We don’t all get to choose the job we work, and we certainly don’t get to choose our salary.

This means that when the weekend comes, more people than you might imagine find both their souls and their wallets wanting. These days, however, it’s easier than ever to make ends meet by finding a secondary means of income that fits in with your lifestyle and provides a little spiritual nourishment too.

If you can’t bear to give up your hobby to make time for this side hustle, you can incorporate it right in to your master plan. If you like to spend your Sunday afternoon cooking, for example, it’s a great idea to take it to the next level and share some edible love by becoming a freelance chef. It may not be something you even realized goes on, but in today’s networked “gig economy” there are plenty of folks out there looking to hire a chef to prepare food in their homes for parties and special occasions. A website called HireAChef is the best place to start.

If you make handcrafted items, it can be very fulfilling to start selling them online or at local outdoor markets. Rather than thinking of it as selling out, you can consider it a way to share you gift and spread the joy. Depending what it is you make, you can add a personal touch or retain a memory by taking a Polaroid of each thing you sell and keeping it in a gallery in your workroom or garage. Making each transaction special is a great way to prevent your passion from becoming an industry.

Not everybody is handy with their, well, hands. If you’re more of a cerebral type with expertise to spare, you can take your particular area of professional wisdom off-road by connecting with the people that need it online. Teaching is an incredibly rewarding profession when the student truly cares about learning, but not everyone wants to go into it full-time teaching. If you have a few hours a week to spare, you can instead connect with students online for one-on-one tutoring via Skype. In this case, Wyzant is the place to start.

If you’d rather reach out to more than one student at a time, it’s possible to establish your own course on Udemy. They have lots of different ways for you to present your program, and the website is intuitive and has plenty of help on hand to get you through the process.

For something totally different, particularly if you commute to work and find yourself getting a bit alienated from your local community, there are lots of ways to meet people in your area and help them out for a bit of cash while getting some exercise or learning new things. Dog walking has been around a long time, but the internet makes it easier than ever for owners and walkers to find each other. Spending time with dogs can be hugely calming, as well as a lot of fun, and it gets you out into the park or forest to stretch your legs and breathe some fresh air!

A more intensive way to reconnect with your hometown is to become a local tour guide. Plenty of people arrive for a holiday or work trip to a new town and would rather get the gossip and insight from a local “real person” than a corporate tourism professional. ToursByLocals is the best way to find them. Spending a few days figuring out your spiel by visiting the places that you’ve overlooked or taken for granted for years can be a great feat of mindfulness, in which you learn to truly value the unique properties of the place you live.

Other ways to reconnect with your community while making a buck include promoting yourself as a babysitter or getting a bit of spending money in return for helping people to move house.

Another great aspect of the networked world is that it can help to prevent waste and overproduction, as we see in initiatives such as car-sharing apps and the like. It’s possible to make money with this too by sharing some of the stuff you’ve accumulated with others. A common way of doing so is by AirBnB, where you rent out a spare room or property by the night, saving your place from going unused, and giving the guest a good price and a personal touch. From preparing the room to welcoming the guests and ensuring they have what they need, it’s a great way to practice generosity, meet new people, and open up your house to the world.

So before you spend another weekend slumped on the sofa, out of energy and out of money, have a work through this new infographic on how you can best find a new source of income and a new lease of life.

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Author: G. John Cole
Image: Quid Corner, Unsplash/Taylor Grote
Editor: Travis May
Copy Editor: Yoli Ramazzina
Social Editor: Waylon Lewis