Turning hobbies into cash

AKA, doing what you love and getting paid for it!
Have to be careful here, it’s starting to sound like one of those infomercials :)
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

I have had people ask me how I earn a living, since everything we have here is paid for, it makes it very easy to live on very little. Saving money is as good as making it, bartering is gold! Voluntarily living on less, doesn’t make me feel like I’ve given anything up, in fact I feel like the richest person I know :) My main “job” is being a caretaker for my friend, I get paid to do a little cleaning, some cooking, some shopping and walking the roads with her, the hours are flexible, and it’s not hard work at all.

One secret to this is designing my life to where I don’t have to spend much money to survive, honestly my big monthly bill is my internet. Of course I have taxes and car insurance and fuel, but other than that,  some food and some bare necessities, I don’t have to bring in much money to live and live quite comfortably IMHO. I have written a way to help get away from living in a way that is costly-prepping on a budget here:

https://off-grid.net/2013/08/25/how-to-go-off-grid-with-little-money/
and
https://off-grid.net/tag/prepping-on-a-budget/

I am working on ways to turn my hobbies into cash, one of my hobbies is the internet, that’s why I don’t mind paying for internet. I love writing, there are many places on line that will pay you to write, some pay better than others. Let me know if you are interested in doing this, I’ll give you the site where I write.

Another hobby I have that is really starting to take off is doodling… yes I expect to eventually earn some money on drawing, teaching it to be exact. Right now I’m playing with it, but if I want to keep doing it, and buying supplies for it, I need it to be able to support itself, I need to be able to earn enough money from it to be able to buy art/craft supplies to keep doing it. Right now, my art stuff is like that bum of a brother in law or uncle  who lays around on the couch, sleeping until noon, eating everything in the fridge and not offering one red cent to pay for sponging off of you… (no real brother in laws or uncles were hurt, killed or embarrassed in the writing of this post)…

I am lining up a couple of gratis teaching classes to teach some of the locals how to do this particular kind of doodling, eventually I might be able to charge a small fee… or perhaps, something I thought about, I ordered a set of Micron marker pens to do the doodling, I will have a drawing for it, selling tickets for a chance at the drawing, at the very least I hope to recoup any moneys I spent getting the class set up, and one lucky student will walk away with a GOOD set of artist pens. I’m still trying to work out how I’ll do that. Here is some of my work:

I was inspired to do a class by going to a different sort of class last week, the class was free and was given/hosted by a local artist, Brenda Hudson (she did give permission to use her name). The class was on how to build a rock wall, it was geared toward the ladies, but we had a couple of men there. We all had a good time and we all learned that we CAN build a rock wall without help.

Sorry the audio isn’t great, I have a cheap camera and on top of that, I forgot my memory card for it, so the video wasn’t as long as I would have liked for it to be… It was quite the fun class…

I have been asked to do a class on setting up an off-grid solar system, that should be easy for me to teach since I live it every day. More ideas, teaching cooking, wildcrafting (local medicinal and edible plants), cleaning homes, working for a local realtor to clean homes about to come on the market and such… there are always ways to earn a little extra cash by finding a need and filling it.

Well, that’s been my week, I have a new laptop coming in, hopefully I’ll be able to earn some more money with this new tool. :) Does that mean I’m raking it in? No, not even close, but because I live so simply, it is cheap to live this way, and without having to be a leach or going hungry, I am able to live in a very comfortable manner on very little money.

Figure out what you like to do, what you are good at, and then figure out how you can get paid doing it, if you have a passion for it, then it will come through loud and clear, and people will pay to learn how to do the thing that makes you so happy!