Take pause, if you go to the cinema this weekend to see the new film The Running Man. The basic plot of this dystopian thriller is that the contestants of a devilishly brutal gameshow must compete to stay alive for 30 days while the television network’s ‘hunters’ try to kill them.
If they succeed, they win $1billion (£760million). I’m going to ask you to look carefully at one scene in which the gameshow’s audience roar their approval for the hunters – because you’ll spot me, in the thick of things.
I am one of those audience members, on screen for a couple of seconds, air-punching and baying like a good ‘un.
In return for all that hand pumping as an extra on this movie, I received £180 a day.
Later on in the film, I’m back again, waving a placard in support of star Glen Powell and getting into fights with the goons that guard us.
It’s all very method-acting – and, in truth, it reflects my real-life approach to Rachel Reeves and her evil thuggery of a Budget.
I know she’s coming for me, I know she’s hunting me for my income tax, for the inheritance tax on my dead mother’s estate, for the London house she calls a mansion but I call the shabby terraced house that is my family’s home – and so I need to fight a little harder.
By which I mean developing a rotating roster of side hustles – extra jobs on top of my actual job as a writer.
I’m certainly not the only one doing this. For a certain sector of the cash-strapped middle classes, it’s become essential to have as many jobs as we can squeeze into our week.
Susannah Jowitt has developed a rotating roster of side hustles – extra jobs on top of her actual job as a writer
Posh people call it a ‘portfolio career’. But for me, the side hustle is a more appropriate name – expanding my meagre talents, sweating my assets for all they’re worth.
The heat is well and truly on for us as a family financially, because my husband is stuck in a terribly modern employment bind. As part of a financial platform’s start-up, he has been let down by his boss’s inability to close a deal that’s been on the table for nearly two years. And so he hasn’t been paid for 18 months.
But nor can he leave the company, because then the whole house of cards that is the deal will collapse, and he’ll never get his back pay.
So after years of my husband supporting me as a writer, it’s my turn to be the breadwinner. We still have a mortgage, some credit card debt, tax bills from when he was earning – and children who, though earning for themselves, still very much need support.
I’m also sick of well-meaning advice from rich friends and well-off family members: ‘Just sell the house!’ or ‘Tell your husband to get a job in a pub!’
But I don’t want to sell my home. My husband is depressed enough as it is without humiliating him with a McJob.
With all that in mind, just over a year ago, I put my 56-year-old brain to acquiring as much additional work as I could manage.
By their irregular nature, the hours spent on my side hustles vary per week – as does the income. But so far, in total, they have made me around £16,500.
Indeed, so successful have I been at acquiring extra jobs, that I now have seven side hustles to my name – from landlady to quiz night host, dinner party chef to miniature watercolourist.
The first and most obvious move was taking on lodgers, which has earned me £9,700 so far, while my other side hustles have pulled in £7,012 overall.
With a spare room and one child moved out to her own place, we have two bedrooms free, plus a single bed in a box room – so this was the simplest move, which we started just over a year ago.
We now have three young paying guests, who don’t mind living with wrinklies like us because it’s cheap and we are ten minutes by Tube from the heart of London. They contribute £1,500 to the family coffers every month, covering the mortgage and most of the bills.
Admittedly, the house can get a little squishy at times – as well as me and my husband, my son and his girlfriend also live with us, making it seven adults under one roof.
And while I don’t cook for them, they do share our one bathroom with my son and his girlfriend. Thankfully, my husband and I have an en suite. But it’s a small price to pay for keeping the wolf from the door.
Then, back in January, on the advice of my daughter’s boyfriend, who’s a musician and well-versed in the gig economy, I signed up to at least half a dozen agencies that find jobs for extras on films and TV. This alone took hours because you have to list everything you’ve done, every skill you have, everything you’re prepared to do – and, as an ex-travel writer, I have done a lot: abseiled, ridden horses, waitressed, done martial arts.
I can’t help but chuckle when I get to the ‘privacy’ section of the form. ‘Did you tick the full nudity box?’ asks my daughter’s boyfriend. ‘Of course I did,’ I say airily, safe in the knowledge that no casting director is ever going to ask a woman of my age to strip, even as a background diversion.
For all my skills, though, nothing happened with the extras work to start with, so I had to come up with some other strings to my bow. For these, I rely purely on word of mouth.
I’ve long been a member of a choir, so I decide to put it about that I can sing at weddings and funerals. I charge £200 a time if I’m doing solo work, or £100 as part of a small choir. So far, it’s earned me £200 for two wedding gigs.
I also monetise my expertise as a local quiz setter and MC. For years, I have run our local Friends of Brook Green Quiz for free. So why not make some money from it? After all, I come up with all the questions myself – it’s not just an internet download job. For a bespoke quiz, I can charge £500 a time, and I’ve pulled in one gig so far, with the promise of more to come.
Then, as all this is ticking along, I am suddenly hired for three extras jobs in a row.
The first is being Press scum, ironically, playing a paparazza on an ITV drama about the murder of Rachel Nickell in 1992, the second, the above mentioned role in The Running Man, and the third as a passerby for one day’s filming on a Mark Wahlberg family comedy – which, as it’s on an early Sunday in Whitehall, makes it a nice little earner at £350.
One side gig taps into my skills in the kitchen, writes Susannah Jowitt. I’ve earned £500 for this
I’ve long been a member of a choir, so I decide to put it about that I can sing at weddings and funerals. I charge £200 a time if I’m doing solo work, or £100 as part of a small choir
Before I start my extra jobs, everyone tells me how tedious it will be – all waiting around, so I pack my laptop and notebook, thinking I can at least do some work for my actual job.
Yet I never even switch my computer on, and spend all my time chatting to my fellow extras, eliciting their often extraordinary stories. Like the middle-aged woman who, having retired from a long career as a high-flying civil servant, is now enjoying her time pretending to be a sci-fi villain one day, a prison officer the next.
‘I don’t get to be an extra that often, because every woman my age is signing up these days, but when I do, I love it,’ she says with a twinkle.
‘I just got so bored being at home. I never knew my husband was so tedious and penny-pinching until I had to spend all day with him.’
After 14 days of ‘supporting-artist’ work, I have earned enough – just over £2,000 after putting some aside for tax – to take my husband away for a cheering holiday.
And that pretty much sums up how I do my domestic book-keeping now: I live in my own barter economy. Every-day costs I aim to pay off with my earnings as a writer, but for treats I have to hustle. If I want to get my blonde hair touched up at a cost of £120, I exploit my side hustles.
Another side gig taps into my skills in the kitchen. I cook endless tasty meals like pheasant casserole, Malaysian chicken curry, homemade pates, and my modestly famous chorizo and cannellini stew for someone to fill their freezer. At £250 plus the cost of ingredients, I’ve earned £500 for this so far.
I’ve even advertised to cook someone’s Christmas dinner ahead of time, which I call ‘Everything But The Bird’ – because I obviously can’t cook their turkey in advance for them, but can do all the trimmings, pudding and more. For this, I’ll charge about £35 per head.
I did this last Christmas, cooking 52 festive meals in all – four veg, two stuffings, gravy, bread sauce and homemade Christmas puddings. That said, it nearly killed me. The puds alone took six hours to steam! The £1,543 I earned, after the cost of the ingredients, sounds like a lot, but per hour of labour it didn’t add up well.
I’m also now a dinner-party chef for hire, at £50 per head, plus the cost of the food. Indeed, just last week, I delivered a dinner party for 12 to the ageing but spirited mother of a friend. ‘I want canapes, a fun main course and an indulgent pudding, with very little to do along the way!’ she said.
I laid on nibbles, a Persian dish of chicken and aubergine fesenjan (a sweet and sour stew), with a herb fattoush, dill rice and flatbreads, topped with pomegranate seeds and yoghurt, finished off with lemon posset. That’s Christmas paid for, I think to myself.
Let me emphasise here that while I am no trained cook, I am confident in my ability to feed people interestingly and showily. The skill level of that dinner party was, to me, very low but the guests were all blown away. I’ve earned over £700 for this enterprise in total.
Now I’m setting up cookery how-to days: first, How To Do Christmas Without Losing Your Mind, for which I’m charging £250 per person to spend a day with me teaching the secret of presenting the Sunday roast that is essentially Christmas dinner as the smorgasbord of indulgence the modern Yule feast demands. I have two bookings already for this.
And my new confidence has spilled over into another creative avenue: Painting.
This one is a harder sell because I am no artist, but I’ve found a way to turn a hobby creating tiny watercolours into not one, but two eccentric side hustles.
First is relatively straightforward – creating holiday house postcards for people who have country cottages to let out. Price is on application at the moment and so far I’ve only done one commission for £80 – still, it has all the promise of a growth market.
The second arose when my husband pre-empted any move by the Chancellor to tax the 25 per cent drawdown of a pension by releasing that portion of his hard-earned old City pension, and investing in March in a tiny flat in Hastings we would rent out.
As time passed, I wanted to put our stamp on the flat even if we weren’t going to be able to live in it, so I looked at a piece of heritage so tied up with Hastings – the Bayeux tapestry – and decided I could create my own.
The advantage of a tapestry is that the draughtsmanship isn’t that great: I simply copied motifs like the Norman boats and how they depicted themselves standing by their houses. Then came up with a storyboard showing me and my family living in Hastings.
Then I sent the finished drawing to a nice man on Etsy who turned it into a printed tempered glass splashback, as you do. The end result in our Hastings kitchen has earned so many rave reviews that I have been encouraged to advertise and offer to create others’ stories the same way. Apparently, I can charge £1,000 for each splashback, or £700 for just the drawing which is motivating to say the least.
Tax-wise, although I do the work, the money goes into my husband’s account so that between us we don’t exceed the relevant tax category. There never seem to be quite enough hours in the day for all these side gigs, but what started as a panic about how on earth I was going to be the main breadwinner with my lack of ‘proper’ job, has become a source of real joy.
I’ve met wonderful people, helped others and impressed myself with my ability to spin straw into gold.
I couldn’t be happier.
So bring it on, Rachel Reeves, do your worst. You can’t get me down when my side hustles mean I’m on the up…
