While I’m a big believer in having hobbies for nothing more than the sheer joy and fulfilment it can bring to your life, attempting to monetise your hobby is not a bad way to start dipping your toes in entrepreneurship culture. The transition from ‘hey this is fun’ to ‘omg people want to pay me for this??’ is nothing short of amazing. I sincerely hope everyone will get to feel that.

(Note: Not everyone can or should be an entrepreneur, but everyone should have entrepreneurial mindset, ie problem-solving skills and all that, wouldn’t you agree?)

RoR started as a hobby, too

Personally,  I started writing personal finance blog articles as a hobby. I offered it as a service while I was looking for a new job, but it eventually expanded into this whole Ringgit Oh Ringgit shebang and its current 8 sources of income, so I never looked back. But of course, I also failed figured out a few ways that didn’t work along the process.

Obviously, I wasn’t the only Malaysian who have attempted to monetise my hobbies. And when I asked RoR readers about it, I was blown away by the variety of answers – your hobbies are hella cool, some of them I never even heard of!

With their permission, I compiled some of the answers – thanks so much to everyone who agreed to be featured in this article 🙂 Definitely opened my eyes on the many possibilities of side incomes, and I hope it’ll do the same for other readers too.

So. I want to sell more books. You want to earn extra money. Both of us can get what we want, I’m giving this affiliate system a shot. Help me sell any of the Money Stories from Malaysia book series and earn up to RM17 per successful order.

I mean, if some of you are already promoting it for free, why not make money from it, right? 🙂

(Oh in case you’re new here. I’m Suraya, the personal finance blogger behind ringgitohringgit.com, and I write about how I apply personal finance advice. I share exactly what I do to earn/save/invest money, not just the theory stuff. Sometimes it gets crazy meta, like this one over here.)

Follow these steps to register. 

Did you know you can buy a business in Malaysia? Some of you may already know this, but I didn’t up until my mid-20s, so here I am putting that fact out there.

If you’ve always wanted to test your entrepreneurial side, you can buy a business from any of the options listed below, instead of starting one from scratch. Kind of like the same idea as buying clothes off the rack rather than sewing it yourself. Might need alterations, but it’s ready-to-wear.

What type of business, you ask? Oh dudettes. So many types. Anything you can think of. We’re talking:

Let’s play a game. Anytime you see someone asking the understandably common question of ‘What should I invest in?’ online – in Facebook, Twitter, any social media really – try and see if you can find that one fella who reply back ‘you should invest in yourself first’.

Which is, you know, not wrong. But it *is* condescending and out of place. I said what I said.

(Btw – the answer to that question is in this article. Most people start their investment journey with one of these five types of investments)

But fine. Like I said, those fellas – and its almost always fellas – are not wrong (again, I said what I said). It *is* important to invest in yourself first, I agree.

How does ‘invest in yourself’ look like in practice though? In this article I’d like to share how I’ve been interpreting that statement. The steps are loosely chronological.

#1 – Get access to learning materials

Non-fiction books. Courses – online and offline. Any source of new knowledge, paid or free. I’d put travel in this category too.

You already know this – it’s too obvious and I’m not even going to expand this section beyond this.

Confession: It’s really… weird… that personal finance, as a topic, is getting more attention than ever. I mean, it’s good and all, it’s just strange to be right smack of it all, as a personal finance blogger.

And shit REALLY got real ever since the Malaysian government launched the National Strategy for Financial Literacy (2019-2023) on July 2019. I’ve personally gotten more outreach requests for interviews, speaking engagements and collaborations since then.

Related: 19 Financial Education Initiatives in Malaysia You Should Know

So, there’s no questioning that personal finance is a HOT topic. For today’s article, I’ve decided to brainstorm and compile how YOU – a personal finance enthusiast – can take advantage of this situation. Here are some ways to make money from this hot trend.