4 Side Income Streams to Sustain You as You Pursue Real Estate Full-Time

Today, I am reminded about how excited I was when I quit my very stable, very awesome day job to jump full force into real estate.

I was very stupid, but very excited all the same.

I remember thinking, “All I have to do is just get one deal, and I’ll make more money than I would in one year working where I am now.”

And it could have been true if I had actually been able to come up with the funds or facilitate the rehabs, both which I had no experience doing.

What I got instead of my “one deal and I’ll be more wealthy than ever before” fantasy was a promise of 1% of the purchase price as well as mentorship in exchange for door-knocking for some established fix and flippers in my area.

It definitely wasn’t what I thought I was signing up for, but it was a great situation all the same — or so I thought.

You see, the truth is, it is very typical to not make any money your first year in real estate. If you are going to jump in full force like I did, you need to have a plan and some side income to cover your bases while you make your real estate business happen.

How do you do that exactly? That’s why I wrote this post.

4 Ways to Generate Side Income While Pursuing Real Estate Full-Time

You see, I’ve now had to leave “full-time” real estate in order to go back into the work force so that I could survive.

When I quit my job, I justified it and fought through, believing that in a couple of months I’d become successful enough to get by. But 10 months later, I still didn’t earn any money from my real estate pursuits, so I ended up needing to change course.

Looking back, I realized there were some things I could have done differently that would have made it so I could’ve sustained myself and pushed through.

You see, at the time, my thinking was, “I can’t get a day job! It will take my focus and energy off of real estate!” and in a lot of ways, this was true.

But recently, I’ve found out there are some “odd side jobs” that are completely flexible and doable around your primary passion, and once I found them, I was like, “Man, if only I had known about these, my whole real estate situation would have been different!”

Today, I want to share 4 of these side jobs with you and hopefully help make your living situation a bit more feasible as you pursue real estate full-time. So with that, let’s get into it!

1. Become a Driver for Lyft/Uber

So I’ve recently signed up as a driver for Lyft, a taxiing app-based service that is super easy to sign up for and make money with using your own vehicle.

There are no set hours, and you typically make about $25-$28 per hour, part-time at your own leisure!

Now, there is a bit of a location game to this — you really need to be in or near a big city to make this worth your time, but if you meet that criteria, this may be a very easy solution that you can do in the late evenings (I typically go out from 6:00 p.m.-2:00 a.m.) around your real estate pursuits during the day.

It’s sure helped me a ton!

2. The Fulfillment by Amazon Program

Amazon has a department where you as a consumer can became a vendor and outsource the headache to Amazon.com.

There are a ton of courses and books on how to do this right, but the premise is you use an app to go around retail stores, buying things on sale that would sell for premium on Amazon, and then you simply ship your items to them, upload your products online, and start getting paid.

I have heard of people who literally make their full-time living doing this, working only 1-2 days a week!

As an aspiring real estate investor, if you could take just one day out of your busy week to do this, you could easily be making a really comfortable base while making real estate your priority.

3. Mobile Notary

Becoming a notary only takes a day of classes and a couple weeks to get things processed.

Once everything is set up, if you were to go around to all your notary republics in your area and say, “I’ll be your on-call mobile notary,” you’ll definitely get business and can make a pretty good source of income (you can set your own price for the driving distance, so you could easily make between $60-$150 per day).

This one is a little more time consuming than the ones above, but if you set your hours around real estate, it could easily work.

business-plan

Related: The 5 Best Side Hustles for Investors Growing Their Wholesaling Business

4. Craigslist Furniture Flip Business

Something I’ve done in the past when I really needed money was scour the “For Free” section on Craigslist.org for items I could turn around and resell.

I’d simply look for gently used furniture and mattresses people were getting rid of and then turn it around and list it right back on Craigslist for a price.

This definitely is the most time consuming option, but again, it’s something you could do evenings and weekends, and if you set it up correctly, it can be done while pursuing real estate.

Another condition to this is that it also needs to be in a highly populated area.

Being in the Bay area, we have a lot of affluent people who don’t realize the value of the stuff they’re getting rid of, so it works really well here.

Conclusion

So I hope this post helped you start thinking about ways to make side income while you make your real estate dreams come true.

[Editor’s note: We republished this article to help our newer members looking to invest full-time find side streams of income. Let us know what you think with a comment!]

Is there anything else you’d add to this list?

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Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.