Expats living in Plovdiv have many advantages. It is possible for expats to earn some extra income as a result of being able to speak English, low living costs, and minimal competition on many different markets. Listed below are some ideas to help you get started, but some of them require more work and patience than others while some of them do not.
We're going to give you some ideas without going into too much detail to lay down the foundation in this article. Please feel free to comment if you need more information about some of them so we know we need to create a more detailed post in the near future. Here we go! These are four ways you can earn extra money as an expat in Plovdiv:
Teaching English (Private Lessons)
Making extra money this way is very popular not only in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, but all over the world where the native language is not English. There are schools in Bulgaria that offer English classes, but there is nothing like a private lesson from someone whose primary language is English. You can also arrange the teaching times yourself whenever it is convenient for you. It is possible to teach English to one student or multiple students depending on your schedule. Alternatively, if you don't want to teach at home, you can arrange the lessons through Zoom and other video tools. It is important to tell people about this service on your social media profiles, create posts about it or even create seperate social media accounts about your offerings, for instance on Instagram. To reach more people on social media, you must use the right local hashtags and share valuable content about your offerings on social media on a weekly basis. Because you are not looking to reach millions of users like commercial companies, finding 3-5 students should be relatively simple.
Buying and Selling Antiques on the Internet
Yes, you read that correctly. You may have noticed how many antique shops surround the Old Town of Plovdiv. We don't mean those fancy shops with pretty displays that look very inviting from the outside. Those untidy little shops that look like a dumping ground for old stuff are what we are talking about. Here is where the treasure lies. They have an array of different things including clothes, house tools, and army equipments that are extremely valuable to collectors. The best part is that the prices are very unproperly marked up (undervalued). The reason for this is both that you pay in Bulgarian Levs and that re-selling side hustle culture hasn't yet developed in this country as it has in Western Europe and the U.S.
Providing Guided Cycling Tours
At the beginning, you can start with as few as three bicycles (one for you and two for customers). During the long summer days, you can easily repeat this experience three times a day and make 250-300 leva a day. Don't have a bike? That's fine too. Plovdiv has a few places where you can rent bikes for a very low daily price. The business can even be started without owning any bikes.
Your Home as a Dining Room
This business is perfect for those who love to cook. You can start this delicious business immediately if you have a dining table that can accommodate at least four people. www.eatwith.com is a website that will help you get started. It is a platform for home chefs and others to meet and eat together. To begin with, you need to prepare a menu (starter, main, dessert). They then upload their best pictures to the website 'eatwith' along with a nice description. You can include as many food and drinks in your package as you like and wait for the orders to flow in. You may not have heard about it before, but trust us, it's a next-level dining experience, especially due to covid restrictions. More people are interested in these micro-private experiences than ever before. However, the reviews on the wbsite reveal the amount of money people are willing to pay for an experience of this kind. You can sharpen your cooking skills as well as meet a lot of new people from all over the world by doing this business.