A recent Freelancers Union post titled 87% of Freelancers Have Multiple Sources of Income covers the gowing trend of freelancers piecing together multiple sources of income - and even multiple careers - to meet their financial, work and lifestyle goals.
The data comes from the Freelancers Union study How to Live the Freelance Life, a research project we partnered with the Freelancers Union on.
As the article's title states, 87% of the surveyed freelancers reported having more than one source of income. The chart below shows the number sources of income reported by these respondents.
We've known for some time from our interviews that side gigs and multiple income streams are becoming more common.
But its been very hard to quantify this information via surveys. The problem is many people don't think of their side gigs as jobs - even if their side gig income is financially important to them. Because of this, survey questions asking about 2nd jobs tend to under report side gig activity.
After multiple survey failures and a lot of testing, we've started to figure out how to ask follow-up survey questions that result in respondents revealing information on their side gigs. This data is an example.
There's still a lot of research that needs to be done on this topic. We're continuing our focus on this area and will have more data and information on the growing economic role of side gigs in the fall.
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