Chelsea, and special guest Stephanie Georgopulos, teach you how to earn extra money with a proper side hustle. Want to start a side hustle, but not sure what to do? This video will give you lots of ideas:
Hi i’m chelsea of the financial diet and with me is friend former colleague writer editor curator copywriter and everything extraordinaire stephanie georgopoulos hi hi and today we’re going to talk about something that lauren and i had already mentioned was one of the big steps to having the freedom to quit your day job follow your dreams and really create your own
Financial life and that is having side hustles so for us that means anything from having side jobs outside of your nine-to-five or having you know a whole freelance career where everything’s just a little bit of a side job and i’ve known stephanie a long time and the entire time i’ve known her she’s had about 75 side jobs at any given time and now she’s a freelance
Full-time after leaving her job in copywriting earlier this year so i thought she would be the perfect person to ask about kind of how to make it happen in your own career so how did you first get into writing / editing i was working at a hair salon and my roommate was working for this woman who owned her own pr company then she got pregnant and she couldn’t come
Into the office anymore and she needed a job and she could do in between puking and do from bed so she started a blog and it was a lifestyle blog so after a couple months i asked if i couldn’t start contributing for free and they allowed me to and i got just a ton of beauty products a ton of alcohol i got trips to las vegas and atlantic city so i wasn’t making money
But i was having like the sort of double life that afforded me a lot of things that i would have never been able to pay for with my hair salon job so since that time you’ve obviously gotten jobs as a as a professional full-time writer copywriter have you always had side jobs since then when i first graduated from college i was working at a thrift store the hair
Salon i was a shop girl a couple of times i also got another little blog gig for this sex and relationship site i got to get on a lot of press lists and get like free vibrators and stuff like that but i found a job doing tech freelance writing for the next one i had no idea what i was doing but i just pretended i did and i went interviewed people and wrote pieces
About like who sucked at twitter i was submitting articles for free to thought catalog and i eventually got hired there part-time so at that time i had no real hustle and then i got hired full-time for i thought catalog and then i wasn’t really allowed to freelance anywhere else and during that time i ended up doing social media for my friend who owned restaurants
And i also started doing copywriting for chevy and that was the first time that i realized you could make can you curse oh yeah you can make a shitload of money doing copywriting i think we should clarify this cause to clarify that i got her that job she did i am the hustle in that story yeah so very once i realized that i was kind of like where else can i do this
For i’m just going to do this all the time i talked to my friend who worked at gawker in advertising and i met with his head of content and she hired me i worked at gawker for two years so at the same time i had reached out to medium.com just submitting one article when the site was still invite-only and they wrote back and were like do you actually want to edit
A collection and i was like yes i do i basically am just living off of side hustles at this point there’s a million side hustles and i’m working on right now and what’s interesting to me is that i think that a lot of people look at it is like you get your job in the field and then you stop pursuing any side projects but i know that like for you it’s always been
Something that you’ve done like even when you had like a quote/unquote dream job in the field you were still like working on still other projects yeah i mean i don’t believe that you should just be using your skills in one way for eight hours a day and then you don’t do anything else because i think that it’s really limiting and if anything happens to that job
You don’t have any connections you just been sitting at your desk for like three years not meeting people not getting your name out there not expanding your skills like you can take one skill that you have like writing for example and parlay that into you know a million different directions you can learn how to edit you can learn how to copyright you can you can
Do a lot of different things but not if you’re just doing your one job all the time well i don’t feel comfortable if i have one job because what if that job goes away what did the company folds what if i just hate it and i haven’t set something up so i always try to have like two or three things set up that i can invest more time in a point you make too because
You say like just because you do one job and you’re really good at it doesn’t mean you might not get laid off the company might not have financial problems like it’s very scary to have all your eggs in one basket so you kind of have like a timeline where it’s like you have like one job that overlaps with another job and then that job kind of comes in more focus and
Then another job it’s like very interesting that way and you said that you found some of your jobs just by like trawling the shady parts of craigslist yeah i always go down to the bottom of the page i don’t want a job that’s listed under the regular jobs i don’t want pr marketing hospitality whatever i want like a gig like i want something that i can do that doesn’t
Involve me going into an office i haven’t gone in for a staff job in years now but i remember when i did i did have other things going on and i was way too nervous to like make that clear up front and i feel like you owe it to yourself to at least ask like is it okay if i have the side projects or just to tell them i have this going on it’s like some employers
Like it to a degree it shows like you’re passionate you have interests that are kind of diverse and and you’re really motivated so yeah and especially if they’re not paying you what you requested that’s a good way to negotiate so what kind of unexpected landmines or obstacles are there to look out for when you have you know all these different jobs two things you
Don’t want to over schedule yourself don’t be afraid to say no if something is not paying enough for your time but something else could or is it sucks to freelance if you don’t ever get to enjoy the flexibility of that financially tax wise you really want to be careful you know at least at the very least make sure that you have enough to pay your freelance taxes
Because when that like bomb drops on you like you get audited or something you messed up couple years ago or whatever happens at least you don’t have to worry about paying all of your freelance taxes plus you know whatever the nightmare scenario is one thing that you should definitely do is just get an accountant i know it seems like it’s going to cost million
Dollars and only like 50 year-old people have accountants it’s not true they’re going to save you money they’re going to write off all your stuff as a freelancer it doesn’t matter if you have a full-time job and you’re barely making anything as a freelancer just get one they will help you and they will save you money it’s worth the cost so what is advice you
Would give to someone either while a looking to find more work in their own field or be looking to find work in a new field my advice for someone who’s trying to get more work in their own field is to just let people know that you’re looking first if you see something that can be done if you have a friend who’s building a website let them know that you can code
It or you can write the copy for it try to solve people’s problems if you’re trying to do something and another field like say you’re trying to make a hobby into something that you can monetize just start doing it there’s etsy now you can sell things anything can become a hustle anything can be monetized you just have to want it and i would advise that you keep
Something for yourself that you don’t monetize because that’s kind of depressing too like everything you do is like a dollar sign that sucks no one wants that you need to keep something for yourself so always keep that in mind too so i feel like the the big takeaway is when you’re looking to have a side job or you know have multiple streams of income maybe change
Careers whatever you’re looking to do by expanding outside of the box of your regular nine-to-five is that you have to be a brave you have to be willing to look in the places that other people won’t look you have to go to the weird janky bottom of craigslist if you’re just sitting there every day nine-to-five at your same job and you’re not working on anything
Else you’re going to stagnate and the professional world is going to keep moving in the financial world is going to keep moving and you’re going to be sitting there typing at your computer thinking you have you know no options but you always have options you just have to be brave you have to ask questions keep your mind open and keep your options open and don’t
Limit yourself to one job remember to hit the subscribe button or to go to the financial diet com for more we’ll see you soon bye
Transcribed from video
Having A Side Hustle | The Financial Diet By The Financial Diet
