Starting in 2010, Tess Waresmith spent three years working on a cruise ship, first as a high-diver and acrobat, and then as a shopping guide for vacationers.

For someone who had graduated from college a year earlier, it was a huge opportunity, Waresmith says. Not only was this a paying gig in an economy otherwise ravaged by recession, but food and living expenses on the ship were covered.

“Over a couple year period, I thought to myself, ‘This is my chance to save as much as possible,’” Waresmith says.

After a couple years of dutifully socking away cash, a friend aboard the ship suggested that she could be doing more with her funds than let them sit in the bank.

“He was just like, ‘Tess, you can use the money you’re hoarding to buy things that make you more money,’” she says. “I knew that investing was a thing, but I’d never thought about it from that frame.”

Waresmith, now 36, took that advice and ran with it. She currently has more than $1 million in stocks, real estate and other investments. In 2021, she founded financial education firm Wealth with Tess, with the aim of helping others follow her path while avoiding some of the pitfalls.

In those early years, Waresmith remembers one pitfall in particular.

“With stock market investing, I was really afraid to do it wrong, so I hired a financial advisor, and they made a lot of really bad decisions on my behalf,” she says. “I was paying over 2% in fees. They sold me an annuity better suited for people in their 50s. I was 26.”

Here’s how she says you can avoid falling into a similar trap.

Waresmith did what a lot of experts might have suggested: hire a professional. But since she wasn’t too familiar with finance, Waresmith didn’t know that the advisor she chose was running a suboptimal strategy on her behalf.

“It’s tough to identify red flags if you don’t have basic knowledge of investing. And when I say basic knowledge, I mean reading one or two books or taking one course,” she says. “You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in investing or be an analyst, but I didn’t really see red flags, because I wouldn’t have even been able to recognize them back then.”

It took her a while to realize that her portfolio was lagging the market — both because her advisor had chosen underperforming mutual funds and because high fees were eating into her returns.

Rather than charging a flat rate, her advisor charged a fee equivalent to 1% of the value of her portfolio, plus a 0.25% to use the advisor’s online investing platform. Some of the actively mutual funds her advisor chose came with expense ratios north of 0.75%.

The strategy, Waresmith eventually realized, was meant to make things more complicated than necessarily. “These were actively managed mutual funds and there were dozens of them,” she says. “It was way over-engineered.”

Then there was the annuity, an often expensive financial instrument meant to provide income for retirees in exchange for fronting a lump sum of money. Waresmith put $20,000 in — money she hasn’t been able to recoup.

“When I turn 60, I’ll get a couple of bucks a month, or something from that,” she says. “It was a big mistake. No one should have sold me that.”

Once she realize she was being charged for an overly complex, underperforming plan, Waresmith cut ties with her advisor and endeavored to keep things simple.

Instead of paying an expensive advisor to manage expensive funds, she opened her own account and invested in low-cost index funds.

The advantages of investing this way are well documented. Index funds aim to replicate the performance of a market index, rather than trying to outperform it. While some active managers manage to beat the market, the vast majority don’t. Over the 10 years that ended in June 2024, about 29% of active funds survived and outpaced their average indexed peer, according to Morningstar.

Funds that track popular indexes, such as the S&P 500, give investors exposure to a broad array of stocks and come with very low costs.

“Index funds are a great way to get started and to understand the basics of the stock market and to get your money invested in a really diversified, low-fee way,” Waresmith says.

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As a kid, Jack Cowin shoveled snow, delivered newspapers and sold Christmas cards for cash. By the time he reached his 20s, it was burgers instead of cards. Fast forward to today: The 82-year-old is a billionaire, thanks to his fast food empire.

Cowin is the founder and chairman of Competitive Foods Australia, the company that operates Burger King as “Hungry Jack’s” in Australia. He is also the largest shareholder of Domino’s Pizza in Australia, and backs a plant-based meat substitute company called v2food.

Before founding Hungry Jack’s, Cowin opened a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Australia in 1969 — his first of many. Then in 2013, he sold off his KFC franchise of 55 stores in a deal worth about $71 million, according to a representative at Competitive Foods Australia.

Today, his business is worth over $3 billion and brings in over $300 million a year, Cowin told CNBC Make It.

Growing up in Canada, Cowin realized early on that he wanted freedom in life. His father was an employee at the Ford Motor Company and was required to travel frequently for work.

“He had a phone call one day, you’re going to Brazil, or you’re going to Mexico, or things like this … When you work for a big corporation, the corporation decides where you’re going to be, [and] what you’re going to do,” Cowin said.

“And as a kid, I wanted to have the freedom to do what I wanted to do. I think I saw that relatively early, because [I saw that] dad’s on the treadmill of here, there and everywhere,” he said. He didn’t want to be at the “whims and beckon call of a corporation.”

So as a child, Cowin spent his time outside of school mowing lawns and delivering newspapers. “I never had to ask for money as a kid,” he said. “I was a sales guy from very early, like 8 or 10 years old.”

By the time college rolled around, Cowin was going from farm to farm selling “trees, shrubs and nursing stock,” he said. He was so successful at it that he was making $8,000 a year while his university professors were making only $5,000 a year, he said.

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Western Ontario in 1964, and went on to get a job selling life insurance he said he was very good at.

“I had a reputation of being someone that could sell,” he said.

By the late 1960s, Cowin had begun to settle down in Canada with his wife and his first child when he one day received a phone call from a couple of high school friends.

His friends had landed a job with the American Kentucky Fried Chicken company and were sent to Australia to do some market research about whether they should expand into the country.

“Since my father had been there [for work], and I was the only guy … that knew where Australia was on a map … they phoned me up and said: ‘You should be down here. You should come and see this.’ So without a moment’s notice, I’m on a plane and I fly to Australia,” Cowin said.

Cowin landed in Australia in February 1969, and spent three weeks there helping his friends conduct research — ultimately finding that there was indeed a market for fast food in Australia.

“At that stage of the game, the restaurant business in Australia was fish and chip shops, Chinese restaurants and fancy white tablecloth restaurants,” he said. Meanwhile, McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC and other fast food restaurants were all rising in popularity in North America.

“So at the end of the three weeks, I pay $1,000 as a deposit on a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise [and] if the American company is going to open a store, then I was going to have a 10 store franchise,” he said.

Six months later, he received a phone call saying that the American KFC company agreed to expand into Australia and Cowin had the opportunity to own his first franchise location. But he didn’t have the funds, so he started raising money.

Imagine this “kid comes into your office and says he wants to borrow $10,000, which is probably about $100,000 today or more … he’s got no experience in the business, no interest on your money … how long before you throw him out of your office for wasting your time?”

“The biggest break I’ve had in my life was … I got on my bike and I got 30 Canadians to lend me $10,000 each, so got $300,000,” he said. “Otherwise I’d still be shoveling snow in Canada. I hadn’t had the finances back then.”

By December 1969, Cowin moved his family to Perth, Australia, where he opened his first KFC franchise. “It was like drilling oil and hitting oil on your first wildcat well, because it was a booming success,” he said.

“Then, you open two more, you get into the hamburger business, you get into the pizza business, you get into the food manufacturing business, and today, that business is a $3 billion business and makes $300 million a year.”

Today, Cowin owns 98% of his company while the other 2% is held by some of his original investors and shareholders, he said. “That original $10,000 is $40 million at book value [today]. So everybody’s got their money back, and those that stayed in have done increasingly well,” he said.

When asked what his secret to sales is, he said, “I think the secret is, whatever you do, do it well … The people that lent me the money really backed me as the investment. I was the investment.”

″And an expression [I have is] when you can’t tell the difference between work and play, you’re in the right place … I’ve never really worked a day in my life because I’ve enjoyed it.”

Correction: This story was updated to make it clear that Jack Cowin opened a KFC store in Australia in 1969.

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When Lisa Su became CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) a decade ago, it hardly resembled a multibillion-dollar company.

AMD stock was languishing around $3 per share. The company had cut about 25% of its staff, according to Time. But under Su’s leadership, the chipmaker has flourished: Today, AMD has a market cap of $205.95 billion and its stock trades at roughly $127 per share.

Su was named Time’s CEO of the Year for 2024 on Tuesday, and the 55-year-old’s net worth has soared alongside AMD’s success — up to $1.3 billion, Forbes estimated in April. For comparison, Su was paid a base salary of $1 million and a performance-based bonus of $1.2 million in 2014 when she took over as CEO, the Seattle Times reported in 2020.

Born in Taiwan, Su immigrated to the U.S. with her parents at age 3 so her father, a mathematician, could attend graduate school in New York. Growing up, “my father used to quiz me with math tables at the dining room table,” she told Forbes last year. “That’s how I first got into math.” 

Su wasn’t initially interested in following her father’s footsteps into a STEM career. As a teenager, she dreamed of becoming a concert pianist, she said: “I wasn’t good enough to do that, so I became an engineer.”

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She earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and spent her early career working in a variety of roles at Texas Instruments and IBM in the 1990s — both huge tech companies, during that era.

“I was really lucky early in my career,” Su told Time. “Every two years, I did a different thing.”

In 2012, Su was hired at AMD as a senior vice president and general manager of the company’s global business units, according to her LinkedIn profile. Two years later, she ascended to the CEO role, becoming the first woman to lead AMD since the company’s founding in 1969.

“I felt like I was in training for the opportunity to do something meaningful in the semiconductor industry,” she said. “And AMD was my shot.”

Su is one of few Fortune 500 CEOs with a PhD. Her engineering background helped her spearhead some of the technological innovations — including a new faster CPU chip for computers — that drove AMD’s recent success.

Friends and colleagues describe her as a “shrewd strategist,” and she sometimes holds meetings on weekends and expects employees to work past midnight, Time reported. Her high expectations can make it challenging for people to survive at AMD long-term, tech industry analyst and former AMD executive Patrick Moorhead told the magazine.

That might be by design: “I don’t believe leaders are born. I believe leaders are trained,” said Su.

Upon becoming CEO, Su promoted a three-part plan to help AMD compete with rivals Intel and Nvidia, Time reported: sell only high-quality products, deepen customer trust and simplify the firm’s operations. The long-term plan took time to pay dividends, but in 2022, AMD surpassed Intel in both market value and annual revenue.

Nvidia, on the other hand, isn’t just the world’s largest chipmaker — it recently overtook Apple as the world’s most valuable publicly traded company. But Su measures success in decades, not quarters, she said.

“When you invest in a new area, it is a five- to 10-year arc to really build out all of the various pieces,” said Su. “The thing about our business is, everything takes time.”

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The first time Eddy Rich dressed up as Santa Claus, he was just doing a neighborly favor.  

It was 1995. His neighbor breathlessly ran down a hill, around a cul-de-sac and to his front door in Tucker, Georgia, to tell him that the Santa she’d hired for a party suddenly canceled, and she had an empty suit to fill, the now-68-year-old recalls.

Putting on the costume and bleaching his long beard made him “feel like a superhero,” he says. Thus began his three-decade side hustle as Santa Claus, beginning at local parties and migrating to personalized video website Cameo — an online marketplace where people can buy personalized video greetings — in 2018.

Last year, he and his son Chris Rich — a 32-year-old property manager who helped establish his dad on the platform, and manages his presence there — made roughly $52,000 from Cameo, including $14,700 during the week of Christmas, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

They’re poised to perform similarly this year: They’ve made more than $30,000 as of Friday evening, with Christmas week still to come. The father-son duo typically divides the money in a 60-40 split, Chris Rich says.

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″[Eddy] is a master of his craft … He just really, really cares about making good videos,” says Cameo CEO Steven Galanis. “He’s not just doing well [compared to other] Santas. He’s performing as well as anyone on the platform.”

When he started as a party Santa, Eddy Rich charged about $125 per hour for in-person events. He could attend, at most, five parties per day, spending hours sitting in Atlanta traffic, Chris Rich says.

Now, during peak holiday season, Eddy Rich films up to 20 videos per hour, up to 10 hours per day, he says. Chris Rich works an additional five hours per day sorting through requests, writing scripts and trimming the videos. The workdays are long, but at $26.25 per video — the amount the Riches take home, after Cameo keeps 25% of each transaction — they could make up to $525 per hour.

The average Santa earns around $60 per hour, according to job search platform ZipRecruiter.

When Eddy Rich first got started, he bought a $550 Santa suit and paid $80 for a custom belt, with a four-inch brass buckle cast by a local jeweler, he says. He still uses that belt, and buys his suit pieces for $40 each at costume discount stores, keeping about five red jackets and two pairs of pants in rotation at a time.

He films in front of his living room fireplace, decorated with nutcrackers and a garland. He uses a ring light, a stand and an iPhone 13 Pro Max to film, says Chris Rich. “He’s the colonel, I’m the Elvis,” Eddy Rich says with a hearty laugh.

Performing from home helps Eddy Rich spend less time physically on his feet, no small consideration for party Santas. He can take breaks more easily, too. One year, he took a couple of days off when he got laryngitis, and was able to quickly log back on and spread Christmas cheer when his voice returned, Chris Rich says.

These days, Eddy Rich is retired from his full-time career as a supply store manager. Extra cash in retirement is nice, but he largely spends his Santa money on others, he says.

“I’ve always been frugal, but this has made loosen up a little more,” says Eddy Rich. “I always leave big tips when I go out to eat, because [wait staff] are working their butts off during December. I try to spread it around and take care of people.”

“If we want to go do something, or we want to buy somebody a gift, we can do it and we don’t have to think twice about it,” adds Chris Rich.

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For nearly seven years, as the founder, CEO and editor of SideHusl, I’ve devoted my time to researching and reviewing platforms that aim to help people make some extra money. A common question I’m asked is, “How can I turn what I already own into a side hustle?”

If you find that you are house rich but cash poor, for example, there are actually a number of ways that you can use your home to make some passive income — and you don’t need a roommate to do it. 

Having sifted through over 500 online platforms, I’ve found that several allow you to monetize the space you live in by renting out pieces of it for a specific purpose, like storage. 

Best of all, these housing hustles are low-maintenance side gigs that don’t require a ton of time or effort on your part. Here is my best advice if you want to turn your home into a potentially lucrative side hustle. 

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Some sites, including Neighbor and Stache, allow people with empty space to rent it out for storage. This can be part of an attic or basement, an empty bay in your garage, a room, a closet — even the space under your bed.

All you need to do is measure the dimensions of your empty space, snap a few photos and come up with a fair price for renting it. Most peer-to-peer storage rental sites will provide guidance on average rates in your neighborhood. The price you charge is ultimately up to you.

You can set restrictions. Most storage companies, including these platforms, bar weapons or anything hazardous, as well as any items of great worth such as artwork, cash, securities and jewelry, for example. And you can limit how often customers can access their goods and require that they call ahead.

A site called Sniffspot connects people with fenced-off yards with pet owners who want a quiet place to play.

Homeowners set their own rates, which typically range between $10 and $25 per hour, per animal. They determine whether to offer amenities, such as tennis balls and benches for pet-owners to sit down.

All you have to do is post a profile, set your rates, and leave the gate unlocked. The site offers $1 million in liability protection for hosts, as well as limited damage coverage.

Got a swimming pool? It, too, can be rented by the hour through a site called Swimply.

You simply need to publish a profile, set rates, snap photos and tell potential visitors what they get access to besides the pool and deck. For instance, is there a restroom or changing area they can use? Does the pool area have a barbecue that’s available for guests?

Although these additional amenities are not a requirement for listing your pool, you’re likely to get more bookings with that type of extra amenity. 

Notably, Swimply also automatically provides liability and some damage coverage to protect hosts.

Several sites — including Giggster, Avvay and Peerspace — that specialize in finding unique venues for filming, photo shoots and events encourage you to list your house for rent by the hour. A house that might rent for $100 a night on Airbnb can rent for $100 an hour here.

Renters are expected to leave the property in the same condition as they found it, so there generally isn’t a need to add a cleaning fee. However, you are allowed to add additional fees (like for a site representative or a cleaning fee), if you want to.

You get to decide what kinds of events you’re willing to host, whether renters get access to the entire house or just parts of it, and the maximum number of people allowed. 

You also set your own rates and determine terms, like whether the renter needs to buy event insurance to host a party at your place, which I would highly recommend.

You can also set minimum rental times of, say, four hours. That way you’ll know that whenever you get a booking, you’ll earn enough to make it worth your while.

Kathy Kristof is founder of SideHusl.com, the web’s most comprehensive directory of side hustle platforms.

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