When childcare costs threatened to consume half her wages after her second child arrived, a mother of two made a drastic change: she left a job she had held for 17 years and set up six side hustles. Today those ventures bring in $1,400 to $2,000 a month, and she works roughly half the hours she used to—about 35 instead of 70—while being home far more with her sons.
None of the income comes from playing games or answering surveys on a phone. Instead, she has assembled a patchwork of small businesses, each with its own trade-offs in effort, profitability, and convenience.
Renting out a pickup truck
Listing her Toyota Tacoma on Turo felt risky at first, but it has become the closest thing to passive income in her portfolio. Over nine months this year, the truck has averaged about $400 a month in earned and projected income. The app handles most of the rental process, and renters have treated the vehicle well. The main hassle is coordinating pickups and drop-offs, especially airport runs, which occasionally require help from others. Still, she considers it her easiest yes given how little time it demands.
A mirror booth with room to grow
For ten years she has worked as a booth attendant for a local event company, typically earning $200 for a three-hour event—though drive time, setup, and teardown stretch those evenings longer. Recently she and her husband bought their own mirror booth and launched True Reflections Booth Co. in Phoenix. By sourcing mostly secondhand or discounted gear, they kept upfront costs under $5,000. A typical event now brings in $600, and when they run it themselves, they keep the full profit. In theory, fewer than ten events would recoup the investment.
The couple now handles insurance, software, equipment, marketing, storage in their garage, and taxes. They have completed one gig and have two more booked, but need to accelerate bookings. Networking is new territory compared with being a hired hand, yet she finds it half the fun—and the earning potential makes it a hustle she rarely turns down.
Freelance writing: persistent but unpredictable
Despite an English degree and her own lifestyle blog, paid writing assignments remain difficult to land. She describes the work as requiring relentless persistence, with rejection a constant even for experienced writers. She has written for as little as $10 and even for free to get noticed. When a pitch succeeds, an 800- to 1,000-word article pays $125 to $250. It is her longest-running passion, but the instability makes it hard to justify as a mother trying to balance multiple ventures—still, she keeps pitching and occasionally gets lucky.
Cleaning that only adds up with free childcare
Through Care.com she found a weekly housekeeping and meal-prep job paying $25 an hour, or about $300 a month. She also occasionally cleans a friend’s Airbnb for $150, usually finishing in three hours. The money-to-time ratio is solid, and she enjoys the physical work and catching up on audiobooks. But family members watch her children at no cost; if she had to pay for childcare in order to clean someone else’s home, the math would not work.
Homemade coffee syrups
What began as a way to avoid overspending on drive-thru coffee has become a small business. This summer she joined Arizona’s Cottage Food program and started selling homemade syrups. An 8.5-ounce bottle sells for $12, with a margin of about 70%. Ingredients are inexpensive, and production takes only a few hours a week, including managing her Hotplate storefront. Her toddler occasionally helps run a driveway coffee stand to highlight flavors—and keeps the cash tips. Since she makes the syrups for her own home café anyway, she sees the microbusiness as worth growing for now.
Print-on-demand on the back burner
Her husband, a designer, runs a Shopify store using Printify for shirts, mugs, hats, and other merchandise. The store is not yet profitable. Original, non-AI designs take time, uploading them across products is tedious, and then come SEO, advertising, and social media—all the work needed to persuade strangers the products exist. A $60 hoodie sounds promising until nobody buys it. They have not shut the store down, but it sits on the back burner until they can devote creativity and time without compromising quality.
Flexibility as its own reward
She has learned that extra income is rarely as effortless as many articles suggest; she does not always reap as much as she sows. Her side hustles are less consistent than her former job, and every month looks different as she juggles multiple small businesses and balances her calendar. Yet she is earning close to her old paycheck while spending more time at home with her boys. Time, she says, is truly her favorite currency.
