Make Money Doing What You’re Already Doing

Stay-at-home parents often look for ways to make a few extra bucks. After all, living on one income can be tough. But finding time to do extra work can be equally difficult for parents juggling household chores with the many other demands of parenting. One solution? Make money doing what you’re already doing.

A laundry list of online platforms offer the chance to make money providing household services — like laundry, kid transportation, tutoring, cooking and even coaching kids in sports. If these are things you’re already doing — and you don’t mind adding a few loads to the washer or additional trips around town — you can make good money doing more of what you’re already doing.

Wash

If you’ve got kids at home, your washer and dryer are certainly already getting plenty of use. But no one pays you to do the kid’s laundry. On the other hand, Hampr and Poplin will pay you to do laundry for other families pressed for time. Hampr pays by the bag. Poplin pays by the pound.

Drive

Before my kids could drive, I used to count how many loops I would make around town. Drive one kid to water polo. Pick up the other for school. Drop off a forgotten lunch bag. Drive one child home, take the other to baseball. And all of my friends were doing the same.

A site called HopSkipDrive can make all those loops around town pay off. You’ll need to be at least 21, have a four-door car, insurance, child care experience and be able to pass a background check. The site arranges rides in advance and you can pick and choose the ones that suit your region and schedule.

Tutor

Do you help your kids with their homework? Sign up with Wyzant and you can help other kids too — for pay. Wyzant is an international tutoring platform that draws roughly 6 million students looking for tutors each month. You post a profile spelling out what you’re qualified to teach, your rates and availability. The site helps you find clients for a 25% commission on what you earn.

Cook

If you’re the parent that everyone turns to when they need contributions for the bake sale, consider signing up with Hotplate. Hotplate operates around the concept “food drops.” This is a date and time that the chef determines a specific food will be available for pickup or drop-off.

Let’s say, for instance, that you have been enlisted to provide a dozen cookies for the school bake sale. You can sign up with Hotplate and offer those same cookies for sale, with a drop date that corresponds to when you’ll already be cooking. Let’s say, for instance, that the bake sale is on Saturday August 8.

You set your drop date for August 8 and say you’ll sell 12 cookies for $10, available for pick-up on August 8. Hotplate sends that message out to anyone and everyone who has signed up to hear about your cookie drops. It will also take orders and collect from your customers, taking a small fee for the marketing and handling service. You get pre-orders, so you know how many cookies to make. And, you can set limits, so you don’t end up cooking day and night to fill more orders than you can handle.

Coach

If you’re an athlete, with athletic offspring, there’s a good chance you spend a lot of your time on fields and in gyms. Want to use some of that time to help other kids get better at their sports? Sign up to coach through CoachUp, Athletes Untapped or TeachMeTo. All three sites help prospective coaches find clients. You set your own rates, availability and say which sports you’re qualified to teach.