More Americans Are Choosing Side Hustles
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and inflation have significantly influenced Americans' lives. The economy has been in decline, wages are falling, and the quality of life has decreased considerably.
Since the pandemic, consumer spending in the second quarter of 2020 decreased by 9.8% year on year. However, businesses and consumers seemingly adapted to the economic landscape influenced by the coronavirus. As a result, consumer spending was 15.7% higher in the second quarter of 2021 year on year. 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 rising after the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, the impact on people's incomes does not appear to have recovered. The recovery of consumer demand, combined with the decline of the economic situation, has resulted in an increasing imbalance of people's income and expenditure. Under this circumstance, more and more Americans are choosing 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 the US has gone 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 side hustles, according to Google Trends:
CouponBirds, a website providing saving tips and convenient passages to various freelancing platforms for users, also studied the visits to freelancing platforms from Jan 2021 to Jun 2022.
The outcome demonstrates that freelancing platform traffic has steadily increased since September 2021, with intermittent fluctuations from December 2021 to May 2022. Since 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 searches for side hustles from January to July 2021 due to a temporary reduction in the pandemic, the demand 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. Nearly 46% of employed males and 35% of employed females have a side hustle, highlighting a significant disparity given that males represent 63.9% of all US employees compared to only 35.1% of females. This gender gap is notable, though it does not imply the further division in side hustle selection ratios.
It is increasingly evident that side hustles have become the mainstream and a common lifestyle for Americans.
