Tutoring

I'm heading out to New Orleans this week for Mardi Gras. (Taking too many vacations is a big part of my plan. So rather than more math I'm going to talk a little about tutoring.)


One of the ways I make extra money is through tutoring part time. I tutor through www.wyzant.com and haven't had any jobs for awhile. Last week I started tutoring again, and it reminded me that the hourly wage from this is really, really good. I had two sessions tutoring calculus and physics with a student and made $75 for a combined 3 hours. I'm tutoring him again this week before a midterm. Immediately before and after midterms seem to be prime tutoring times, as students either try to cram or catch up. This is a really good way, in the short term for me to come up with some extra cash to save. Unfortunately it suffers from one major issues. My time is finite, so while I can use this to increase the amount I'm saving, I won't be able to come up with additional increases in the future. This isn't scalable, and the income isn't repeatable. Once I tutor someone, and they pay me, its over. I could calculate the additional income as instead an income stream based on the investment I put it into. Assuming that I can earn 8% on my money, and I need to increase my contribution by $50 per month, I need to earn 50 / 1/150 = $7500 a month from tutoring. This works out to be 300 hours a month. This doesn't include the fact that additional principle progresses me toward my goal. Which is about 80 hours a week. It'd be significantly easier to add an income stream of $50 if I could figure out a way to make it more recurrent.  But for now this is helping me get some significant increase in my savings.