Thinking I can make more than minimum wage with this type of side hustle would make me pretty foolish.
Yes, I make over $100K.
My wife is making about that in self-employment as well.
As i have said before, the times I go out are times my wife is working with students so I am not losing any "quality" time with my spouse, I am losing time watching TV or playing video games by myself. I have plenty of other time to read or do those things outside of those hours, so I am choosing to trade $0 hours for $15 hours and make a tiny bit of extra money to help speed up the FIRE train as much as I can.
It's wonderful and I am helping people get something that makes them happy.
Your position makes much more sense to me, based on your last few posts...
The focus of this endeavor is more about your day-to-day lifestyle vs. the actual money earned.
You are home alone and bored. Food delivery gives you something to do and helps pass the time.
As an added benefit, you can earn a bit of extra cash doing it.
For a family of 2 with a household income over $200K in a LCOL state, the money you earn with this food delivery gig is inconsequential.
This is why you don't care about your expenses, the number of hours worked, or your hourly rate.
It is just a "hobby" to get you out of the house when your wife is working.
Sure, though hobby is a bit off and I am certainly not doing it because I am bored; I could do other things for certain but none make any money, they are just fun. I wanted to find a way to make a little extra money and speed up the stash, however little it might help (guessing even it I keep at this pace from now until 2029 which is my target FIRE date I might move things up a year with added cash this late in the game. At times my daily change in index funds is more than I have made thus far in this process).
I know I am not losing money, but yes, if I was looking for this to be my main job there are a lot of alternatives that make more sense.
Goals have been simple:
- Find something I enjoy a bit to make extra money
- Speed up the stash
- Try to pick something I can do anywhere we might move to once we FIRE and in the event I need to plug a hole in a bad year with a few thousand in earnings
The last point was really the value of this exercise. As I get closer to FIRE and see how a pandemic can really mess with things I wanted to know that if the world blows up once I step away I can do something other than Wal-Mart greeter to make extra income in my older age as I am not going to be a spring chicken when I hit that FIRE date (not one now).
Now with that said, I am a strong proponent of "do not let perfect get in the way of the good". I bristles against the minutiae of figuring every last dollar that might be an expense in this enterprise. Once you get the big nuggets, the other things are just not worth the bother and I stand by that even for someone not in my circumstance. Sure if someone's entire income is $20K, $100 expense is a much bigger deal than it is in my case with 10 times that household income. If my car fell apart tomorrow and I could not afford a replacement that was able to let me continue this I would stop immediately. If traffic picks up or I find that in winter this gig makes no sense because of the change in dynamics, I will stop, at least until spring. I am constantly testing the scenarios in my head as I live them each week with this gig. I have made adjustments to make it worthwhile. I no longer go out every night as order volume makes that a losing proposition. From a trucking perspective I am not running a lot of deadheads. Every time I am in the car for this it is making me money. If orders dry up for that day, I turn off the app and head home. I do not try to milk a dead horse. So the statement above of "do not just compare what happens on a good day" does not fit how I do this. Every day is a good day. The only difference is some might be great. The $150 on Saturday was mostly Instacart, which has less driving per hour hence the high dollars and low miles. Yes I spend time, so I account for that in hourly rate, but since Instacart is around $25/hour for the time spent it covers things quite well, with the downside being more of those dollars would be taxable as I do not have miles to offset them.
That last point might be worth delving into as it may not be the typical way to look at this. On the FB groups for these gigs I see people posting "Would you take this order?" with a screenshot from their phone. The latest was an Instacart order for $40, that would take an hour to shop most likely and had a delivery of 20 miles. My point was I would because the 40 miles round trip would assure me that I had earned at least $20 of those dollars tax free. The responses indicated most people are not considering that, they just focus on the distance and time not on a new order. But is it really better to take an $11 order that takes 45 minutes to shop and is 2 miles to deliver? I think not, because then you may have another $11 order next and now you have spent the same time I have even with the driving time and you made half of what I did and are taxed on almost all of it. Not realizing there is a way to use the mileage to make more money is a flaw in focusing on what is the hourly rate you are making, because I assure you, that taking shorter, smaller orders does not move the needle enough (increase on the high end is $1-2 per hour best case, and most case you make less, that I achieved when trying that model and was heavily reliant on a steady stream of orders, which is not the reality one can count on now). I think these are the things people, even on this thread, overlook if they have not actually done the work and tested the results. There are a lot of ways to get taken to the cleaners on these gigs. I am confident I am fully aware of them, even though it appears I am "ignoring" costs, and have made them irrelevant because of the offset I achieve my doing this smart. It is no different than the analysis people do about rental properties. You can lose your shirt buying properties for rent, and many people do and get out of it because they do not do the work to understand how to maximize value. As I have said many times, I think I have maximized the crap out of this gig work. That is part of why I think there are so many of you pressing me on I must be not giving you the expenses right because I cannot do it that cheaply. This feels the same as when I share with couple who spend $400-$500 on groceries a month that I spend $600 or less a month for a family of 8 and I get told I am lying or must not be tracking. I show them the YNAB and the credit cards that show the spend and there is not much to say. I bring that same level of optimization to this process and so that is why I may seem flippant because I am aware of the spend and I am making money. Is the main rub for those pressing back that it is not worth the money I am making to use their time this way? If so, I certainly get and respect that, and when this starts being a chore of me and less of a fake "hobby", I will stop.