Podcast Episode 18 Using Gig Economy Apps to the Fullest

I had the pleasure of speaking to Kevin Ha, founder of Financial Panther about using gig apps. Before I go into an in depth discussion about the gig apps I want to discuss why Kevin calls his blog Financial Panther. The name financial panther comes from an episode of the Simpsons where Marge told Homer that they should see a Financial Planner. Homer, being homer heard that they should have a financial panther. On Kevin’s Blog he uses the urban dictionary definition of financial panther. 

“A large jungle cat that can be trained to maul a person’s creditors and bill-collectors if that person is short on money.”

During the course of the interview I spoke to Kevin about using Gig economy apps to be able to monetize your life. Things like a blog or a freelance business take time to develop but you can use these gig economy apps to be able to earn money today. Delivering food on grub hub or door dash can make you some money today, flip the app on and your in business. Also if you use a bike to get from the pick up point to the delivery point you can get some exercise in as will as a side benefit. On his blog Kevin has said that he makes $40-$50/hour doing food deliveries during peak times by running multiple apps at once. In February 2020 alone Kevin made more than $1,000 doing gig economy apps, check the link here for the full blog post.

In every families budget a large expense is housing costs. To be able to combat expense this you can do house hacking like I mentioned in a previous episode or you could use Airbnb. Airbnb allows you to focus on renting out your entire or a part of your house to someone else for  a short term stay. The app allows you a great deal more flexibility more than what is typically available in a long term lease. If you have commitment issues then this is for you! You don’t have to worry about having a tenant in your house forever instead it could be a day and you can try it. The amount that a landlord will make is usually higher on a daily basis using AirBNB versus a long term rental. There are some reasons to justify this increase in income, the cost to clean and prep the unit for a new tenant will be higher because there is more tenant turnover in short term rentals. Also you may have extended vacancies in your Airbnb property as well.

If you like to walk you can use the Wag app to make some money for a lunch time stroll with a dog. This could be a great opportunity for you if you are an animal lover. In my area there is a lot of competition for this, which drives down the availability of times someone may want you to walk your dog. Also if you’re doing this on your lunch start with shorter walks to be able to make sure you can make it back to your desk in time just in case things take a little longer than expected.

The one thing that Kevin discusses that is near and dear to my heart is food. He uses  secret shopper jobs to be able to get free food at restaurants. This will not earn you any money per se but you will be able to save some money by going out to eat for free. I am going to include a link to Kevin’s blog article where he writes about how to secret shop for free here here. The one thing I am going to say about this Is that if you’re considering to do secret shopping be careful because of the corona virus.

If you want to find out more about monetizing your life with gig apps then you can reach out to Kevin Ha at the Financial Panther Blog.