Some part-time gigs—such as tutoring, pet sitting or helping with tax prep—allow retirees to work a few hours at a time, and the extra income can make a big difference.
Pet Sitting and Dog Walking
If you have a fenced-in yard and the ability to care for someone else’s furry family members, offering pet services can be lucrative and flexible. According to data analyzed by e-learning platform Preply, dog walking is the best-paid side hustle by average hourly wage.Teaching
One of the few perks of the pandemic is that online teaching and tutoring have flourished. You can set up shop on an online tutoring site like Preply or Wyzant, or an online teaching site such as Udemy. “Carve out a couple of hours on weeknights to tutor students online,” Woroch says.If you have the credentials, consider creating a college-level course that you could teach as an adjunct professor.
Consulting/freelancing
Retirees often have decades of valuable experience. Taking on project work can help you stay in the game on your own timeline.Filling Community Needs
Depending on where you live, there may be ample opportunities to pick up side work with your town or city. Your local school may need occasional (or frequent—flu season!) substitute teachers, for instance.Hosting Guests
Do you have a lot of extra house, and do you live in an area that attracts visitors?“Rather than letting that freshly renovated basement or spare room go to waste, rent it out on Airbnb,” says Brian DeChesare, founder of Breaking Into Wall Street, a financial modeling training platform. “You get to set your ideal availability, so you’ll never be stuck with guests at inopportune times.”
Taxes/bookkeeping
Got tax prep skills? You can find work assisting with tax returns in the first few months of the year—then take the rest of the year off. This is a great opportunity for anyone with tax experience, but it’s also possible to take a tax prep course that will qualify you for spots at the big-box tax firms.The same goes for bookkeeping if you have a finance or accounting background. You can put your previous financial skills to work on a freelance basis or take a bookkeeping skills course to qualify for project work.
“If you’re looking to do an additional job, building your skills—which might mean getting a certification or taking another course to help make yourself more competitive for a specific role—we certainly encourage our clients to look into doing that,” says Toni Frana, career services manager for FlexJobs. “For something that requires some knowledge of financial fields … you do need to have a little bit of experience in those areas.”
