BiggerPockets Money Podcast - 470: Make an Extra $100/Day with These Work-From-Home Side Hustles

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Want to know how to make $100 a day the easy way? We’ve got the queen of side hustles, Jackie Mitchell, on the show to share the most legit, low-effort, flexible side hustles you can try today to start making money tomorrow. Jackie challenged herself to make $100 per day for the next 100 days as she and her husband work to save up a down paymentfor their first house. She’s documented her entire journey on social media to show the side hustles that are (and aren’t) worth the work. From study groups to surveys, meal-prepping for others, training AI chatbots, and playing piano at events, Jackie has tried dozens of different side hustles so you don’t have to. In today’s show, she shares the best side hustles where you can make up to thirty dollars an hour working entirely from home, the side hustles that trick you into thinking you’re making more money, and how you could start making THOUSANDS more a month while working a few hours extra every day. If you’re trying to save up for a down payment like Jackie, ditch some debt, or want a little extra in the bank, these side hustles could be your first step toward financial freedom. Stick around because Jackie will tell you which side hustles could boost your bank account!   In This Episode We Cover How to make an extra $100 per day with simple side hustles that DON’T require experience The one side hustle Jackie comes back to that offers consistent work and high pay Which side hustles are NOT worth the money and take FAR longer than you think Taxes, 1099s, and how to keep track of your income and expenses when making extra money “Body mirroring” and how Jackie stays super efficient when doing side work  And So Much More! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Money Facebook Group BiggerPockets Forums Finance Review Guest Onboarding Join BiggerPockets for FREE Scott's Instagram Mindy on BiggerPockets Grab Scott’s Book, “Set for Life” Listen to All Your Favorite BiggerPockets Podcasts in One Place Apply to Be a Guest on The Money Show Podcast Talent Search! Money Moment Food Spending Eating Away at Your FI Plans? Here’s How to Eat for Cheap The Most Efficient Path to Financial Freedom With Justin From Saving Sherpa Taking Command of Your Finances by Understanding (& Controlling) Money with Joe Saul-Sehy Side Hustle Websites from This Show Data Annotation Prolific Remotasks Swagbucks Beer Money Subreddit Click here to check the full show notes: https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/money-470   Interested in learning more about today's sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email us: [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast where we interview Jackie Mitchell and talk about all the different ways she has managed to make an extra $100 per day and why she's doing it. Hello, hello, hello. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my $100 co-host, Scott Trench. Thanks, Mindy, great to be here and great to learn from somebody who's stacking Benjamin's. She is stacking Benjamin's every single day. Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary. less just for somebody else to introduce you to every money story because we truly believe that financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you're starting. That's right. Whether you want to retire early and travel the world, go on to make big time

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Email money moment at biggerpockets.com. Jackie Mitchell is a 25-year-old rising TikTok star based in Columbus, Ohio. She's documenting a 100-day challenge where she works all kinds of side jobs to make an extra $100 a day. Jackie, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. I'm so excited to talk to you about this challenge. Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be on and talk with you guys. Jackie, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, I can. So I am from Columbus, Ohio, like you said, not originally, but I live there now with my husband. I'm 25. I work at a church

full time. My husband's an audio engineer. And we live in an apartment with our very orange cat, Obie, who likes to cause a lot of trouble. And yeah, I've just, been documenting kind of my experience on what it's like to earn a little bit of extra money on the side if it's realistic. Yeah. And can you tell us a little bit about your childhood with regards to money? Yeah, absolutely. I grew up in Pittsburgh with both of my parents and my younger brother. And my parents were really good about teaching us how to budget, how to be financially literate. Super thankful and blessed for that. My parents always instilled in us, you know, the importance of saving what we do have and, you know, kind of finding ways to save, finding ways to spend less

money. So it was always kind of central to my life. I used to go thrifting with my mom all the time. Like even before thrifting was like a cool thing that the kids did. And I loved it and I still do it to this day. So it's always been ingrained in me definitely from a young age. And I also think I've always had a knack for making extra money. Right. So I was always the kid who was like organizing lemonade stands, trying to think of like summer business ideas. I remember one. time, we had this like huge crab apple tree in our backyard. My dad wanted all of the crab apple droppings picked up. So he told me and my friend, hey, I'll pay you a cent, just a penny per crab apple. And he stopped counting after like 4,000 and we ended up making $40, which I think is a

lot more than he expected. But, you know, when you get $20 as a kid, like that might as well be 200K. So, you know, I've always had that kind of knack for finding extra ways to make money. Awesome. Is that what prompted this 100 day challenge? Or what? What brought this about? Yeah. So, you know, a little bit behind the 100-day challenge for me personally is just that we are saving up to buy a house. You know, Columbus isn't really a like high cost of living area, but with how things are going, it's going to get there in the next few years. It's a really hot job market right now. Intel's been building this like huge facility that's been driving like thousands of jobs. So the real estate market's really hot. I'm seeing stuff

fly off the market. And, you know, for me as a potential first time home buyer, that's really scary. And I, I love what I do for my day job. I absolutely love it. But it's definitely more of a passion project than it is like, you know, a high earning job. So, you know, I wanted to find some ways to utilize my free time and make some extra money and save up for a down payment. Awesome. Is there a reason why it was 100 days? Is that you wanted $10,000 specifically or? Yeah, $10,000 would help specifically. I think that's like what would close the gap on my goal. And it also just felt like a nice round number. You know what I mean?

When you want to do a challenge, it sounds a little bit wordier when you get into like for 72 days, I want to make, you know, $18 and $70. You know what I mean? Whatever it is. So I just wanted like a nice round number. And so that's part of the reason I came up with 100 and 100. Awesome. So let's dive into it. What did you start with and what are some of the like, like let's hear about some of the ways you've made these extra $100.

And the creative ones, the hardest ones, the easiest ones, all the good stuff. Yeah, I think so far I've really run the gambit and there's lots more to discover. When I started, a lot of the ones I was doing were ones that I had already utilized in college. So this is something that I had been done loosely doing just kind of to earn some extra cash while I was in college to save up for a trip, stuff like that. Things like swag bucks, which is like, you know, a paid survey site and they do mobile game offers. They've got kind of like some shopping offers. So I'd been utilizing them for a while.

prolific is another site that I used a lot already before this challenge, which would be a site that either researchers or consumer studies run, kind of like short little surveys. So maybe they're like five, 10 minutes long. You get paid like per hour for those. So I've been using that. Some other online work, data annotation is another website that I'll use quite often actually now that I've gotten into it. And then outside of that, I've cooked for friends. I've done meal prepping for friends. I've given piano lessons. I've done, you know, played events for money. I have, you know, sold stuff on Facebook Marketplace. My coworker gave me a giant bin of Beanie Babies that I'm selling on Facebook Marketplace right now. So, you know, I've really run the gambit. The thing that's up

next to me that I would love to try, though, is Instant Cart Shopping. But I'm on the wait list. I loved grocery shop and they won't let me in. So I'm counting down the days. Hey, Instacart. If you're listening to this, let Jackie into your program. Okay, so how many hours do you think you're averaging per side hustle or per day when you're trying to get to your $100? Yeah. So this would just vary on what's available per day. But I would say typically three hours maybe, maybe four on a hard day. If you can get into something like a focus group, which is less like consistent, right?

Focus group studies aren't going to happen often. But when they do, that's like $50 to $200 just for one hour. study, right? So, but I would say generally speaking on a day-to-day basis, I'm putting in at about three hours of work, four hours of work. Okay. So if you make $200 today, do you skip tomorrow or do you still jump on tomorrow? Sometimes, but I'm trying to be good about that, partially because, you know, my audience isn't looking for me to take breaks, although I am definitely. But, you know, I also want to be sensitive to, you know, if I want to work, I better do it now. Because if I wake up the next day and I have any inkling to work any extra hours, that's much better than waiting for.

the day that I'm sick and I don't want to, but I used my paid extra day off, you know, a long time ago. So every once in a while, I'll call it short. I always say, you know, any progress is progress. So if I've hit $95 for the day, but I'm, you know, about to fall asleep, I'm so tired, that's, that's good enough. And some, there's a lot of days that I make like $112. So it all evens out right now. I think I'm about three days ahead of my goal. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. Fantastic. And so what is the, the easiest way you said is going to be a focus group. so far. When you find those, you pounce on those, that's the great opportunity. Well, it's been the hardest. Yeah, a couple hard ones are just things that are grueling. You know, some prolific studies,

researchers are looking to do kind of like a psychological study or a study on how people react in social situations. And sometimes those are particularly confusing on purpose. So I'd say sometimes that gets hard because like you don't know what the purpose of the study is or they're asking you to do really like menial tasks that are like grueling. But you know, you just kind of never know what you're going to get into when you sign up for for a study there. And then I would also say some of the stuff I do on data annotation is just really like mind numbing stuff. It's just kind of like plug and chug, typing, a lot of that. So those are the two that I would say take the most work for the pay. But they're also the two of the most consistent ones, which I think makes sense.

So yeah. What is data annotation and how does somebody qualify for that? job. So I get it because data annotations seem to be something that wasn't on a lot of people's radar before this podcast. I don't work directly for this company, you know, so this isn't something that I'm necessarily like touting, you know, from the rooftops there. But, you know, it is in a general sense, I can't get into specifics too much. But what I do on their website is take replies and responses from large language models. So large AI chatbots that are used either for the general public or for a specific purpose. And I'm analyzing those responses. I'm fact checking it for things like verbosity. Am I, you know, checking to make sure it's comprehensible. How's the readability? Then I'm editing all of those

responses to make it better for the chat bot. And then I'm feeding it back to the chatbot. Some of those are more hyper specific and they've got a lot more like specific requirements for each turn. But, you know, in a general sense, that's what I do on that website. Okay. That is super interesting. I know. You said there are some things that are specific. So bigger pockets is a real estate investing website. Scott and I both work there. We have a lot of high level real estate investing knowledge. That's a, it's something you can learn, but it's like, it's more like lifelong knowledge. Are there opportunities that are like hyper focused on lifelong knowledge? Yeah.

where somebody would be more qualified for that. Like, like, I'm, I've got 25 years of real estate experience. So I would be more, I would be more of a fit than you would for that particular job. Like, I'm really buttering this question, but like, is there a way for, for you to do hyper-specialized, things like that? And then are those data annotation jobs paying more to me who has different skills? skillsets. Yeah, I think that's a great question. So I can speak a little bit into this, but obviously I don't qualify for some of their hyper-specific tasks, but I can give you a general idea of what I think they're looking for. So just as a broad statement on their website, they say they, you know,

prefer people with strong writing and logical, like critical reasoning skills. So that's like an all across the board encompassing like when you take their assessment. That's what they're going to ask you. So that is just the pre-screener to see if you get in. And then you are qualifying. and essentially for each project group that you're getting. So I'm qualifying for like a subset of projects to work on that has, you know, a large number of tasks. But I do get things that come across my dashboard quite a lot for things like is your first language Japanese. Do you have experience coding?

And those do seem to pay more than than the ones that I'm getting, you know, just because that's a smaller subset of the community that would be working on there. That is so cool. I'm going to go check that out. that is yeah yeah because that I could talk all day what's the hourly pay for this it depends on the project same with prolific so a lot of these sites are going to be per either task group or per like larger system of like whether it's the same model across all boards or if it's like a more specific harder task I would say for data annotation my pay ranges somewhere between 20 and 30

$3 an hour. Prolific is looking at like, you know, maybe $12 to $25 an hour, something along there. And then I've also heard Remo tasks is very similar to data annotation. I haven't tried them out. I'm actually in the wait list for them. But they, I think, are paying similarly for similar tasks as data annotation is. So what are you looking, what is your kind of like, you know, in the next 50 days, I assume you're going to do more experimentation with that? What are some of the areas that you're excited to explore next that you think might be really

good dollar per hour options. Yeah. One of the things I've been super excited about that I've only gotten into recently and only because of this challenge is, you know, content creation. So that's something that was only available to me because I started this challenge and gained any sort of, you know, platform or any sort of following. So stuff like UGC for brands, I've done a couple of brands, which to me, like the turnover rate on how much work I'm doing to edit a video, post a video versus what I've done before. I mean, that's really high, high rate of pay for the hour that I'm putting into it or whatever. So that's been huge affiliate marketing. I've started an Amazon affiliate program. So I've got some links in my bio there. So I'm testing out the waters

in terms of like affiliate marketing and content creation that would only be available to me because I started this challenge. So it's kind of full circle. Tax season is one of the only times all year when most people actually look at their full financial picture, including income, spending, savings, investments, the whole thing. And if you're like most folks, it can be a little eye-opening. That's why I like Monarch. It helps you see exactly where your money is going, and more importantly, where your tax refund can make the biggest impact. Because the goal isn't just to look backward, it's to actually make progress. Simplify your finances with Monarch. Monarch is the all-in-one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial

life, including budgeting, accounts and investments, net worth, and future planning together in one dashboard on your phone or your laptop. Feel aware and in control of your finances this tax season and get 50% off your Monarch subscription with the code Pockets. What I personally like is that Monarch keeps you focused on achieving, not just tracking. You can see your budgets, debt payoff, savings goals, and net worth all in one place. So every decision actually moves in Edle. Achieve your financial goals for good with Monarch, the all in one tool that makes money management simple. Use the code pockets at Monarch.com for half off your first year. That's 50% off at monarch.com code pockets. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How

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I have a short commute, which is nice. So it doesn't take me too long. I'd probably get out of bed like 7.30 or 8. I try not to do too much work if I don't have to before my day job. Just like to start my morning nice. And I'm a morning person anyways. I just want to enjoy the morning and kind of get my day job done. I head home at four and I'm at home usually most days around 4.30.

And then I definitely always turn on my heated blanket, sit in bed to do some work because if I can work from bed, I'm going to work from bed. And then it just depends. My husband doesn't get home until six. So I usually have a window of like, you know, one and a half, two hours where I'm not doing anything in particular. So that's a nice time to knock out a couple hours of either prolific studies, data annotation, a focus group, content creation, stuff like that.

And then anything I can do to get that done before like 8 or 9 p.m. is great because it does take me about an hour to edit my videos and do the voiceovers from the previous day. Awesome. And if you weren't working a full-time job and had time during the day, would there be better or more opportunities, especially in the opportunistic space? Yeah, I would definitely say that I would be doing a larger quantity of these jobs. So very rarely am I hitting the limit of what's available to me. So there's always more jobs available from most of these sites, I would say prolific is one that kind of dwindles on the weekends. But for the most part, it looks like a lot of these sites really need workers. So I've yet to hit a wall where I'm like,

I really can't make $100 a day. To me, it seems like I'm running out of hours. They're not running out of tasks. Awesome. And have you considered things like, hey, there's an event going on or something like that. And they're looking for staff that can support that. And there's an opportunity to make way more in there. Or are you really looking for stuff by and large that you can do from home? I'm looking at both. I've definitely done either like just some random kind of in-person tasks like shopping and cooking for people. I have done playing. I've done piano events before. And I've also worked in the service industry before this. I worked a second job in the evenings at a steakhouse. So I definitely am open to that. But I do think my audience is specifically looking for things that are

accessible to someone like a stay-at-home mom. And I want to be sensitive to that because, you know, But the reason that I'm getting any opportunity like this at all is because of my audience. So I do try to prioritize things that would be realistic for like a working mom or a full-time caretaker. Okay. So now we need to put our finance Friday hats on and ask if you've considered leaving your full-time position to pursue this full-time. Yeah.

I have not at all. But my full-time job was never about the salary for me. So I think that's why I love what I do so much. and I cannot overstate that. So I think that's part of the reason that I have so much energy to do other tasks on the side is because, you know, I want to be sensitive to. I know a lot of people feel maybe stuck at their job or they feel like drained by their day job.

And I'm in a really fortunate position to not feel that way. So I really love what I do. I love my coworkers. It's not something I'm considering at this time. I just really love what I do. So, but again, more of a passion project for me than, you know, a big income source. Yeah. I think it's a great what, what you're doing.

is a great option for testing out other things. If you can go on data annotation.Tech and start trying out these jobs and you're like, oh, you know what? I really hate this, but I'm a piano player and I never thought about playing in public. And now I can because thanks to Jackie's TikTok videos, I was reminded that people will pay people to play piano for them. Oh, yeah. And now I can have this job that I love.

I have had jobs that I hate. And when you get up in the morning, your soul is crushed just a little bit more because you're like, oh, yeah, it's Monday. I have to go to work. So when you have a job that you love, it's really such a non-soul crushing event. It is, it's like you wouldn't consider quitting. So I totally get that answer. Totally get that.

Yeah. So you document this on TikTok like we've talked about. Why did you decide to do that? That is the question. And in terms of my day one post, I have no idea why I posted it beyond just the vague notion of needing accountability. So I thought, you know, if I post this and someone sees it, one of my friends sees it and they know I've posted it, you know, I've got to post day two. I love to make things a competition with myself. But that can only get you so far.

I do also want accountability from others. And, you know, within that first day of hundreds and thousands of, you know, likes and comments like, oh, I want to see what day two's like. I was like, I really have to actually commit to this now. So it was kind of surreal. But I think I just posted it because I wanted to make sure I would actually stick to my goal. And that's definitely worked. I can't stop now. So when did you, when did you first see it resonating with with other people that, you know, weren't part of your core network? Yeah. I would say day one, I was really surprised because I had about 100 followers. So really my network at that time was just some some friends or some auxiliary accounts that have been following me. But up until,

that point, I really hadn't had any sort of audience. So I'd posted that and my, my follower count jumped by like several thousands. So I was like, wow, okay, it seems like people want to see this. That's great. And then I think on day nine, that video was particularly, that might have been the video you guys saw that that one kind of got a lot of traction and gained me a large portion of the followers that I have here today. What was that video? That was day nine of my challenge. And it was just a normal day. I can't understand particularly what was so enticing about that day. I did a few different offers. I did like a swag bucks game offer.

I did some data annotation. I talked about selling some, you know, some beanie babies online. So I don't know what was enticing about that. I don't know if just the algorithm picked it up. But that was like sort of my bigger break into gaining a larger audience. What's enticing about it is the fact that it's so achievable and relatable, right? Like that's what, and you know, like we like that's, I think one of the things we like to talk about here on Bigger Pockets Money is, you know, the big story is, you know,

somebody with a very normal income with strong savings habit achieves financial freedom or builds wealth over a reasonable period of time through hard work and highly relatable approach. And that's all you're doing here, which is why you're so extraordinary is because, you know, anybody can do what you're what you're doing here. It's just putting in the hours. You're working a full-time job and then you're going home and doing more work. And that is going to create huge benefits to your life over time. and it's just really inspiring to see it to see it being done.

Thank you. Yeah, I absolutely believe anyone can do it. Yeah, you're, you're aiming for $100. You're not aiming for $10,000 a day. And that's what I love is that it's totally doable. And what are some questions you're getting from folks for the community? Yeah, one of the biggest ones I get is definitely how I'm handling taxes. And I think that's a super valid question. I'm going to get hit with quite a few 1099s this year.

So what I always tell people is you always have to track your expenses and your earnings separately. Even if a website tracks it for you, even if you have all of your pay stubs recorded, I would tell people to always put into just a simple spreadsheet what you earned, how many hours that took you, because you may look back at the end of the year. And even not for tax purposes, you may just say, this wasn't worth how much money I made for how many hours I put in. But you may not be able to look at that until it's way too late. right so so track that by yourself and then you can make estimated payments quarterly um for taxes and so that's what i do because even though it's the same amount whether i pay it all in march or i pay it four times a year it kind of just feels like you're paying a little bit less that's what i'll call you know people get into girl math i think girl math would be to do to do four payments quarterly

but if you make estimated payments i think you're going to err towards the side of a return rather than get hit with that large lump sum at the end which i think is is a really really big benefit for a lot of people. Yeah, I didn't even consider that, and I should have. That makes a lot of sense that you got to be tracking all of those things. What is the most fun work that you've done thus far, regardless of income to per hour ratio? I think the most fun for me has just been through TikTok. I actually got accepted into their creativity beta program, which pays creators a portion of

the revenue from qualified views. So I'm actually getting paid a little bit every time I post a video that's over one minute long. So to be able to create content that I was already creating, that I already love to create and I was going to share for free anyways, to be able to make any revenue off that at all is amazing. I always share that when I make that in my videos. And it's been, you know, just between $5 and $25 a day. But when I'm aiming for $100 a day, that's a quarter of my goal. That's amazing. Okay. So you said at the end, people are asking about taxes and at the end of the year, you can go over and see if there's anything you wouldn't do again. Is there anything that you've done in these first

50 days that you have said, well, that was interesting to try. I am never doing that again. Yeah, that's a good question. I think not just in the 50 days that I've done, but just in like a holistic kind of like four years, five years of doing this throughout college and whatnot in my early adulthood, I would say tasks that pay per task a couple cents. It may seem like you can do a lot of those. So stuff like Swagbucks, a lot of other survey sites are offering like cents per task. I don't think that that usually adds up to be worth it. It kind of tricks you into thinking like, okay, if I just do enough of those an hour, I've actually got a pretty good chance of doing a lot of tasks. But to me, it hasn't been worth it. So in terms of specifically Swagbuck's website,

because I know a lot of people use it, I've got a lot of followers that use that site. I stick to their game offers and their shopping offers. Their surveys are not worth what they're paying, in my opinion, versus a reputable site like Prolific that's offering researchers the chance to directly talk to consumers. They're paying a much higher rate. So if you've got a subset of like similar groupings of tasks or similar groupings of revenue sources, try to look at those and then say, can I put more effort into this one that pays higher than, you know, continue to put into, but work.

into something that's not going to make as much money. Makes sense. So some of these days, I'm sure you're able to get to your goal pretty quickly and some days, not so much. Do you find this eating into a lot of your free time? Is it creating a lot of stress in your life or are you enjoying it? That's a good question. I think I am not quite stressed, but I do definitely feel like I owe it to myself to keep going,

right? So I am somewhat of a workaholic. I really enjoy working. When I worked at a restaurant back in the day, I liked to be. working. I liked the feeling of coming home and having worked to jobs, which I know is not a lot of people's reality. It's just how I work. So I liked feeling accomplished, but I do want to be sensitive to, you know, finances are a part of life, but they're not the point of life, especially not, at least in my case. And so I want to be sensitive to spending time with family and spending time

with friends. One of the great things about the stage of life that I'm in with my husband is we're both 25. We're young. We don't have kids. And then our friends are also in the same boat. You know, they're young 20-somethings, they understand the need to make extra cash. So even if we have people over, we love to host. So we'll have people over here probably four or five times a week. We're going to have someone come over for dinner after this. I got to start cooking after this. But because of that, you know, my friends are pretty open to the fact that I'm earning extra money. They're supporting me on it. So, you know, say we have dinner and then we all just kind of hang out in the living room. Someone's put on a movie. No one's going to, you know, be upset if I, you know,

say, hey, I got to do a couple hours of data annotation on my laptop while we watch this movie. I've been really blessed with friends that understand that. And even a few friends that do that along with me, you know, on their own journeys to making some extra money. I had a friend, Aaron, who came over a couple days ago. And all we did was turn on a horror movie, watch bake some cookies and just get started on some data annotation and some surveys. So, you know, it's possible.

It's possible to do it together, I think. I was going to say, have them bring their laptops over and you can have a data annotation party. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. What are some of the things that you've learned about yourself during this challenge? I've learned that I definitely work best when I'm not at home. So one of the best things to do on my day off is just to go to a cafe.

And I thought this was just like a me phenomenon, right? You always think like you're like the only person in the world who feels these things. What was nice was a lot of my followers shared that this was something called body mirroring or body doubling. That's actually a really effective tool for studying and for working purposes. and it contributes to why people feel like they might stay on task more when they're in a large group of people or if they're in the office, just simply because your brain sees other people working and it just says, hey, I should be doing that too, right? So it's much easier for me to delay stuff procrastinate when I'm home alone. So I've found that it does really help on my day's offer

in the evenings. If I can get to a local cafe, sit down and people watch, you know, that makes all the difference for me. I don't know if that's partially because I'm an extrovert, but yeah. All right. So I got a question here around you're going to save up 10 grand. I'm assuming that you guys have other savings on top of that because you talked about your upbringing with very infrugal, cost conscious, those kinds of things. When you buy your house, what kind of house are you looking to buy? And have you considered a house hack? Are you familiar with that term? I am only a tiny bit through you guys from what I've listened to so far. So I'd love for you to talk about that a little bit more. But I'm definitely. looking for, we've got a pretty short list. We'd like two bedrooms and we'd like to live in a home somewhere in the Columbus area, right? But honestly, we're looking for fixer uppers. We're looking for whatever. We are, we're not really that picky. We understand that it's our first home and we are, you know, not high earners. So we have to be realistic about what we're getting. Absolutely. Just

throw it out there if you can get a house with an extra bedroom or two or maybe a duplex or something and they pay $1,000 a month in rent. You're $33 a day towards your goal of $100,000. $100 a day with that particular investment. I love it. I'd be open to it. I love that. So besides housing, what comes next in your financial journey after this challenge? Yeah.

So I think after that, we've got some student loans that we'd love to pay down more aggressively, right? Of course, that's a lot of people's goals. And then after that, I think it's time to look at the future. So boosting our retirement savings or contributing to stuff like 529s for future children and just investing for the long term, right, for things to be passed down for generations. What advice would you give for folks who want to also find creative ways to add to their income? Are there things that you would go back and change now that you're 50 days into the challenge and tell people to start with?

Yeah, I would say to start, it's always best to look at yourself, your skill set and make sure that you know yourself before you go in. I think one thing I see a lot is people maybe getting a little bit frustrated that they can't do specifically everything that I do. but I can't specifically do anything that anybody else does, right? We're so highly personalized. So like Mindy brought up earlier, there's going to be a lot of skills that, you know, you have that I don't that would be better suited to opportunities that I haven't even found. So first step is always going to be just to know yourself, know your skill set, and then also

be realistic about how much time you want to invest because you can set as many goals as you want. But if you only have two hours a day that you're willing to invest, you're not going to end up reaching your goals and you're going to make yourself. a little bit upset. And then I would also say that one of the best things to do when you have a lofty goal is to break it into weekly or daily pieces. All of us can say, I want to save money. All of us can say, I want to save up for a house. I want $10,000 to buy a new car. You know, all of these things are great goals. But the reason we lose a lot of momentum is because that seems like an impossible

task. It feels like you're, you know, standing on the face of them or at the face of the mountain. And, you know, there's no way to scale it. So I would say by breaking it into smaller, goals, $10,000 becomes $100 a day. Well, that seems more reasonable. I can see how I can take that action step. So that's my second piece of advice there. And then my third piece of advice would be to utilize online forums to vet all of the sources that you're using. So if you are looking for more ways to make money or you just want to make sure that a site that you found is legit, I honestly, I know this sounds crazy, but I think Reddit is just a great tool all around. I know it gets kind of a bad rap where I know it gets a little bit of like, oh, that's for like money nerds and I can't,

I can't utilize Reddit. But I think everyone can utilize Reddit. I use a lot of sites on Reddit for either frugality purposes or one of my favorite sites would be it's called R slash beer money. And it's just what it sounds like. It's not, you know, enough to make a living off of, but it's sites like these that you could at least make a good chunk of change on. Those are fantastic pieces of advice there. I want to ask one quick question about your goal setting. Do you have a system for that or any type of mechanism you're using to create these goals, chunk them down, or is it pen and paper? Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is just going to be pen and paper dividing. You're going to want to divide as much as possible.

So you have to know when you want your money by, right? So if it's a monetary goal, you have to know an end date. Otherwise, you're going to delay it as much as possible, right? I mean, even the best of us want to procrastinate every once in a while. So pick an end date, pick a solid goal, and go over it by a little bit. If you really need $5,000, set a goal of $6,000 to cover taxes, expenses, whatnot. And then after that, yeah, we're just going to divide that down from, say, I've got three months to do this goal.

I need to divide that per month, then per week, then per day. And then I would say always put that somewhere you can see that, whether that's on a home screen, on your phone, whether that's in the mirror, in your bedroom, on the kitchen fridge, anything where you can see it daily. I think we are likely to forget about our goals. One of my bosses always says vision leaks. So we need to be like refilling vision day after day. So, you know, a lot of it is just reminding yourself day after day.

And if you're immersed in it, you're more likely to actually achieve that goal. So put it somewhere you can see it and make it bite size. Okay. We are 50 days into the 100 day challenge. What is your content going to look like after day 100? I would love to continue making consistent content. That's what I'm planning on doing in the new year. I see myself as a highly competitive person and I do love a good challenge. So I can foresee some challenges coming up in the future. But I also post a lot about budgeting and hosting on a budget, gift giving. I'm really passionate about showing people how they can host on a budget and that they don't have to sacrifice quality and style for money.

I think you can do both really well. So I am excited to focus a lot of my content creation on stuff like gift giving and hosting on a budget. And I keep, this is something that I get a lot of questions about that I'm excited to talk about a little bit more is I keep my husband and Josh and I under $80 a week for two people for all of our groceries. So stuff like grocery budgeting. I love to share about that. So so maybe like a shop along with me kind of thing I would love to do in the future. Oh yes. Yes, because $80 for two people isn't going to be attainable in every city in America, but holy cow, I want to see, oh, you should connect with budget bites. And do you know budget bites.com?

I do not. No. Oh, she's got a whole website filled with recipes and she breaks out like how much each ingredient costs. I love that. So it's like you need a tablespoon of olive oil. That's 12 cents or three cents or whatever it is. And so then you have an idea of what the recipe is going to cost.

I love that shop along with me idea. Oh, do that next. I will, absolutely. Okay, we are all going to be following along with you, Jackie, and where can we follow you one more time? You can follow me on TikTok and Lemonate. I'm posting budgeting and productivity content on both of those. My name's Jackie Mitchell on both of those sites. And spell it out again? My username is J-A-C-L-Y-N Mitchell with an extra L at the end. Awesome. Jackie, this was super fun. Thank you so much for doing the challenge. And thank you so much for sharing the challenge. with our listeners. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you guys so much for having me. We had a great time. Thank you. This is incredible. And we will talk to you soon.

All right. Bye. All right. That was Jackie Mitchell and her $100 a day challenge. And I just love her. Scott, what did you think of the show and what did you think of her challenge? Oh, my gosh. I mean, what an amazing, an amazing woman here. She's just crushing it with this. She's got a great thing going on going on with this. Really, you know, you can tell the financial is super strong. You can tell that she's hustling and that she's built a community around her prior to even building this huge following on TikTok that embraces the same values, a very fun and full life while working basically a job and then a part-time job on top of that to get to her financial goals. So really admire that. I can't wait to see what happens when she starts

getting, you know, accumulating these tens of thousands of dollars here over time and starts investing them and where this all kind of ends up for her because I think she's on a really, really good path that is just the very beginning of its compounding journey. Yes, I'm super excited for her future because she is not afraid of hard work. And all of the $100 a day options aside, if you're not going to do the work, you're not going to make the money. So I see Jackie's future as a very bright star because she is ready to do the work. She's willing to do the work and she is jumping in there with both feet. I just absolutely love her.

So please go give her a follow on TikTok. Honestly, I think she needs her own subreddit because I would devour everything in that subreddit, all of her information. I have subscribed to her TikTok feed just so I can watch her videos every day. I love her energy. I love her story. And we're going to have her back next year when she's doing her come shop with me videos because those are going to crush it too. I looked in my crystal ball. All right, Scott, should we get out of here?

Let's do it. That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He, of course, is the Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying farewell, carousel. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple. And if you're looking for even more money content, feel free to visit our YouTube channel at YouTube.com slash Bigger Pockets Money. Bigger Pockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench. Produced by Kaelin Bennett. Editing by Exodus Media. Copywriting by Nate Weintraub. Lastly, a big thank you to the Bigger Pockets team for making this show possible.