Getting out of the rat race is simple, but not necessarily easy.

To escape, all you need is monthly income — from non-job sources — that exceeds your monthly expenses.

For example, if you spend $3000 a month, you’ll need to bring in at least $3000 (after taxes) outside of your day job.

Simple, but not always easy.

In this post, I’ll break down:

the most common rat race “escape routes”
the pros and cons of each
how to choose the right path for you

Ready? Let’s do it!

The Rat Race, Defined

The term “rat race” means different things to different people, but let’s see if I can paint a picture.

You might feel like you’re stuck in the rat race if you’re:

commuting in traffic
to a job you don’t love
to barely get by

There’s a certain circular rhythm to your days, weeks, or even your years. You’re spinning your wheels but not getting anywhere. You perform tasks, go through the motions, and sometimes even get rewarded for your efforts … but you still feel trapped.

A friend put it this way: “We work jobs we don’t like, to buy stuff we don’t need, to impress people we don’t know.”

Is this what adulting is supposed to be like?

There’s got to be more to life, right?

The 3 Most Common Paths to Getting Out of the Rat Race

Remember our escape math from earlier:

Non-job income that exceeds your monthly expenses.

The 3 most common ways to generate that income are:

Traditional investments
Real estate
Entrepreneurship

These are in contrast to–and far more realistic than–other paths some people bank on, like:

An unexpected inheritance
A lonely Nigerian prince
Winning the lottery

Figure Out Your Spending

Living frugally — or at least spending with intention — is an important part of your rat race escape plan. The less you spend, the less income you’ll need to break free.

If you’ve never calculated how much you actually spend on a monthly basis, it’s worth taking a minute to figure it out.

Do you spend $3000 a month? Do you spend $10,000 a month?

How much does your lifestyle cost?

This is the income you need to generate — this is your Rat Race Freedom Number.

So how do real people achieve it?

1. Save Your Way Out with Traditional Investments

The most commonly-prescribed path to escape the rat race is through traditional investments, like:

Stocks
Bonds
Mutual funds / ETFs

How Traditional Investing Works to Escape the Rat Race

This is how “retirement” has worked for generations — amass a big enough nest egg during your working years and then slowly draw down on those savings after you stop working.

At that point, you’re literally getting paid to do nothing … but the problem is you probably don’t want to wait decades until you’ve saved enough!

The FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) movement has an alternative for you, and argues that retirement isn’t an age, but rather a number. According to the oft-cited Trinity study, once you accumulate 25x your annual expenses, you’re free.

Spend $40,000 a year? You could theoretically leave the rat race behind with $1 million in traditional investments, and live off dividends and share price appreciation for decades.

Spend $100,000 a year? You’d need $2.5 million.

Advantages of Traditional Investing

These so-called “paper assets” are accessible to just about everyone — you can even invest right from your phone with services like Robinhood. (They’ll even give you a free share of stock to get you started.)

Stocks, bonds, and mutual funds and ETFs are also highly liquid, meaning you can buy and sell them quickly.

And over the long run, they’ve historically performed very well. Projecting 7-9% annualized returns would be realistic.

Disadvantages of Traditional Investing

The big drawback is trying to get out of the rat race with traditional investing either takes a lot of time or a lot of money.

Despite enthusiasm from the FIRE community, the truth is unless you have a wide margin in your personal finances — the gap between what you earn and what you spend — there’s no real way to shortcut building up that nest egg.

Plus, should unexpected expenses pop up during retirement, your withdrawal rates and assumptions can go out the window.

Who is Traditional Investing Best For?

This path may be the best way to escape the rat race for high earners who live a relatively inexpensive lifestyle. 

If you (or you and your significant other) bring in $300k a year, but only spend $50k, this is a great option. Ignoring taxes for a second, you can see how it would only take 5 years of “profiting” $250k a year as a household to accumulate the $1.25 million you’d need to support your lifestyle in retirement.

If your work is tolerable, 5 years will fly by — and that assumes you’re starting at $0 savings today.

On the other hand, if you make $50k a year, and spend $49k, traditional investing is never going to get you out of the rat race. There’s simply not enough margin there.

Which brings us to option #2…

2. Beat the Rat Race with Real Estate

The next common rat race escape path is real estate, and for the sake of this post, I’ll focus on rental property investing.

(Real estate comes in many different flavors and strategies, many of which have been covered on Side Hustle Nation.)

How Real Estate Works to Escape the Rat Race

Real estate is appealing for its easy-to-understand business model:

Buy a house, rent it out, and pocket the difference between that rent and your monthly expenses.

Lather, rinse, and repeat until you’ve got enough monthly cash flow to quit your job.

For folks like Dustin Heiner, that was around 26 properties and $15k a month in reliable cash flow. He “retired” at 37 and supports his family off the income from this rental property empire.

Invest with that monthly cash flow in mind, and use it to slowly start chipping away at your own living expenses.

Advantages of Real Estate

Rental property investing can accelerate your climb to financial independence in several important ways.

First, you can take advantage of leverage — borrowing money. In contrast to traditional stock market investing described above, where $20,000 buys you $20,000 worth of stocks, that same $20,000 could be used as a down payment to buy $100,000 or more worth of real estate.

Then you can pay down that loan balance from the rental income you receive over the next 30 years.

The next big advantage of real estate is appreciation. As you know, houses tend to cost more today than they did a generation ago.

By owning those properties, you can capture this appreciation when you sell — or borrow against the equity in your houses to fund future acquisitions.

Third, being a landlord comes with several tax benefits, including the ability to write off your mortgage interest and even take depreciation on the buildings you own.

And finally, real estate can be a very passive income stream once you have your tenants and other relevant team members in place. There’s an upfront time investment, but no trading hours for dollars down the road.

Disadvantages of Real Estate

Home prices don’t fluctuate as wildly as the stock market, but investing in physical assets takes more legwork and also means your cash isn’t as liquid.

(You can’t exactly just press a button on your phone and sell a house when you need cash.)

And although there are some creative ways to buy houses for no money down, real estate is usually a “takes money to make money” option.

As a landlord, you’ll also face:

Vacancies – If the house sits empty, that erases any positive cash flow you were banking on.
Repairs and maintenance – Roofs, windows, toilets, water heaters … nothing lasts forever and it all costs money.
Unexpected expenses – Our friends had to re-do their foundation to the tune of $90,000!
Tenant issues – Why some humans think it’s acceptable behavior to trash other humans’ houses is beyond me, but it happens.

On top of that, your local real estate market might not be a great place to invest so you’ll be dealing with all this remotely or through a third-party property management service.

Who is Real Estate Investing Best For?

The people I see having the best success with real estate are those who take a long-term view and are committed to operating multiple properties.

Especially if you can buy multiple properties in one location, there are some economies of scale that make life easier than having only one house or having houses in different cities across the country.

As your empire grows, you’re better able to absorb a vacancy or unexpected expense for one or two of your properties in a given month.

You Might Like: House Hacking 101: Live Free and Turn Your Biggest Expense into a Profit Center

Alternative: With Fundrise, you can begin adding real estate to your portfolio with as little as $10. This appeals to me as a way to benefit from real estate in a way that’s diversified and totally hands-off.

Disclosure: I’m a Fundrise investor. If you join through my referral link, I earn a commission. Opinions are my own.

But just like traditional investing, real estate can and does work to escape the rat race — if you have the capital, patience, and fortitude to stay the course.

Still, there’s another rat race escape path you need to know about…

3. Escape the Rat Race with Entrepreneurship

The third way to get out of the rat race is to build your own business.

If you look at the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America, one thing should stand out: most built their wealth through entrepreneurship.

And even if you have no aspirations to build the next Amazon or Facebook (I certainly don’t!), building a business is a realistic way to break out of the 9-5 grind.

It’s how I was able to walk away from corporate America, years before starting Side Hustle Nation. Entrepreneurship has helped 100s (maybe even thousands now!) of friends, Side Hustle Nation readers, and Side Hustle Show listeners do the same!

How Entrepreneurship Works to Escape the Rat Race

We tend to overcomplicate entrepreneurship, but I’ll try and break it down here.

A business is simply a system that solves a problem in exchange for money. It’s a problem solving machine.

That means to come up with a business idea, you really need to come up with a problem. Think of:

what frustrates you
the headaches or challenges you’ve overcome
what other people complain about

On the other side of those problems, there might be a business idea.

The solution usually takes one of 3 forms:

A service that makes that problem go away. Dirty house? You can hire a cleaning service.
A product that makes that problem go away. Dirty house? You can buy cleaning products.
“Content” that makes that problem go away. Dirty house? You can watch YouTube videos about how to organize and optimize your space.

And when the money from your solution starts to exceed your living expenses, it’s au revoir rat race 🙂

I break down these 3 business models in detail, with lots of examples, in my book, The Side Hustle: How to Turn Your Spare Time into $1000 a Month or More. It’s free on Kindle!

You’ll also find tons of side hustle ideas throughout this site and in The Side Hustle Show podcast archives.

Advantages of Entrepreneurship

Building a business is unique in that your primary investment is “sweat equity.” These days, you can get an enterprise off the ground for a very low startup cost.

On top of that, starting a business is a way to work on something you care about. Bringing an idea into the world is exciting and rewarding in a way that collecting stock dividend payments just isn’t.

And in contrast to the stock market or real estate market, you have considerably more control over the success and failure of a business you own. (And the speed at which that can happen.)

Plus, if you intentionally build something with scale, you’ll find entrepreneurship to be time-leveraged. By that I mean your earning power — or effective hourly rate — improves as your business grows.

Disadvantages of Entrepreneurship

With job security in question and the shift toward a freelance workforce, it’s hard for me to see the downsides in learning an entrepreneurial skillset.

Still, the fact remains that 50% of small businesses fail in their first 5 years. For that reason, it’s important to start small, minimize your expenses, and grow at a pace you’re comfortable with.

Building a business can be labor intensive, and many entrepreneurs find themselves in a trap of working in the business rather than on it. They feel like they’ve built themselves a job … only one with a really demanding boss that’s even harder to walk away from.

Who is Entrepreneurship Best For?

I believe entrepreneurship is the most realistic rat race escape path for most people, but especially those who:

Don’t have the “golden handcuffs” of a great-paying job
Aren’t afraid of failure
Are a little impatient

Entrepreneurship appealed to me because I couldn’t fathom the reality of working a corporate job for the next 30 years. There had to be a better way!

And there was.

Why Do You Want to Escape the Rat Race?

What’s beyond the walls of the rat maze for you?

While “escape” can be a powerful motivator, I think it’s helpful to know what you’re escaping to. If you weren’t tied to your job for income, what would you do instead?

For Side Hustle Nation readers, motivations include:

A location-independent lifestyle — not being restricted to one part of the world
Early retirement
Less stress
Working from home
Leaving the big city for a slower pace of life

For me, my driving force was to gain freedom over how I spent my days … hence pictures like this:

When I worked a corporate job, it just rubbed me the wrong way that I had to ask someone else (my boss) if I could take vacation on certain days.

I also wanted to see the direct impact of my work on my bottom line — something I didn’t get at the day job. If I did great or did poorly, my paycheck remained the same.

Not super motivating.

With my side hustle, on the other hand, the harder I worked, the more I made.

For me, getting out of the rat race wasn’t about never working again. I just wanted more flexibility, control, and earning power from my work.

Alternative: Find a Job you Love

For many people, escaping the rat race could be as simple as getting out of a toxic commute and work environment.

If you found a job you loved, and maybe offered you some time and location flexibility, do you think you’d feel a little less like a rat?

Here are some top choices for legit work from home jobs.

1. FlexJobs

With over 50 career categories, FlexJobs has jobs ranging from entry-level to executive and freelance to full-time.

The leading work from home jobs site charges a nominal monthly fee (save 30% w/ promo code FLEXLIFE) to access their listings, but you’ll easily earn that back and then some with one job.

2. SolidGigs

One of my favorite platforms to help connect your skills to paying freelance clients and projects is SolidGigs. Every day, they curate the best freelance jobs in:

marketing
writing
design
development

Plus, they’ve got an awesome library of resources to help you learn how to best pitch and price your services.

SolidGigs is free to try.

3. Hired

Hired.com helps designers, engineers, data scientists, and managers by connecting them with prospective employers.

The site is free to join, and one thing that’s cool about Hired is they also help you get the best offer by letting companies compete for your services — instead of you getting into a bidding war with other workers.

The company caters to people looking for full-time, part-time, and freelance gigs.

Click here to learn more and create your free Hired profile.

Your Move, Rat Race Escape Artist

Which is the best path for you? Of course, it depends on your interests and starting points.

If you’d like to learn more about starting a side hustle, I think you’ll get a ton of value from my Start My Side Hustle Workbook.

It’s normally $49 but I thought I’d test offering it for just $19 for a limited time.

Serious About Making Extra Money?

Start Your Free $500 Challenge. My free 5-day email course shows you how to add $500 to your bottom line.
Join the free Side Hustle Nation Community. The free Facebook group is the best place to connect with other side hustlers and get your questions answered.
Download The Side Hustle Show. My free podcast shares how to make extra money with actionable weekly episodes.

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Photos courtesy of Depositphotos.

Growing an engaged audience is crucial but challenging when starting a podcast or online business.

Chris Hutchins started the All the Hacks podcast in May 2021. Today, he reaches over 250,000 downloads per month and has released over 120+ episodes optimizing life, money, and travel and built other content to help listeners upgrade their lives.

In this episode, we’ll take a deep dive into Chris’s approach to growing his audience quickly and how you can apply similar tactics in your own business or side hustle.

Tune into episode 576 of The Side Hustle Show to learn:

How Chris gained traction in the podcasting space
Clever marketing tactics to grow your audience
Ideas for turning listeners into paying customers
Key mindsets for podcasting success
Chris’s #1 tip for side hustlers this year

Download Your Free Bonus: The Podcast Starter Kit

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Why Chris Chose Podcasting to Grow His Audience

When starting All the Hacks, Chris chose podcasting as his main platform despite the challenges with search and discovery compared to other options.

In the past, Chris had tried blogging and being active on multiple social media platforms without seeing much traction or success. He put in the effort creating content, but it just wasn’t taking off.

However, over the years, Chris had built up a strong personal reputation and established credibility by frequently appearing as a guest on other leading finance and lifestyle podcasts.

Chris realized his sweet spot was audio storytelling centered around optimizing major areas of life like personal growth, money, finances, travel hacking, and more.

These were topics that friends, colleagues, and acquaintances often picked his brain about in real life over dinners or casual conversations.

In Chris’s own words, “I’ve tried for many years to experiment with different platforms and it totally, totally failed. I love deals. I love optimizing life, money, travel, and that’s been my brand amongst friends.”

People seemed to really value his advice and perspectives on living an optimized life. And with podcasting, he could share his insights with a much wider audience of people interested in those same things.

The key factor that made the difference was consistency. Chris made a firm commitment to publish one episode per week without missing any.

As he put it, “I said I am committing to release an episode every Wednesday, and I just committed to it, and I haven’t missed one since.”

Initially, he told himself he would try recording and releasing at least 8 episodes and see how it went. But by the time he got to Episode 3, Chris knew in his gut that podcasting was the right medium and format for him.

All the Hacks’ Broad Appeal

At first glance, the idea of a show helping you “optimize all aspects of your life” seems extremely broad. It is counter to the common advice of “niching down and focusing on a targeted audience.”

Not only that, but it’s a concept numerous other podcasters and influencers have likely attempted to build content around before. So on the surface, it may appear challenging to stand out.

Yet it worked remarkably well for All the Hacks.

Why is that?

According to Chris: “The idea was, the niche is that people who like to optimize their lives, which you could argue is a lot of people, but I think when you kind of break it down, some people are just really content not optimizing their lives.”

So while the topic is broad, Chris realized there is still a sizable audience segment who actively enjoys the process of optimizing and improving major parts of their life.

As an avid lifelong optimizer himself, Chris speaks authentically on a wide range of topics. He doesn’t pretend expertise where he has none. The advice comes from real experience testing principles in his own life.

And as Chris noted, “I think part of why it worked was that I was trying to not to go niche on a type of a personality, but not a type of topic.”

Applying the 80/20 rule, you gain more knowledge by diversifying instead of going ridiculously deep into one narrow niche. This variety allowed the show to touch on different areas of life optimization while engaging listeners.

So in summary, while ultra-targeted shows may thrive, Chris leveraged his genuine passion for optimization along with a broad but engaged listener base interested in upping their game in different aspects of life.

Hacks Chris Used to Rapidly Grow His Audience

In the early days of All the Hacks, Chris meticulously tested many different marketing tactics and approaches to build his audience. He tried a lot of things, tracked the data, and doubled down on what delivered results.

Here are some of the strategies that proved most effective for rapidly growing his listenership:

Tapping Into Existing Audiences

Once Chris had a few episodes recorded, he called in every favor and connection he had made, even if those people only had relatively small followings themselves. As he explained:

“I called in every favor. I told everyone I know, can you share this thing? I knew one day I would want to launch something that I asked for people to help with.”

Getting his podcast in front of these other engaged audiences generated significant momentum and a vital initial base of subscribers. It provided the spark to kickstart the flywheel effect.

Chris was also very aggressive about pursuing opportunities to guest on other related podcasts with built-in audiences aligned to his topics of optimizing life, finance, travel and more.

He estimates this guest appearance approach typically converts around 3-4% of the host’s audience into regular listeners of his show.

On the other hand, he found simple promotional swaps where he exchanged ads or mentions with other podcasters tended to only convert around 0.5-1% on average.

So being a guest rather than just doing a promo swap generated 5-10x more new listeners from each appearance. The key is finding podcasts with a relevant audience and bringing tons of value as a guest.

Have Multiple Episodes at Launch

When Chris finally did launch, he made 3 full episodes available immediately instead of just releasing the first episode alone.

Having multiple episodes out there initially allowed new listeners to get a much better sense of the show’s full range and variety of topics right off the bat.

If he had only launched with Episode 1 focusing on a single theme, some people may have gotten the wrong idea about the show’s scope.

Chris also stresses the critical importance of having a “trailer” or some kind of short, compelling preview video that quickly communicates the essence of your show.

As he notes: “You want to make sure it’s easy for people to find all this content. So I think that’s one way to build that excited, passionate, loyal listener base who is going to recommend your show to their friends and ask that.”

Test Paid Ads

Once the show was more established after a few months, Chris did a small budget of $100-200 advertising tests on niche podcast apps like Overcast and SparkLoop.

He found the strong results—both the clickthrough rate and, more importantly, the subscriber conversion rate—validated the wide appeal of his content.

As Chris explained, “What that told me is, compared to the average show, the title, the description, the cover art is probably about average. It got about the number of clicks they expected. Maybe on the high end of average. But the number of people that subscribed is 2x what they saw. Which made me feel like, wow, I have content people like.”

Micro-experiments like these provide concrete validation when you’re just starting out.

Try Grassroots Marketing

In the spirit of testing everything, Chris tried some creative guerrilla marketing tactics that ended up working surprisingly well.

For instance, he put a link and blurb about the All the Hacks podcast in his default email signature. Incredibly, this led to some new listeners who didn’t even realize it was an ad; they assumed Chris was just personally recommending the show!

The key takeaway is you have to get innovative about finding opportunities to spread the word everywhere you go. You never know what unconventional marketing tactic could drive a few listeners your way until you give it a shot.

Engage Your True Fans

Once Chris had a solid baseline audience, he started focusing more on engaging and retaining his most avid listeners to keep growing organically.

For example, he includes thorough show notes for each episode highlighting:

key resources
relevant links
time-stamped chapter markers.

This caters to fans who want to dig deeper into the content.

He also proactively asks loyal listeners to leave reviews and solicits feedback through surveys. This helps him keep improving the show and create more of the content they value most.

When Chris asks about other podcasts or blogs his audience follows, he can identify overlapping niches and potential partners or collaborators to work with. It reveals opportunities.

The takeaway here is once you have a core audience built up, you need to engage them, understand them, and optimize your content for those true fans. This helps sustain organic growth through word of mouth as they share the content they love.

Making the Leap to Full-Time

It took longer than it should have by Chris’s own admission, but he eventually transitioned All The Hacks into a full-time business.

Rather than focusing on the loss of his salary, he framed it as a 6-month experiment. Between saving up and already earning more from the podcast than his day job, it became feasible to take the leap.

Now Chris’s wife is leaving her job as well to work on All The Hacks. As Chris said, “It means we have no more stable income and entire creator income life. But we just felt like we had to do it, so it felt right.”

Monetization

For the first several months, like most creators, Chris focused entirely on building his audience and improving the content. But over time, he has steadily incorporated multiple streams of revenue.

Advertising

Chris estimates each listener is worth approximately $2-4 per year in ad revenue based on his calculations. So it only makes sense to buy listeners via ads if the cost is lower. Typically, a show needs at least 10k-20k downloads per episode for ads to become a viable revenue stream.

In his own words: “I typically think that you cross a threshold where the advertiser is spending $1,000 per episode to advertise, and it starts to become interesting. But to get to $1000 an episode at even a $20 CPM means you need almost 50,000 downloads.”

Affiliates

Promoting products, services, software tools, and credit card links his audience finds valuable earns commissions while providing a helpful service. These partnerships earn income more easily than ads early on in a show’s lifespan.

Membership

For $19/month or $99/year, the All the Hacks membership offers:

Exclusive deals and discounts on brands relevant to “life optimizers”
Monthly community calls
Private Q&As and access to Chris
Full archive of calls and show content

So far, over 300 passionate supporters have signed up. Chris sees this as similar to AARP but for millennials.

Digital Products

Sell tools and resources your audience needs—for Chris, this has included his credit card optimization spreadsheet. He is also building a comprehensive course on travel hacking.

Coaching

One-on-one consulting for people serious about starting a podcast or building their brand using his expertise.

Speaking

Paid talks at companies, conferences, or organizations about topics related to the show and Chris’s knowledge base.

Growth Hacks to Attract More Listeners

When it comes to attracting more podcast listeners over time, Chris relies on several go-to strategies:

Guesting on other shows, especially those catering to his target audience of optimizers and deal finders
Promo swaps with other podcasters to cross-promote and share audiences
Optimizing his show notes by adding chapters and links to provide value and build loyalty
Asking niche fans to leave reviews to help validate the show to prospective listeners
Monitoring the news and trends for timely episode topics to tap into search demand
Including a clear podcast recommendation in all emails and communications

What’s Next for All The Hacks?

Now that the podcast is established, Chris is looking to further grow his audience by adapting the content for more platforms:

Repackaging podcast content into newsletters instead of mere transcripts
Creating videos optimized specifically for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok
Turning audio content into visual social posts ideal for Twitter (now X), LinkedIn

He plans to hire freelancers to help adapt the content in ways native to each platform.

But again, Chris emphasized following your own curiosity and excitement above all else. That genuine interest will drive longevity and creativity more than chasing any specific opportunity.

Key Takeaways

Chris’s journey growing All the Hacks provides several digestible but powerful tips you can apply in your own business:

Leverage Existing Audiences
Focus on Consistency
Commit to One Platform
Validate with Testing
Engage True Fans
Diversify Monetization

Chris’ #1 Tip for Side Hustle Nation

“Follow your curiosity.”

Links and Resources from this Episode

Episode 478: 33 Life Hacks to Experiment With in 2022 – Mission: Optimize Everything, with Chris Hutchins
All the Hacks
Overcast
SparkLoop

Looking for More Side Hustle Help?

Start Your Free $500 Challenge. My free 5-day email course shows you how to add $500 to your bottom line.
Join the free Side Hustle Nation Community. The free Facebook group is the best place to connect with other side hustlers and get your questions answered.
Download The Side Hustle Show. My free podcast shares how to make extra money with actionable weekly episodes.