March Recap — I’m Making Money! And I quit my 9–5 job!
The month of March was very interesting for my side hustles. There were some amazing things that happened that I really want to share with you all. I want to start off by telling you that I formally resigned from where I was working and April 2, 2021 will be my last day. This was not an easy decision for me to make, but certain events occurred in the month of March, that it just made sense to commit to my side hustle and leave behind that 9–5 job that was just making me extremely unhappy.
The first that happened was in early March, my TikTok following blew up. I didn’t go viral or anything, but over a couple days, I was able to gain almost 1500 new followers. This was amazing and gave me a lot of hope and restored confidence that if I stuck to my side hustle, I could be successful at some point. The next thing that happened was a bunch of key people at my place of employment left and I also got the worst performance review I’ve ever received in my career. Clearly, my head has been somewhere else this past year and my latest performance review just proved to me that it was time to move on. It’s amazing how thing change so much over the course of 12 months. I was the top performer and the highest ranked Systems Engineer at my last place of employment. 12 months later, I’m at the bottom. This pandemic taught me a lot. I had a lot of time to reflect on what I wanted in my life and working for someone else, helping them achieve their dreams at my expense was just not something I wanted to participate in anymore. I also learned that no matter how big or small the company, in the end, you are just a number. And so, I’ve taken matters into my own hands and for the next 9 months, I’m going to try to build out an enterprise that exceeds my yearly salary. I’ll be posting more details later, but if you’ve been following along with my monthly recaps, then you know how much of my time I’ve been investing towards getting a few sources of revenue going.
A couple of other things I want to mention here. I started the month of March off strong. I was posting a lot, had a lot of content planned out, but then something happened. One of my posts on my social media accounts got some unwanted attention. Rather than continue down the path I was on, I decided it would be a better idea to pause posting content until I completely quit my job. The last thing I was for a conflict of interest or something to take away everything that I’ve been working so hard for on the side. The other thing that happened was that I got a couple of freelancing gigs via Fiverr. These two projects kept me SUPER busy. I learned a lot over the last few weeks and I’m here to tell you that April is going to be completely different. For the first time in my life, I’m going to do what I want with my life.
Those fiverr posts also gave me a lot of encouragement because I’m finally making money off my side hustle. Prior to this, I was making pennies for my podcasts and blog posts. Now, I’m charging an hourly rate that is representative of where I want to be financially and clients are slowly starting to come. In total, I’ve made 600 dollars from fiverr in the month of March. I know it’s not a lot, but those are my first real earnings I’ve made with my skills outside of a 9–5 job. This is amazing! I also fixed a computer for a family member and made 45 dollars. I have another project that is yet to be approved by the client, but when it gets approved, I will have made another solid amount of money from Fiverr. I also worked on a couple of web development projects and I plan on getting paid for those over the next couple weeks. Because of all these events and the fact that money is finally starting to come in, I am confident that I can grow and scale this side hustle of mine into a full blown business.
I wont really mention my typical social media reviews because to be honest, I didn’t really grow in any platform other than TikTok. But, as I now have a lot of focus and clarity with respect to my next steps, expect my May report to be action packed. I’ll have to be very careful to make sure I plan out every day going forward because with the amount of side hustles that I’m trying to grow, it is going to become very easy to get overwhelmed with everything I need to achieve.
So here’s my plan for the next couple months. My first objective is to make a consistent $3,500 per month. This represents my current monthly expenses and therefore, I want to earn at a minimum this amount so that I do not have to tap into my savings. On the topic of savings, I also decided to quit my job because I have enough money to last me 12 months. I figured if I give myself 9 months to achieve my dreams, and I succeed, great! If I fail, well that gives me 3 more months of runway and time to find a new full-time job. I really don’t want to get to that point so I really need to make sure that my first plan works out. But it’s always nice to have a backup plan.
I don’t want too ahead of myself, but I do have a series of financial gates that I will try to hit over the next 9 months. I’ve also promised a very nice reward should I hit my ambitious target/goal.
I encourage you to join me on this journey. All my life I was taught that working a 9–5 job was what I was supposed to do. Against everyone’s advice, I decided to quit and try to make a living on my own. I might fail, I might succeed, but 50 years from now, when I’m 82 years old, I will not look back at this point in time and say I didn’t do it. I will say that I was beyond scared, but I proceeded with fear.
