A lot of us are looking for extra income and we sometimes try side hustles that we see online or hear about from friends—but the problem is that many of those side gigs actually cost us more than we make. Between upfront costs, hidden fees, equipment, ads & wasted time, it ends up being an expense that just isn’t worth it, especially since some of these side hustles only pay a few dollars per sale. Others involve spending hundreds just to get started and never recovering it. Either way, here are fourteen side hustles that will likely lose you money.
Featured Image Credit: fedemarsicano /Depositphotos.com.
Selling T-Shirts Through Print-On-Demand Sites
What usually happens with custom T-shirt sellers is that someone spends hours designing a clever T-shirt, uploads it to a site like Redbubble or Teespring, then waits. And waits. After weeks with no sales, they throw money at ads or hire someone to “fix” their store and that $20 design eventually earns them $2. Without an audience or marketing experience, most people never even cover the time they spent uploading all those product mockups.
Putting Your Only Car on Turo
People get excited when they hear that they could rent their car out for $80 a day on an app like Turo, which sounds relatively easy. But what you don’t hear about are the cancellations or the cleaning fees, as well as the insurance mess when someone scrapes the bumper. You also have the hassle of being car-less when you need to run errands and it’s extremely stressful if you don’t have a backup ride.
Getting Into Vending Machines
When you see someone online saying they’re making passive income from vending machines, you might start looking at listings and buy a machine. You find a “decent” spot and load it with snacks—but then a few weeks in, the machine jams or the chips go stale. People stop buying and that means you spend more driving there than you make, which is especially bad when you realize that the repairs aren’t cheap.
Starting an Etsy Sticker Shop Without the Gear
Anyone who likes art may think they can start selling stickers by printing at home, but without a cutting machine, the edges will end up being wonky and this will upset your customers. Eventually, you might spend more on shipping and ink than what you earn—Etsy takes a bite, too. After a few months, the shop’s still open, but you’re not because you’ve already moved on and your printer is just sitting there with dried-out cartridges.
Making Dog Treats Without a License
Baking cute dog cookies and selling them at a local market sounds like a good business plan until you find out that you need to register your kitchen and follow state guidelines. You’re technically not allowed to sell food for pets, but some people don’t learn that until they’ve already bought the supplies and made a logo. You also have labeling rules & ingredient sourcing to worry about, which could result in this cute side gig becoming wasted money.
Launching a Course on Udemy
You record yourself teaching something you’re good at and upload it to Udemy, then you check a week later…zero sales. It turns out that most of your sales only count if they came from your own link and when Udemy runs a sale, your $90 course drops to $12.99. They keep a cut of this, so you’re left with maybe $3 per buyer—if you even get one. People spend months making these courses and never make back the time or money they spent on doing so.
Starting a Dropshipping Store With No Real Product
Most people who get into dropshipping think it’ll be easy, since you have to find a product from AliExpress and build a nice-looking site, then sell your product. After watching a few videos, you run some ads, but nothing sells—you tweak the images and still nothing. It’s because people are already getting the same thing cheaper on Amazon, if they want it at all, as most dropshipping products are quite useless.
Starting a Kids’ YouTube Channel
While you might have an idea for a kids’ channel—maybe something fun & educational—putting it into practice is a different story. Recording a video with your phone doesn’t look great and animation is too expensive. YouTube also won’t pay you a dime unless you hit 1,000 subscribers & rack up 4,000 watch hours, but by then, you’re at least $300 in the hole with nothing to show for it.
Buying Return Pallets Hoping for a Win
It’s tempting when you see videos where someone buys a pallet of store returns and pulls out valuable items—so you try it. But yours shows up and it’s full of weird phone cases, off-brand curling irons, & some broken Bluetooth speakers that nobody wants to buy. A few things sell, but slowly, while the rest take up space in your garage. The pallet cost $700 and you’ve made back maybe $90, leaving you trying to give away half of it for free just to get rid of it.
Becoming a “Travel Agent” Without Any Real Credentials
There are a bunch of websites offering to make you a certified travel agent, which involves you paying the fee and posting cruise deals to Facebook—yet nobody clicks. Once you ask around, you realize you can’t actually book through airlines or hotels unless you’ve got real credentials and most of what they gave you was just an affiliate link. That monthly fee you’ve paid to be part of a “network” doesn’t bring in anything but auto-billed charges.
Trying to Run a Paid Newsletter
Running a paid newsletter is a lot harder than most people realize and you have to write one post, then another, then another. Once you check your stats, you find out only one person opened it, so you add a sign-up link to your socials & spend time tweaking the font, maybe even pay for a design template. Eventually, you realize you’re basically writing a diary and paying monthly for the privilege, which just doesn’t seem worth it at all.
Signing Up for a Skincare MLM
You’re all in at first with the latest skincare MLM and you’ve bought new products, a starter kit, maybe even had a team Zoom call with someone shouting “this changed my life”—a week later, your friends start dodging your messages. The company auto-bills you for more products, even though your shelves are full and you’re wondering if you’re now your own only customer. Every time you try to quit, they dangle a “new bonus level” that somehow costs more to unlock and you’re stuck in a cycle.
Signing Up for App Testing Sites
The signup process for app testing sites is usually long, but that’s half of what makes it so exciting to join—you’re ready to get paid to click around some apps & give your opinion. Instead, you have to go through “screeners” & “qualification tests” and lots of forms that lead nowhere, even after you refresh the dashboard multiple times. You could’ve spent all that time actually making money, rather than hoping for something to show up.
Paying for a “Digital Real Estate” Course
Some people drop nearly a thousand dollars, thinking they’ll learn how to build local business websites and rent them out. The course starts with three hours of mindset videos, but soon transitions to advice they could’ve found in a five-minute YouTube search. The “magic method” is just building generic websites & cold-emailing plumbers, which these unlucky victims try to build. But it’s more likely that they’ll hear nothing and the domain renewals hit their card next month with no leads and no clients.
Disclaimer: This list is solely the author’s opinion based on research and publicly available information.
Like our content? Be sure to follow us on MSN.
