This couple paid off $114,000 of debt in less than 2 years — then saved up $431,000. Here are the side hustles they started and how much money they made from each one.

Jhanilka and Anthony Hartzog

In January 2017, Jhanilka and Anthony Hartzog were recently married and had relocated from Brooklyn to Dallas. They each had a good job, and their combined salaries added up to about $180,000 a year.

But they also had a problem: They were in debt for $114,000. The bulk of this was student debt, but it also included $30,000 for their new car and about $7,000 in credit card debt.

The Hartzogs wanted to travel and they didn't want this debt dragging them down for decades. "Jhanilka had a New Year's resolution in 2017 to travel more and save more," Anthony Hartzog recalls. "I was saying, it's going to be really, really hard to try to travel more and save more."

That's when the couple decided to get serious about paying off their debt quickly. After a meeting with a financial advisor, they set a goal to be debt-free by Jhanilka's 30th birthday in December, 2018, only 23 months away.

Not only did they meet that deadline, two years later they've built up $431,000 in savings.

How did they do it?

Anthony works full-time as director of client support at an IT firm. Jhanilka is a licensed mental health counselor who works full-time for a managed care company and also provides online therapy via the mental health app TalkSpace.

Even so, they were able to build on their existing income with an impressive array of side hustles that the couple says fit comfortably into their lifestyle and the ways they already spent their time.

Here's what they added:

• Working at the gym. Both Hartzogs love to work out and they already spent lots of time at their high-end gym. So they thought, why not get part-time jobs there? Anthony got a job on the maintenance staff and Jhanilka, worked at the reception desk, eventually becoming the front desk manager.
  
  Time commitment: 25-30 hours per week for Anthony, 20 hours per week for Jhanilka.
  
  Extra income: Approximately $1,000 a month, plus hundreds of dollars in monthly savings, since as employees, they were entitled to free memberships. 

• Dog-sitting. The Hartzogs have a dog, and even before the pandemic Jhanilka worked from home. So they signed up with a dog-sitting app because it was easy enough to have one or more additional dogs around, plus it helped develop their own dog's social skills. They set their price at $25 per day per dog, and sometimes had three or four extra dogs around on weekends.
  
  Time commitment: "There weren't really separate hours," Jhanilka says, though she notes that having several dogs on hand can be more stressful than just one.
  
  Extra income: Between $150 and $500 per month.

• Car sharing. The Hartzogs rented out their car through a peer-to-peer car-sharing service in which customers rent cars directly from car owners when the owners aren't using them.
  
  Time commitment: None (other than not having the car available). "They would come pick up the car, drive it around, and drop it back off," Anthony says.
  
  Extra income: About $700 per month. 

• Maid service. Anthony heard a podcast in which a college student talked about starting a cleaning service where he contracted out the cleaning duties so that he never had to do any housework himself. The Hartzogs thought that was a pretty good idea, so they reached out to the student for some advice, and then started their own cleaning service, Maids2Match, funding the startup with some of the money from their part-time jobs.
  
  They work with about 10 professional house cleaners who clean about 100 houses each month, working as independent contractors. The cleaners keep 60 percent of what customers pay.
  
  Though the couple started the business with a plan to accelerate their loan repayment, they wound up investing their profits back into the business instead, building up the business bank account while they paid off their debt from a combination of their side jobs and regular salaries.
  
  Time commitment: Variable
  
  Extra income: Fluctuates between $2,000 and $5,000 a month. Total income from when the business began is about $420,000.

With their debt behind them and their side business bringing in good money, the Hartzogs have changed things up a bit. These days, they're no longer working at the gym or renting out their car, and they only dog-sit for a select few of their favorite dogs.

Meantime, they've begun offering online courses and one-on-one consultations to help others do what they did — that side hustle has brought in about $40,000 so far this year, Jhanilka says.

The effort has been helped along by the couple's media appearance, including one on Good Morning America. More recently, the Hartzogs (who are renters themselves) bought a rental property, renovated it and rented it out. Now they want to buy additional rental properties. "All that extra money that we were throwing towards debt, it just all goes toward investing," Jhanilka says.

Here are the Hartzogs' advice for others who hope to pay down debt, save and invest:

Jhanilka says that budgeting their money using a budgeting app made all the difference when they set out to eliminate debt. "Prior to budgeting, we always paid our bills on time, but once we started budgeting, we basically told our money where we wanted it to go." Having a budget allowed the Hartzogs to see how much money they had left over each month after covering expenses. "That is what kick-started us putting money toward the debt," she says.

"There are only so many expenses you can cut," Anthony says. "Dave Ramsey — love him — talks about rice and beans, but I would rather you try to make as much money as possible picking up side hustles."

The key to a good side hustle is to find something that disrupts your life as little as possible, the Hartzogs say. "We had to figure out just how much we could take on without it becoming a burden on us, and also what was convenient for us to do, so we weren't taking jobs that were overly stressful, or that took us out of the house for days at a time," Anthony says. "It was more along the lines of what we could fit into our lifestyle."

This is why, he says, a great way for many people to pick up extra money is to pick up additional work at their existing jobs.

It's important to have the ability to shut down your side hustles whenever you want to, they add. "When we realize that we're doing too much, we'll make sure to be intentional and say, 'OK, this weekend we're not going to do anything at all," Jhanilka says.

Recently, Maids2Match had one of its best weeks ever, but that was a bit of a problem for the Hartzogs. "It was very time-consuming," Anthony says. "That's not the goal with the cleaning business. Our profit numbers are kind of slim because we want it to be as passive as possible, so if we're working on the business, that means it's a problem for us." With that in mind, they decided not to take on any new customers the following week.

You may be tempted to try a very tight budget so as to pay down your debt as fast as possible. That's the wrong approach, Jhanilka says. "Budget for everything," she says. "People only think you're budgeting for rent and your car, but we budget for restaurants and for movies because we knew we were still going to do those things. It's just not realistic not to put those in there at all."

And, she says, when you hit a milestone, such as paying off one credit card, "Make sure that you celebrate those wins while you're doing it. Because that's what keeps you motivated."

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