More Americans Are Choosing Side Hustles

 

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and inflation have had a significant impact on the lives of Americans. The economy has been in decline, wages are falling, and the quality of life has decreased considerably.

 

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, consumer spending in the second quarter of 2020 decreased by 9.8% compared to the same time period in 2019. However, a year later, in the second quarter of 2021, the pandemic was still affecting the economy, but businesses and consumers had started to adapt. As a result, consumer spending was 15.7% higher in the second quarter of 2021 than it was a year earlier. In fact, consumer spending in the first and second quarters of 2021 was even higher than in the first quarter of 2020, which was largely unaffected by the pandemic since it began late in the quarter.

As people gradually get used to the current situation under COVID-19 and household consumption keeps normally rising after the shock of the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, the influence on people's incomes does not appear to be recovered. The recovery of consumers' demand, combined with the decline of the economic situation, has led to a result: people's income and expenditure are increasingly unable to balance. Under this circumstance, more and more Americans are making the choice - to work a side hustle- to make ends meet.

 

According to a survey in Insuranks, around 44% of Americans are working at least one extra job for a living. 40% of Americans have side jobs, up from 6% a year ago, and an additional 28% said that they take on a secondary gig due to the biggest inflation US is going through in the past 40 years. Nearly half of those who put in less than 10 hours a week in a side hustle can complete their extra jobs. The average income of an American with a side hustle is $12,689 a year. And about two-fifths (37%) say they earn $5,000 or more for a year, and nearly one in five (17%) say they can make $15,000 or more per year. (That is, a monthly income of side hustle for about $500).

 

Here are the changes in people's interest in a side hustle, according to Google Trends:

CouponBirds, as a website providing saving tips and convenient passages to various freelancing platforms for users, also did research on the traffic to freelancing platforms from Jan 2021 to Jun 2022. 

The outcome demonstrates that freelancing platform traffic has been steadily increasing since September 2021, with intermittent fluctuations through December 2021 to May 2022. Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, the trend of seeking side hustles has been on the rise among Americans, owing to the growing pandemic threat. Although there was a slight decrease in searching for side hustles from January to July 2021 due to a temporary reduction in the pandemic, the need for side hustles continues to rise as the virus resurfaces, and its infectiousness intensifies.

 

Furthermore, there are thought-provoking facts about the selection of side hustles. Almost 46% of employed males and 35% of employed females have a side hustle, highlighting a significant disparity since males represent 63.9% of all US employees compared to only 35.1% for females. This gender gap is deliberate, not to indicate the further division in side hustle selection ratios.

 

It is increasingly evident that side hustles have become a progressively mainstream choice and a common lifestyle for Americans.

 

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 Diana Howard