Surviving A Recession - Things To Do
Subscriber request for simple side income to make a little spare cash
We had a dentist appointment. Normally if you have dental insurance you just leave our dentist and they send the bill to your insurer. Then whatever isn’t covered they mail to you later in a bill.
Apparently some dental insurance companies have moved to a reimbursement model where you pay the dentist direct and the dental insurer sends you a check a few weeks/months later to reimburse you. Why? No idea…the point of this anecdote isn’t the finer points of dental insurance administrative practices….I am sure BowTiedGatorDDS would love to answer all those questions for you :)
No. The point of the story is this was our first real in-real-life red flag that people are hurting.
When the front-desk lady calls us over after the full multi-child family got their semi-annual cleanings, she said “we know it can be hard for people not expecting this policy change, so if you want we offer payment plans”. (hurray for looking homeless when it doesn’t look like you can pay a <$1k bill)
Anon, the all-in price of the visit is under $150.
And this isn’t spending $150 that is gone forever. This is floating $150 for a few weeks. If you have any sort of emergency fund, this would be a non-event. Pay $150, get reimbursed $150 next month, deposit it back in your emergency fund. (Heck, this is better for us as we get some credit card points this way)
With the realization times are truly tough, we wanted to put out a post for any of you who could use a few $1ks extra. Almost every item on this list is going to be something we have personally done and will vouch for. Many of these we still do, albeit not as regularly as we did years ago.
And everything here has a high $ per hour payoff. It just isn’t scale-able. Which means you can do all this, make a few $1k and not lose focus on a real secondary income.
The focus here isn’t how to build a ‘7-fig business over the next 3 years’. We are talking much more focused and near-term, tangible action items. If you lose your job in the next 3 months, what are some things you can do today to start getting some extra buffer. And we tried to highlight activities that either don’t take a lot of time, are low intensity so you can work on other things during the time, or are very flexible…
[Note - Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be one of these stupid side hustle lists telling you to take surveys where 40 hrs gets you a $25 gift card or to go and be part of medical studies… You need to value your time and make sure the per hour rate is decent or it is a role you can sit and work on your real side money while doing it
Funny aside- in college we did a few studies. We went to one and sit through the introduction with another dude. The study was on dehydration and involved picking up a 25lb box and putting it on a slide, then walking over and picking it up again to repeat. It was in a heated room. Cool, so far we are on board. A little cardio and get paid. Then they pull out this huge foot long looking dildo “thermometer” that would be in your ass the whole time measuring your internal temp. Nope. We stand up and walk out, turn around and the other dude still there. Bro had to be real hard pressed for money.]