Usually, summer is the time of year when we relax and enjoy the warmer months. But for some people, that time of year is when they bulk up on their work, padding their wallets so they don’t have to do as much the rest of the year. Sometimes it’s a matter of choice and sometimes it’s a necessity, but here are three jobs where the focus is summer-heavy.
Treeplanting
While it may seem easy to giggle at this choice as a job belonging to nature lovers, treeplanting is an incredibly hard occupation. And it’s also one where you can’t really train or prepare for it, which is why it has such a high turnover rate.
For a small taste of what it’s like to go treeplanting, imagine a typical day happening like this:
Wake up at 5am having slept in a sleeping bag and tent
Wander over to the kitchen tent for a full-sized breakfast, and then packing enough food and water for the next 14 hours
Hop into a heavy-duty pickup truck with the bed packed with dozens of boxes of little saplings, and try to catch a bit of a nap for the bumpy one to two-hour ride deep into the bush
Plant trees for 12 hours, following this rhythm: load up, walk, grab a tree, bend down, plant it, repeat
Change clothes repeatedly as the weather changes several times in one day
Wearily climb back into the truck and have a bite to eat during the same one or two hour ride back into camp
Eat dinner, and then go to sleep between 5 to 7pm
On the plus side, you get paid per tree so the more you plant, the more you earn. As a newbie, your main goal is to hit 1,000 trees in one day (that’ll take about two weeks), working up to how many hundreds you make in one day.
Lifeguard
Be prepared to get highly skilled in the art of swimming and saving lives, because the more you can do, the higher you’ll be paid. Salaries are around $9.85 an hour, but you can easily bump that up by working at private pools, working in Canada, or insuring yourself to work for private parties.
But also be prepared for hours of…nothing. Being a lifeguard is rarely as sexy or exciting as it is on TV, and the work mainly consists of intense focusing. There’s so much concentration that goes on, lifeguards have to constantly rotate to ensure they don’t miss a single thing. On the plus side, though, your lunch break can be spent splashing around and enjoying the sun.
Caddy
For a lot of people, getting paid to spend time on the golf course is a pinch-me job. Depending on how good you are and who you’re caddying for—Tiger Woods might possibly be looking for a caddy again—you can make $50 to $100 a bag per round (approximately four-and-a-haf hours).
Some of the things you’ll be expected to do are carrying the golfer’s bag, of course, as well as putting up new divots, eyeballing potential trajectories to the cup, supplying and cleaning golf balls, raking sand traps, and just being a general assistant.
There are plenty of jobs that are summer- or warm weather-only, but these three picks represent some of the higher-paying jobs that allow you to stash money away for the rest of the year.