If you have a family and work in full-time ministry, you’ve probably had a month or two where you had no idea how you were going to make it to the end of the month financially. I know I’ve had several of those kind of months: months where we had to decide which bills to pay and which ones not to; months where we were crossing our fingers hoping our landlord would wait a few days before cashing our rent check; months where we prayed nonstop that God would somehow provide.
If you have a family and work in full-time ministry, then you probably have little to no time to pick up a second job or do extra work to help provide some financial cushion in your life. So what do you do?
First and foremost: make a budget. I cannot stress that enough.
Second: ask for a raise. But before you do that, make sure you read this article from Chris Wesley on how to increase your salary.
Third: find a way to bring in additional income doing what you’re already doing (or should be doing)!
That third step is what this article is about. I want to share with you a few ways that you can make a few extra bucks by capitalizing on things you’re already spending time on. Now I’d be surprised if you break the bank with any of these ideas, but think how your life would change if you could bring in a couple hundred dollars extra each month…
Share What You’ve Created
I would bet that you’re regularly creating content for your ministry at the parish, right? You’ve probably got a dozen youth nights and a couple of retreats on your hard drive right now collecting digital dust, right?
Why not share those with youth ministers around the world and make a little bit of money while you’re doing it?
ProjectYM is building a storehouse of tried and tested youth ministry resources from people in the trenches of youth ministry – people just like you.
You can check out the submit page for more information, but basically this is how it works: 1) you upload that youth night you created for last month; 2) we review the resource for content, concept, and marketability; 3) if we think it’s a good fit and useable by other youth ministers, we take it through our editing process – it’s checked for grammatical and theological errors and given a beautiful facelift by our design team; and then 4) we add it to our online store. When someone purchases your resource, she’s able to download it right away and use it to help their ministry, and then you and ProjectYM split the money.
There’s more details available, but what it boils down to is a way for you to get paid for the content you’ve already created!
Help Your Friends Get In Shape
If you’re circle of friends includes a lot of youth ministers, then chances are some of them (and maybe yourself) and fallen victim to the youth ministry diet – you know what I’m talking about: tons of pizza, junk food and soda. After a few years in ministry, eating like a teenager reeks havoc on your health.
What if there was a way to get in shape, start making better food choices and get your friends to do it with you all while making a little extra income? There is. It’s called Advocare. Now before you write this off as a scam or waste of time, give me the benefit of the doubt and hear me out.
A couple months ago, I was out of shape and overweight. I was eating crappy and drinking 4-5 sodas EVERY DAY. When I found out my wife was pregnant with our third child, I decided to use that as the kick in the butt I needed to get in shape. For months I’d been hearing from close friends (and reading Facebook posts from not-so-close friends) about this thing called the 24 Day Challenge. Basically it’s an intense 24 days of restricted foods, vitamin supplements and some exercise. After EIGHT different youth ministers recommending I try it, I decided to give it a go. 24 days later I had lost 14 pounds and kicked my soda addiction (haven’t had one in almost 3 months).
It worked, so I knew I had to tell other people about it. And the great thing about Advocare is that they’ll actually pay me to tell people about how their products have changed my life.
Here’s the thing: if you have time to put 5 or 6 hours a week into it, you can actually make a nice chunk of change recommending and marketing Advocare products like my friend (and youth minister) Matt Regitz:
“I have been a full time youth minister for 12 years and I never got into it for the money. Actually I have never heard anyone in Catholic ministry say they got into it for the money but it is still a necessity for raising a family in society. As my family grew so did our expenses and I wanted to find another way to supplement my income to so I could stay in ministry as long as the Lord might call me without having to exit back to the corporate sales world from which I entered just to make ends meet. This is where Advocare came in for me and my family, as a solution to the gap between expenses and church salary. Now a family of 6 with 4 kids 8 years old and under, I know life will only continue to cost more. In about 6 months, a monthly income bump of $1,000 a month has been a huge help and this is only the beginning. I am thankful for the blessing Advocare products have been both to my health and to my finances…and how it has played a role in my continued ministry to young people.” (Matt Regitz)
Matt’s story is awesome, and if you (or your spouse) has a few extra hours a week, you can totally transform your life with Advocare – for example, Matt’s wife is able to stay home with their kids full-time because of the extra money he’s making through Advocare.
But if you’ve only got a few minutes to spare every week, you can still generate additional income with Advocare. My life is crazy right now, and other than setting up my site, I haven’t spent any time marketing or working on Advocare – all I’ve done is talk about my experience with the 24 Day Challenge and replacing soda with Spark (in real life and on Facebook), and I made a hundred bucks last month. Now $100/month isn’t as life changing as $1,000/month, but that’s a bill that might not have gotten paid otherwise.
You can get more details about becoming an Advocare distributor by clicking here or feel free to post any questions in the comments at the bottom.
Recommend Tools You Love
I’m a techie person. Scratch that: I’m a nerd. I love finding new web-based tools that make my life and my ministry easier. And more than that, I love sharing those finds with my friends, coworkers, peers and pretty much anyone who will listen.
What’s even better: getting paid to tell people about those tools!
A lot of the tools that I use everyday in my ministry actually have affiliate programs – basically I get paid a referral fee for each friend who signs up for the service based on my recommendation.
There’s tons of tools out there that offer affiliate or referral programs – start finding some by checking the sites of your top can’t-live-without-it tools.
Some of my favorites include: Formstack, Bluehost, and ProTexting. I want to make special mention of ProTexting because it makes up the largest of my affiliate commissions (currently about $200/month). Why? Two reasons: 1) It’s the best group texting service for ministry; 2) They’re commissions are recurring – meaning as long as people stay customers of ProTexting, I’ll get a percentage of they’re monthly bill EVERY MONTH.
So what do you do? Once you’ve signed up as an affiliate for a service you love, simply be on the lookout for opportunities to recommend it WHEN IT’S RELEVANT (in live conversation, in a Facebook group, in a comment on a blog you frequent, as a response on Twitter, etc.)
Here’s the most important part of recommending affiliates: only recommend companies/products/tools that you absolutely LOVE. Don’t send your friend to sign up for lame service just because you’ll make a couple dollars. I recommend Formstack, Bluehost, and ProTexting because I use (and LOVE) all three.
BONUS: If you’re interested in signing up as a ProTexting affiliate, I’d love to have you on my team! Use this link to sign up (and comment below to let me know you did), and I will hook you up with some cool perks like video walk throughs to help share with people about ProTexting, cool graphics for social media, and CASH bonus for your first referral.
This is a great idea, Michael! But people need to be careful; if the documents being uploaded were created for and paid for by a parish, they probably belong to the parish. In most cases it’s understood that anything an employee creates as part of their job belongs to the employer; the employee doesn’t have a right to redistribute it or charge money for it. Youth ministers might be able to have their pastor sign a release on something, but they shouldn’t assume that anything they create in the course of their paid duties is theirs to do with as they please.
Of course if the materials were created on a volunteer basis or outside of work time, that’s a different story.
Jonathan – Great point. In all things, check with your pastor first. It might even be worth us drawing up a general release that youth ministers can ask their pastor to sign.
Also, intellectual property rights might be a point worth negotiating before someone starts at a new parish.
Along the lines of sharing materials, you can often preach retreats at nearby schools and parishes. These also are very helpful when you ask for a raise. “3 local schools invited me in and paid me to run confirmation retreats” can logically imply “I am a top youth minister in the area.”
However, this can be tricky to combine with being in one place. I do this now although money management is a little different as a religious.
Wish you coulld make money online? Now you can!
http://tinyurl.com/k9723qv
I like some of these suggestions but skip Advocare and Spark. For someone who works with teens and is viewed as a role model, using and promoting energy drinks is a bad idea. And not only are they unhealthy, very few people make money in multi-level marketing programs on a part-time basis.
Dr. Marc – I don’t know that I’d classify Spark as unhealthy energy drink: it’s chock-full of vitamins, minerals and nutrients providing healthy and balanced energy.
As to the money making: both myself and multiple other youth ministry friends of mine make a decent side income from Advocare — including several people who’s wives are now able to stay home with their kids full-time thanks to that income.
There are so many things wrong with “energy drinks” I don’t know where to start.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2966367/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20926266
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22324861
You may not classify Spark as unhealthy but research does. Throwing a bunch of vitamins and minerals in there doesn’t make it healthy. Spark has more caffeine than 3 cans of soda but caffeine does not provide energy. Caffeine is a psychoactive chemical stimulant. Energy comes from real food in the form of calories.
As a youth minister, it is also important for you to know that teens and young adults who use these products are more likely to use drugs and abuse alcohol. You should be discouraging the use of these drinks instead of selling them.
http://www.wolterskluwerhealth.com/News/Pages/Teens-Who-Consume-Energy-Drinks-More-Likely-to-Use-Alcohol-and-Drugs.aspx
I’m sure that you mean well but there are more productive and helpful ways of supplementing your income.
Dr. Marc – I appreciate your input, not sure that I agree with your conclusions, but I do appreciate your expertise on the issue. Thanks for the articles above, I’ll give them a read.
Great read, always looking for extra ways to be more efficient around the office. I just wanted to share something I’ve been doing recently. I run an office and have noticed that unused toner was piling up in storage. Looked into returning but that was no good. Tried out the site http://www.tonerconnect.net/ and was impressed. They had quick service and that payout was nice.
@Jonathan Great point. Everyone needs to check their diocesan policies about Intellectual Property before submitting. That said, though most large dioceses have rules about it a large number of them don’t and even those that do often times will release you to do so. I could name three large globally recognized resources that function in a similar way and don’t encounter issues with it.
Also you could set up the parish as the beneficiary and use it as a method to fund raise. I can’t imagine any pastor having an issue with that.