The Downsize Side Hustle - Second Edition

By Art Barry

Downsizing-in-place became the obvious side hustle choice when we looked at costs and the effort that would be required to move to a smaller home. Making a move just didn't make sense based on current economic uncertainties. This book provides a step-by-step narrative of how we turned extra space in our house into a private guest quarters that generates $1,200 a month. The second edition contains revenue and expense information for the first two years of operation. The research and source references are worth much more than the price of the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Art Barry
• Release date: Mar 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215100530

Art Barry

Art Barry is a successful entrepreneur and author who lives in North Texas with his wife and rescue dogs. His first e-book on Amazon, The Downsize Side Hustle, was first published in 2020 and has solid reviews. Barry's interview on the Landlord Diaries YouTube channel for the second edition received 1,000+ views in 2023. Dark Latitude, his debut novel, was published on Amazon in November 2023. He has written numerous articles for magazines including Technical Photography, Audio Visual Communications, Texas Computing, Computer Currents, and QST, the Amateur Radio Relay League magazine. He held marketing and managerial positions for several major U.S. corporations, including the Color Tile division of the Tandy Corporation and Electronic Data Systems Corporation. In 1992 he founded his own company to provide clock batteries for computers, peripherals, and medical equipment. The company he founded serves over 19,000 customers in 42 countries using direct marketing and the Internet.

Book preview

My First Side Hustle

A side hustle is a means of making money alongside one's main form of employment income.

— Definition by the Dictionary.com Slang Dictionary

It would probably be an excellent time to point out one of my favorite tropes, attributed to the wonderfully sardonic Oscar Wilde: No good deed goes unpunished. My wonderful wife arches her eyebrow when this subject comes up, especially when I utter it or another trope which sounds like it could have been spoken by one of my favorite curmudgeons, W. C. Fields: I do one good deed a year whether I need to or not. As it turns out, what I thought would be a good deed turned into a business that started out in our den on two folding tables. It was the early 1990s and desktop computing was starting to change the way we did business and the marketplace. Businesses everywhere, large and small, were buying computers, integrating them into their business, and training their employees to use them.

There was just one problem: Who was going to service all those devices? Further: what happens to those businesses that are located outside major metro areas and need assistance with some of the more mundane tasks that occur regularly with computers and their peripherals?

One of these mundane tasks includes replacement of the clock battery. Many purchasers had no idea that the computer they bought needed a working battery to hold the date, time, and setup information, so it would boot up properly when turned on. In a major metro area, this isn't necessarily a problem as long as the company has a maintenance budget and is willing to pay for a service call that probably exceeded $100.

It occurred to me that computer owners needed to know this information, so I wrote an article for a regional computer magazine that described the problem and informed the reader how to replace the battery without the need for a technician. I enjoyed the exercise and, after publication, went merrily on my