Gilding Your Golden Years With a Side Gig

Are you considering gilding your golden years with a side gig? You’re not alone.

Retirement was once all about leisure — travel, golf, rocking chairs and spending relaxing days with the grandkids.  But today, retirees are increasingly returning to work. Their reasons vary from grappling with inflation and unexpected expenses to simple boredom.

“I don’t like having nothing to do,” says Richard Eisenberg, a retired editor, who now writes columns and teaches classes at NYU. “But I also have to force myself to not overdo it. I work maybe one-third of the time.”

Eisenberg isn’t cash-strapped. But, he notes that working in retirement does have substantial economic benefits. And for many, that’s a motivating factor. Indeed, a recent survey by BadCredit.org found that one in four retirees had to return to work to pay day-to-day expenses. And more than a third who haven’t returned to work, struggle to make ends meet.

Side gigs to gild your golden years

The good news is that gilding your golden years with a side gig is increasingly easy. And where full-time workers often complain of age discrimination when they hit a certain age, online platforms offering side hustles rarely care about your stage of life. Indeed, some actively recruit older workers for both their experience and their temperament. Better yet, some of these sites allow retirees to engage in activities that they enjoy — like traveling.

Here are 10 great side gigs ideal for retirees, starting with the lowest-paying jobs that have the fewest requirements and moving toward the highest-paying side gigs that often require expertise, assets or experience.

Seasonal jobs

Want to travel while you earn money? Seasonal job sites, such as CoolWorks, VagaJobs and Xanterra, help you find temporary jobs in hotels, resorts, camps, dude ranches and national parks. Notably, almost all of the hospitality concerns that list jobs with these sites actively court healthy seniors. Why? As a generation, they’re considered extraordinarily patient and polite — key qualities for public-facing positions.

While these jobs are generally not high paying, they often come with housing, meals and, of course, the ability to travel to attractive destinations. Xanterra, for example, enlists workers for resorts located in national parks, like Yosemite and Yellowstone.  VagaJobs is currently recruiting for a luxury hospitality chain in New Zealand. And CoolWorks is seeking employees for a resort in Key Largo, Florida.

Drive

What makes Uber and Lyft attractive options for retirees is that they allow you to work anytime you want — and for as long or as little — as you want. To drive for these apps, you’ve got to sign up and have the car you’ll be driving inspected and approved. You’ll also need to show proof of insurance and be able to pass a background and driving check. (Not surprisingly, these apps don’t want drivers who have multiple speeding tickets or accidents.) You’ll also need a smart phone.

Once approved, you simply need to turn on the site’s driver app and start accepting assignments. Each assignment says where you need to pick up your rider, where they’re going and how much the gig pays. If it’s a gig you want, you accept it. Otherwise, you ignore it. When and how much you work is completely up to you.

Mystery shop

Some mystery shopping gigs are well worth avoiding because they pay poorly — usually $15 to $25 per gig — for a significant amount of work. However, there are also some that pay decently and allow you to engage in fun activities — like going to movies and dining out — for free.

Among the top rated mystery-shopping sites on SideHusl.com are EyeSpy, which specializes in fine dining and hotel shops and Service Evaluation Concepts, which enlists mystery shoppers to check out everything from convenience stores to health plans. SEC pays from $15 to $100 per assignment.

Opine

It’s likely that you’ve developed a few opinions over the course of your life and some companies would like to hear them. These companies run focus groups, which ask consumers to provide detailed opinions about everything from the right number of cup-holders in a SUV to the what are your main concerns when choosing a Medicare Advantage Plan.

Focus group work doesn’t come up everyday. But when it does, it’s usually well paid, offering from $50 to $150 per hour. To find these gigs, sign up with focus group search firms, such as WinnWinn Research, FindFocusGroups, Field Work and FocusGroup.com. You’ll be asked to fill out a detailed survey about you, your family, and sometimes even about the products you own to match you with relevant focus groups.

Pet sit

If you love animals, you can sign up to be a pet sitter on Rover. This site allows sitters to create a profile that says what kind of animals they’re willing to watch and what they’re willing to do.

You might, for instance, want to watch cats (or dogs or rabbits, gerbils or reptiles) in your own home. Or provide walks — or drop-in visits — at the client’s home when people are away on vacation or at work. You can also offer to watch pets in the owner’s home.

For each of these services, you set your own rates and availability. (Typical rates for walking a dog range from $15-$25 per dog, per half hour. Rates for overnight boarding vary from $25 per dog, per night to about $100.)

And, you have ability to vary your rates, based on whether it’s a weekend or weekday; ordinary day or holiday. You also can stipulate the size of animals you’re willing to watch. If you aren’t comfortable with, say, big dogs, you can stipulate that you only watch dogs under 10 pounds in weight.

Freelance dog walkers and sitters say they can easily earn $500 to $1,000 a month, once they’re established at this site.

Rent your yard

Nearly 80% of Americans over the age of 65 own their own homes. And having that space allows you to engage in a number of asset-based side hustles, such as renting out your yard. Asset-based side gigs are ideal tools for gilding your golden years because they’re a low-maintenance way to make money from something you already own.

A site called SniffSpot, for example, allows you to list your yard as a private dog park for pet-owners. You set the price, times and dates that your yard is available, and pet-owners book your yard by the hour. To be sure, the rates generally aren’t high — usually $10 to $25 per dog, per hour. But, your involvement is modest too.

You generally just offer space, a bowl of water and maybe a chair or bench for pet-owners to relax. You don’t need to greet your guests. Just leave the gate open.

Renters are expected to arrive and depart on time and leave your yard in the same (poop-free) condition it was in before they came. If you’re lucky enough to get a few back-to-back bookings, this hustle can earn you $50 to $100 a day, while you sit on the couch.

Rent storage space

If you have an empty bedroom, attic or garage, you can rent it out for storage.

Several sites, including Neighbor and Stache, allow property owners to list whatever empty space they have to rent. Property-owners describe, measure and photograph the space and set the monthly rental price. You also set rules for access, such as whether renters need to make an appointment to get their things.

Rents range widely based on the amount and type of space that’s being rented. One Southern California listing offers a 5′ x 4′ closet for $100 a month; several others listed 20′ x 10′ garage spaces for anywhere between $100 and $850 per month. If you can accommodate hard-to-store luxuries like RVs and boats, this side hustle can be particularly lucrative. And, like renting your yard, the amount of work required from you is minimal.

Rent the whole house

If your retirement ideal is to travel for months at a time, you may want to rent out your house while you’re gone. Naturally, you can do this through industry leader, Airbnb. But there are plenty of other options that are particularly attractive for those likely to spend months away from home.

SideHusl.com’s two favorites are SabbaticalHomes and TrustedHousesitters. The sites are dramatically different, though, so a little explanation is necessary.

SabbaticalHomes focuses on long-term rentals to educators. You determine the dates your home is available and how much you want for it. You post photos and respond directly to rental requests, working out payments directly with the renters. The site gets paid a flat fee, which is often far cheaper with lengthy and expensive rentals than the percentage-based fees charged on Airbnb.

TrustedHousesitters is our favorite option for people who have pets that they want to leave at home. This site matches travelers looking for free accommodations with homeowners, who need somebody to watch their pets. You don’t officially get paid for the housesitting — nor for having someone stay at your house. But you get free pet-sitting at home and free accommodations wherever you’re staying. So, that’s likely to save you thousands of dollars on hotels and kennels.

The site does charge an annual fee, but its less than you’d pay for a weekend away at a nice hotel.

Consult

If you have deep experience in almost any field, you can sign up to be a part-time consultant. Consultants weigh in on a vast array of topics, from remodeling homes to choosing business bank accounts. Many of the gigs require professional experience, so they’ll ask you what you do (or did) for a living, as well as the sorts of products and services you have personal experience with.

Several of these sites also require you to read through a series of disclosures that stipulate the types of jobs you can’t take due to potential conflicts of interest. However, once you slog through the set-up process, which is likely to take an hour or so, the sites will send you consulting offers, which usually pay $100 or more per hour.

Good sties to find these gigs include GLG, Catalant, Maven, Respondent, UserInterviews and Rare Patient Voice.

Testify

Those qualified to consult are also likely to qualify for gigs as an expert witness. Expert witnesses are enlisted to help lawyers and juries understand technical details and procedural norms in often unfamiliar industries. For instance, if a builder is sued over a building collapse, his lawyer might look for structural engineers to help explain what might cause a building to fall down (outside of the builder’s negligence). Law enforcement officers — current and retired — are often enlisted to help in drunk driving and police brutality cases. Nurses and doctors are enlisted for medical malpractice and wrongful death suits. Safety experts are enlisted for slip-and-fall cases. And the list goes on.

Yet, even though tens of thousands of expert witnesses are needed every year, many expert witnesses are only enlisted once or twice annually — if that. This is a very intermittent side gig.

That said, the pay is extraordinary when you do get a gig. Expert witness search firms say most experts charge $200 or more per hour, and can sometimes charge $750 to $1,000 an hour.

The best sites to find expert witness gigs include GLG (which also represents consultants), Expert Institute and Round Table Group.