Every extra dollar counts when you become a dad, so why not make a few clams on the side with the help of your little one?
Babies are expensive, obviously. Before they’re even out, your kid is hoovering up your once gloriously disposable income like a vacuum cleaner possessed by Charlie Sheen’s ghost. And that’s not just because of the unnecessary, over-marketed tat you’ll buy to prepare.
Childbirth in Australia may still be free in the public health system, but extras such as birthing classes, non-hospital scans or pathology and non-bulk-billing GPs can pile up fast.
Jump ship to the private system and you’ll be shelling out to have an obstetrician standing bedside while mum pops the sprog.
Once out, child-rearing will cost you $140 a week, minimum, even if you’re keeping things tight as a low-income earner.
On average, middle-class parents will shell out a thumping $800K to raise two kids to the age of 21. The point is that you need to get that kid making bank as soon as possible. Here are a few options.
1. Put them in commercials
I just did that with my kid, for example. See him here shilling the magnificent all-new Audi Q5 on Mother’s Day.
He spent a morning schmearing banana Paddle Pop across its rolling expanses of buttery, cash-scented Nappa leather, and jabbing his tiny chipolata fingers into its minimalist German switchgear. (Carsales’ Best SUV over $50,000 in 2017! Book your test drive today! Vorsprung durch good luck cleaning that.)
Child talent fees for a half-day shoot, plus signing away online and social usage fees for six months, run to maybe $650. Warning though: it’s a trickier payday than you might expect. For a couple of reasons.
First, who is minding your kid between takes? I’ll tell you: you, because you’ve taken the day off to do so. So you can minus your own day’s earnings from that windfall for starters. (You’ll do the same to go to castings, which aren’t paid.)
Plus you can expect an evening of hell when your hyped-up progeny loses his mind after a day of disrupted sleep and 17 banana Paddle Pops. Which he’ll have puked into your own car on the way home, only with no paid detailer hovering on hand to clean it up.
Secondly, everyone thinks their kid is the cutest baby. But unbeknownst to you, because you literally can’t see it, the apple of your eye might be more of a random turnip from the Harris Farm spare-parts lumpy vegetable bin.
You still love them, but it will be a shock if a proper talent agency such as Cute Kids or Starfish Kids, who’ll have children on their books from four months of age, reject yours.
And third, even if you do get over the line — and avoid some of the dodgier, high-fees-false-promises scammers — it’s a cutthroat market. Six jobs a year is a good return.
Nail it, though, and that sweet cash goes straight into junior’s future fund. Or, as I like to call it, Dan Murphy’s.
2. Instafame
Instagram’s own stated rules require “everyone to be at least 13 years old before they can create an account” and note that “in some jurisdictions, this age limit may be higher”.
This is why the accounts of, say, Pixie Curtis — the daughter of PR maven/possible lunatic Roxy Jacenko and convicted corporate criminal/obvious dirtbag Oliver Curtis, who has over 100K followers — carry disclaimers. (In that case, @pixiecurtis’s says it’s run by her mum.)
Sadly, the best way for a kid to generate a large following is to have famous parents — even if they’re famously rubbish (DJ Khaled’s kid, @asahdkhaled, born in October 2016, has 1.9m followers.) But you can parlay your kid’s adventures into actual dough, even as a pleb.
“With just 100,000 followers, an Instagram user could earn $5,000 for a post made in partnership with a brand,” says Forbes.
“But even if you have just a few thousand followers, you could still work with brands that need micro-influencers.” (Which is to say, Influencers who have a small but very devoted or niche following. Basically, you’ll need a schtick.)
Your main weapons will be a distinctive aesthetic, high-production values, and the ability to invest many hours per day posing and styling your child to craft original content. And a high tolerance for (your own) narcissism, and for fostering the same in your kid.
Think carefully about whether this is worthwhile. Forbes has a number of tips for growing and then leveraging your online ‘Insta brand’.
3. Sports
Children’s sport in America is now a US$15 billion industry (and Australia is following).
It’s spawned its own clique of sub-13-year-old Instagram shits such as 11-year-old New Jersey Instagrammer @joeybaseball12, AKA Joey Erace, a precocious l’il leaguer whose string of endorsements is already paying (some of) his family’s bills.
“The cost for parents is steep,” says TIME. “At the high end, families can spend more than 10% of their income on registration fees, travel, camps and equipment.” Erace’s dad has ploughed over US$30,000 into his son’s development, but baseball has a grand payday if he makes it. The MLB’s best-paid player, Mike Trout, banks US$33.35m a year.
Trout’s old man, Jeff, was a teacher/baseball coach. He encouraged his son’s talent without turning into a crazed-Eastern-European-tennis-parent, or ramming him with the Torana if he jogged too slowly like Cec Waters.
Local sports also reward parents for their investment in their kids’ talent. Andre Ponga, father to league’s brightest prospect, Kalyn, followed the unwitting basics of Jeff Trout’s plan (in essence: have them to play multiple sports, drive them to every tournament).
Last year, the entire Ponga clan relocated from North Queensland to Newcastle after Andre came home and “put down [a $3m] Knights contract in front of me”, recalled Kalyn. Kalyn was 19.
Score.
4. Dad blogging
Just to be clear: mum blogging is done. The market for quirky, relatable, charmingly flawed mums writing about the criminally underreported experience of new motherhood is juicy, but also so saturated it could be running a bath in Atlantis.
To paraphrase Hunter S Thompson, mom blogging is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good women die like dogs. There is also a negative side.
But what about … dad blogging?
Are you funnier than me? Almost certainly, but are you funnier than Ben Pobjie? More insightful than Andrew P Street? More honest than Gregor Stronach? Are you good with the grammars and also of speeling? Write for us! The pay isn’t great but you can maybe write-off your pram on your tax.
5. Organs
I mean, there’s money in it. But yeah, nah.