I made $5,000 in 3 months: How I managed to do it
Just for some background, this was back in the summer of 2019 when I was trying to save up money to move to Spain in the fall. I had left my full-time job at a climbing gym mid-spring, had 3 months left on my lease, and still had bills to pay. Even though I had a bachelor’s degree in Management Science, I had no experience in my field whatsoever. So how did I do it? I ended up working 5 jobs.
Let’s begin with the first job. In April, I got hired as a delivery driver and kitchen help at Tiff’s Treats Cookie Delivery, a cookie delivery service that delivers…well… cookies. This place was where I made most of my money because I would work 25–35 hours plus tips and driver’s fees. I was also able to pick up more shifts or drop shifts if needed. Here’s a quick breakdown (can also be seen on their careers webpage as well):
A delivery driver at the downtown store I worked at would start at $10 an hour plus $2 in driver’s fee per order if driven in the company vehicle or $4 if driven in their own vehicle as well as tips (tips were optional). The hourly wage for kitchen help (making cookies and packaging them) was $12 in which I would work 1–3 shifts per week. In an hour, a driver would deliver on average 1–3 orders on a normal day, 2–4 on a very busy day such as events or holidays, and 0–1 on a very slow day which would be weekend mornings. Even though I made an hourly wage as a delivery driver, the amount of tips and driver’s fees fluctuated. Sometimes my biweekly paychecks would come out to more than $900 and sometimes less than $400, it would always depend on the amount of tips I made on each order (sometimes $1, sometimes $20) and the number of orders I would deliver, especially if I delivered them in my own vehicle. In the little amount of time I worked there, I made a little more than $4,000, or around $2,900 with expenses paid.
My second job entailed working at the front desk of another climbing gym as well as teaching a core class there. I would make $10 an hour plus $20 per class plus $10 more for every gym membership sold. I worked six-hour shifts three times a week plus my biweekly 30-minute core classes during those shifts. At Tiff’s Treats, I would only work the morning shifts such as 8–2, 9–4, or 10–4. Here, I would work weekday evenings from 5–10 and only one weekend morning. My paychecks would come out to $300–400 every two weeks, it wasn’t much but I did get to climb there whenever I wanted as a perk. In the end, the amount I made was around $2,000, or about $1,600 with expenses paid.
This next one I would not consider an hourly job since I didn’t know the next time I would be able to work it. A friend of mine’s parents owned an Airbnb, and a pretty popular one at that (only because it was the cheapest option for the number of beds in our city). She would clean the house from time to time and her parents would pay her $50 each time (the standard Airbnb cleaning fee). However, she sometimes wasn’t able to clean it so I ended up taking over. In a span of three months, I cleaned the Airbnb a total of 7 times for a total of $350 which I kept in my piggy bank for emergencies (thankfully that money wasn’t needed for its intended purpose). Cleaning that Airbnb was perhaps the easiest of all because I had three hours to clean a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house with six queen beds in total.
That same friend’s father wrote a book about cutting corners when remodeling homes and needed someone to edit it. However, he didn’t want to pay a legitimate editor (of course) so he asked me to do it for $150. I ended up taking the deal and spent one week rereading and editing his awful book. According to Editorial Freelancers Association in 2008, “basic editing costs $25 to $40 per hour Pace: 5 to 10 pages an hour.” The book had more than 250 pages and was a very troublesome read… so was I heavily underpaid? Yes. Anyways, that money went straight to the piggy bank (again was not used for emergencies).
The final job was more of a surprise to me. I love to bake and for some strange reason thought I could make a good amount of money selling homemade chocolate chip banana bread when I had some free time in my tiny studio apartment kitchenette. The cost for me to make one loaf of banana bread was $1.56 ($1.24 for the aluminum foil cooking loaf pan and lid and the rest was the cost for ingredients) and I would sell each loaf for $5 with tin because I would sell to family and friends. This was not the most financially sound decision of mine: in 2 hours I yielded 4 loaves only to make $13.76 for them. I sold about 16 loaves for a total of a whopping $55.04. If I could go back and charge more or just use a loaf pan to bake and wrapped the loaf in cling wrap I would. It was a fun learning experience nonetheless.
In the end, I would say I learned a lot from working at various places and doing various things for money. I realized how easily I was able to adapt to different working environments and continue to motivate myself when I no longer wanted to continue working. I was able to meet my goal of $5,000 just before moving to Spain and gained plenty of experience along the way as well as a couple of pounds from the 3 dozen cookies we were allowed to take home every week…
However, now I am finding myself in the same situation because I am currently in Spain, rapidly running out of my savings and desperately needing money to pay next month’s rent. So what’s the catch? It is much harder for a foreigner to get an hourly paying job on a student visa. Part 2 coming soon?
