I feel your pain. I am in my mid-50's and in 2019 I quit my job, only to have Covid disrupt things before I was ready to return to work.

At my age I do experience some ageism in the employment field so I have put together several gigs and flexible jobs.

I Teach online business classes through a vocational college part-time. I get paid an hourly wage.

I Teach English online through a platform (Gig Economy). I get an hourly contract amount.

I drive a delivery vehicle in the e-commerce division of a major logistics company on a very flexible schedule, (This is a major international company). I am an hourly wage employee.

And I do a retail arbitrage online business.

You would think that all of these diverse activities would result in a reasonably stable income. In March 2024, and the past couple of months I have been struggling.

I had one session of my teaching at the vocational college cancelled as there were no students registered. This is a very high paying job and I lost 4 weeks of pay.

During the same time I had about 40% of my shifts at the delivery company cancelled due to lack of freight.

The Teaching English gig which does not pay well, also went soft, and in any event, the amount I can potentially earn has no way to make up for the loss of the other two no matter how many hours I put in.

And I also had the worst sales month in my resale business. I have been averaging $2500/month and that month I only has $600 total gross sales.

A perfect storm.

I really don't know how many activities I would actually need for income stability, but apparently it is more than 4, and more than one person can practically manage. I am actually thinking about going back to a conventional job.