Cooking up extra cash for retirement fun

You do not have to be a skilled chef to earn extra retirement money with food, nor do you have to work long hours in a restaurant or food truck daily. A love of popular types of food and a willingness to take a little risk helped these retirees earn extra cash to supplement their retirement income.

Call them the Waffle King and Queen

Waffle Makers.  Ed and Mary, with no background whatsoever in the food or restaurant industry, knew what food they loved and thought that other people would love it, too. So they bought a commercial waffle maker and began making and selling waffles at their local farmers’ market on Saturday mornings. The toppings were a few syrups, powdered sugar, whipped cream and the fruit-of-the-season. It is both fun and a solid money maker for them.

They live in an area where the farmers’ market operates only during summer months, so this is definitely part time work. A couple of years later they traveled to the sunbelt in winter and continued their waffle business in a local farmers’ market. They managed to get permission to operate their booth for a few weeks, even though the market was one of the year ’round ones.

If you want to go into any type of food business, be sure to check local health department regulations as well as business licenses needed.  Also check with your local farmers’ market if you plan to sell your food there. Some have waiting lists and expect you to be at the market every week, rather than selling on an off-and-on irregular basis. 

The Pie Lady Knows her Business

The Pie Lady.  Peggy, an office manager for many years, had a great reputation among her friends for her homemade pies. She even won some awards at the county fair for her pies with olive oil in the crust. After doing some calculations about how much money she would need when she retired, she realized she needed more. So–you know where this is going, but there is an unexpected decision–before she retired she came up with a name for her new pie-making business, got business cards and checked out local health department requirements. 

She started selling pies to friends right away for birthdays and other parties and told them about her plans to expand once she retired. As soon as she left her full time job, she approached local businesses about pies for parties. “Cake?” she often says. “Who wants cake when you could eat a delicious coconut cream pie? And you can put candles on it, too!”

Her latest effort is teaching pie-making to pre-teen and teenage girls in her own kitchen. So often their mothers have office jobs and do not have time to teach their daughters, so she offers after-school and Saturday classes.

Friends and family have encouraged her to start selling pies on the internet but she has said “No, it would take too much of my time. I’d have to set up a factory and work 12 hours a day.” She earns enough locally and wants to continue to have free time to do other things with her life.

Garlic Goes South with the Snowbirds

A retired couple, snowbirds, with a love of garlic spend most of the year at their Minneapolis home where she has a good size garden, planted with, among other things, lots of garlic. When Fall comes, this couple harvests the garlic. As chilly winter begins to close in they prepare the garlic into food they can sell to their neighbors in a snowbird village when they travel to warm Arizona after Christmas for the cold months. Garlic soup is a favorite. Their garlic sauce can be added to pasta, mashed potatoes and many other foods. These garlic goodies sell quickly and once their supply is gone, that is the end of sales for the year. This extra money lets them attend special events like the spring training baseball season in Arizona.

Selling recipes on etsy

There are now “food shops’ on etsy where people are selling their personal family recipes for $2.50 each plus cookbooks for $8 to $15. The art work and photography is excellent and they are almost a more important element than the recipes themselves. I don’t know anyone who has tried this so there is no real personal story to share on this topic. It is, however, another interesting idea for seniors searching for ways to make extra spending money.