5 Side Hustles You Can Do In Retirement (That Actually Work)

These are five side hustles that you can do in retirement that actually work, and by the end of this video, you're going to know exactly which one to start with based on your unique situation. And this is coming from someone who's helped literally thousands of people get online jobs, whether this was a full-time remote job, freelancing, or a side hustle. I literally have thousands of confirmed testimonials. And many of these people, which I'll be going over here in a moment, are older or even in retirement. Plus, I started a side hustle myself that turned into a $10 million business. So I definitely know what I'm talking about when it comes to side hustles. And I have gotten requests for this video from my older viewers over and over again. And a lot of my older 50-plus viewers are doubtful that they can do these side hustles. But in reality, my 50-plus community members get results faster than my younger clients, almost always, but only if you do the right side hustles. Why? Because you have an unfair advantage that I cannot replicate and nobody else under the age of 50 can replicate. And that is wisdom, experience, and trust. 30 years of being the person that other people came to for help. And you cannot look wisdom up on ChatGPT or Clod. So the five side hustles in this video are the ones where your age is a superpower, not a limitation. So if this resonates with you, let me know by gently cheersing that like button and let's jump into it right now. Okay. So first one we're going to talk about is going to be affiliate marketing. And a great example of someone who's done this is my community member, Guy. Now, his goal when he first joined our community was to just make a part-time income. He wanted to make $1,000 to $2,000 a month to supplement his retirement income so that he could live a higher quality of life. And he wanted to help other people that have the same ailment that he has, which is tinnitus. So tinnitus is constant ringing in the ears. It's something that a lot of veterans have. My dad has it himself, and it is very debilitating. And Guy wanted to help other people to treat, manage, or just prevent in the first place tinnitus. And he wanted to make an income at the same time while he's doing it. And that's exactly what he was able to do with this channel. And he reached his goal of making $1,000 to $2,000 a month, specifically $1,500 a month. And he did this by just simply reviewing different hearing aids. And he actually has two YouTube channels, the Hearing Care channel, as well as Your Tinnitus Guy. And he was able to reach his goal with less than 500 subscribers with a very tiny channel. Now, of course, at this point, you know, he's got these two channels, 5,000 and 12,000 subscribers. So he's making a lot more than what he was making back then. But the whole point was he truly was able to start a side hustle, literally just reviewing stuff that he already knew a lot about anyways. Then when people would click on the link, if they ended up buying, he would get paid. You just review slash recommend products and services that you already would have recommended anyways. And you can get paid to do that. And the beautiful thing about affiliate marketing is you're not selling anything that you made. You're not shipping boxes. You're not building inventory. You're not running customer service. You're just being the person that people come to for honest recommendations and getting paid If you're 50 plus, you are already that person in your friend group. You're the one that your daughter calls when she's buying a car or you're the one that your neighbor asks about when they're thinking about buying a vacuum cleaner. You are the trusted voice, but you're not getting paid for it yet. Here's the analogy. Think about the last time that you walked into a restaurant that you'd never been to before and the host said, oh, you have got to order the steak. Trust me, you ordered the steak. Was it good? Probably because that host wasn't selling you on the steak. They were just recommending the steak that they already knew was really good. And there's a huge difference between those two things. Selling makes people put their guard up. Recommending breaks it down. And that is affiliate marketing. You're not selling, you're recommending. And the company is paying you to send them a customer who's already inclined to trust you. And I have to say that out of all the business models you can start, this is one of the easiest ones because you don't have to have your own product. You don't really have to sell anyone or market anyone besides just getting some traffic to the link. You don't have to do delivery or customer service or shipping or logistics or any of that stuff. Everything other than literally just recommending the person to the product is taken care of for you. And it's not just guy that's doing this. For instance, I picked a random person from my family, my 50 year old brother, Zach, and he is self-described as technologically challenged. Now he's been working 30 years in the trades. And last year he told me, Shane, my body's starting to wear out. I want to figure out how to make money without using my body. And he thought I was going to recommend some sort of online job or a certification or something along those lines. But I told him, no, you should start a YouTube channel and do affiliate marketing. And within 29 days after posting his first video, which by the way, his first video blew up and got 800,000 views. He had a $214 day just from YouTube paying him a loan. And since then he's made lots of money from affiliate marketing. For instance, last month he had a record month of $18,000. Now the only thing about affiliate marketing is you do need one thing and that is traffic. But honestly, any sort of side hustle that you do, you're going to need traffic anyways. And there's many different ways of getting traffic, but that brings me to the very next one on the list, which is going to be YouTube and specifically starting a personal brand on YouTube. Now you might've noticed lately that there are literally thousands of channels from older creators who have been blowing up on YouTube. And that is no coincidence. YouTube is clearly pushing older creators. And there's probably a few reasons for this. One, the 50 plus demographic owns about 80% of the wealth in the United States. And because of that, advertisers want to advertise to that demographic because they have the money. But in order for advertisers to advertise to that demographic, that demographic has to be on YouTube and they have to be engaged. And generally speaking, birds of a feather flock together. So people who are on the older side prefer to watch and consume content from other people that are on the older side. And then additionally, younger people like to look up to older people and watch content from them as well. Then the second thing is there's tons of people that are younger that create content, but there's not that many older people, but there's clearly a lot of demand for older people creating content. So it's simply a supply and demand imbalance. And then third, YouTube has been giving a lot of push to more niche audiences lately, and that's made it way easier for older creators to blow up. So whether it's just supply and demand or YouTube is doing it artificially, it's very clear that older creators are blowing up left and right. Like Dry Creek Wrangler School, who posted this video right here when you just ain't got it together. It's just him recording with his iPhone camera with no edits whatsoever. And it blew up, got over 8 million views and made him over $42,000. And that's just from AdSense alone, right? AdSense is the thing that's easy for us to see. If he's properly monetizing this, he's probably making far more than that. Just as an example, AdSense is less than 5% of my total income. Or this gentleman, Essential Craftsman, his name is Scott, who, according to vidIQ, is making $16,000 a month just from AdSense alone. And this single, very simple video called SkillSaw Pro Tips got 7 million views and made over $39,000. Oh, and it's not just men. Here's a channel, Fabulous 50s, run by a lady named Sheila, and she's making $12,000 a month, again, just from AdSense alone. And it's all about working out for women over 50. And it's estimated that she's made at least $2 to $5 million from this channel. And just as an example, this video right here, Lose Belly Fat Sitting Down, Ab Workout for Women Over 50, got over 6 million views and made over $32,000. Or how about this channel, Hot and Flashy with Angie, which is style, beauty, anti-aging, as well as health for women over 50. She's made millions of dollars from this channel. This video right here, just one video alone, made over $27,000 just from AdSense alone. But you might be thinking, well, Shane, all those people have millions of subscribers, so of course they're making a bunch of money. And that is one of the most common misconceptions, is that you need a bunch of views to make a lot of money. That is simply not true. For instance, our community member, Craig, who owns this channel, Montana Real Estate, is a realtor in Montana. And he actually has many brokerages around Montana. And this YouTube channel is one of their main marketing strategies. And this video right here, for instance, blew up, got over 100,000 views. And I can guarantee you, he wouldn't be wasting his time doing YouTube if it wasn't getting him a lot of leads and leading to actual deals as well. And by the way, this video, he literally just recorded on his laptop with his webcam. There was nothing fancy about this video at all. And if you think you need to make super high production quality content to do this, and you need lots of fancy gear and that kind of thing, well, just check out this channel right here, MNJ Metal. He posted this video right here, how to make pickled Pepsi at home for free. It blew up, got 9.6 million views, and it made over $48,000. And that's just from AdSense alone. And it's a conservative estimate too. And this video looked like it was recorded with a potato. The audio was bad. Everything was bad about it, and it did not matter. So I think you get the point here. YouTube is of course a content platform. It's a social media platform, but it's also a search engine at the same time. In fact, it's the second biggest search engine in the world, and it's owned by Google, which is the first biggest search engine. And so it has all the advantages of being a social media platform, but it's also a search engine. So it has the advantages that people are actually searching for solutions to their problem on the platform as well. So you can post a video, and literally years down the line, you can still be getting views, getting subscribers, and making sales through whatever your products and services that you're selling or affiliate marketing stuff that you're selling, et cetera, et cetera, is. So yeah, there are millions of people over 50 watching YouTube every single day, and the supply of creators serving them is tiny. So massive demand, tiny supply. And that is a great place to be. And that's why YouTube is an absolute gold mine for people on the older side that want to make content. And this is exactly why I started my own brother on YouTube. First, he started off doing affiliate marketing, and now he's moving on to other stuff as well. Plus, he's opening a second channel. All right, guys, quick break. This video is sponsored by me. I wanted to let you know that I'm going to be doing a live training this week where I'm going to be revealing the YouTube content advantage in 2026. It is a completely free training, no strings attached. In fact, I'm giving away even more bonuses at the training. Just as an example, I'm going to be giving away my niche validator. And this is going to be available for both Claude as well as ChatGPT, which is a super valuable piece of software where you can finally figure out what the best niche for you is. So do not miss out on this training. Make sure you sign up for it down in the description and the pinned comment below because you only get it if you join the training. So if you don't join now, you might miss it. But that being said, in the workshop, you'll get to meet me. You'll get to ask me questions directly. So I look forward to meeting you. So click the link in the description, the pinned comment below. Make sure you put it on your calendar. And if for whatever reason you missed out on it, you weren't able to attend, make sure you still click that link because we might be having workshops in the future as well. And you'll be the first to know about it. So, yeah, hope to see you there. And now back to your regularly scheduled programming. All right. Next side hustle is going to be done for you services using your career skills. And I call this one the career encore. Now, this one is for people who spent 30 years getting really, really good at something like accounting or H.R. or marketing or project management or engineering or sales or I.T. or operations, whatever. And now they're staring at retirement thinking, wait, am I just going to throw all that knowledge away? Don't don't throw it away. Don't waste it. You can take what you spent 30 years learning and you can turn it into a service and you can offer it to other people who need it, but don't have it. They pay you and you work part time on your own terms from your kitchen table or your patio or your trailer at the lake, wherever the hell you want to be. And what's obvious to you after 30 years in a field is not obvious to anyone else. You spent so long doing this thing. You forgot it's a skill and you forgot that people pay good money for it. And some of these skills can get incredibly niche. Just as an example, let's say that you spent your entire career working in the Bay Area for tech companies. Well, guess what? There's a channel about that Bay Area executive coach. How specific is that? And you might be thinking, well, this channel only has 2000 subscribers. There's no way they're making money, right? Well, when you sell a service, which in their case, it's helping people get better jobs. You make a ton of money. And I have worked with so many people doing this, and I know that they make a ton of money. And it's pretty much a no brainer as well. If you help somebody go from, let's just say, $100,000 a year job to a $200,000 a year job, they will gladly pay you $10,000 for that. It's a total no brainer. Here's another really great example. Tom from Career Nerds. He helps service academy grads looking to make bold career moves get into specialized executive networking positions. And this is a seven figure business. Now, by the way, this does not have to be executive coaching either. Josh, for instance, helps entry level people get into IT jobs and then more advanced people get into very high paying cybersecurity jobs. And when he first started working with us, he was making less than $1,000 a month, and we helped him get all the way up to $186,000 in a single month. And I could honestly go on and on and on here. And by the way, it doesn't have to be career coaching either. It could be how to use Excel like this channel right here. Technology for teachers and students says that they're making about $6,000 a month just from AdSense alone, and they're likely making far, far more than that from other stuff. So yeah, it's basically just teaching people very boring stuff like Excel. So the whole point here is you learned a specific set of skills, right? And you learn these skills over a long career. Don't let them go to waste. I have a very particular set of skills, skills I've acquired over a very long career. You can teach other people the same stuff that's very simple to you and very easy to you online. And if you want to see an extreme example of this, well, just look at Scotty Kilmer. He was a mechanic for 57 years. He's in his 70s now, and he makes videos on YouTube just helping people pick the right cars, fix their cars, maintain their cars, et cetera. Now, if you look at his estimated monthly earnings, according to vidIQ, he's making about $25,000 a month. But like I said before, these estimated earnings are usually on the low side. It's usually significantly more than this. For instance, he did an article with a news station where he said that he made over $24 million from YouTube. And he said that he made more money in one month on YouTube than he saved in 40 years as a mechanic. So yeah, I think you get the point. You can make content about this, and then you can sell products and services on your channel. And you might be thinking, well, Shane, I was a stay-at-home mom or something. I don't have any career skills. It doesn't matter. You have skills that you've gained over your life. For instance, this lady right here, the sourdough lady. There's an article saying she made hundreds of thousands of dollars from this channel that literally only talks about making sourdough bread. That's it. Just one subject, one super niche subject, which is the sourdough bread. And of course, she sells courses and consulting, helping other people make the best possible sourdough bread. And speaking of that, that brings us to the next one on the list, which is going to be coaching and tutoring, right? And this is another great side hustle that you can do. So everything else on the list is either you make a product and you sell it to people, or you recommend somebody else's product, or you just do YouTube on its own and make money from AdSense, or you do a service for somebody. But you can also do coaching and tutoring. And you don't need to be the world's greatest expert. You don't need to have a PhD. You don't need a fancy certification unless your specific niche legally requires one like therapy or financial advising. You just need to be one step ahead of the person that you're coaching. So a great example of this is RJ the Unretired. He's another one of our community members. He started with us, and within a few months, he posted a video that blew up, got over 1 million views, and completely blew up his channel. And he's still making about $23,000 a month. But within just a couple months, he had a $28,000 a month. And he literally just talks about retirement. That's it. And he even has a second channel because he used to be a CEO, where he does CEO coaching. So he's crushing it with two different YouTube channels. Or you can just do tutoring, right? So here's an example of the organic chemistry tutor. He makes $81,000 a month doing this. And the craziest thing is he hasn't posted a video in three months. So that's $81,000 a month passively. And it's just from AdSense alone. If he's monetizing even remotely well on this channel, he's making far more money than that. And like I said, you don't need to be an expert. You just need to be one step ahead of whoever you're teaching. For instance, this guy right here teaches pickleball, which is a great sport that I'm having a lot of fun playing myself. He's making $28,000 a month, and he focuses on teaching pickleball for 50 plus. Now, is he a professional pickleball player? No, he's pretty good. Don't get me wrong, but he is focusing on teaching pickleball for people that are 50 plus, which I think is awesome. So I'm just giving you example after example, after example, hopefully one of these sort of jog some sort of idea for you. And again, if you want to check to see if that idea is good, go ahead, click that link in the description in the pin comment below to get the niche AI and attend the live training. And this brings me to the last thing, which is going to be digital products and online courses. So this one's pretty self-explanatory. It could be a digital product a resume, for instance, a resume for a very specific type of career, or it could be an online course that helps you to do something. Example, this is our community member Antoine from Black Heights. Now he talks about how to get remote tech careers and high income opportunities for career changers. And he does focus on helping people in the African-American community. And he sells an online course for about $2,497, helping people to land these jobs. And he's literally just helping people do what he already did. Now, I know Antoine doesn't look like it, but he is on the older side and he's able to land a job where he made over $500,000 in a single year in tech. And he helps other people do the same thing. Or how about Thomas Frank here who sells Notion templates and he's made millions of dollars doing this. In fact, with this channel, he's making over a hundred thousand dollars a month and he went and talked about it on a podcast. So, yeah, I think you get the idea. Digital products can be really, really good as well. And as an older person, you probably have a massive amount that you could help people with. Just like Seth, for instance, who got a marketing career while he was on the older side and then taught a bunch of other people how to do it. And he sells a course as well. So, yeah, I think you get the point here. Really, really good opportunity here too. Now, you're probably thinking, Shane, I'd love to do one of these, but again, I don't know what niche to pick. And like I said, I have a live training this week. Do not miss out on it. Click that link in the description in the pinned comment below. And at this live training, I'm going to be giving you the niche AI and I'm going to be helping you pick your niche. Then I'm going to give you a step-by-step guide to get started building your personal brand on YouTube. YouTube's the mother platform, but then you can automatically syndicate the content to other platforms. And then I'm going to answer any question you have on exactly how to get started. Now you might be wondering, Shane, why do you do this? Why do you give all this free value away? Well, first of all, I love helping people. This is my passion and I love doing this. And I know that 99.9% of you are just going to watch my free YouTube videos, get a ton of value out of them, download my free resources like the niche validator AI, get a ton of value out of that, attend my live trainings, which are completely free, get lots of value out of that. And we are never going to end up working together one-on-one and that is completely okay. But for the 0.1% of you out there who want that one-on-one mentorship or who want us to literally just do it for you, then go ahead and book a call by clicking the link in the description and the pin comment below. On this call, we'll figure out where you are right now, where you want to be. We'll make a plan to get there and we'll see if we're a good fit to work together or not. We only accept about 18% of people who apply and we're only taking in about five people right now. The types of people we typically work with are business owners, both online as well as in-person, usually the types of people who sell digital products or they get clients. But we also work with YouTubers who are getting views but struggling with monetization, YouTubers who are crushing it and they want to crush it even harder, or people who are professionals, they have a lot of experience, they're experts at something and they want to share their expertise using YouTube. But all those people have one thing in common is that they're serious about YouTube and they want to treat it like a business. So if that sounds like you, go ahead and click that link in the description, the pin comment below, but only if you want to get started right now and you're very serious. With that being said, check out this video right here of exactly how we helped my brother Zach go from zero to a full-time income in less than one month on YouTube.