Side Hustle as a Way to Semi-Retire
When you semi-retire and run your own online business, you have a lot more freedom to do what you want when you want.
But remember, it’s not a free pass to totally step away from your online income stream!
You will always need to make space for marketing, admin time, the degree to which can vary depending on the type of business you run.
That considered, it’s still a pretty cool idea to play with for the huge benefits it brings.
If semi-retirement piques your interest and you’re wondering how you might manage this transition in your own life, tune in to the latest podcast episode and learn more.
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Show Notes:
Hey, Risers. Welcome to episode 146 of Empathy Rising. I had the coolest synchronicity happen to me this morning, during my morning meditation routine, whatever you want to call it, where the passage that I read for the day, the card that I drew, and the meditation that I did, they all synced up with each other and it was just a really cool experience. It was like it was magic or like it was meant to be or something like that.
So I'm still buzzing from that. I think that magical moment can stick with you through the whole day when things just seem to line up or just fall into place. So I think that was really neat, and I'm just kinda passing that magic onto you today, and hopefully, you have synchronicity or beautiful things or be able to see the magic in the mundane today. That's my wish for you.
Today, I'm super excited to talk about today's topic because this is something that I'm personally working toward and it's something that some of my students are working toward and it gives us entry into a deeper conversation. So this is the idea of semi-retirement. And can your side hustle bring you to semi-retirement?
So, let's dive in, and then we'll start having a deeper conversation around this. I got the idea for this week's episode from the money series that I did a couple of weeks ago. I had to put a part one and a part two where I shared what my money goals are and how I am working towards them, as well as the exact numbers of my most recent 2022 cohort launch. I guess the launch takes place in 2021, but it's for the year of 2022. Not only did I share my money goals, but I shared how much money I'm making. And I think that got me thinking about why am I striving for that kind of money and why I'm working towards semi-retirement.
I'll share another little personal story. I'm in a new mastermind this year. My coach Jacqueline is running a mastermind, so I'm working with her one-on-one and I'm in this mastermind, which is super awesome. I'm very excited to be in the mastermind. Two of the people in there are published authors that traditionally published from publishing houses. And I think this might be a goal of mine. So I'm super excited to be in the group. I am going to learn a lot from this group.
However, there was one kind of interaction that rubbed me the wrong way and the woman wasn't didn't do it intentionally. Her entire business, her entire mission in life, her purpose is to help women be wealthy. And so I was talking about my money goals and she came at me like why don't you want more? Why don't you want more? And they got me really thinking about my philosophy, the way I live my life, and the way I run my business is lifestyle first.
Your business should be built around your lifestyle, not the other way around. Your lifestyle shouldn't trickle in and be an afterthought after your business because there's several different paths that I could take. I could shrink my business from where it is now.
On a day-to-day basis, we don't even live off the money that I make. So I don't need to make as much as I do. It has an end goal. And I talked a lot about that in those two episodes, but I'll talk to you a bit more about it here. I could maintain the revenue that I currently bring in, which is great. It's getting us towards this semi-retirement that I want to be at and I could scale even more. I could add more revenue if I wanted, and that would be really just an achievement goal. That would be, can I do it? Yes, I can do it. Check it off the list because there's a dollar figure that I've arrived at that was going to give me the lifestyle that I want. And that's what we're going to explore.
Basically, for me, my main goals are providing a financial legacy for my girls, providing property that's owned outright so that if they want to live in it, they can, or if they want to liquidate it, they can and have the money. That is really important to me. I'm also working on being mortgage-free by my early forties in our primary residence.
Josh and I had bought an investment property in Mexico. There's a town in Mexico that's five hours from where I live, where I'm from in Arizona. It's called Arizona's beach, even though it's technically in Mexico. And we had bought a little condo there and then pandemic, and we maintain it as much as we could through 2020. We ultimately let it go at the end of 2020 because our property manager was like nickel and dimming us and I didn't feel comfortable traveling to actually check on the property and see if it was really in that disrepair or if they were taking advantage of us. So, we ended up letting the property go.
We really would like to have another property in Mexico. That is third on the list after the mortgage being paid off and after these things, but really what this all is leading to is a lifestyle goal. The money that I see that I will make in the next eight or nine years is wonderful, but it is not my end goal. The money that I will make in the next eight or nine years is a vehicle for the lifestyle that I want. That is my end goal.
If I made more, could I shrink that timeline? Could I shrink it from eight or nine years to five or six years? Totally. And if that happens, that'd be lovely but I'm not going to break my back and I'm not going to bust my ass to shrink four years off my timeline. So by the time we get the Mexico house, it'll probably be late forties. If we don't decide to get the Mexico house, it would be 43 to 45. I want to be living in a semi-retired state. The reason the Mexico house pushes that out a couple of years is because I want to own it. I do not want to carry a 30-year mortgage. I just don't. I don't want to be 75 still paying on a house. That's not a financial asset for my children.
The first goal is the forever house property that I've shared a lot, like a ton of times. I'm on a current trajectory that will be paid off by the time I'm like 43, 44. And if we get the Mexico house that adds three or four years on, but this goal of semi-retirement. And I know this is a hot topic. I had a personal reaction to this topic, but it's this concept of striving versus settling. I think both of those words suck. And I think both of those words have terrible connotations: strive for more or settle and do less than you could possibly do. Just settle.
Right? Neither of those are good words. And so I think there's something in between, and I think it's a lifestyle. I think it's defining what success is to you and going at that as hard as you can, or as hard as you want, but being sure that your definition of success is authentically yours, not influenced by other people. This is what I wanted to dedicate the episode to.
According to Google, semi-retirement is defined as working part-time on purpose. And that's really easy, but we need to take that a few steps further because working part-time means that you are generating enough revenue from part-time work and you're doing it on purpose because you don't need to worry about finances. To me, that is like the ideal lifestyle. I would really love to be working maybe in less than I do now, which I'll get into hours and numbers and things a little bit further in the episode, but on a podcasting week, like this week, I work probably 20 hours because I am creating like sometimes six weeks of content for you as I try and get ahead for summer and because I don't want to record episodes while my girls are home.
That is a heavier week. On a week when I don't have podcasts, I work 10 hours, and that would be amazing. And if I could even do less than that and still be financially solvent. I'd be super happy. So we need to make sure that this part-time work on purpose, this choice to maintain part-time hours and part-time effort, needs to still be financially lucrative.
Now, there are a couple of reasons that this is going to work for us, right? When the house is paid off, Josh will be retired from the army. So Josh has retirement. We don't know the final figure yet, but we've had some friends retire right around the same. You know how long you were in the army, what rank you were in the army? Those all have influence on your retirement money. And so we're pretty confident that Josh's retirement is going to pay our bills, the electric bill, the car payment, the groceries, the water bill, the streaming services bill, that will all be covered by Josh's retirement.
It took us 20 years to get here. It took us Afghanistan and Iraq and things like that to get here. I'm not saying that you need to make those types of sacrifices, but this isn't something that's going to happen for us overnight. So something that we've been steadily working towards, so Josh's retirement will pay the bills, and my goal we'll be to pay off these properties. Probably as fast as I can with a reasonable amount of energy going out. Still making sure I'm showing up for my girls, still making sure I'm showing up for my marriage, and those types of things.
I could totally scale and pursue a million-dollar business, but I'd rather sprint for five years, pay everything off. And then because of Josh's retirement paying our bills, let's say we want, you know, $2,000 a month to just play around with, to be able to travel or take trips or, spoil ourselves, who cares. But imagine, I can only imagine if we only had to bring $2,000 in a month and let's say, before taxes, so let's say $3,000, $3,500 a month to play around with $2,000 a month after taxes. My life would be totally different than what I do to earn the multiple six figures that I do now. So this is the ultimate goal for me.
Now I have a student, her name is Pam and she is going through this transition as well. Pam was in Side Hustle for the year of 2021, and Pam had an interesting journey because she had already moved from one-on-one therapy to one-on-one coaching. She had let her license go a while ago, several years ago, and was strictly one-on-one coaching. Pam wants to move to Mexico. So her goal was to move from one-to-one to one-to-many to get these people who are knocking at her door for one-on-one coaching into group programming, or maybe membership sites where she could serve a ton of people, whatever it was.
I know for Pam, it was group programming, but she wants to shrink the 20 to 30 hours a week that she's spending with one-on-one coaching clients to something, like, 10 hours a week in group programming and spend the rest of her time on the beach in Mexico. Working part-time on purpose. That's Pam's goal. That's my goal.
Now there are some potential drawbacks to this. The first one that I see for some is going to be health. That's why Josh is in the army and when he retires at 20 years, we will both have healthcare as the retirement package, the girls will have healthcare till they're 26 because that's when they'll be still dependent. So, that was a big decision of ours to go and push for retirement. A lot of people maintain their full-time job at a community mental health or a hospital or something, and they do their private practice on the side and that's for the benefits.
Oh, we could get into capitalism and we could get into patriarch and we can get into all that, but our system is set up to keep us working 40, 50 hours a week, and we are compensated for that not only by pay but by benefits. One thing though is the fact that most of you guys are in private practice, you probably already have the chance of being used to being self-employed and having to provide your healthcare through the marketplace or getting coverage, maybe from a partner. So I definitely see healthcare as one potential hang-up to moving to a part-time on purpose, a lifestyle part-time work on purpose.
Speaking of partners, this is also the potential hangup that I see, and it's one that I'm going through. I'd say Josh and I have been going through this for about two years. When my income exploded, even if Josh did quit his job today, we would be able to not only live the lifestyle that we live from his income but more because I make more than he does. When that shift started to happen, which was in about 2018, 2019, I realized my job is completely mobile. I could be anywhere in the world doing exactly what I'm doing, and I do not need to be stuck where the army sends us.
However, he does. Josh is not mobile. Josh is not completely free. I have way more free time than he does because even though I'm talking about shrinking my workload, it's still one 20 hour a week a month, and then three 10 hour weeks a month, is not that bad for the amount of cash that I bring in. While we still have the same vision for our lives. I'm already there, and it can be really frustrating to have to wait for him to catch. It's really frustrating. It's hard on me.
So if you're partnered with somebody who isn't an entrepreneur, or maybe somebody who sees the value in and maybe wants to embody more of a full-time lifestyle, they might be still wrapped up in that concept moving towards semi-retirement can bring up issues for the relationship if one of you is on one page and the other is on a different page.
I definitely wanted to cover some of the potential pitfalls, and these are just two that I've come up with kind of off the top of my head. There's probably several more that are speaking to you. Again, right now, it's something I thought about is my kids too. We could homeschool our kids. We could put our kids in online school, but there's benefits for them showing up and seeing friends every day and stuff like that.
Semi-retirement.... you could feel that constraint not only from your partner, but you could also feel it from your local school district. So there's things to think about, not only from the financial side of things, but also from what might cause you strain if you're moving towards this type of lifestyle, but there's other people or other structures or systems in your life that are set up for a different kind of lifestyle. How are you going to navigate that?
Let's say you've thought about all of that. Your healthcare you've got worked out, all that stuff. The next step is thinking about and envisioning what semi-retirement might be like for you. Does it mean traveling a lot? And if it does, that's where that could cause issues. If you have school-aged kids, or if you have a partner, or maybe you have aging parents and they need your help or just your company or whatever is happening with your family. So do you envision traveling a lot and what does that mean for you?
Also, does it mean permanently moving to Mexico like my student Pam, or does it mean permanently moving to a different state? It could be out of the country. You could become an ex-pat, or you could just be moving to a different state that you've always desired, and now that you have the time to enjoy that state, that might be where you want to. This could be having multiple homes or home bases.
My goal is to have our mountain house up in the snowy mountains of Presque, and then also to have our beach house down in Mexico. To be able to choose the environment that is most supportive for me at that time. Do I want to be up in the mountains? Do I want to be down by the ocean? What do I want? So having multiple homes or home bases is what I'm going for. It could mean none of those things for you semi-retirement could be staying, put exactly where you are. Just having a ton more time to pursue hobbies or start new hobbies.
My mom is turning 70 this year. She was on the podcast a couple of episodes ago. You could get to know her a little bit, but she wants to take up weaving, which I think is really neat. All the women in my family are fiber artists, knitters, embroidery, macrame, like anything to do with fiber. So the fact that she wants to take up weaving just feels natural. Now that she is actually retired, she has all the time in the world to start weaving.
But if you're semi-retired and you're working part-time on purpose and all your financial needs are met from that part-time on purpose. What hobbies would you pursue? Maybe you don't need to travel. Maybe you don't need to move. Maybe you just need to learn how to paint and garden and whatever it is you want. So we need to identify what this lifestyle looks like for you.
The step after that then is determining the cost of that lifestyle. If you're paying out of pocket for healthcare, imagine, and if you're having two homes or you're traveling once a month or you're moving to maybe a more expensive state, maybe you want to move to San Diego, southern California. Maybe you want to move somewhere where your cost of living is going to go up perhaps, or maybe it's going to go down. Maybe that's the point of moving, right? So we need to know what that financial number looks like so we can make sure that we're hitting that financial number in part-time hours. That way you can make a plan for that semi-retired lifestyle.
There's also a few different paths to semi-retirement. You may want to retain some therapy clients. So it could be shrinking your caseload down to three clients or five clients. I know that sometimes people like ideal number three to five, but then you have an additional income stream that's one-to-many or an additional income stream that's more maybe passive. That's going to supplement the 10 to sometimes 20 clients you cut down to get to three to five. So again, part-time hours, but it could be a combination of therapy.
I know a lot of you aren't looking to leave the field altogether. You're just looking to do it more on your terms. So keeping those few clients and then having the other revenue that makes up for your income, right? Some of you, however, are looking to leave therapy altogether, and you want to replace all of your income or maybe more than you were making from your practice with other revenues.
Both of those are totally viable options, and both of those leave you with that part-time hours on purpose. What we need to figure out at this point is touch versus volume. The higher-touch the program, the higher the price you can charge, and therefore the lower number of sales that you need. You are still conducting direct hours. They're direct hours in a group instead of direct hours with one-on-one and they're not clinical direct hours they're just the hours where you're talking to people or answering people's questions, they're not therapeutic hours.
You can get started making substantial cash much quicker with a higher-touch program. The way that this is going to be part-time hours is it's probably going to be, let's say 15 to 20 hours. Out of all the examples we're going to run today, it's the highest number of hours per week, but it also lets you get started sooner and make money sooner. So that was my approach with Side Hustle. I now average about eight to 10 hours per week with Side Hustle. I mentioned earlier if it's podcast week then that jumps up, but that's only one week a month. Also, if I'm launching or if I'm getting ready to open enrollment for the next round, I am going to have some extra tasks in those weeks. And so my hours will jump up again.
So on average, eight to 10 hours, a few weeks sprinkled in throughout up to 20 hours per week. That allows me to run one program that gives me multiple six figures. Okay. You could also go for a lower touch program where it's two to five hours per week with your students. However, if you're shrinking the amount of time that you're with people, your prices lower, therefore what has to change? Your volume, the amount of sales you make. So that time it's not like it's two to five hours per week. It's still 10 hours per week or 15 or maybe 20, but two to five of it is with other people where the other time is in marketing. You make up for a lower touch program with marketing time.
So you could potentially creep closer to 15 or 20 hours you're just exchanging like admin time for client time, basically. This is the lower amount of time you're with people, and then you're doing marketing projects in the other times. You could also release passive products like eBooks or self-study courses, and they take none of your time to deliver, but you will still have to market them. You make the curriculum once and then you just sell it on autopilot. It's fabulous. You're going to spend tons of time marketing that.
Now a side note here is that you can absolutely outsource your marketing and do none of it. So that's two to five hours. It's actually all you do. And then the other 10 to 15 or whatever hours you are paying somebody to do that for you or with a self-study course, you make your course once and then you pay for all of the marketing to be done and you have no marketing but you're going to have to put that into your semi-retirement budget.
So, I definitely did not start outsourcing my marketing. It wasn't until 2020 that I started outsourcing my marketing, partly because my business grew beyond my expectations and partly because of the pandemic and I needed help. You can outsource. And if it's something that you want to do from the get-go and you have a budget for it, go for it but if you know that it's something that you want to keep in house and you want to keep your profit margin high, then you'll be doing that marketing time on your own.
So, let's run a few math examples here. I think that would be fun to just show you what that looks like. So I use really conservative numbers here. This might be way lower than what you bring in. It could be higher than what you bring in, but I'm just gonna go with some conservative examples. So let's say that your practice is currently making $120,000 and your hourly rate is 160. That means you see about 16 clients a week, which I think is a modest and a moderate caseload. I know some of you have way more than 16 clients a week. So we've got to think about after taxes and expenses, you're paying yourself. That's conservatively. Say between 70 and 75. If you've got an in-person office again, if you're in a more expensive area, that's going to be less. If you're online, you might be closer to maybe 80 or 85.
That's amazing. There is nothing to sneeze at with 16 direct hours, clearing 80 ish thousand dollars. That's awesome. But what we need to point out is on the surface this looks like 16 hours a week, but we need to factor in things like admin notes and documentation and treatment planning, emails, client requests, intake phone calls, any of that other stuff that takes up your time. You're probably closer to 20, 25 hours per week, still 25 hours per week to clear 80 grand. That's not that bad, but let's run some different examples to see how online income can be a little bit different and can get you closer to that semi-retirement by freeing up more of your time.
So a high-touch example first, we could call that a $5,000 12-month group program. Okay. You would need 24 group members to hit that and 120,000 we'll say that you have a Q and a call that is two hours per. And then you have two small group coaching calls where you break them up into two groups of 12. That's five hours of direct content contact. You're making the same amount of money with five hours of direct contact versus 16 hours of direct contact.
So lighter load, less burden, less talking to people, more energy for you. Then you still need your marketing time, which could be 10 hours per week or so. I think that's really reasonable, 10 hours a week. That's about what I was doing when I was doing all of my marketing. And, of course, you can outsource this, but let's say your five hours of direct talking to people hours, and then your 10 hours of marketing that gets you to 15 hours. You have no notes. You're completely mobile. You no longer have to go in the states that you're licensed in or pay attention to any of that at all.
Will there be emails to answer and things like that? Yeah, probably. So let's bump that up to 17 hours. Okay. You're still eight hours less than your practice. And the most important part is that your direct hours are 11 hours less, where you need 16 clients. You get 24 sales in a group program, but you only spend five hours working with those 24 people. So huge difference.
Let's move into a medium-touch example. This I ran as a membership site. If your membership site was 50 bucks a month, that would mean 200 members to get to $120,000 a year. If you bumped your membership up to a hundred bucks a month, then that would mean a hundred members. Now I will tell you, it is going to take you some time to gather this many members. So a membership site is a longer game than a group program is.
What is amazing about membership sites is they're more scalable. So whether you have 10 members, a hundred members, or 200 members, your work is the same. So you don't have to change anything as your membership doubles, triples, quadruples, right?
So it can take... I think what's reasonable to get to a hundred members is 12 to 18 months, depending on your audience size and how much, how many hours you're giving to marketing. Within a year or so you could easily be at a hundred members. So let's take a look at what this kind of timeframe would look like. I think a four-week structure is the most conservative and definitely would be something that would command a hundred dollars a month.
So the way that I like to structure a four-week membership structure is week one: you're giving a 20-minute lesson. You could do this live on zoom with the students or with the members, or you could pre-record it and then release it to the members. That part doesn't exactly make a difference, but you want those lessons to be really short, so 20 minutes, but we'll say it's an hour to build out the slideshow or an hour to gather your materials or your thoughts together, and then 30 minutes or so to deliver, especially with setting up your stuff and then you record, or if you're waiting for people to get into Zoom, call it 30 minutes.
So an hour and a half on week one. Week two, you can also do an hour and a half of Q and A call who has questions about last week's lesson and you sit for an hour and a half and you answer the question. Week three, another hour and a half, and you can call this hot seat coaching call. You could call it a small group call. You could do lots of different things here. Let's say that you're doing hot seat coaching where two people volunteered to take the subject matter further and you're doing an hour and a half of that.
Week four, I like another 20-minute video. It could be a closure, like a closure video here where our biggest takeaways from Q and A here, where our biggest takeaways from the hot seat, and so the lesson that I want to pass on to you this month is this, right? We'll assume it takes you another hour and a half to make. If we add up the hour and a half of each week, you're at six hours for the month, right? Six, not six hours a week, six hours for the month and depending on if you do stuff live, or if you do stuff prerecorded, potentially two of those weeks, so three hours is when you're actually with people.
The other two you could be pre-recording and not even seeing anybody. So six hours for the month, one and a half hours of delivery per week. Now we have to think about this though because you're going to need volume to get to those a hundred members versus the 24 and the group. So four times as many people in a membership because your touch is lower.
So you will be doing more marketing one and a half hours of your week is spent delivering. Then 10, 15 hours or whatever it is spent marketing. You will get to a point where you can outsource. You will get to a point where you can pay for ads if that's something that's important to you, but initially, you're going to have that marketing time. So you're probably still closer to 12, 15 hours a week.
Again, no notes or other like hidden time, potentially some emails to answer, or maybe some tech questions or some troubleshooting. You can add in maybe another hour or two to your weekend. So let's say it's 13 to 16 hours. Three of them are actually in contact with other people. So you can see how not only is the number of hours per week going down, the number of hours that you spend with people goes down.
Alright. So let's talk about a zero-touch digital asset, and then I'm going to go with a $500 course here. For a $500 course, you would need 240 sales per year. You need time to create the asset. So let's call it 10 hours per week for a month. And then it's built takes you 40 hours a week or 40 hours to build a course, which I think is very generous. I don't think you need that much time.
You'll want to time every six months or a year to update the content on your course, depending on how quickly the industry that you're talking about is, or how quickly the info changes. Now, you're going to need a lot of marketing here because you're trying to get 240 sales per year. That's significant and you are going to have to be audience building and have to be selling at all times to get those 240 sales, which you could potentially turn passive if you're ready to invest.
Now, here's the side note though. Remember, you don't build your program until you have pre-sold it. So there's usually anywhere between three to six months of audience building before you're even ready to build the course. So that one month to build the course, you've got to add three to six months onto it if you're going for passive income.
So remember passive income is not actually passive. That takes the time away from the delivery. You don't see anybody, you don't talk to anybody at all. However, there is a lot of time invested in getting ready to do that. As well as a lot of time invested in marketing to do that, can you shortcut that? Absolutely. But it costs you money. So those are things to think about.
So after listening, I hope you can see how online income can help you earn full-time revenue with part-time hours. And there's no hidden time commitments. There's no notes. There's no other things and in addition to your actual client hours, the number of hours that you see people and interact with them goes down significantly. The marketing time stays about the same. Perhaps it goes up a little bit as your touch goes down, but it's still doable in part-time hours.
If you are someone who is craving that semi-retirement lifestyle and you want to explore some of these options, there are a few questions that I want you to answer. I cover all of these questions in my free masterclass. So in this training, you'll explore the style you want to embody the money you want to make the marketing that you want to do, and that will help you determine your next steps, choose which program feels like it's right for you, and get you started in the direction of making it possible.
So to head on over and grab that masterclass, go to marissalawton.com/masterclass. It's on-demand so you can watch it whenever it's most convenient for you. I'll be back next week, and until then keep on rising.
