Company cutting hours by 20%, ideas to make up lost income?

[BrieAndChilli]

Company cutting everyones hours by 20% as a temporary measure. Whilst I am keeping one eye on an escape plan for several reasons I would like to hang on there if possible.

looking for ways to make up the drop in income - I al very busy outside of work volunteering so that eats up a lot of my time (if only I got paid for it!)

small town so not a large amount of casual work around here. Would prefer something-home based but realise that I dont have capital to set up anything and also lots of things are scams!

only been told by work today so am in a bit of a flap.

The only things I would suggest are selling old stuff on vinted / eBay, etc., and perhaps take up a job with little hours that work around your current role?

Supermarket staff, cleaning, barista, exam invigilator, and so on. any job like this really tends to have very flexible hours and small contracts.

Shit position to be in, my old job used to fuck us around like this which is why most of us left. Hope you work it out OP, good luck.

What do you do for work? Could you offer a similar service privately to potential clients? This is something I do around my contracted job and I make good money.

Can you drive? If so Amazon or Evri deliveries.

Assuming you've checked that the income drop won't mean you're entitled to universal credit or anything?

The other thing to consider is any ways to lower costs temporarily - mortgage holiday if applicable?

Being brutal about it you may have to look at changing your volunteering commitments

You’re in a flap at the minute, so firstly I would suggest sitting with it for a while to let the dust settle.

There not a lot of quick and easy well paid opportunities that you can pick up and put down. So many best focusing your energy on looking for something new.

unless you have a hobby/skill set that you want grow into something or you have specialist knowledge you could freelance with. Maybe your volunteering role has some avenues?

I’ve been in the same position for a few months. I Vinted and eBay’d a ton of stuff as I had time to list and post. And took on a virtual PA job for a few hours a week. The latter only works out though as I wfh most of the time and just slot the hours in among my regular work (and do longer hours overall) as I couldn’t just let it pile up for the Friday I have off. I am already a PA so no new skills involved.

I signed up for surveys which are £60 an hour but I never get chosen. Tried matched betting in the past but wasn’t confident enough in the logistics and hated all the signing up for betting sites.

What is your job/work area etc? Is there a temp agency to join?

Not answering the question, but have you looked at how much net pay you need to compensate. Depending on how much you earn/current tax threshold you might find that the shortfall is less than you expect.

It’s not temporary. They are going bust and trying to minimise the redundancy obligation. Wise up.

You could get work as an AI Trainer - the positions are work from home, usually they look for a 10+ hour a week commitment but it varies. They are not jobs you can rely on for your main income and should be more for additional income as projects can end suddenly, you can get fired with no notice for something like not logging enough hours, taking too long on tasks or they want people from a different time zone etc…

Mercor is a good one - you do tend to have to apply for lots of positions over several months but when you get one and you are in the door you get instant offers for other ones coming up. Outlier is another one, less good pay and seem to fire people on a whim a lot. They seem like a much less ethically sound company but they do always pay and they seem to take on thousands of people for one of their main projects which can give you something to put on your cv and more experience for when you get a better one!

There are boards on reddit about the various companies with lots of helpful tips on how to get hired. They pretty much work across lots of areas and will look for obvious skills in things like STEM and literature but will also have projects that look for skills in data entry, project management, plumbing, radiology etc… some of the niche areas also get paid much higher rates. Data Annotation and Alignerr are two other ones I’ve seen mentioned as being good - though I think DA are very hard to get a post with.