Hustles You Wish You Started As a Kid...

[Jackson Cole]

Hi All! In my last post I asked "What's a peice of advice you wish you could've told your 16 year old self?" Not really expecting a response I whipped up a quick snippet and hoped for the best. Well I hoped... and my hopes came true because I was able to hear from 5 AMAZING individuals that each had excellent advice. Gosh what a world we live in. A random 16 year old kid can reach out and get high quality advice from industry experts in less then a hour... crazy.

With that being said, one peice of advice that stuck out to me was "Start A Hustle." Great advice and that's something I've always been interested in. For those of you who don't know me I've always been a little more entrepreneurial then the average joe. But here's a tiny bit about me for context.

• Made some decent money acting in commercials and doing professional theatre for a little.
• Filmed my school's football team and edited a hype video... worked my way up to getting paid to make videos for various teams and events.
• Tried to start a clothing brand, got a few sales, not proud to say I lost passion, focus and gave up.
• Started a YT channel, grew to 1,000+ subscribers, kids at school found it and I slowly stopped posting.
• Volunteered at a local church, started as a camera operator, showed up consistently, learned a ton and eventually worked my way up to working as director of the broadcast team for a couple of services.

With all that being said, that's about where my resume is at right now. I've taken a pause on filming sports and events because I recently joined the football team to help my physicality in lacrosse, but I'm hoping to film the basketball team this year.

My little brother being a hustler like me recently started mowing lawns in our neighborhood for a price and honestly I'm kicking myself for not jumping on that one first (don't tell anyone I told you but it's going pretty well for the kid).

There's so many different hustles out there... selling snacks at school, mowing lawns, pressure washing driveways and even cleaning cars. For all the seasoned BiggerPockets folks hopefully reading this I was wondering if y'all have any hustle ideas or thoughts that you've been thinking over and saying, "Dang I shoulda done that when I was a kid." If that's you... then drop them in the replies! Thanks for your time, - Jackson

[Bradley Berger]

1) Since this is BP, House Hacking. When you're young you can live in all different conditions. If you're only able to rent, then get something bigger than you need, share your bedroom with a roommate, and rent out the other bedrooms individually. Get a net profit, and live for free. Then when you can buy a home, do the same thing there.

2) This was always my favorite. Charge like $2 per week to take out people's trash bins. Pretty much everyone will go for it since it's so cheap. If you get 100 houses in one area where the trash is the same day, it's like 2 hours of work in the morning one day per week for $200. Trash collection comes on different neighborhoods on different days, so you could do 5 different neighborhoods, work 2 hours each morning, and make $1000 per week. You'll learn so many valuable skills too: sales, customer service, confidence, etc. You'll also get a good relationship with your customers, so depending on where you live, you could do seasonal up-sells: rake leaves, shovel snow, put up Christmas lights, mow lawn, etc. Also cleaning the trash bins (powerwash with soap). It sounds crazy, but you could make over $100,000/yr working like 20 hours per week while in school.

3) Learn how money works. This one is harder than it sounds. Learn about inflation and how it really affects assets. Learn about how debt works. Learn about loan programs. Talk to lenders to see what interesting products they have, you'll be surprised at all the interesting things that can be done. Learn about accounting and budgeting.  Learn about rates of return, and how they change. Doctors and Lawyers make good money, but people on Wall Street make significantly more.

4) Specific to you. Don't care what 'they think'. You stopped posting on YT because people at school found out. If anyone is giving you negativity about it, they're just jealous. Seriously. Most adults can't get past this, and it's extra hard as a kid in a school where you're stuck seeing the same people every day, so don't expect to just change your mindset in 1 day, this is something everyone struggles with. Having 1000 subscribers is awesome, obviously people were liking your content, don't be embarrassed by it, double down, then triple down. What do you think they'll say when you have 10,000 then 100,000 subscribers.