Tuesday, May 21, 2019
I get it. You’re a broke millennial that needs cash. There are some days I wish I could make money faster and so sometimes you have to make a buck. These are by no means going to make you rich. But every little bit will get you closer to freeing yourself to one day be financially independent. Just one or two extra lucky days of income can put you ahead enough in the rat race and keep ahead.
Here are a few ideas to generate some money.
1) Sell candy bars. Some people do this for fundraisers and it doesn’t take a whole lot of knowledge or skills to parlay this into a small way to make cash. Often when you sell items like this you have to make sure you don’t eat your inventory. We’ve all seen the World’s Finest Chocolate fundraiser bars but you could probably get some other type of items to make cash on.
2) Sell cookies, baked goods or lemonade. If you were young hopefully your parents gave you an opportunity to do this time honored tradition into and get into the foray of consumerism, salesmanship and entrepreneurship. True some people are “Debbie Downers” and don’t realize that kids should be able to do a few days of simple sales without crazy red tape and all that, some people aren’t as supportive in bringing your community together to teach kids simple entrepreneurship skills for later on. It’s just a lemonade stand!
3) Hold a garage sale. This is another great way to make a few extra bars of cash when you really need it. Perhaps you can label your clothes or old furniture, drawings, toys, books, and electronics and keep it simple and put it out there on the corner of your lawn with table and even get your neighborhood involved and sell while decluttering. A good tip is to keep prices low and simple. Most people that come in just want a good deal. I remember picking up a wheelchair for a friend that needed it and it was only $5. Cleaned it up and it was a steal. Another place I got a rice cooker for about 50 cents to 2 dollars. It was also a good deal with it being a stainless steel cooker.
What is nice is you can even hold it concurrently with other items above.
4) Take your used books or magazines to sell back at the college bookstore or even to Half Price books. I am not a big fan of getting less than what a book is worth when I clearly bought it at a higher price. Colleges are a business. You get an education but they are basically selling you things and advertising and indoctorinating you with their sports team paraphenalia and need to join fraternities and sororities and purchase items or even buy certain foods from campus. Luckily there was usually never any major blatant selling at college other than for big ads at sports arenas or the side of buses and the campus newspapers. Magazines however you tend to not get much bang for your buck. I remember at the end of the year at college roommates basically threw out and liquidated about 300 plus magazines and I went and dumpster dove at the time thinking I was getting neat free stuff cause I couldn’t afford all those on my own. (Gotta be careful of critters etc when getting free stuff occassionally) But anyways went down there with a whole stack and got maybe like $2 or $3 for my whole stack. It was a sad sobering moment.
5) Sell tin cans or aluminum cans at the local metal recycling center. This was also a go to for many years when we were younger our family used to go looking and collecting and saving metal cans to try to see if they could sell scrap metal for some money or pennies. It was worth a shot and with several garbage bags but only getting a few dollars from it. It was still worth a shot.
6) Get a bubble gum machine or vending machine and put it in an authorized public location and make money off it. This is semi-passive. There are YouTube channels of people collecting dollar bills, quarters and credit card amounts from doing this, but you have to consider buying and storing food items, replenishing them, driving to the locations, stocking them up, gasoline for traveling back and forth, and any other credit card merchant accounts required for this, as well as, maybe location rental fee and repairs.
7) Make money by creating portraits or caricatures of people. You have to be somewhat a talented person to do this. You might also sell jewelry at a fair or Henna tattoos for instance at a fair.
8) Create portraits and wedding photos or videos for people. Help them celebrate an occasion by capturing the moment.
9) Play an instrument on the street. I’ve seen people with suitcases and a jazz saxophone, a cello or violinist do that.
10) Be a magic performer on the street or juggler or acrobat, mime.
11) Perhaps offer to dress up as a cartoon character, clown, or princess cosplayer for someone’s birthday.
12) Consider mowing someone’s lawn or shoveling snow.
13) Babysit or dog watch.
14) Uber or Lyft
15) Help someone by picking up their groceries or running errands. There’s a web site also called Amazon Mechanical Turk that you can make side gigs for instance.
16) Create a product like a book or ebook and sell it. J.K. Rowling after all became a best selling book writer, as did, E.L. James and Stephenie Meyer.
17) Teach a class. You might be an expert in something and might be able to give workshops, seminars, or teach a private class or tutor on a subject and get people to learn something. I know some people that are knowledgeable enough about acting or dancing and are able to do this.
18) Take on small side gigs or projects for people, perhaps you can do psychology or medical studies or donate blood.
19) Some people do voice over work which is also fun.
20) Knit or crochet or creat little scarves, sweaters or pieces or works and sell them.
21) Make soaps, candles, wax figurines, special paper art, stone carvings, and sell them.
22) Plant a garden and sell your harvested crops.
23) Make jams or jellies and sell them for cheap.
24) Cut hair.
25) Make printable t-shirts.
26) Sell post cards or business cards or posters. You could probably take pictures of nature and sell them on photo paper.
These are just a few idea and more may come later and it will be updated later.
