This article deals specifically with the question: is forex a good side hustle? Some statistics quote that between 30 and 50% of Americans have a (or should we say ‘attempted’) a side hustle in the last twelve months to support their primary income. The internet is full of people who are either trying to make a side hustle work, or figure out what to do as a side hustle. So there’s definitely plenty of demand out there for side hustles.
Local services
Most side hustles are something like a local service eg babysitting, gardening etc where the trade is time (plus skills or ability or availability) for money. These sorts of side hustles are easy to market for free on the likes of Facebook, they’re easy to set up and there’s very little setup cost. They can even attract a reasonable hourly rate especially if you have a particular skillset or are prepared to go above & beyond for instance if you’re happy to babysit late on Friday nights instead of enjoying yourself, or you don’t mind doing jobs at short notice. The downside is that with any ‘trading time for money’ situation, the moment you stop working the moment your income stops.
And for many people (not all) who are also time-poor, this type of side hustle isn’t very viable.
Great however for students, people who have part-time jobs, non-working spouses or retired people who want to supplement their retirement income and keep active.
Selling stuff
The other common type of side hustle is to find something to sell and make a profit from the proceeds. This could be something you manufacture like scented candles to buying and reselling items on Amazon or Etsy. The attraction to this sort of side hustle is that it’s not perceived as so time consuming (you can be making sales while you’re asleep), but also you can usually work your own time reasonably easily. And the best part about it is that if what you sell is popular then it could really take off and become much more than just a side hustle. The downside of selling stuff is much more complex however than just offering to walk your neighbors dogs. Firstly what are you going to sell? Will it even sell? How will you find this out before committing? How will you market it? How will you get paid? How are you going to manage your accounts? Tax? Shipping? Handling unhappy customers? How much money will it take to get set up & running? How much inventory will you need? How will you ensure quality standards? Is there compliance requirements to be met?
All these things have to be thought of and worked through before you earn a cent. In reality what you’re trying to do is start a business. Albeit a deliberately small business but still a business. Once you start, there’s no going back.
Many people base their selling related side hustle on a passion they have. But passion is too closely linked to emotion and although passion is great, what is more important when considering a business idea is logic. Cold calculated logic. The reality with a selling related side hustle is that they cost far more to get going than anticipated, they cost far more to operate than anticipated, they take up huge amounts of so called free time (remember time is money in nearly every case), and they make much less money than hoped.
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Is forex a good side hustle?
Forex gets a bad rap on every side hustle related forum and for very good reason. Many forums actually ban any posts relating to forex otherwise they become flooded with scammers who prey on the desperate and unsuspecting. But the truth is, forex ticks all the boxes when it comes to a side hustle – except one.
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First the positives.
Forex doesn’t take up much time, or at least it shouldn’t. So it works for people who have very little available time.
Although forex technically is buying & selling, because of the way it’s done it hardly compares to a traditional buying & selling business where goods are exchanged for payment. So almost all of the difficult questions that arise with a typical selling side hustle are avoided. Its very easy to get started in forex and very inexpensive or even free.
Lastly, it is completely scalable. There is probably no other business that can start as small as forex trading and build up as big.
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But there is one major flaw with forex: profitability.
And obviously this is quite a major flaw because the whole idea of a side hustle is to make money. But it gets even worse. Not only can you not make profits, you can easily lose your entire investment as well. This is not a low-risk possibility, it’s almost a certainty that you’ll end up losing some or all of your investment.
To make matters worse, you’ll start to spend time trying to figure out how to trade profitably. Don’t forget time is money so if you could otherwise be using that time to clip your neighbor’s hedge for $20 an hour, then it really is costing you money. But it continues to get worse. At some point you’ll decide that you’ve reached the limits of your ability to become profitable by yourself or with free strategies online and you’ll take the plunge and pay for a training course or a strategy. Unfortunately this will give you no better guarantee of making profits than continuing your own efforts. And perhaps worst of all is that forex trading is addictive. By now you may well be too far down the road of addiction than you’d like to admit.
To conclude, for almost everyone who is looking for a profitable side hustle, it’s best not to touch forex. The only way to make profits out of forex is with a system that is easy to use, produces regular profits without requiring any particular skills of the operator and above all else protects your capital from loss.
Such systems are available but they’re not cheap. Think very carefully before considering forex as a side hustle.
