I’m a Charterholder, hold a financial planning designation, relatively young, and work 40 hours/week in a risk management role. I’m looking to put in another 10-15 hours/week to make a little extra on the side. I’m not qualified to teach, the pay for a tutor isn’t great, and while I’ve thought of starting my own wealth advisory service, I’m not too fond of the initial startup costs/time. Does anyone have any other ideas to make a little extra on the side? I’m passionate about investment analysis and would love to do some independent research as long as the pay was there.
Answering online surveys?
Take community classes in home improvement, and then become a night time emergency plumber. People will pay hundreds of dollars for someone to fix their exploding toilet at 2AM. (not my experience… I know people…)
You are probably qualified to taech a finance class at a community college or as an adjunct professor with your CFA charter.
^Yup
^^ Yeah, why aren’t you qualified to teach? You’re unlikely to be offered a tenured finance professorship at Wharton, but the charter is more than adequate to qualify you to teach basic finance at a CC or local college.
I’m not sure about that. In my state (Texas), you have to have 18 hours of graduate level courses in the subject you want to teach. I have 18+ graduate hours in both accounting and finance, so I’m (technically) qualified to teach accounting and finance. But since I only have 12 graduate hours of economics, I’m not qualified.
I don’t think the CFA Charter is enough of a qualification–at least not technically. However, I would agree that anybody who has the CFA Charter is, in real life, qualified to teach undergrad finance at the local community college.
So no one does anything to make money on the side? I was looking for something to do, esp since I lost my job. I rewatched The Men Who Built America last night, and now I can’t sit still. I mean, if that doesn’t motivate you, I don’t think anything will. I thought what Blackomen posted was good, I’ll have to read through that.
I’ve taught an undergraduate investments course with little more than CFA Level 1 material. I drew on other knowledge as well in my lectures, and had a few “challenging proplems” that stretched into L2 kinds of things, but there was nothing essential in the course that would seem out of place if it appeared the L1 exam.
In terms of knowledge, CFA is enough to teach community college type courses, I think. However, the CFA is not accredited as a university-level provider, and so it isn’t recognized by universities as equivalent to masters’ level work, which most are legally required to demand of their professors (you might still be able to do it as a ‘lecturer,’ though).
Not to hijack the thread, but I think a lot about teaching, basically because it seems cool to talk about finance for a few hours. However I’m a little worried about the “challenging problems”.
I think about following what I believe is the decent teaching standard - overprepare and be humble to admit when I don’t know something, then tell the students that I’ll look it up and get back to then. Does that work? Should I expect trouble/agressive behavior from some students even though I’m a nice guy? How do you deal with that?
I think that’s not really off-topic since that’s an option the OP may decide to follow
Controlling the classroom is important. If students think they can push you around, they will. And lots of ways that students try to game the system for grades. It’s understandable, but your role is to push back against it. So you have to have tight control, especially in the beginning. As the course moves on, you might relax a bit, but you have to be clear about what your standards are and what is expected of students.
There are a wide variety of students. Most of the time, there will be one or two students who are kind of agressive. There will be some who are a bit of a show-off (that’s not usually bad, but it can be distracting). There are some who have to be there for some reason other than they want to take the course (maybe it’s a required course) and are bored. Most students I’ve encountered are pretty pleasant and nice, but the one or two unpleasant ones can really make it a bad experience for everyone involved if you let them.
Saying you don’t know is often ok, provided it’s something that you’re not reasonably expected to know. Usually that would happen when some student asked a detail about some specific thing. And there, yeah, I’d often say I don’t know. If it seemed relevant or I had a guess, I would often take a guess and explain the rationale for the guess, and that would do the trick. For many types of courses, you don’t need to know everything, you just need to know how to think well. And if you really are kind of expected to know something but can’t fully recall it, it’s ok to say “I’ll look that up and back to you on that.”
Teaching CFA students was actually quite nice, because they all know why they are there and they are pretty much all motivated to pass the exam, so there is less silliness. Many are older than college students and so are a bit more mature and organized. What’s tough about teaching CFA materials is that it’s almost always a race against the clock… trying to get through so much material in 3.5 hours. It’s always a trade-off between clarity, completeness, and time. Sometimes you go over, sometimes you have to skip material, sometimes you have to give an explanation that you know isn’t the full story or isn’t as clear as you could give if you had time. But with CFA, you’re not in control of the curriculum, you’re not in control of how much time you’re alloted to teach, so you just have to do your best with what’s given.
Another thing that’s good about teaching CFA stuff is that you’re not caught up in administrative stuff like attendance and homework management (taken care of by the course provider), and you don’t have to give exams. And it pays better than adjuncting (though not as well as a tenured job).
Teaching is surprising hard, particularly in the beginning, when you have to go back and remember what it was like not to know the things you know. Creating a logical flow of ideas. Figuring out ways to demonstrate the idea after you introduce them, and then figuring out ways to test that. Grading is a PITA (the worst part of teaching IMHO).
Thanks, bchad. That was an awesome post!
Why don’t you trade the futures markets overnight? Or FX?
Do you have any skills like photography or musical instruments?
To switch things up a bit and give a nonfinance related idea, my brother (no degree, works in retail store) buys broken/damaged items on craigslist, ebay or from someone he knows, fixes them and then resells them. Examples include things like dirtbikes, quads, motors, etc. He’s really good with his hands and has made a decent source of extra income over the years. If you are good with your hands and are able to see potential (“find value”), it might not be a bad idea.
If you’re crafty you can sell things on Etsy…
If you are reasonably math inclined and have self discipline I would seriously consider playing poker. I played poker as my sole source of income for several years, both online and live. If you live near a decent sized city you will have no problem finding games that are quite easy to beat and large enough to be worth your while. If anyone is curious, I’d be happy go into any details about expectations, strategies, recommended sources for learning etc.
If you’re intelligent enough to tackle any of the CFA exams and motivated enough to self-educate, you should have no problem becoming a winning player in many live games in a quarter or two.
Btw…online poker was banned a couple years ago but will surely come back soon once govt figures out how to regulate it. When that happens, the games will be incredibly soft and extremely lucrative for anyone in a position to take advantage of it.
I’m down for some education. Every since I went to the casino with my buddies land lord and he walked out $1600 richer I’ve been wanting to learn the science behind it, but have no idea where to begin. Especially if I can do it online, which I believe is legal in Canada…