my Story

Hi, I’m Elle 👋

A few months ago, I quit my £43,000 career as an Occupational Therapist to help support my elderly and disabled parents.

Which means I am now attempting the very sensible task of replacing an actual salary with side hustles 🫠

That experiment became The Side Hustle Fund.

It started with £10 a day

When I first started side hustling, I realised I was asking it to do far too much.

I wanted it to replace a salary.

Immediately.

Preferably while requiring very little effort from me.

Turns out, the internet has been slightly misleading about how easy that is. And that realisation was not good for my self-esteem.

So I started smaller.

£10 a day.

That is roughly £300 a month or £3,650 a year.

Not retire-to-the-Maldives money.

But potentially a utility bill.

A chunk of the food shop.

Money towards savings.

And, importantly, somewhere to start.

Now I share realistic ways you can work towards making an extra £10 a day, while documenting my own experiment to see whether I can scale lots of smaller, flexible income streams into something that eventually resembles the £43,000 salary I walked away from.

There is one slight problem

I don’t have loads of spare time.

Or, frankly, loads of spare energy.

Supporting my parents means life can change very quickly.

A perfectly normal week can suddenly involve hospital visits, appointments, admin, phone calls and approximately seventeen things I did not have on my to-do list.

So I cannot build an income that depends on me being available at exactly 10am every Tuesday.

And I definitely cannot spend three hours earning £4.72.

Every side hustle has to justify its existence.

If it pays reasonably well for the time and effort involved, it stays.

If it takes half my day, requires the organisational skills of an air traffic controller and rewards me with enough money to buy half a meal deal, I’m probably going to quietly put it in the bin 🫠

The Side Hustle Fund is built around four things

Earn it

This is the obvious one.

Realistic side hustles, affiliate income, platforms, apps and other ways to bring more money in.

I test what actually pays, how much effort it takes and whether I would bother doing it again.

Sell it

Sometimes the easiest money is sitting in your house already.

Selling unused clothes, gadgets, furniture, tools or anything else that is taking up space can create quick breathing room without adding another ongoing job to your life.

I also look at selling digital products and other things that can become more scalable over time.

Save it

Making more money is only half the equation.

Keeping more of what you already earn matters too.

So I also share realistic ways to cut costs, make things last longer, use cashback, make better buying decisions and stop money quietly disappearing in the background.

Not extreme frugality.

Just sensible ways to make your money stretch further.

Simplify it

Because if a system saves me money but requires a spreadsheet, three reminders and a minor emotional breakdown, it is probably not staying.

This is where I share the things that make everyday life easier.

AI tools.

Simple systems.

Meal planning.

Home routines.

Money admin.

Anything that reduces mental load, saves time or makes it easier to actually keep up with everything else.

Because sometimes making life simpler is just as valuable as making more money.

I’m interested in the money-to-effort ratio

I am not trying to become the busiest person on the internet.

Quite the opposite.

My goal is to work out how to create more income and more breathing room without continually adding more work.

My background is in psychology and occupational therapy 🧠

Before all of this, I spent years working in healthcare.

My background means I am probably incapable of simply trying something without analysing why it works, how much effort it takes and whether there is a more efficient way of doing it.

Occupational therapy also taught me something that has become increasingly relevant to this project:

A solution is only useful if it actually fits the person’s real life.

That applies to side hustles too.

Telling someone to spend every evening building a business is not particularly helpful if they are exhausted after work.

Telling a carer to take on fixed freelance appointments is not particularly helpful if they have no idea when the next hospital admission might happen.

And telling someone to “just start a passive income stream” is not enormously useful either, given that most passive income appears to involve a suspicious amount of active work first.

I want to find options that work in the messy middle of real life.

I’m not writing from the finish line

This bit matters.

I have not replaced my £43,000 salary.

That is the experiment.

You are watching it happen.

I am testing different income streams, keeping the ones that make sense and dropping the ones that do not.

Some months will be better than others.

Some ideas will work brilliantly.

Some will earn approximately enough money to fund a Freddo.

And I will show you both.

I would much rather tell you that something was a complete waste of my time than pretend every side hustle is a “game changer” because there happens to be a referral link attached to it.

The bigger goal

£10 a day is the starting point.

But I am interested in what happens when you keep building.

£10 a day is around £300 a month.

£20 a day is around £600 a month.

£50 a day is around £1,500 a month.

And eventually?

I want to know whether flexible income streams can realistically replace the salary I left behind.

Not by working every waking hour.

Not by turning every hobby into a business.

And definitely not by joining something that requires me to message everyone I went to school with in 2003.

I want to build an income that bends around my life rather than requiring my life to bend around work.

That is really what The Side Hustle Fund is about.

Earn it. Sell it. Save it. Simplify it.

More income. More options. Less unnecessary hustle.

If you need an extra £10 a day, I hope I can help you find it.

And if, like me, you are trying to build something much bigger from lots of small income streams, you can follow along and see whether I manage to pull this off.

Preferably without losing what remains of my sanity in the process 🫠