One of the topics we will explore on PLM is the physician side hustle. Physician side hustles have been around since residents have been trying to scrape by to pay their bills. Side hustles for the general population have become more popular in mainstream media as a way to build freedom. Let’s dive into an uber brief side hustle history and then talk about physicians and side hustles.
Side Hustles – A Uber Brief History
Side hustles use to be popular among a small group of people. (Usually, it was entrepreneurs who were running multiple businesses.) It was a way to find complementary income that supported other business endeavors. It is true that people will work more than one job (or sometimes more), but it was another job, from another employer. But they were not necessarily considered a “side hustle”. It was a second job.
The side hustle started to become popular in mainstream personal finance with the concept of Multiple Streams of Income. The idea of multiple streams of income is simple: don’t rely on only one way to earn money. If you lost your job, then you have a way to pay your bills.
This goes against the concept of the idea of one job/one paycheck concept. The FIRE (Financially Independent – Retire Early) movement was kicked off by the book, Your Money or Your Life. The concept of multiple streams of income was added to the FIRE movement as a way to boost income as a way to achieve FIRE status earlier.
5 Things to Know about Physician Side Hustles
You have probably started hearing about physicians’ side hustles through the internet or even through the people you know at work. Consider this your primer on physician side hustles. Let’s start with defining a physician sid hustle so that we are not under any misconceptions.
1. What are physician side hustles?
Let’s start with defining the physician side hustle. Most people (including physicians) have a “day job” which is their primary source of income. Side hustles, side gigs, or freelancing are jobs that people do in addition to their “day” job.
In medicine, these jobs were historically called moonlighting and they were a rite of passage for resident physicians. It truly is amazing to hear from the physicians a generation or two before me how they added moonlighting shifts to a 120-hour workweek when they were in residency. This is way before the time of physician burn out and it was “just what physicians would do” I was once told.
Today, attending physicians (and some medical school students) are also getting into side hustles. As a side note, I firmly believe that a medical school students’ job is to learn medicine. Medical school is a full-time job that you are paying to do.
2. Physician Side Hustles are work.
Make no doubt about it, side hustles are work. In case you missed it in the above paragraph, these side jobs are in addition to your day job. Whether your day job working as a medical school student, resident, or attending physician, adding another job to your day job can put a strain on an already busy schedule.
- You will have to find the time to find, develop, and grow your side hustle while maintaining your primary job. When you hear about an “easy” physician side hustle, don’t fool yourself. A. Sometimes the people talking about the “easy” side hustle is not actually doing it themselves. They hear about all the cool things of the side hustle but are not told how hard it was to get it started.
- Another reason why it is “easy” is because the person has already figured out how to incorporate the work and the time required to do the side hustle into their lives. Once the physician has built the habit of having the side hustle into their lives, then it becomes “easy”. You will feel the work of the side hustle early on in the process because it learning the skills of the side hustle will be new for you. The side hustle may become “easy”, once you work the side hustle into your schedule.
- Compared to your training and your workload, the side hustle may bring a reprieve from the strenuous work you do in your day job and therefore, by comparison, is “easy”.
3. Physician side hustles today consist of three categories.
- Side hustles that use medical degrees or medical training to perform. Physician side hustles used to only consist of moonlighting – using physician skills to earn money on the side. (This was more popular with residents when there was not an 80 hour work week and salaries were lower.) Examples include working in an emergency room, doing admission H&Ps, or
- Side hustles that have nothing to do with medicine. This category has jobs that anyone with minimal qualifications can do. Examples include arts/crafts sold on ETSY, selling t-shirts, running a microbrewery, etc.
- Side hustles that combine the two. This category has physician coaching, blogging, podcasting, writing books centered on medicine-related topics, to name a few. It truly is the best of both worlds such that you can use your medical knowledge to enhance a side hustle.
4. Side Hustles “hit” differently for physicians.
It can be more difficult for physicians to start a side hustle because of:
- Time. You will read how people start up a side hustle while on their one-hour lunch break, after work, or on the weekends. Surprise! How many physicians have a one-hour lunch break where they can actually be building a business and not catching up on charting? How many weekends are taken up with call duties or studying for boards? Physicians have a time crunch that can be a real challenge for
- Financial anchoring. A financial anchor is an expectation of what something should cost. Attending physicians quickly expand their paycheck (and usually their lifestyle) with the larger income of an attending physician. There will be some side hustles that do not look attractive to attending physicians, simply because they don’t pay enough for the amount of time they put in.
- Fear of Failure. Some physicians do not want to venture out into a side hustle because of fear of failure. Physicians do not want to spend the time without a guarantee of monetary success. The road to medicine is well demarcated: earns these grades, do well on these rotations, go to this residency and you will be a “real” doctor. There is no such thing as a side hustle. Side hustles can go sideways and not be successful.
5. Why are physicians seeking out side hustles?
So why are physicians even venture out into a side hustle?
- Medicine is changing from a cottage industry (physicians starting their own practices) to a corporate industry (physicians becoming employees). They want to scratch that entrepreneurial itch and run their own business – something they can not do in medicine.
- Burn out is an “encouraging” force for physicians to seek outside hustles as a way to gain control over their lives.
- Physicians are looking for multiple streams of income to supplement their physician income. After the COVID-19 pandemic, where some physicians lost significant income, physicians are looking for a way to diversify their finances.