If you’ve been within 30 feet of someone with any sort of financial savvy in your life, you probably know that you should be maximizing your annual IRA contributions starting as early in life as you possibly can.
{Is this news to you? Check out our blog on retirement accounts in the US for an in-depth explanation as to why you should have started investing in one a loooooong time ago.)
The thing is, even if you have a full time job, finding $6,500 in extra cash per year to set aside for retirement might be tough to do.
If you just started sweating, it’s okay. We’ve got six excellent side hustle ideas that are easy to implement and can help you make enough extra money to be able to start contributing to your retirement accounts this year.
Thanks to the advent of the gig economy, it’s easier than ever to turn raw work ethic into extra cash in your spare time. There are myriad platforms that make all sorts of side hustle ideas possible.
Traditional Freelancing
Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer are all platforms that function as more traditional freelance marketplaces in the digital world. They connect businesses with freelancers who are looking for work in everything from IT to graphic design to writing and editing.
So, to make such platforms work as a side hustle job, you will need to have some “marketable” skills, create a resume, and interview for positions like you would for a full time job.
However, once you start getting jobs, you can establish fairly consistent streams of extra money. You’ll set your very own schedule and hourly rate (depending on the type of work you’re doing), so you can charge competitive rates to make yourself more attractive as a freelancer.
It’s also worth noting that all of these platforms charge freelancers fees for earning on their sites. For example, Upwork charges a 10% flat fee on any income you make through their platform. Despite this, depending on how much effort you choose to invest in your freelance side hustle, you could easily make an extra $6,500 per year to contribute to your IRA.
Let’s look at a specific example:
Let’s say Jim’s side hustle is freelance writing on Upwork and he charges $25 per hour for his services. Upwork is going to take $2.50 per hour from him as their fee, so at the end of the day he’s bringing in $22.50 per hour.
If Jim wanted to max out his IRA contributions for the year using only money from his freelance writing side hustle on Upwork, he’d have to work a total of 289 hours over the course of the year (before factoring in taxes), which shakes out to 5.5 hours per week — very doable.
Odd Jobs
You might think you don’t have any marketable skills, but you probably do. Even if all you’re capable of is assembling a piece of Ikea furniture, you could start a side hustle that creates enough extra income to start putting more money away towards your retirement.
Platforms like TaskRabbit connect folks who have work they need done with others who are looking to get paid to do said work. It’s a bit less “official” than the more traditional freelance platforms, since the tasks you’re assigned are things like cleaning, moving, shopping, etc. The kind of stuff anyone can do as a side hustle.
Like with Upstart et. al., you can set your own hourly rate for the work you’re willing to do on TaskRabbit, and, like with Upstart, Taskrabbit will take a percentage as a service fee (usually around 15%, though it depends on your location).
As you might expect, if your side hustle ideas all involve menial tasks like going grocery shopping for someone, you probably shouldn’t expect to be able to charge as much as someone with professional graphic design skills. So, in all likelihood, you’ll have to do more work on TaskRabbit to make enough money to max out your IRA contributions in a year, but it is possible.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say Gina charges $15 per hour for her side hustle job of grocery shopping on TaskRabbit. After the platform takes their 15% cut, she’s bringing home $12.75 an hour.
To earn money enough to max out her IRA contributions for the year, she’ll have to work 510 hours, which is just under 10 hours per week.
Rover
For some folks, getting to spend their extra free time with as many dogs as possible would be a dream come true. Thanks to Rover, these people can turn their dreams into a side hustle that where they actually earn money to hang out with dogs.
Rover is a marketplace for all things pet-care-related. You can hire for everything from pet sitting to dog walking to house sitting. Like with all other platforms we mentioned, contractors on Rover get to set their own rates and Rover takes a cut (usually 15–25%, depending on location and level of expertise).
If all you wanted to do on Rover was walk dogs, you could probably make enough to fully fund your IRA for the year. However, if you’re willing to do pet sitting or house sitting, you could make quite a lot more money than that.
Let’s look at an example:
Armin walks dogs on Rover and charges $20 per walk (the range varies, but usually the going rate is anywhere from $15–$25). The greedy Rover overlords take 15% as their cut though, so Armin only brings in $17 for each walk.
If he wanted to fully fund his IRA with Rover dog walking money, he’d have to go on 383 walks per year, or about 8 every week.
Is freelancing worth it?
Regardless of your skill level, given enough effort, you could certainly earn an extra $6,500 per year with any number of side hustle ideas on one of these platforms. Nobody in any of the examples discussed worked more than an extra 10 hours per week, and in all scenarios they were able to earn enough to fully fund their IRAs for the year.
So, yes: freelancing is a great way to earn a little extra money to fund your IRA.
Just keep in mind that these numbers are all estimates, and that your actual income on any of these platforms is likely to vary somewhat depending on your location and how much you’re willing and able to work.
Do you have a guest bedroom that nobody ever uses? What about a garage with some extra space? A parking spot, perhaps, that’s gathering dust? If so, you could be earning enough (nearly) passive income to easily max out your IRA contributions for the year.
Here are just a few platforms you could be utilizing to help make the most out of the stuff you have, but don’t really use:
Airbnb
In 2022 the average price of a bedroom in a shared home on Airbnb was $69 per night. What’s more, the platform only takes a 3% cut from the hosts (they pass the astronomical service charges on to the guests), so you actually get to keep $67 for every night your average room is rented out.
In order to max out your IRA in a year, you would need to have your spare room rented out for 97 nights, or 8 nights per month.
Now, if you’re lucky enough to have a separate space, like an in-law suite or a carriage house, your life gets even easier. The average nightly price across all airbnb rentals in 2022 was $153, but that includes the rooms in shared homes, and totally private spaces tend to go for more money than that.
Let’s assume you can make $175 per night renting your cute carriage house on Airbnb. After the 3% cut the platform takes, you’re bringing in $170 per night. That means, to get to your $6,500 IRA contribution for the year, you’ll need to have the place rented for 39 nights. That’s just 3 nights a month!
Of course, it’s worth keeping in mind that you’ll likely incur some additional expenses if you want Airbnb to be a successful side hustle for you. Things like cleaning products, additional utility charges, and the time it will take you to clean the place and get it ready for the next guest will certainly factor into the math when it comes to how many nights you’ll need to have the place rented if you want to maximize annual IRA contributions on those profits alone.
Neighbor
Despite what it sounds like, Neighbor is not an app for reporting suspicious-looking characters walking down your street. Actually, it’s a platform for renting out storage and parking spaces.
If you have your own home with with some extra room in your driveway, basement, or garage, you could put that space to good use and earn extra cash to contribute to your IRA with a side hustle renting it out as storage.
Of course, how much you can expect to make will vary wildly depending on where you live.
In a suburban area where everyone has their own driveway and there’s abundant on-street parking to boot, you might be lucky to get $25 per month renting space in your garage as a side hustle. In New York City, however, 50 square feet of basement space goes for well over $200 per month.
Regardless of where you live, Neighbor takes a 4.9% processing fee plus $0.30 for each new reservation made for your space.
Let’s look at two different examples, one in a more residential area, and one in a crowded city:
Suburban Sven
Sven lives in a suburban area where space is plentiful. Despite this, he’s able to rent half his garage to store a vehicle for $25 per month. Sven’s customer wants to keep their car there long-term, so he only has to pay the $0.30 reservation fee once, and he’s taking home $23.75 per month after Neighbor’s processing fee.
Unfortunately for Sven, this side hustle is never going to make him enough money to max out his IRA. Even if his garage is rented out all year long, he’ll only end up making an extra $285 for the year.
Stacey in the City
Stacey lives in a small apartment in Brooklyn. Because she’s a minimalist, she doesn’t even use the closet in her living room, so she rents it out to an artist to store their finished paintings for $150 per month.
After Neighbor’s cut, Stacey gets to keep $142 per month to put towards her IRA. Stacey is certainly going to make more money than Sven is renting out her closet as a side hustle, but it’s still not going to be enough to max out her IRA.
Even if her closet is rented all year long, she’s only bringing in an extra $1,704. Granted, contributing that much to your IRA is way better than contributing nothing, but it seems there are likely more lucrative side hustle ideas out there than using Neighbor.
Having said that, renting storage space is fairly low lift as side hustles go, so you could probably make money on Neighbor and explore other side hustle ideas as well without totally destroying your work/life balance.
Turo
Turo is a platform that lets you turn a vehicle that you’re not using all that much into a side hustle by renting it out to other folks. How much money you can expect to make using Turo depends entirely on the type of vehicle you have (and somewhat on where you’re located).
For example, in Washington DC you can rent plenty of run-of-the-mill vehicles (such as a Volkswagen Jetta or a Honda Odyssey) for between $45 and $60 per day. If you have something particularly exciting, however, like a Tesla Model X, you could get in the ballpark of $250 per day renting that out. If you’ve got something truly wild, like a Lamborghini or a McLaren, you can earn well over $1,000 per day.
Turo does take a cut, however. How much depends on the level of protection you choose when you create your host account. Basically, you can choose to keep between 60% and 90% of your earnings on the platform. The more you choose to keep, the worse the insurance coverage provided by the platform.
So, for example, the 60% plan has the best insurance: there’s no deductible whatsoever, so you’re guaranteed full replacement-cost of your vehicle if something were to happen to it, and they’ll pay up to $50 per day for a rental car while yours gets fixed or replaced. At this price point, you also get paid for the potential income you could have earned on Turo during the time your vehicle is being repaired or replaced.
The 90% plan, on the other hand, has a $2,500 per-incident deductible and does not offer any sort of income-replacement if something happens to your car.
As you can see, there are lots of factors that could impact the amount of extra cash you can take home from a side hustle with Turo. Let’s take a look at a couple of specific examples though. We’ll use middle-of-the-road vehicles for both examples, since we assume if you have McLaren money you probably don’t need to worry about maxing out your IRA each year…
Risky Rick:
Rick rents his Jeep Grand Cherokee out on Turo for $75 per day. He’s not particularly concerned about the insurance situation, so he opts for the 90% plan so he can keep as much of his profit as possible. So, for each day his Jeep is rented out, he gets to keep $67.50.
At that rate, Rick will need to have his vehicle rented out 97 days per year in order to earn the $6,500 necessary to max out his IRA. Of course, if anything were to happen to his car, he’d need to make that money up somehow.
Cautious Kevin:
Kevin rents his Tesla Model 3 on Turo for $70 a day. He’s pretty nervous about potential damage to his car though, so he uses the 60% plan. That means he only takes home $42 each day his car is rented, but peace of mind is priceless as far as Kevin is concerned.
At this rate, he’d need to have his Tesla rented out 155 days per year in order to max out his IRA.
Either way, if you’re not using your vehicle, Turo is near the top of the list of side hustle ideas that require virtually no work from you whatsoever. Passive income like that is easy to chain together with other side hustles, so even if you can’t rent your car out enough days of the year to make the full $6,500, you could probably mix and match side hustles to make it happen.
If you are creative in any of the million ways there are to be creative, you could start a side hustle that could earn you some extra money online. In order to be truly successful in the digital marketplace, however, you will need to do digital marketing and social media management for your own business, which might be time consuming.
It’s also difficult to estimate how much money a side hustle in selling digital products on online platforms could make, given that the category is extraordinarily broad. We’ll take a look at a few examples though to help illustrate how a platform like Etsy or Teachable could become an excellent side hustle idea for you.
Etsy
You can sell nearly anything on Etsy, from wedding decorations to children’s toys to jewelry and more. So, whatever creative talent you might have, you can probably monetize it on Etsy to set up a side hustle and make some extra cash for your IRA.
Before we look at an example of potential earnings from an Etsy side hustle, let’s talk how much of a cut they’ll take. Etsy charges its sellers a few different fees:
So, in the United States, you can expect to lose 9.5% of every side hustle sale to Etsy fees, plus an additional $0.45 on top of that.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at a couple of examples of made up folks whose side hustle is to sell online with Etsy:
Sewing Sue:
Sue’s side hustle is to sew handmade stuffed animals and sell them on Etsy for $40 each (this is about the middle of the road for handcrafted stuffed animals on Etsy as far as I can tell). After the fees Etsy charges her, she gets to keep $36.20 for every stuffed animal she sells. (We’re operating under the assumption that, even after the fees, Sue breaks completely even on shipping.)
In order to earn the $6,500 necessary to max out her IRA, Sue will have to sell 180 stuffed animals per year. How feasible this side hustle actually is depends on how long it takes Sue to sew each one of these stuffies.
If she can make one in an evening while watching Netflix, that’s great. But if it takes her a week, she’s not going to be able to make enough extra money to maximize her IRA contributions from her side hustle alone (though, any contribution is certainly better than none).
Dungeon Dave:
Dave makes his own brand of original character sheets for the popular Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing game and sells them on Etsy as digital PDFs. Customers buy the PDFs in the online store then print as many copies of the sheets as they like.
Dave sells his character sheets for $4.00, and so he brings home $3.17 from each sale after Etsy’s fees.
Because the price of Dave’s work is so low, he’s going to have to sell over 2,000 character sheets in order to maximize his IRA contributions with his profits. But, he doesn’t have to do any additional work once he’s designed the character sheet and uploaded the PDF to his Etsy account — anything he makes from this side hustle will be totally passive income.
Given that there are tens of millions of people who play Dungeons and Dragons, selling 2,000 character sheets in a year is certainly within reason.
Overall, selling on Etsy seems like a more difficult side hustle idea than some of the more passive income options we’ve looked at before. However, because it’s likely that the work you’d do making an Etsy side hustle successful is creative and probably fun, it might be a more enjoyable way to maximize your IRA contributions than, say, grocery shopping.
Teachable
If you have a skill you could transfer to others via an online course, you could be earning extra money through the Teachable platform. Teachable offers online courses in everything from watercolor painting to baking, music production to academic disciplines.
Instructors can charge whatever they like for their courses, though most of the offerings seem to be between $59 and $75. Teachable will, of course, take a cut which will vary depending on what level of membership you have.
Teachable offers a few different pricing plans (including a free trial offer), but the most relevant ones are going to be the Basic and Pro plan (unless you have designs to start an empire of online tutoring courses and not merely a side hustle).
Basic Plan
The basic plan will cost you $39 per month. On top of that, you’ll lose 5% of every sale you make to the platform. For that price point, Teachable also gives you the ability to list up to 5 different courses and offers some email marketing tools you can use to help spread the word about your side hustle.
If you charge the standard rate of $59 for your course and you’re on the basic plan, you would actually keep $56 from every course you sold, minus an additional $39 per month for your subscription fee. So, if you kept your account active all year long, you’d need to sell 125 courses throughout the year in order to max out your IRA contributions with a Teachable side hustle.
Pro Plan
The pro plan costs $119 per month, but you get to keep 100% of all the money you make on the platform. What’s more, you gain access to a whole suite of marketing support tools, plus you can have unlimited courses listed, which might make it easier for you to sell courses at a high volume.
If you subscribe to Teachable’s pro plan, you get to keep the full $59 you make for every course you sell (minus your monthly subscription charge, of course). So, at this price point, you would need to sell 135 courses per year in order to maximize your IRA contributions with this side hustle.
Based on these numbers, the basic plan seems like the better option for most people, unless you know you’re going to be able to sell in high enough volume that the increase in monthly cost gets negated.
You don’t have to sell exclusively online in order to find clients and for your side hustle idea to be successful. In fact, many hobbies or passion projects are marketable skills that people in your local community would be happy to pay money for.
Of course, marketing your side hustle online is probably an excellent idea if you want to have access to as much business as possible. However, social media marketing within your established circles is probably enough to get you enough extra money in a year to max out IRA contributions.
Here are a few examples of various hobbies that could easily be turned into side hustles lucrative enough to earn you extra money for your IRA.
Photography
These days, anyone with an iPhone and an Instagram account thinks of themselves as a professional photographer, however when it comes time to hiring one, most of them won’t cut the mustard.
If you have a professional-grade camera and know how to touch up photos digitally, you can make a veritable killing with photography as a part time job.
Hourly rates for professional photographers vary wildly, depending on their level of experience and the type of job you’re hiring them to do. While a beginner might be able to reasonably charge between $25 and $50 per hour to do professional headshots, an experienced photographer can charge thousands of dollars to shoot a wedding.
So, if you’re a talented amateur photographer with professional-level equipment and enough of a portfolio to be able to demonstrate that you know what you’re doing, it would be reasonable for you to charge between $50 and $75 per hour for your services.
Let’s just say you charge $65 per hour. We’ll also assume you already own all the equipment you need to deliver a quality product to your customers. In this scenario, you would need to work 100 hours a year (or a little under 2 hours per week) in order to earn enough at your part time photographer side hustle to maximize your IRA contributions in a year.
Cooking
Cooking is easy. Cooking well, on the other hand, is a bit more difficult. If you know a few professional cooking techniques and some recipes, you could put together a curriculum for a cooking class that the vast majority of people could benefit from.
Professionally-taught cooking classes on Cozymeal.com go from between $99 and $125, and generally are capped at 2-3 students per class.
For the sake of being reasonable, let’s assume you shouldn’t try and charge the same rates for your class as a professional chef. Determining what you can and should charge for your own course can ba a bit complicated though.
You need to account for the price of the ingredients you’ll need to use to teach the course, and of course you have to make enough food for everyone in the class to get a meal.
A good place to start is to calculate how much it will cost you to buy the ingredients to cook the meal for however many people are attending the class, and then add on $25 or $30 for yourself.
If you can count on $30 profit per person, and you have the space to teach 2 people per class, that means you’re bringing home $60 per class. In order to earn the $6,500 necessary to max out your IRA, you’ll need to host 109 classes per year, or 2 per week.
Gardening
If you like working in the garden, you can make a nice side hustle out of helping folks with black thumbs spruce up their landscaping.
Professional landscaping can be rather expensive, but as an individual working part time, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to charge $25 an hour for your services, so long as you know what you’re doing.
A side hustle gardening earning $25 per hour would mean that you could max out your IRA contributions after working for 260 hours per year, or 5 hours per week.
If, however, you live somewhere where it’s not warm all year round, you may need to work more often during the summer months since work won’t be available in winter.
The advent of the gig economy has made it easier than ever to earn extra income in your spare time. There are a variety of apps you can download right on your phone that allow you to make money without having to invest lots of extra cash in starting a business.
Here are some estimates on how much one can expect to make using a few different gig economy apps as a side hustle:
Uber or Lyft:
According to ZipRecruiter’s data, the average Lyft or Uber driver in the US makes around $24 per hour, but that changes depending on where exactly you live (drivers in Washington, DC, for example, make on average $27 per hour).
At that rate, you’ll need to drive for about 240 hours per year to make the $6,500 necessary to max out your IRA.
(Though, it’s important to keep in mind that you’ll probably need to factor in some extra wear and tear on your vehicle if you want to implement rideshare driving as a side hustle idea.)
Instacart:
Shoppers can make between $10 and $20 per hour, depending on factors like order size, location, and tips.
To earn enough to maximize IRA contributions in a year, you would need to work approximately 435 hours per year (or 9 per week) as an Instacart shopper in order to max out your IRA.
Amazon Flex:
Amazon is now hiring out gig workers to do much of its local delivery, and they’re paying relatively well for it too. According to Amazon’s website, their Flex drivers earn between $18 and $24 per hour, depending on location and when they work.
Taking the average of those rates, you would need to work 310 hours per year (or 6 per week) driving for Amazon Flex in order to max out your IRA.
This isn’t actually a side hustle, but reducing expenses and maintaining a budget can free up extra money that can be redirected to your retirement account. By reviewing your spending habits and finding ways to save, you can potentially increase your retirement contributions without the need for a side hustle at all.
Start by analyzing your monthly expenses and identifying areas where you can cut back. Here are some common things people spend too much money on and ways to potentially reduce your annual budget by enough to be able to contribute the maximum amount to an IRA, along with estimates of potential savings:
Dining out and takeout:
Cutting back on restaurant meals and opting for home-cooked meals can save a significant amount of money. Anecdotally, whenever I go out to dinner with my wife, we spend between $60 and $80 on food and drinks.
It’s safe to assume we could easily cook for ourselves at home for a quarter the price. So, if we go out to dinner one fewer night per week, we could potentially save $3,120 per year.
Entertainment:
If you’re subscribed to 4 streaming services that you mostly don’t use ever except for 3 months per year when a show you like is airing, you could probably just cancel them without losing out on too much quality of life.
A cancelled Netflix subscription will save you around $216 per year. Now, if you could ditch two or three streaming services, you could really start to save enough to put a dent in your IRA contributions for the year.
Groceries:
If I had a dollar for every time I went to the grocery store and spent an extra $50 on items that weren’t on my shopping list but just looked yummy and I couldn’t help myself, I’d be retired in Costa Rica right now.
If you’re like me and have trouble with grocery store impulse purchases, make a list before hand and stick to it. Most grocery stores also offer curbside pickup as an option, so you can prevent yourself falling prey to your weak willpower by not even going into the store.
Estimating exactly how much cutting out extraneous grocery purchases can save you specifically in a year, but it’s not hard to imagine the savings climbing into the thousands of dollars range.
Debt repayment:
Credit cards’ interest rates are just mind-bogglingly high, and the average American has over $5,000 in outstanding credit card debt. If you had an average amount of credit card debt with an average credit card interest rate, that’s going to cost you around $1,000 per year.
Before you start contributing to your IRA, you should absolutely be paying off your high-interest debt. It will not only prevent your balance from growing, but also free up extra money for contributions down the line.
If you need to earn some extra money in order to be able to contribute to your IRA every year, there are plenty of ways to do it. Side hustles like freelancing, renting out unused assets, or monetizing a creative outlet all have the potential to earn you enough extra income in your free time to at least make some sort of contribution to your IRA each year, even if you can’t quite max it out.
Here’s a list of the side hustles we examined, and a rough estimate of how much money you might expect to make with each:
Freelancing:
Getting extra work through apps like Fiverr, Freelancer, or Rover could easily earn you an extra $6,500 per year to contribute to your IRA, assuming you have some sort of marketable skill you can capitalize on.
Depending on the work you can do, you could make at least $15 per hour doing something like grocery shopping on Taskrabbit, or well over $50 an hour providing graphic design services on Fiverr. In either case, you can earn enough with these side hustles to max out an IRA working less than 10 hours per week.
Renting out unused assets:
Between Airbnb, Neighbor, and Turo, you can rent out basically anything you own that you’re not using, whether it’s a spare room, a corner of your garage, or your car.
While renting out storage space on Neighbor doesn’t seem to be lucrative enough to earn you enough to max out an IRA, both Airbnb and Turo are good enough side hustles to make it happen.
An average spare room on Airbnb would need to be rented for 97 nights per year to max out an IRA, and an average car would need to be rented for 155 days on Turo to do the same.
Sell online:
If you can create something worth selling on Etsy, or if you have a skill you could teach as an online course on Teachable, you could make the money necessary to max out IRA contributions.
Etsy selling seems like it would be more time consuming than some of the other side hustles we examined if you wanted to max out your IRA contributions, but on the bright side it’s fun, creative work, so maybe that makes it worth it.
Teachable probably has a higher bar to get started, since you have to design your own online courses, record videos, create materials, and upload it all to the site before you can start making money. Once you have it set up, however, as side hustles go, it’s fairly passive: any time someone buys one of your online courses, you make money.
Monetize your passions:
Turning hobbies into side hustles is more feasible than you might think. If you have professional-level skills in cooking, gardening, or photography, you could hire yourself out or teach classes locally to earn good money in your spare time.
We estimate that any of these skills could earn you enough that 10 hours or so of extra work per week would be enough to max out your IRA.
Join the gig economy:
Driving for Lyft, Uber, or Amazon Flex can all earn you on average in the ballpark of $25 per hour. At that rate, you would need to work an extra 260 hours per year (or 5 hours per week) at any of these side hustles to max out your IRA.
Budgeting:
Technically not a side hustle, budgeting is maybe the best way to “earn” money, and it won’t even take up any of your spare time. By streamlining your grocery shopping, cutting out excess lifestyle purchases, and paying off high interest debt, it’s likely you could save enough in a year to max out IRA contributions.
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