Making extra money is hard to do. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t use the word “extra” to describe it. Extras are things over and above the norm. For people who are working a normal job, extra can be hard to achieve. If you think about it, just by going to work, you’re already working extra. The reason your boss has employees is because they can work harder than they’re paid for. Let’s say you work an eight hour day. The productivity you generate during the first five hours of the day might all be eaten up by your paycheck. But those extra three hours, that’s what the boss gets. Anything you produce over and above the amount you’re paid to keep you fed and happy belongs to the company.

So when you get home at the end of a busy day, you’ve already worked to pay yourself, and to pay your boss. How can you find the time and energy to make more money on top of that? The answer is, slowly and carefully. Extra money is often earned through methods called side hustles. Side hustles are business ideas, tiny little cottage industries that you can pursue and your spare time, while earning money that you would not otherwise have.

Another example of a way to make extra money, whether on or off the clock, are the passive income strategies. These are almost never truly passive, as they take work to get going or a lot of extra resources, but they are an amazing thing to have once you have them. These can be anything from having a rental property that you earn extra money with, to royalties from a self-help you wrote months ago and now sell on Amazon.

So we’ve got two major categories, side hustles and passive income. A side hustle might take payday loans or other financing strategy to get off the ground. It’s important, when financing a business idea, to think about how much money your business idea is likely to earn you, compared to how much it will cost you to originate and operate. If you aren’t making a lot more money after the thing gets started, even after paying back your loan, your business idea probably isn’t very good. But if you have a lot of profit after your other obligations, you can probably bet that this will remain a reliable side hustle for some time.

Then there are the passive income strategies. If you have the resources in place to start making rental income, are in a position to receive royalties or other regular payments, or can receive regular dividends from one investment or other, you will be able to have earnings that you never really think about or work for. This is an awesome place to be.

Most people will have to start with the side hustle, then build to the passive income. Sometimes these strategy categories blur together. In any case, you’ll have to try one or more in order to make extra money. This can help you “buy yourself out” of your regular career, or build any other dream you can dream up.