Additional Income: Part time job vs Tuition, what works

A part time job is usually carries way fewer hours in a week as compared to a full time job. The bad thing is that it usually bestow no employee benefits. On the other hand, the benefit is that most people are able to squeeze a part time job in their schedule if they want to.

While it is possible to squeeze in a part time job in their schedule, it is not necessarily easy. What do we have to look out for? Apart from the actual houring hours during the part time job, we do need to take note of the travel time. One way to save on travel time is to find a part time job near your home or your full time job workplace. Not only saves you time, but also transport cost.

Below I shall take a look at 2 different kinds of part time jobs. You can come up with your own conclusions.

Temp clerk:
Assuming you get a part time job working as a temp clerk.
You're working 3 hours a day from 7pm to 10pm.
7 days a week.
and earning $10 per hour. (which is considered quite decent)

Your monthly income would be:
3 hours x 7 days a week x
4 weeks a month x $10 per hour
= $840
Total hours put in:
3 hours x 7 days a week x
4 weeks a month
= 84 hours a month

Which seems like a pretty good source of income. But the hours are long. You probably won't have time for anything else.

Tuition teacher:Now if you were a tuition teacher.
You're teaching on both Saturday and Sunday.
Perhaps you can manage 3 classes a day each 1.5 hours long.
For each class the student pays $25.
Your monthly income would be:
3 classes per day x 2 days a week x
4 weeks a month x $25 per class
= $600
Total hours put in:
3 classes per day x 2 days a week x
4 weeks a month x 1.5 hours per class
= 36 hours a month
Still a good source of income. But you're working much less for it.

Tuition class teacher:
What if you could set up your own tuition class at home.
You could convert a room in your home into a classroom to accomodate 10 students.
Since its a tuition class, the fees would be much less. So let it be $10 per lesson per student.
Same as before, you probably can manage both Saturday and Sunday.
And at 1.5 hours per class, 3 classes a day 8 weekends a month.

You monthly income would be:
3 classes per day x 2 days a week x
4 weeks a month x $10 per class x
10 student per class
= $2,400
Total hours put in:
3 classes per day x 2 days a week x
4 weeks a month x 1.5 hours per class
= 36 hours a month
Even factoring in 50% of inefficiencies if you can't get enough students, you still get $1,200 and work less.

Additional Income: The up and rising Blogshops

Whats a blogshop? I define it as a blog that catalogs a range of products on sale. What I observe is that it is a low cost, low manpower system of running a small time business. Hence it is easy to set up. And this thing is on the rise. The things you need for setting one up are as follows. A blog, a supplier and a little bit of time. You can sell things like clothing, accessories, handbags, shoes and tons of other stuff. Some blogshops transact using paypal or credit cards, while some others would meet up the customer and get cash on delivery of the product.

One trend is that it seems like there are alot of blogshops using the same supplier. Hence what you get is every shop seems to be selling the exact same thing, which is not good for business at all. Therefore, it is important to source for some unique product. I doubt there are any suppliers that would only do your business. I would say, this should be the trickiest part of this idea.

The second most difficult part of this business is the marketing. How are you going to tell the whole world that you are selling stuff at some awkward and hard to spell website address? I have a few suggestions:

1. There are apparently a lot of blogshop directories out there, but the problem is that those directories are themselves very low profile and unheard of.

2. Another way would be by word of mouth, but unless you've got awesomely incredible stuff to sell, I doubt this can get you very far.

3. You could also sign up for some wed advertising which would cost you money which you have no idea if you can ever recoup from.

4. And fourth would be to get your website listed in the search engines and rank it up high. But unless you are a pro search engine optimizer, this is going to be a tough journey for you. You could do it yourself, but there is a whole new school of stuff you need to know and learn. Not the type of stuff I can cover here without straying too far from my topic.

In summary, what ever it is, once you have an awesome product to sell, you have won half the battle. The other half would be the marketing.

Cost analysis of this would depends on how you intend to run this. If you can live with meager 1 sale per half a year kind of business, then its basically zero cost. However, if you intend to market the website aggressively with the help of search engine optimizers, the cost can rack up pretty high. And I will try to investigate a little on this cost in the near future. Do check back to see what I have for you.

So basically my stand is its worth a try only if I can get awesome products to sell. If i can't convince myself to buy 50 pieces of whatever it is, then I assume it would fail here.

Additional Income: Rent a room, cost analysis

So you are interested in renting out that extra room you have? Seems like a good deal isn't it? Never hurts to do some math we learnt in school.

So basically for the rental of a room, getting ~$400 should be considered reasonable? You could get more for renting out the master bedroom, but for calculation sake, we shall stick to the regular bedrooms.

And I expect the usual rental term to be about 2 years. Base of this, our rental revenue for the 2 years would work out to be

24 months x $400 = $9,600

Decent... But wait, everything has costs involved. So what kind of cost are we looking at? Well, the first thing we need to look at would be furnitures. We can't rent an empty room. Below I list a bunch of stuff we need.

As an estimation:

Item - - - - - - - - - - - - -Est. Price
------ - - - - - - - - - - - - ----------
Bed/Mattress ----------> $1,200
Cupboard ---------------> $400
Desk --------------------> $250
Chair --------------------> $120
Small TV ----------------> $500
Air conditioning --------> $750
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ----------
- - - - - - - - - - - - -Total: $3,220

Next would be utilities. Basing on the average household of 3 people, the monthly bills are about $150. At least thats what I am getting. So 1 person would cost about $50. We know all tenants over use their water and electricity, so we shall mark up the usage by 20%. That would make the tenant's contribution to utility bills be at $60. And over 2 years that would work out to be

24 months x $60 = $1,440

What about repairs for the air-con, lightings, da da da. Lets say it works out to be approximately $200 per year, $400 in 2 years. Now assuming thats all the costs involved, our total cost is

$3,220 + $1,440 + $400 = $5,060

And our profits

$9,600 - $5,060 = $4,540

Thats $4,540 plus a bunch of 2 year old furniture in 2 years.

Additional Income: Selling stuff on online auction sites

Ever felt you've got way too much junk in your room? Rather than throwing them into the trash can, why not selling them on auction sites? You get a little cash for cleaning up your room, which seems ok. However do note that if you are suppose to deliver the items you sold, make sure your transportation cost don't eat up too much of your "profit".

Some auction sites are as listed below:
88db
ebid
ebay

and amazingly http://sg.auctions.yahoo.com/ has retired

And of course, do not sell stolen items.

Additional Income: Car Advertising, you can do it too

Wow apparently you can get about $100 per month simply sticking stickers on your car. Might be able to get a lot more if you have a great car. And the designs don't look too bad either. We have a local advertising firm which does this. I shall not mention it here, you go look it up yourself.

asiaone article

The catch is that you have to travel 500km a month minimum. So watch out for the fuel cost. Which means you don't purposely drive 500km a month just so you can sign up for this scheme. But I'm sure there are lots of car junkies out there that can manage that easily anyway.