How Much $$$ I Made From Side Hustles in 2021

In this video, I’ll break down how much I made… and lost with my side hustles this year.

So quickly before I dive in, it’s worth mentioning that almost – if not all – of these different ventures have been documented to some extent in my past videos, so if you wanted to know about flipping land for instance, just search my channel and you’ll find out more.

And while this channel actually started off as a side hustle itself, it’s kind of turned more full-time for me, so I won’t include any Adsense-related income in this video. And of course, I don’t make these videos to flex on anyone or anything like that. I think it just provides some insight into what can be earned from different avenues online.

Alright, let’s get into it.

Losers

First – I want to cover my side hustles that lost money. It’s unlikely everything you try will turn out to be profitable and for years, many of my attempts either lost money or returned an unremarkable profit.

Futures Trading

As recently documented for the second and third time, I am not a good futures trader. I lost $954 with my first attempt in January. Then more recently in November, I lost about $700. And I traded for another week in my challenge against Matt from Trades by Matt. We started with $2,000 accounts, and at the time of filming, I am down $1,632.

Print on Demand

In May, I attempted a print-on-demand shop on Shopify for the second time. I was targeting the whole “meme stock” culture around GameStop and AMC, which definitely wasn’t the right demographic to try and sell t-shirts to. Since I spent a little too much on designs from Fiverr, I ended up losing about $1,000. So uh, yeah, you definitely don’t need to spend so much on designs or advertising and could really test your designs on something like Redbubble for free before putting money into Shopify and Facebook ads.

Alright, I think that wraps up my losers, so let’s dig out of this $4300 hole.

Winners

Flipping Land

First up is a parcel of land I bought in 2016 for $5,000. The way I bought it was utilizing Google Adwords for keywords like “sell vacant land” and “how to sell land” and phrases like that. I had a website with a pretty lengthy form for people to fill out if they had a parcel they wanted to sell.

The advertising was pretty effective, and I was able to get 2-3 leads per day with a $30 to $50 per day ad budget.

I sold this via seller financing for about $16,000, so I was receiving payments for the last several years of $175 per month. In January of this year, the owner I sold the land to in 2016 decided to go ahead and sell the lot. So at closing, I received the rest of what he owed me, which was $7,698.

Any time I put into flipping this lot was done 5 years prior – it’s really been a nice stream of passive income for me. I just spent maybe two hours getting all the documents together for closing and that was it. Almost $7700 to kick off 2021.

Trading Stocks

Next, I have profits from trading stocks and options. And for this video, I’m only going to include the amount I withdrew to my bank, not any additional funds that are still at my brokerages.

One of the first videos I posted on this channel was how I took $1500 and turned it into $62,000 in one month using stock options. I then lost a good chunk afterwards as I went through the learning curve of trading, but in January, I put most of my account into GameStop shares. I documented the process in this video, but it ended up working out pretty nicely for me.

So I didn’t add any more funds to this account, rather, I just used what I already had in there, but I have spent hundreds of hours in screen time learning, studying, charting, and trading. I would say at least 40 hours a week, taking some months off here and there, but you could argue that the time commitment disqualifies it as a side hustle. Since it is not what I rely on to pay my bills, I’ll count it.

This year, I only withdrew $60,000 from my trading account, so let’s add that to the bank.

NFTs

In March, I collab’d with 3D artist Jonathan Nash to create an NFT. I helped with the concept and composed the music for it. It initially sold for $8,800 , of which I received $1782. Three months ago, it sold to another collector for about $50,000, of which I received a royalty of $450.

We collaborated on two more. Joyscrolling sold for $17,000 and Day Trader sold for a little over $17,000.

Altogether, those three projects netted me about $10,732 with very little time commitment on my part. Those were a lot of fun to work on.

My wife and I also released a handful of photography NFTs, but that’s tied pretty closely with our main business, so I’ll leave that off from this video.

Sports Betting

Next, we have sports betting, which my only big win was this crazy NCAA football parlay I documented in my video on it. I did a few other bets after that, but I lost them all because of course, I did. I knew I just got lucky with that parlay, so I withdrew $12,000 from my betting account.

I’ve got about $250 left, so I’ll probably just try a few more bets here and there just for fun.

Music Streaming

Alright, let’s move on to music streaming revenue. Between Apple Music and Spotify, I received about 865,000 streams this year across 7 different album releases. Even though I have about 20 more songs finished, I didn’t devote any time to getting them mixed and out the door, so my last release was a year ago, on December 18th, 2020. So no additional time or monetary investment on my part. Now the streaming platforms are always a few months behind, so I only have numbers from January to September, but those 9 months brought in $3,100 in revenue.

On average, that’s $344 per month, so I could extrapolate that for the remaining months, but I’d rather just count the concrete numbers, so let’s add in the $3100.

Music Licensing

On a similar note – pun intended – my music licensing numbers just came in. I license my music on Artlist, which pays out once per year. Even though I had no new releases, I was able to get just over 40,000 downloads, which is about 3,000 fewer than last year. Since most customers pay $200 per year for unlimited downloads, they pool everything together and have a set percentage that gets distributed to the artists, based on how many downloads they receive. Because of their business model, the amount paid per download will fluctuate from year to year, so you never really know how much you’ll earn.

This year, those 40,000 downloads earned me $17,000 in licensing revenue. Not bad at all.

Video Licensing

Last but not least is video licensing. We only ever uploaded two sets of clips to Artgrid, the sister site of Artlist. We haven’t uploaded anything new since, but even still, those clips earned us $940, which was honestly a pleasant surprise. I don’t really think about it and certainly don’t devote any time to it, so I’ll take it!

Final Thoughts

So altogether, these different “side hustles” or whatever you want to call them earned me $107,170. And yes, that’s before taxes – I’m sure I’ll get plenty of comments about taxes. I just give all of the info to my accountants and let them figure it out. So it’s safe to assume at least 30% of that will go to taxes, but that’s still $75,000 more than I would’ve made if I was too scared of paying taxes so I didn’t bother to try to earn any more money.

And sure, I can chalk up the sports betting to virtually all luck. And with stocks – a GameStop-type situation doesn’t happen every day, but I had spent months leading up to it studying and trading so that when opportunities like that present themselves, I am ready to take advantage of it.

Thanks so much for watching my channel this year. I’ve had a lot of fun making these videos and looking forward to stepping things up in 2022. I’ll see you in the next one.