Making money doing what you know best, tutoring

It's easy for many of us to forget that over the years we have gone to college for X amount of years and we may be thoroughly trained in a certain subject or field. While we may take certain subjects for granted, like calculus, history, politics, economics, etc., others are just beginning their journey into that field and need a helping hand. And this is where your knowledge can generate money by tutoring them.

This is how I got started by tutoring.... An email was recently sent around my department from an individual’s father, looking for a guiding hand for his son who will be taking a course in the fall semester in college and wants a head start since he'll have a heavy load. I looked at my schedule over the next 5-6 weeks and discovered that I could probably take on the additional load of tutoring a few times a week. So I replied back by offering my assistance and my online resume by LinkedIn showing my accomplishments in teaching and tutoring and the subject matter from the past (and of course what I'm doing currently as well).

They wanted to know what my rate would be per hour and I dug around looking at www.payscale.com for tutoring rates average and then I discovered another website, www.universitytutor.com where you can search locally for tutoring in a wide range of fields, their rates, travel fee's (if any), etc. While there were many people to teach the subject, physics, the rates I discovered were in the range of $15 to $30 per hour. Wow $30/hr., that's better than what I get paid at my day job! I looked at the tutors around our area, and all of them offered to tutor a wide range of subjects but none had specific training in physics besides just the entry level, so I replied back offering $25 - $30 per hour. Needless to say, they took the $25/hr. rate.

Now, 5 tutoring sessions later, and only spending about 6 hours with the student, I've earned nearly $150. And in the next few weeks, we'll be going at a faster pace, which means, I have to tutor him longer per session so I'll be raking in the money!


I did sign up for the University Tutor website and I really hope I'll be able to pick up a few hours a week from them as well.

Net Debt - August 2011

Student loans: -$77,809.34 (+0)
Car loan: -$3,000.52 (+835.97)
Revolving Credit card debt: $0.
Mortgage: -$139,050.34 (+178.20)

Net Debt: $219,860.20

About the car loan, if you notice, I'm pushing as hard as I can to have the car loan paid off as quickly as possible and I'm on track to have it paid off by new years. My actual car loan payment is only $172, so I actually paid an additional 4x as much. Although I could probably pay it off completely now, college will be starting soon, so between that and my college tuition bill, and some other bills that we are planning for, that would drop our cash reserves to almost nothing and we would have to start dipping into the emergency fund.

I've also picked up a side gig tutoring! So, at the moment, I have the pleasure of tutoring and making an extra $25 per hour, which I tend to be doing about 3-4 hours a week. So an extra few hundred dollars a month isn't too shabby, and I probably would be wasting that time anyway, so I'm happy at least to be making money from my wasted time. :-) I want to keep a running total of the money made from tutoring, so I'll be keeping a total there and hopefully this will encourage everyone to get a side gig and make some extra money and help pay off that debt faster, save for the future, or what ever you want to do. Of course it wont pay me more than my current job, but at least it definitely compliments it nicely.