for a while, but we come back down to earth when we see the average Joe failing at what we think is easy money. If you do decide to try these hustles I wish you good luck, let me know how it goes. If you already tried these hustles feel free to share your experience, I would love to hear how it went!
