Side Hustle of the Week

Unless you are part of the 1%, you likely have some kind of side hustle. It can be anything from selling art, to developing websites for small businesses in your free time. This weekly series is to give you an idea of what to do to make you a little extra money and what the power of that extra side cash can be.

This week: Donating your plasma

You probably haven’t given a lot of thought to selling part of your person to make a little extra cash, if you have, you haven’t thought about doing it twice a week. You read that right. Two times per week. Let me explain, plasma is not blood, but rather your blood’s water. This is something easily replenished and that has very little effect on you for the remainder of the day. You get paid to sit on your phone, read a book or do whatever else you can get done with one arm stuck with a needle. Yes, this does involve a needle but the risk is low and in the 7 years I have been donating, I have not had a problem.

A typical donation starts with you scheduling a physical, bringing proof of address, your social security card and ID. The nurse will check your vitals, your veins and various assessments to determine if you are healthy enough to donate. Once it is established that you are healthy enough and your veins are good enough, you sit comfortably on a bed while you make a fist repeatedly to get the blood moving. The machine takes your blood, extracts the plasma and gives you your whole blood back. The first visit will take about 3 hours, with every visit after this taking only 45 minutes to an hour.

The MONEY. The payment structure will vary depending on the company and incentives. Check your local center for promotions that increase pay based off of frequency of donations. I make $120 / week donating plasma. Sometimes promotions will increase that weekly rate or they will give you a bonus at the end of the month after X amount of successful donations.

What to do with this extra cash?

I’m not here to tell you how to spend your money, but I will suggest how you could spend it. More than likely the money you get from plasma will be loaded on to a debit card by the time you leave the building. That makes it pretty easy to go and spend, but here is my strategy.

1. Lock the debit card away.

2. After doing two donations a week for a month, cash out the debit card at your banks ATM so you don’t get charged (US bank won’t charge a transaction fee)

3. Take that money and immediately put it in to a High Yield Savings Account, U.S Large Cap Equities Fund, Mutual Fund, or any other investment pool that you have where your money will grow. I would advise against crypto because I already made that mistake; learn from mine. This is a great habit to form and the earlier you form it the better.

   1. Use an app like Acorns if you don’t want to set up complex accounts like that. There are many apps that will make minimum risk investments over time for you. You can set up recurring investments or do it manually on a set interval.

That is the side hustle of the week. Look up plasma donation in your area; I recommend BioLife. I have never had an issue with them and they are always fast.