Photo by Vitaly Taranov on Unsplash
There’s something special about making money from selling a piece of your body.
It’s an odd moment. It can feel dystopian, but freeing in a morbid way. The curtain of capitalism gets pulled away and you see its shriveled hands working the levers while it screams “Look away!”
At the start of 2024, I was fresh in the working world and trying to find any way possible to generate extra money.
For whatever reason, three side hustles that became available to me this year involved bodily fluids (mostly blood components).
Not one to pass up an opportunity for a few bucks, I leaned into the body fluid theme and kept them going.
I will use a scoring system based on each side hustle's potential for money, the time needed to profit, and the effort needed for each.
Plasma Donation
Money: $
Time: $$
Effort: $
I wrote about my qualms with plasma donation here.
I started donating plasma while I waited for the local white blood cell donation company to call me back. Thankfully, the first month of plasma donation is the best month as that's when they pay out their big promotion prices.
Plasma donation is a shady business as the payout is location-dependent, the more people willing to donate in an area, the less each person makes. Each location is full of propaganda saying “Donate today to save a life!” when the company pulling out your plasma is generating millions of dollars and paying you $25.
They take out a rather large amount of fluid from your body so you will feel tired for at least the rest of the day (and they don’t even give you a snack on your way out!).
I stopped donating as soon as I cashed in on the promotional first-month prices and never went back.
If I really need the money in the future, I’d be hard-pressed to return to this.
Between the low pay and the needle wounds that build up, there are better ways to make a few bucks. Not to mention the potential for adverse effects that can occur anytime you get blood drawn and returned to you.
White Blood Cell (WBC) Donating
Money: $$$
Time: $$
Effort: $
I feel a lot better about donating white blood cells.
The compensation is substantially higher, around $100/hour, and after a solid meal, you should feel fine for the rest of the day (and as a big plus, they give you all the snacks you want during and after donating!)
The facilities for WBC donating are substantially nicer than the plasma donation centers, the staff are nicer, and they have snacks and an iPad for you to watch shows while donating.
I only donated twice at one facility before I had an allergic reaction to something in the donation process. The head nurse dismissed me from donating for my own safety. As annoying as that is for my wallet, I appreciate the preference for safety.
Most white blood cell donation centers also offer two other paid “donations”: a bone marrow harvesting procedure and a superpowered white blood cell donation.
The bone marrow procedure pays about $100 more than a WBC appointment and is only an hour-long appointment (versus 3-4 hours for white blood cell donation).
The superpowered white blood cell donation requires taking a medication that tells your bone marrow to pump out more white blood cells than usual. Then you go into the donation center on back-to-back days to donate white blood cells.
I don’t want to have my bone marrow harvested nor do I want to take a drug to push out extra white blood cells.
With that said, the WBC donation checks are very sweet and I would jump back into a donation pool if I find a different company to sign on with (Fingers crossed I don't have another allergic reaction!)
Sperm
Money: $
Time: $
Effort: $
Every guy sees those “make money by selling your sperm!” ads and dreams about the great life he can fund by jerking off into a sanitary cup a few times a week.
The reality is very different.
Sperm banks are highly selective on who they accept as donors, and for good reason! Imagine spending a thousand dollars to buy sperm for your picture-perfect family, just to find out that the sperm bank paid some random guy to fill their freezers full of potential children.
Not a great business model.
I attempted to join several sperm banks and was rejected by two before I realized why I was being rejected. They ask about your family's medical and psychological history to weed out any potential for certain conditions. I guess something in my family history is a red flag for sperm donors!
Not one to be easily deterred, I kept my eyes open for another way to profit off my swimmers (it was the year of the body fluid side hustles you know). When I saw an advertisement for a research company that buys sperm to test at-home fertility kits, my answer had arrived!
I quickly jumped through the hoops to enter their candidate pool and started delivering samples to their corporate deaddrop.
They pay $50 in Amazon gift cards per sample,which is great in a world where Amazon sells everything.
After starting and stopping a few times, I ultimately stopped this side hustle.
The drop location is about an hour away from me via public transit (in the opposite direction of my regular job), and most of the drop-off times available were between 8-9 am. So even though I’d get $50 for little work, with the dollar and time cost of transit included, it came out to less than minimum wage.
This was a big help to me when I was starting my new job and money was tight. It allowed me to buy things for fun when my paychecks went entirely to surviving. For that, I’m grateful, but now that I’m not counting every penny hoping to pay rent, I want to move into side hustles that don’t require jerking off to start my day.
Looking Forward
Since this was the year of body-fluid side hustles, I will 100% be avoiding those in 2025.
My goal is to move towards work-from-home, passive, or creative hustles. I’d like to start a YouTube channel, continue to grow as a writer, and delve more into the stock market.
My ultimate goal is to live off my passive income. I’m far from that goal today, but when I consider a new potential side hustle, I decide if it has the potential to become passive (given time and effort), or if it is keeping me in the time-money exchange.
What are your side hustle goals for 2025? What did you try for 2024?
Thanks for reading,
Emery