A year back, I left my job without my next job lined up. I wanted to take time to figure what I want to do next. But that means stretching my finances. So I wanted to know alternative ways to earn money to ease the pressure. This is a common situation for many people. For whatever reason, many people don't wish to do a full time job and financial safety is a big hindrance to that. So I started exploring.

I have found 2 good alternatives -

1. Freelancer

Freelancing means taking up projects online and get paid on an hourly basis. Simplest way to get started would be to register on upwork.com or similar sites. Build your profile and apply for projects.

But here are things that very few people know -

Many startups cannot hire fast enough. But they have a lot of funding. So they hire a lot of freelancers to generate initial momentum. Their problem is your opportunity.

So if you have good skills e.g. designers, frontend, devops, big data etc., you may get good projects and get paid high as well. In my observation, even a moderately skilled developer can get upto ~$40/hr. But if you have specific skills, you can earn a lot more.

It's not all rosey. It takes a while to build your experience on freelancing platforms to charge higher. But you will start earning immediately and choose how much you want to work.

2. Creator

Being a creator means creating content of some sorts - videos, courses, blogs, books etc and selling them through various marketplaces - Gumroad, Podia etc. It can be about anything that people would pay for e.g. a course on getting started with cryptocurrencies.

This could be a somewhat harder route but the upsides can be huge.

e.g. Daniel Vassallo left his high paying job from Amazon and wrote a book on how to grow twitter audience. He sold it on Gumroad.com and has made over ~$500K in book sales.

There are more ways, but I found these easy to get started with and have reasonable earning potential. Please reach out, if you want to learn more.