Some people send risky text messages or go sing karaoke after having a few drinks with friends. Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban took it a few steps further, spending six figures to buy a lifetime flight pass.

It was 1990, and Cuban — age 32 at the time — had just become a millionaire by selling his software startup MicroSolutions to CompuServe for $6 million. “My buddies and I went out and just got destroyed,” he told the “Club Shay Shay” podcast last week. “They’re like, ‘What do you think you’re going to do with all this money?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t care about cars or houses, but boy, you know, I fly a lot for work.’”

Cuban didn’t know if lifetime flight passes even existed, he said, but he grabbed a phone and dialed up American Airlines anyway.

“I called them up and just slurred my words, ‘Do you guys sell lifetime passes?’” said Cuban, now 66. “I got all that information, hungover as hell, and I signed up. Initially, it was $125,000 and then I upgraded it. I forget how much I paid, but it gave me almost unlimited miles for me and somebody else for the rest of my life.”

The AAirpass, which debuted in the early 1980s, gave members unlimited first-class travel with the carrier for the rest of their lives — for a price that depended on their age at the time of purchase. In Cuban’s case, his $125,000 in 1990 would be worth roughly $300,000 in today’s dollars when adjusted for inflation.

In 1994, American Airlines replaced the AAirpass with a similar membership, Airpass, which offered fixed-rate flights for frequent business travelers. The airline halted new memberships and renewals in November 2022, and stopped honoring the Airpass’ unlimited travel perks in March 2024, according to its website.

In the years after buying his AAirpass, Cuban shared his flight privileges freely: “I’d be out in LA or Dallas like, ‘You want a road trip? Let’s call American Airlines.’” He eventually transferred it to his dad — and later, after his dad died, to a friend, he added.

After all, in 1999, Cuban made another impulse purchase. Newly minted as a billionaire after selling his audio streaming platform Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock, he bought a $40 million Gulfstream G5 jet. The transaction still holds a Guinness World Record for most expensive e-commerce transaction ever.

″[Buying a plane] was my all-time goal because the asset I value the most is time, and that bought me time,” Cuban told Money in 2017. “Other than that, I’ve lived in the same house for 18 years and still have the same cars.”

“Other than the plane, which is a big splurge, I’m still a slob. Not all that much has changed,” he added.

Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank,” which features Mark Cuban as a panelist.

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When Kyle Stockford went a few months without selling a painting, he decided to pick up a side hustle.

It was 2021, and Stockford was a full-time abstract artist making colorful collages. Without sales, he needed another way to subsidize his living — so he turned to his brother, who’d been doing people’s yard work and helping assemble Ikea furniture through gig site Taskrabbit.

Stockford signed up to do similar gigs, making ”$16 to $18 an hour,” he says. But the real money was in helping people move: The 29-year-old now charges as much as $98 per hour on Taskrabbit to load up his Chevy Express van with other people’s belongings and transport them across the Boston area.

College move-in season is his busiest time of year: Stockford’s side hustle brought in $9,740 in August 2023 revenue alone, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. It brought in between $3,000 and $5,000 most other months, leading to a total of just over $36,600 in extra cash last year.

“I’ll be doing Taskrabbit for a while,” Stockford says. Here’s how he built his moving hustle.

Stockford bought his van in 2018, during his final year at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He wanted a vehicle that could help him transport paintings from Massachusetts to potential buyers.

After roughly a year on Taskrabbit, Stockford got “kind of antsy about the fact that I’m driving around this big van, and I’m not making any money with it,” he says. He bought straps, moving blankets, gloves and some bungee cords to prepare his vehicle, and himself, for a more intensive set of jobs.

“It wasn’t much,” he says. “Probably around $50 in supplies from [Harbor Freight Tools].”

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Stockford says he started out charging $65 per hour, and booked an early gig helping two Northeastern University students move from the school’s campus to their new apartment. The job took less than two hours, and he made about $130, he says.

“I was struggling, because it was just me,” says Stockford.

Focusing on smaller tasks — like one-bedrooms or Facebook Marketplace pickups — helped him book more jobs per day. He learned to put a lot of effort into customer service, too.

“I started to realize how stressful moving can be for people,” he says. He’d tell them, “Don’t worry, this will be over in about two hours.”

Stockford’s repertoire-building work in 2022 paid off last year. “2023 was insane,” he says. “I worked pretty much every day in August” and about halfway through September.

He felt himself improving at the gig, he adds. If he was working with college kids, for example, he’d know to ask for keys or codes to get in and out of dorm rooms. He’d bring door stoppers and a roof rack for mattresses, park as close as he could and, depending on the task, bring a second Tasker in to help.

“You know what to expect after a little while,” says Stockford. “It’s kind of the same group of furniture and the same couple trash bags of clothes.”

Stockford lives on the South Shore of Massachusetts, so traffic getting in and out of Boston can be tough — and the gigs themselves can be exhausting. “A lot of third floor walk-ups,” he says.

But despite the side hustle’s seasonality, it’s successful enough for Stockford to eschew full-time work. He balances 10 to 20 hours of moving per week with a part-time job as an art handler and preparator at the McMullen Museum of Art in Boston College.

The combination of gigs gives him time to keep working on his own art, too. “I can work three weeks out of the year, make a bunch of money and then just shut it off,” says Stockford.

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Back in 2017, I was raising two young kids, working as an HR specialist and trying to pay back over $50,000 in debt. 

I started a blog called “Money Talk with Tiff” to chronicle my journey to debt freedom and help others do the same. Two years later, I started the “Money Talk with Tiff” podcast and became a full-time entrepreneur, running my business from my home in North Carolina.

I didn’t think about leaving the U.S. to live somewhere else until very recently. My dad is from Jamaica, so I have always felt connected to the island. In 2021, when I was 31 and pregnant with my third child, I finally got the opportunity to visit.

I fell in love with everything about it: sights, smells, weather, people, food.

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I stayed for a month, visiting family I’d never met, meeting new friends who felt like family, and traveling from city to city. I didn’t want to leave.

I started to seriously consider moving to the island. I came to the conclusion that I had been my own boss for a while, and I could work from anywhere — why not this place that truly felt like home?

So, in May, I moved with my two youngest kids, 10 and one, to Negril, Jamaica. I’m so much happier now. Here’s why.

Whenever I sit out on my veranda, I say, “My office is open.” There is some incredible scenery right outside my door, so I work outside every day.

I live on the cliff side of Negril, so getting to the beach is about a 10-minute drive. It takes me only two minutes to walk to one of my favorite restaurants, Rick’s Cafe, where I can jump off the cliffs into the ocean. 

My house has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a fenced-in yard with many fruit trees. I have moringa, mangoes, naseberry, and ackee in my yard.

The area I live in is one of the most expensive on the island, because it is more popular with tourists. But my expenses come to about $1,900 a month, including rent, utilities, childcare, food, transportation, school fees and home maintenance.

When I lived in North Carolina, my same expenses were about $3,000 a month. 

My oldest will graduate soon, so it made sense for him to live with his dad and finish high school in the U.S. But my middle child is in elementary school and was not thriving academically in North Carolina. This was a chance for him to get a fresh start. 

In Jamaica, the kids get to be out in nature for much of the day instead of sitting in front of screens all the time.

When he is at school, my son and his classmates have two recesses, one for 35 minutes and another for 45. When he gets home, he stays outside until dark. I have noticed his concentration improving already.

Kids in Jamaica start school at three years old. My youngest is nearly two now, and I’m excited for both of them to experience this kind of educational environment.

The kids and I often have beach days and sometimes go to the river. We go fishing without rods, just plastic bottles, hooks and fishing line. I’ve even gone crab hunting at night. 

Some folks here like to do “bush cooking,” where they prepare food outside, and people will happily offer you a plate if you are around.

The food here is incredible. Everything from fish to fruit is fresh and not ultra-processed. Many vendors sell local favorites, items like patties, delicious savory pastries filled with spicy beef and jerk chicken. 

There is so much culture and community here. I love reggae music, and it isn’t unusual to hear people blasting it throughout the day. 

Even though I was friendly with my neighbors back home, we barely saw each other. Here, even though people are busy with work and chores, everyone regularly stops by to say hello and ask after your well-being.

On my lane, most of the residents are related to each other, and they have graciously welcomed us into their family. 

We don’t have hot water, which I surprisingly don’t miss. We have one air conditioner and we wash our clothes by hand and hang them out on the line. I love it. This is what life was like for my grandparents and their parents, and now we get to be a part of it.

Being here, there isn’t the hustle mentality and the constant stress and anxiety that is so prevalent in the U.S. The people here are more relaxed.

That can manifest itself in unexpected ways too. When I opened my bank account, it was an all-day event. It’s the same with many chores you want to accomplish. Getting your food at a restaurant takes a while, because everything is cooked from scratch.

The slower speed used to frustrate me, but I’ve realized everything is fine if you go with the flow. Rushing is no longer necessary. You can take your time and be in the moment.

This move has inspired me. I am in the process of launching another business to chronicle my journey here and help others see Jamaica and all of its natural beauty. I could not be happier to have made this leap. 

Tiffany Grant is a financial educator, writer, podcaster and coach. Before she was an entrepreneur, Tiffany was an HR professional. She is the founder and host of ″Money Talk with Tiff,” an Accredited Financial Counselor and holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

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Growing up in Nara, Japan, one food that was a constant in my home was tofu. It’s truly been a lifelong staple. 

When I was a baby, once I could eat solids, my mom commonly prepared two dishes for me — one was a mix of tofu, rice porridge, sweet potato, kabocha (squash), and nori (seaweed) paste, and the other was miso soup with rice porridge.

I carried on that culinary tradition with my two kids when they were small. I never bought any ultra-processed baby food; instead I opted for tofu. It saved me time, money and stress, and it was a way for us to connect with our roots while living in the U.S.

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When we arrived here in 1994, tofu was harder to come by. If I could only find shelf-stabilized packaged versions, I kept about two dozen of them in the house at any given time. Even today, I always have several packs of tofu in my refrigerator.

In Japan, tofu is enjoyed by folks of all ages. My in-laws are 95 and 88 years old. They still live in Nara, and have tofu, natto (fermented soybeans) and miso soup every day. They attribute their longevity and immunity, in part, to that daily routine.

Here is why tofu is my No. 1 kitchen must-have.

Tofu is traditionally made from soybeans and nigari, the liquid that remains after removing the salt from seawater. In the U.S., calcium sulfate is often used as the main coagulant. 

Either way, tofu contains all the essential amino acids that meat, poultry, eggs, fish and dairy do — but without cholesterol, since it is plant based.

It also is rich in calcium, iron, vitamins, fiber and isoflavones, a type of plant estrogen. 

Studies have shown that the consumption of tofu can help reduce the risk of heart disease, fight cancer and reduce the risk of bone loss. 

It takes 70.6 kilograms of greenhouse emissions to produce just one kilogram of beef, but only 3.2 kilograms of emissions to produce the same amount of tofu.

I typically purchase 14 ounces of organic tofu for $2 or $3, which is often much less than the same amount of poultry or beef would cost me at the grocery store. 

To me, it is simple math. In the course of the week, if you were to swap out one or two beef burgers for a tofu burgers, you would feel better, pay less for groceries and do something small to help the environment. 

Tofu has a very natural, subtle flavor, so it can be matched with just about any cuisine or dish. Since it’s soft, you can also prepare it without a knife and cutting board.

As a nutritionist and cooking instructor, I am always developing new recipes, and tofu makes it very easy to experiment.

I serve tofu in a variety of ways: pan-fried or in soups and salads, in nimono (slow cooked roots and veggies), dumplings, veggie pancakes, vegan curry, burgers, cabbage rolls, mochi and ice cream, to name a few. 

My go-to lunch is a tofu miso soup with seasonal roots and leafy vegetables, seaweed, ginger and goji berries. Generally, I make a large pot and return to it throughout the week, serving it with multigrain rice, natto and nukazuke (pickles). 

My other perfect, simple meal is hiyayakko. It is cold tofu — usually the silken or soft variety — topped with nori, sesame seeds, ginger, shiso, scallions, natto and a little bit of soy sauce. If you prefer it warm, you can always pop it into the microwave for one to two minutes and then add your toppings. 

I often call tofu my best friend for happy living. I hope you are inspired to incorporate it into your kitchen, too. 

Michiko Tomioka, MBA, RDN, is a certified nutritionist and longevity expert. Born and raised in Nara, Japan, her approach focuses on a plant-based diet. She has worked in nutritional roles at substance recovery centers, charter schools and food banks. Follow her on Instagram @michian_rd. 

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What if there were something you could do to help your child succeed in life, but you weren’t doing it yet? 

I’m talking about helping your child become mentally stronger, which is easy to overlook with everything else that demands your parental attention. But it’s more essential than ever, given that kids face so many triggers for self-doubt, fear, and anxiety, and so many barriers to resilience, focus, and positivity.

I’ve been studying mental strength for three decades. That work recently culminated in my book “The Mentally Strong Leader.” And I’ve applied my findings both to help adults and to help parents assist their kids. 

I’ve seen firsthand the impact that teaching mental strength can have: My own daughter, who learned to handle the challenging environments of middle and high school with resilience and confidence, was able to successfully transition into college and the “real world.”

You, too, can help your kids become confident, resilient, positive-minded problem-solvers. It starts by nurturing their mental strength in these six ways.

If you have kids, you’ve likely endured a barrage of “Why?” questions: “Why, Mommy?” “Why do we have to do that, Daddy?” “But why?” 

Take that inquisitive spirit and put it to good use. Teach kids to be good problem solvers by using the Five Whys analytical approach pioneered by Japanese inventor and industrialist Sakichi Toyoda, whose son established the automaker Toyota. 

Foster kids’ instinct to keep asking, “Why?” until they get to the root of a problem. Often, the root cause emerges around the fifth repetition of the question.

Say they aren’t getting their allowance this week, for example, which is a problem for them. Help them get analytical as follows, maybe even making a game out of it:

• Why aren’t you getting your allowance? Because you didn’t wash the dishes like you said you would.
• Why didn’t you wash the dishes? Because you played video games instead.
• Why were you playing video games when you knew you shouldn’t be? Because you didn’t put them away. They were in front of the TV, ready to go.
• Why didn’t you put them away when I told you to? Because you weren’t listening.
• Why weren’t you listening? Because that’s a bad habit you need to work on.

The point is, problem-solving starts by digging into why an issue occurred, so you can address the root cause. Help your child build this habit when they’re analyzing any problem, and you help them become mentally stronger. 

Kids seek their parents’ approval. It’s natural. But approval-seeking becomes unhealthy when it turns into a constant search for external validation. You can begin to migrate away from your authentic self. 

Help your children measure their performance against their own expectations rather than seeking a stamp of approval from other people.  

Instead of determining if they lived up to someone else’s standards, encourage them to consider: “Did I accomplish what I set out to do?” and “Am I becoming a better version of myself?” 

You probably already know that it’s smart to put limits on how much time your kids spend on social media — and how much time you spend on there, too. That doesn’t make it easy.

As you talk with your kids about the social media they do encounter, remind them not to compare their bloopers to everyone else’s highlight reels. Help them understand that influencers often post carefully tailored impressions that don’t reflect real life, and that they shouldn’t hold themselves to the impossible standards they come across. 

Encourage them to view social media as largely entertainment, rather than a measuring stick. This can help prevent or at least soften feelings of inadequacy that might otherwise arise. 

When kids focus too much on the outcome of their efforts, it can lead to perfectionism. Instead, teach them to fall in love with the process. 

Especially when they’re encountering setbacks in their efforts, ask them:

• “Are you learning along the way here?” 
• “Are you having fun?” 
• “Are you growing and improving?” 

That’s the real victory, and by asking these questions, you help them focus on the positives of the journey.  

By no means am I saying they shouldn’t strive for a great outcome. But becoming overzealous about results can eat away at kids’ mental strength because so many factors besides effort can influence the outcome.  

It’s important to help keep children from falling into a victim mentality, which can make them feel and act as if they’re powerless. Here’s one key question to ask them in such times: “Do you just want things to change, or do you want to change them?”

The former is passive and can induce prolonged periods of wallowing in the sense that “it’s not fair.” The latter is proactive and helps turn your kids into change-leaders. That can build up their mental strength. 

A great source of anxiety for kids can come from worrying about things they can’t change. 

You can conduct “Control Checks” with them. Ask them to write down all the things they’re worried about. Then ask them to circle only what they can control and discuss with them how they could do something about those items. 

Mental strength has a lot to do with putting your energy where it serves you best. This exercise works to narrow down a kid’s universe of worry and helps them put energy toward taking action that will improve their circumstance, which can further ease their worry. 

Scott Mautz is a popular speaker, trainer, and LinkedIn Learning instructor. He’s a former senior executive of Procter & Gamble, where he ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion-dollar businesses. He is the author of ”The Mentally Strong Leader: Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Thoughts, and Behaviors.” Follow him on LinkedIn.

Want to be a successful, confident communicator? Take CNBC’s online course Become an Effective Communicator: Master Public Speaking. We’ll teach you how to speak clearly and confidently, calm your nerves, what to say and not say, and body language techniques to make a great first impression. Get started today.