So this is it – the first blog post on a new blog. Welcome to the random thoughts, stories of our experiences and summaries of our research into side hustle after side hustle as two 40-somethings navigate their way to freedom from full time jobs, without necessarily being retired.
Why exactly are we doing this?
We’re in a very weird phase of life right now. Our offspring is about to graduate from university and we’ve filled our empty nest with two Bengal kittens. We’ve already left permanent employment behind. We’re both now consultants who take contract roles but this still means that one of us commutes and one of us works from home.
We’d like to spend more time together but we’re not ready to retire. So this means we need to find other ways of bringing in money. Ways which will let us pay the mortgage and household bills, with a little bit of play money left over.
Yeah but “why are you blogging about your side hustles?” we hear you asking. To be fair, you’re probably not. We don’t know if anyone will ever read this blog or even be interested in what we write. The side hustle to freedom blog is more for us, a way of capturing all the lessons we learned, successes and failures we shared and plans we make for the future.
What exactly is a side hustle?
A side hustle is a job or money making activity that you do as well as your day job. For us that means re-invigorating our web shop Fuzzy Buttons (both as it’s own ecommerce site and on eBay); building a buy to let property empire, Greenverge Property, and exploring whatever else we can think of in the meantime.
We have had many side hustles in our lives over the last 15 years. More failures than successes but we learned a lot from trying them. We’ll dip into the catalogue of failures and share the lessons that they taught us, since these lessons learned by failing at these side hustles gave us the confidence to try newer, bigger and scarier things.