I’ve been teaching and blogging about money for a while, as have some blog buddies. Many of us have side hustles, or main hustles, or both. Any way about it, we’re into making money.
For some reason, my very first hustle came to mind, so I thought I’d see what others did for their first coin and Tweeted:
“Do you remember your very first hustle? Mine: Selling unwanted toys out of my wagon, pre-’68. ”
I got a couple of replies and J. Money, of Budgets are Sexy and Rockstar Finance, recommended that I write a post on it.
Got the wheels turning, so here we are.
What did folks do to make their first money? I got responses through Twitter which are short versions and responses through Rockstar Finance Forums, which are longer.
David Carlson of Young Adult Money – “I think I would have to say poker!”
Derek of Life and My Finances – “My first side hustle was mowing lawns at 12 years old. $12.50 per yard.”
Tonya of Budget and the Beach – “Probably Babysitting”
Andrew Daniels of Family Money Plan – “Love this. Mine was finding and selling musical instruments.”
Jax of Project Beach Life – “At 11 I began pet sitting for my neighbors when they went to their lake house. My mom only let them pay me $10/weekend but I saved it all.”
Brian of Debt Discipline – “I re-sold Batman toys during the first movie in 89. No one wanted Bob “the goon”.”
Kudy of Monetary Musings – “Maybe not my first… But I started growing and selling pumpkins when I was about 11!”
My Sons Father – “Mine was a classic: lemonade stand. Although I think I drank more lemonade than I sold.”
Eric McWhinnie – “Wow! I was about 8 yrs old. I bundled clothes hangers at a t-shirt store for $5hr & lunch. Every hit song from the 90s on repeat. Loved it!” http://www.cheatsheet.com/author/eric-mcwhinnie/
Othala Fehu – The first business I ever started was “Bug Busters.” “I would knock on your door and for $5 cash in hand I would troop around your yard filling my bucket of hot soapy water with all your little Asian (Beatle) Invaders….” Read More https://othalafehu.wordpress.com/2017/02/11/first-jobs/
Courtney of Your Average Dough – “Mine was actually working at a local farm in my hometown!” Unless helping my parents at a yard sale counts.”
Amanda of Centsibly Rich – “Yes! A lemonade stand. Most memorable sale was my grandpa’s $20 cup of lemonade. :)” I’ll bet Grandpa wasn’t a hard sell, for sure. 😀
Rob Erich of Money Nomad – “Mine was renting out our family VHS movies and selling lemonade at 7.”
Winnie Sun of Winnie Sun dot Com – “Yes, I remember selling avocados with my friend Alan in the neighborhood. You can read about this here: http://winniesun.com :)”
Millennial Legacy – Picking up nails on a job site at 8 years old.
Stephonee – I started my own newspaper when I was six years old: the Kids Gazette. I typed it up in a super-old version of Microsoft Publisher (Windows 3.1, baby!) and I sold it on the counter tops of local businesses in my hometown (grocery store, pizza place, etc.) by asking if I could put a few copies out with a coin jar for payment. I also sold ads to local businesses in the paper.
PrimalProsperity – My dad would pay me to do things around the house like clean windows and then I did some babysitting, but my first ‘real’ job was at a Chinese takeout restaurant.
Ana – Hmmm… my first job was my internship, boring.
MissMazuma – My first hustle was selling wrapping paper door to door…I was 4. Granted it wasn’t for money, but it was for something I valued very much at that age – crappy toys from a catalog.
FullTimeFinance – I worked at a Boy Scout summer camp being a life guard, swim instructor, waiter, and generally anything else they needed. I had to live on site all but one day a week and food was provided. Pay kind of sucked though, paid by the summer instead of by the hour.
Lindsay – I wrote a post along these lines too: My Make-Money List. I started my first side hustle as a 3-yr-old. I picked blueberries in the woods around our house and tried to sell them to my mom for 5 cents a pop. Clearly my calculations didn’t work out because the customer base was too small.
MrWoW – Well. My first gig was farm work. My mom’s cousin had a horse boarding farm, and I would bale hay, clean chicken coups, split wood, mow fields, mend fences, etc. I was a farm hand. And it paid well… $5 a hour. I still can’t believe it. But yeah, that was it. I shortly realized how nice it would be to be old enough to actually work for real bagging groceries at the grocery store.
MaxYourFreedom (http://www.fulltimefinance.com – My first job was as a freshman in high school. I used to buy large bulk packages of sour candy strings, which had about 100 strings per box. I would take them home and re-package them in bunches of 10 using plastic wrap. Even got my family to help out.
Each box was $20, and I would sell the bunches for $5 each, for a $30 net profit. I would usually sell out by my first class, and my locker would smell like strawberry candy. The teachers must have thought I was some kind of dealer.
Sarah – My earliest hustle was probably hustling my Dad to bring me back presents when he traveled for work…I had him wrapped around my little finger and he couldn’t resist my pouty face when he left.
Really though it would have been babysitting. As soon as I completed my babysitting course I made sure every single person knew I was available.
Nexum – I bought candy and resold in smaller units to classmates for a profit in elementary school. Promptly lost all my profits in middle school “investing” in comic books. First real job was packing carry out orders for a restaurant while in high school.
HighIncomeParent – The first time I can really remember making money because of a specific skill I had was when I was about 12 years old. My certain set of skills were smallness and climbing ability.
My aunt and uncle just bought some lake front property. It really had not been cared for the last 30 years and the trees were thin and grew straight up. Down here is Texas we get Spanish ball moss in all our Oak trees.
Well wouldn’t you know about 6 months after they bought the property a 100 year flood covered their house and the property. But my uncle being who he is made chicken salad out of some other chicken byproduct. We took a canoe out and pulled off the Spanish moss from the trees and trimmed them from the canoe since the water was 15 feet higher than usual. It was awesome for a 12 year old boy who loved to climb and make money. He paid me $10 an hour. More money than I ever made before. Plus, I got a Bar B Que sandwich on the way home and a day with my favorite uncle.
J.Money – t was probably babysitting for me…. or maybe mowing lawns? Nothing too fancy haha… Although I do remember the first time i participated in a friends’ venture! he set up a mini-gambling ring in our middle school where we could bet $1.00 or $2.00 on the outcomes of NBA games. I think I lost around $7.00 in a week and couldn’t take it anymore… that was 7 weeks worth of allowance!
Joe_5700 – grew up in a neighborhood that was brand new with houses being built for years. I used to sell soda to construction workers mostly over summers out of a red wagon. It was a good business where I learned that you could turn a single quarter into two quite quickly with a little walking around and salesmanship.
Erith – I grew up at the seaside.
We used to offer the holidaymakers to take their deckchairs back for them… and get the deposit! We also checked the beach as it emptied and took back any empty chairs that had been missed. (Some tourists were more interested in getting their train rather than taking their chairs back.) And we also trawled the beach for empty lemonade bottles (more refunds!)
Remarkably lucrative – it kept us in ice cream. The lady who hired out the chairs was so impressed by our acumen, she paid us to help her on busy days – hence my first hustle became my first very unofficial job, I was about 12 or 13!
Mrs.Groovy – Like J$ it was babysitting for me too. Luckily most parents allowed a friend to come over because I used to scare myself half to death watching Chiller Theater and other horror movies. I think I made a few bucks an hour.
Teacherinvestor – Great question ~ I cleaned garages . . . I know, random huh? Oddly I had this guy ask me if I would clean his garage . . . I think he felt sorry for me and gave me something to do. But I have to say that I did an awesome job . . . because word of mouth got around and I was cleaning all of the garages in the town. Lol!
Steve –Safeway here. Didn’t take long for me to learn what I didn’t want to do for a living.
Slow Dad – My first side hustle was different to my first job (paper route). Aged 10 or 11 I used to go dumpster diving behind the local newsagents, liberating the unsold playboy magazines and selling them to the older boys at the local high school who were too chicken to buy them in the store.
I diversified into muscle car magazines, but this proved to be a hazardous pursuit as the older rev-head boys would as often beat me up and steal the magazines as pay me for them.
Before long I stumbled onto a far more lucrative trade, magazines targeted at teenage girls (beauty and boy band magazines). This line of business saw me much less likely to be mugged, as well as making me very popular with the ladies. I didn’t really understand why this was a good thing at the time, but came to greatly appreciate it as I got older!
So, there you have it, some pretty interesting hustles, and first jobs.
Goes to show, that many folks are interested in making money and a number came up with interesting ways to do it.
So, what was your first hustle? How’d you make your first money?
