What’s up you guys, let me start by throwing up a screenshot of my gross profit back when I first started this side hustle.
The bottom number is where you can see around 419k and some change. 2018 is when I first started this side hustle and made about 485K my very first year, but PayPal doesn’t let me go that far back now, so I just grabbed the oldest one I could get.
This is meant to encourage and motivate anyone who may be looking to make money with a side hustle. This is no way meant to brag or make it seem like it’s easy making this amount of money.
I grew up living in a motel in a bad area at a young age, then had to move in with my aunt and uncle after my dad passed away, then to an apartment and later in life my childhood home was foreclosed on.
So, I didn’t come from money, and making this amount of money was beyond what I knew was possible, because of how much we struggled growing up. I want you to know that no matter where you are in your life, that the best days are in front of you.
A side hustle is a great way to make money and can even become your main income source if you take it seriously enough.
So here’s how I turned $800 into 420K in one year
Table of Contents (Click to expand)
How it started my side hustle
So, it all started when I was working on a house flip that I lost a lot of money on. The house sat on the market for almost 9 months, and we had a hard money loan on it, so we were paying on the borrowed money with high interest.
We ultimately had to accept a low offer and sold for a loss. Now at this point I had no money and a failed side hustle.
I needed to make money quickly because at this point my wife was pregnant with our second baby girl Ryann and I needed to find a way to make money fast! So, I started thinking about what I could sell to get some cash.
Now if you are subscribed to my channel and follow my videos than you may know this story already, but for those of you who don’t, I started looking around the house and found a old camera (from a failed YouTube channel that I started back in the day, for the house flips that I was doing, which we all know now how that played out) and my Adam A7 speakers, from another failed attempt to follow my passion.
I sold it online for $800 total and took the cash and found this super sketchy guy on craigslist who had 4 speakers that I bought for $200 each and sold them for $400 each making me $1600.
I started from 0$ and now had $1600 in my account.
This is when I thought to myself, what if I just kept doing this and see how far I could take it in a year. So I kept buying anything and everything that I could sell for more.
I went and analyzed my monthly expenses every month, and cut out a lot of things, and invested all the excess capital from that as well.
After about 6 months I still didn’t take a cent of any of the profits and went and got a high interest loan and bought more stuff to sell online. I slowly paid the loan back over the year and at the very end when I ran my numbers on PayPal, I had grossed half a million dollars.
This is a side hustle that anyone can do, my wife and I would grab some coffee and go garage sale and thrift store hunting on the weekends. It was honestly kind of fun.
You don’t have to go to the extreme like I did, where I dedicated every single day to it, but you could start small and easily make an extra $1000 a month doing this.
There are a few things that I had to do to get to the point where I was making that kind of money.
First I had to increase the amount of excess money that we keep each month. So, this is where you could become frugal and cut expenses. I’m not going to go too deep into this but ultimately you need excess money so that you can leverage it to make you… more money.
Once you accomplish this, you need to then increase earned income or the amount of money coming in. This is where you could start and side hustle that you feel is a good fit for your lifestyle.
I say that because we are all in different seasons in our lives and you need to pick what is best for you. You could start gigs on Fiverr, become a notary, flip things on eBay like I did or any side hustle where you can quickly get some cash coming in.
If you are in desperate need of cash right now then I would stay away from the side hustles that may take longer for you to see money coming in, like blogging or starting a YouTube channel.
These can be great side hustles, but when you need money asap, you must consider which side hustle could get you results faster.
In my scenario I needed money fast because my wife was pregnant and we needed the money. Once you have the side hustle making you money consistently then you can start your dream business or side hustle that may take longer. And that’s ok because we play the long game to truly transform our finances.
How can I start a reselling side hustle?
Ok back to the flipping things for more. Before you can buy stuff to sell on eBay, Facebook, amazon or online in general, you must have a sense for what price you can sell your products for.
This requires market research, and it doesn’t matter what people have it listed for, it matters what the market is willing to pay for it.
So let me show you how this is done in case you want to know or try it out yourself.
Hope over to the eBay app and enter the name of the item.
This is the item that you are thinking about flipping that you may have found at a local garage sale, and you want to make sure you buy it at a good price so that you can sell it for a profit.
Lets do it on a mobile app because if you’re out and looking for stuff to buy you can easily look it up on your phone.
After you type the name of the item you are looking for, go to the top right filter and scroll down where you see, show more, click that.
Now continue to scroll down and select (Sold Items), click back to the screen and you will see the green font for the prices that each of the items sold for.
Remember to factor the sold prices, the condition of the item, the completeness, and the amount that particular item sold versus how many active listings are currently up. This will help you identify demand.
Also factor in the cost of shipping and supplies into your offer.
Once you and the seller agree on a price you take it home, clean it up, take nice but realistic pictures and list it at a competitive price so that it sells fast.
Rinse and repeat.
Ready…Set…GO!
It’s amazing how much you can make by just putting in the work.
After I did this for a couple years, I started funneling the profits into other startups and business ideas that I wanted to start. Some of them failed and some of them worked.
That’s something important to walk away with from this article. It doesn’t matter how many times you fail, eventually you will win. You only need one yes to change your life, so continue to work at your side hustle and if that one doesn’t work out, then bounce back and try again.
Most of the side hustles you hear about, can make you money, some just will require more patience and a longer timeline. They can become your main source of income and can even replace your 9 to 5.
This will ultimately come down to you and what you want out of it. My story is not unique, there are some of you experiencing and facing challenges I’ve never had to face. I want to encourage each of you to use this side hustle or any side hustle you relate to and give it a try and see if you can create something special out of it.
