Flight attendant opens up about having side hustles and lists her favorite ones: 'Be very careful'

It does not matter how handsome your salary is, the rise in living costs throughout the world and the rate of inflation are making livelihood difficult for everyone. If you believe that a flight attendant's job is supposed to be glamorous, pay them well and allow them to travel the world and live the picture-perfect life, then you might be mistaken. At least that is what a flight attendant Destanie—who goes by @destanieaaa on TikTok—is trying to debunk. Despite having a stable job, she still has to look for lucrative side hustles to increase her savings.

She starts the video by clarifying that when someone starts as a flight attendant, they don't make enough to live comfortably unless they are working 24/7. She wasn't able to fly around the globe 120 hours per month because that would have affected her sinus issues. Destanie admits that she is blessed to have turned her TikTok creation into a side hustle because of the videos she keeps making during her layovers. She claims to make around $50 to $100 a day just from posting clips on the application procedures for becoming a flight attendant.

But content creation is not everybody's cup of tea, plus there have been cases of flight attendants and cabin crews getting fired over making social media videos and oversharing or name-dropping specific airlines and their management. So Destanie has been careful not to explicitly state the name of the airlines she works for because she can't risk her job. "Be very, very careful," she adds after warning people to handle their social media side hustle carefully because "people might be watching you."

"I don't think I am an inappropriate representative of my airline at all, but I am just very honest," she continues. The second side hustle she mentions is about stacking up one's educational degrees. She reveals how numerous flight attendants attend online classes while they are employed. Destanie also suggests people with typing skills hop on Fiverr and other freelancing community websites where they can bag various gigs, such as one of the side hustles she took that required her to rate the dating profiles of men on an online dating app and she got $10 for her feedbacks.

The next thing she mentions is how flight attendants dabble in real estate and make a good income. One of Destanie's co-workers was able to retire in her 50s because she "worked with a financial advisor who made it possible for her to quit her job with the airlines and start investing her money wisely." She shared, "I flew with one flight attendant during basketball season and she is also a bartender at the basketball stadium," adding how the colleague could do her job seasonally by taking time off from her flight attendant job.

While she was unemployed, she even picked up last-minute gigs with catering services. "Best of luck out there. Yeah, honestly, you have to be super creative to make something work," Destanie tells people while concluding her video. A lot of others agreed on how rough it is out there to make a decent livelihood with a single job and they left their personal experiences as well. @yourunionsister wrote, "My first year, I had 3 jobs. Flight attendant, waitressing, and a Mom and Pop Grocery Store. I should post about the different money strategies I had when I first started." @vikisrama added, "I wanted to move to Spain from Ireland with my boyfriend but was worried about wages, so I applied for Ryanair. I am earning 800€ more than the minimum wage here. All depends on where and what airline."