We all grew up wanting to be sports people, or firefighters, or movie stars. You'd struggle to find a school child who answers the question "What would you like to be when you grow up?" with "I'd like to work in an office, wearing a suit, constantly watching the clock".
That's where most of us end up, though. But it doesn't have to be that way! There are ways to buy yourself out of the rat race. They might not be the world's most exciting jobs, but they'll create cash and allow you to enjoy the finer things in life.
With a little creative thinking, a lot of effort, and some patience, you can work your way to an early retirement without having to punch the clock every day. No more pretending to love every terrible idea your boss has! Here are fifty dull yet effective ways to get rich.
In this weird modern world, you can now get paid significant amount of money by a website to cook for complete strangers, all of whom will pay to come and sit around your table and be hosted by you. You wine and dine them and keep them entertained, they go home happy and full, and you earn up to $700 each time you do it.
We're not making this up. The website is EatWith.com, and it's accepting applications right now. Do you have a specialty dish? Are people forever pestering you to make pizza, curry or steak for them because you do it better than anyone else? You could be about to become your neighborhood's next event chef. And with the money you make from it, you could even pay somebody else to do the staggering amount of washing up you'll be faced with every evening.
Believe it or not, not all websites become as good looking and easy to use as this one overnight. They require careful planning, design and then testing for errors. Even then, the original design team don't get it right every time. The people who make major new websites often go looking for someone to test them, click all around them, look for bugs and give their honest opinions.
This might be a very dull job, depending on the content of the website you're looking at, but it's one that pays well. We're talking $10 for each 20 minutes of your time. Plus, you don't even have to be nice; if the website is awful just tell them so, they do back to the drawing board, and you still get paid anyway! UserTesting.com, UserLyrics.com and TryMyUI.com are just three of the many sites who are constantly accepting applications from people who want to spend their time this way.
Did you miss out on the Bitcoin boom? If you weren't involved five years ago, it's probably too late to join in now, whatever the adverts on the internet tell you. The boom has been and gone, and anyone who was going to get rich by investing has already done it. Let that be a lesson to you not to miss out the next time an opportunity rolls into town.
Keep your eyes close to the ground when new cryptocurrencies emerge; they happen all the time. Make friends with someone who knows their way around the internet and can give you tips. And buy domain names that might be popular one day. The man who bought pizza.com for $20 in the 1990s sold it for $2.5m in 2008! Buy them, sit on them, and sell them to the highest bidder.
This tip has been around for years, but it's still as good for making extra money today as it always has been. Some people give blood in order to help people who need it in surgery, and for medical treatments. If you're one of them, well done. That's very commendable. But you could take it one step further and sell your blood plasma.
The plasma in our blood is used to treat a number of diseases, both large and small, and it's valuable. There are plasma centers all over the country (and all over the world), and they'll set their own rates for donor payments, but it's not uncommon for a donor to be paid up to $400 for each donation. It's not the most pleasant experience to go through, but you can make quite a lot of money doing it.
You won't make your fortune starting at the bottom rung of a waffle house, but they, and other service industries like them, have fantastic opportunities for career progression so long as you're able to stick to the task and demonstrate your worth. Almost everyone involved in a waffle house franchise started at the ground floor and worked their way up.
Take any role within a waffle house franchise and tell the boss you're ambitious. Ask for extra duties and responsibilities whenever possible, and always put the hours in. Most people working within a waffle house treat it like a part time job, so be different. Become a manager. Then become an area manager. Ask for more and more stores and responsibility. Once you're really good at that, buy into the franchise and open your own store. It's one of the easiest systems to climb through if you're dedicated.
No, courts haven't moved online. Not yet, anyway. You wouldn't be ruling or deliberating on current cases, but you can do jury work from home, and it's mostly for the benefit of legal firms and lawyers. The cases are real, but the names have been changed. Take a look at the website eJury to find out more specific detail and find out how much work they currently have to offer.
Virtual juries are used to help train lawyers, and to give them feedback both before and after trials. You're presented with the evidence in the case, and the argument made by lawyers on both sides, and you return a verdict based on your understanding of the case. Lawyers then use your feedback to develop strategies that will help them when they have to go to court for real. It offers a fixed fee per case, and it's a way to turn your reading time in the evening into cash.
Ever walked into someone's house, or office, taken one look around the place and thought "This looks awful. Who designed it?". So have the rest of us. If you can see what's wrong with interior design, you also probably have an instinct for how it could be improved. Not everyone has that instinct. That's why the job 'interior designer' exists, and if the instinct exists within you it would be a great one to nurture.
As with several other industries, family and friends is the best place to start with this. Remake or remodel rooms in their house for them. Take 'before' and 'after' pictures. Start a business website and social media page and display the photos. If people like what they see, they'll order from you. Your end game in all this is to get a partnership with a property construction firm, where they can offer your bespoke room designs as an attractive incentive to potential buyers.
This is really one of the most red-hot emerging industries in the world, and there will never be a better time to get involved in it than right now. Drones are everywhere. They used to be the preserve of the military, but now they have many varied different everyday appliances.
If you see a sweeping overhead shot of land or a building on a TV show, once upon a time it would have been taken from a helicopter, but now it's a much cheaper drone. People use drones to record their wedding day, or survey building sites, or just to get incredible photography. Not only that, drones can be used as a bespoke delivery service, often faster than transporting things by road! All you need to get setup is a drone, and they're not as expensive as you think. Buy one, teach yourself how to fly it accurately, and offer your services online.
More photos are taken every hour in the modern world than were taken in the entirety of the 19th century. Let that statistic sink in for a moment. We take more and more photos every day, and most of them just sit on social media, or our computers, making us no money. There is a massive demand out there for stock images. You'll see a hundred of them on the internet today. Those pictures have to come from somewhere.
Online agencies are happy to buy photos from you for resale as stock images. Take quality, generic images of buildings, scenery, yourself, your office space, your car - anything you like! People will use them and re-use them for various purposes on the internet, and every time they do, you'll get a royalty payment. The more photos you'll take, the more you'll earn. Plus, you get a new hobby out of it.
Thanks to the efforts of many celebrities over the past couple of decades, accessories for dogs are now big business. That includes designer dog leads, designer dog coats, special collars and shoes, and dog perfumes. That's not perfume which is designed to make a dog smell attractive; we're not trying to create a doggy hookup service here. It's to stop them smelling bad.
A lot of people love the idea of owning a dog but are less thrilled about wet dog smell getting on their clothes or furniture; especially business people who can't turn up to work smelling like they just crawled out of a kennel. They'll happily buy dog perfume. Dog perfume can be bought on the internet. You don't need to design your own, just become a retailer and find the right client base. Is there a large, well-to-do office building near you? If so, the right clients are probably all in there!
You don't have to be a WWE wrestling legend to become the undertaker. Funereal work is one of the most somber professions known to man. You're dealing with human remains, grieving relatives and difficult family occasions. It takes a special person to be able to cope with the stress and sadness that a role like that can bring, and it's no surprise that not a lot of people want to do it.
It's a specialist job, and one where demand is constant. Because there's a lack of funeral workers, most towns and cities don't have enough funeral directors, and that lack of competition means prices are high. The average funeral worker earns something in the region of $60,000. You can imagine how much more you'd likely be earning if you managed such a place yourself. So long as people keep dying, there'll always be work available.
We did warn you that these would be boring ways to make money. Nothing says "boring" like accountancy. However, it's the very fact that it's boring that puts a lot of people off doing it. Accountants don't have any magical powers. They just study hard, pass exams, and know what they're doing with figures. Very few people want to get involved with that level of math and finance themselves. That's why they pay someone else to do it.
The real money to be made in accountancy comes from knowing how to be tax efficient. If you know what should be tax-free and what shouldn't, and how to present a set of accounts that attracts the lowest taxation possible, your services will be in high demand. If you can work with a large company and save them millions on their potential tax bill, you'll find they'll be happy to pass on a proportion of that saving to you as a fee.
Ladies, this is an area where you have an advantage over men; you're much less likely to run out of a material that you could be earning money for. Your hair has a material value, and right now you're leaving it laying around on the floor of your hairdressers. Hair extensions have never been more popular, and wigs are expected to be much more realistic than they used to be. There's a constant demand for real human hair.
If you have an unusual color, thickness or type of hair, it might be even more valuable, but all it really needs to be is clean. People who buy hair extensions want the hair to be strong and natural looking so it blends in with their own. The best thing about this method of making money is that you'll probably never run out of your supply. So long as you can keep growing it, you can keep selling it!
How do most goods dealers get started? Usually by selling one or two items, making a profit, buying some more and then selling them, too. Charity shops and car boot sales are great places to find hidden treasures, which you can then take home and sell on eBay for a lot more than you bought them for. This is a practice known as 'eBay flipping', and there's big money in it if you know what you're doing.
The 'knowing what you're doing' part is obviously the hardest part, so you'll want to take the time to know what's valuable and what isn't. Fortunately, eBay is now an app on your phone. Go to garage sales and thrift stores, see what's there, look what the same items sell for on eBay, and if you can make a profit, buy them and sell them on. If there's an option to buy in bulk, go for it and make more money!
If you can drive a car, you can drive a truck. If you can drive a truck, you can move cargo. So therefore, it follows that if you can move cargo and get paid for it, you can hire more trucks and more drivers. If it sounds simple, it's because it is. Until a better invention comes along, the best way to move goods from one place to another is on the back of a truck, and so there will always be a demand for services.
Companies actually advertise on the internet for haulage services all the time. You'll have to start off with low prices to attract business, but once you're established you can push those prices up, or sign exclusivity deals with businesses for a guaranteed rate. It will take time to grow, but when you have a fleet of vehicles and drivers, you'll be making big money on a daily basis.
There's been a sharp decline in people with practical skills over the course of the past decade. People go to college and university and come away with qualifications in the arts and sciences. The general level of human knowledge has never been higher, but practical skill has probably never been less available. If you're prepared to get your hands dirty, you can make serious money as a plumber.
This all comes down to math. The fewer plumbers there are, the more they're in demand. The more they're in demand, the more they can charge, because they have a captive market. There has never been more demand for plumbers. And because you can charge a high rate for your services, you'll make money quickly and be able to hire another plumber to work with you. Progress from there to a team of plumbers with offices, and there's no limit to how much money you could make.
Printer ink is actually the most expensive liquid in the world. It costs more per liter than oil. How we ever arrived at this point, we don't know, but it's true. The cartridges that they come in are valuable, too. Every time you've traded in your printer cartridges, you've given away $5. That's not so much for an individual cartridge, but think about volume.
If you work in an office building, there are probably several printers in there, which require replacing regularly. Offer to dispose of them safely. Even better, approach other office firms and offer a disposal and replacement service. Buy up cartridges, deliver them for a profit, and then make money by selling the old ones back to Cash for Cartridges, or another online site that will buy them. You don't even need to make a large profit selling new ones if you're cashing in on the old ones!
To a greater or lesser degree, everybody loves music. We all have different tastes, and the argument about the Beatles vs The Rolling Stones will probably continue until the end of the human race, but there's something out there for everybody. And all of it needs reviewing. Bands - especially unsigned bands - rely on reviews for their press kits and advertising. Because they need them, they pay for them.
You can sign up to become a reviewer on slicethepie.com, and potentially begin reviewing music straight away. It takes a while to see a good financial return, but every trustworthy review increases your ranking as a scout, and the better reviewed you are, the more people will want reviews specifically from you. You have ears, and you've listened to music before, so as long as you can write a good descriptive piece, this could be a whole new career.
Standing around and letting university or college students draw you sounds like it's both boring and embarrassing, until you realize that someone's willing to pay you to do it. Your time is worth money. Most classes that go looking for subjects for their students or members to paint will pay something in the region of $15 per hour for you to be their muse.
This might not make you rich on its own, but it's a great way of making extra money that you can fit around your working life. Work regularly with one or two institutions in your area that require life models, and you'll soon earn enough to buy your way into one of the other money-making methods on this list! Plus, when you think about it, it's kind of flattering. You could always offer to buy back some of the better work and hang a portrait of yourself on the wall.
You know what people really hate doing? Household chores. Gardening is one of the worst, especially when the weather isn't good. But do you know what people who have lawns also have? Money. Nobody can buy a property that also includes grass land if they don't have the money to do it. That's why the rest of us are living in apartments! Chances are, they've got enough cash to spare to pay you to take care of the lawn for them. And they're probably good tippers, too.
Start off with friends and family, build your reputation, invest the cash you earn in bigger and better equipment, and soon you have a full-size lawn mowing business. Once it's big enough, sell it to someone for a large lump sum and put your feet up. Your days of hard work are over!
You've probably heard of Airbnb. It's a website where people offer out short-term accommodation within their own home, or a home they own, to people looking for a place to stay for a night or a few days. If you rarely vacation yourself, or just don't like the idea of people staying in your house, you probably think you'll never have a reason to use it. You might be wrong.
If you have land outside or behind your house, or you're lucky enough to have a field, you could make money through the website (or even websites like it) by letting it out for camping purposes. If there's a festival nearby, or your garden faces an area of natural beauty, you might be surprised how desirable your garden is in terms of providing someone with a safe space to stay for the night.
How are you at drawing? Can you play an instrument or record a tune? Do you have a rich, smooth voice that would be brilliant for voiceover work? Failing all that, can you write a poem, or content for websites? If the answer to any of these questions is 'yes', you could turn your hobby into a money-making empire by selling your services online.
The website Fiverr is a market leader in this field, but other similar websites are available. You can advertise yourself to a whole world of buyers who are just crying out for the perfect cartoon, poem, article or song but don't have the skills to do it themselves. You can even set your own prices depending on how popular you are. Some people sell poems for $5 a time. Others offer entire movie making facilities for thousands of dollars. If you've got it, and you're good at it, why not sell it?
You probably know the area you live in pretty well. How often do you get stopped in the street and asked for directions to a landmark? That knowledge could be turned into money with a little entrepreneurial spirit on your part. You could become a tour guide for tourists visiting your town or city. If you live somewhere that gets visitors from elsewhere regularly, you could find yourself in particularly high demand.
The website Vayable.com allows you to set yourself up as a tour guide and offer your services. Look for something quirky that's going to catch people's eye; how about your favorite bar that most tourists don't know about? An area of natural beauty that's off the beaten track? Most importantly, be friendly and charismatic. The more people rate you as a guide, the busier you'll become. Charge a fixed price per tourist, run big groups, and you're onto a winner.
When we make this suggestion, we don't intend for you to go to a normal boring office and start working behind a desk. You're looking for ways to get out of that life, and we're not here to keep you in it. You could become a recruitment worker from home if you have an eye for who's good at what, and a wide pool of friends.
Refermehappy is a website which allows you to suggest friends, family or just about anybody else for a job, based on the criteria that's posted online. The theory is that nobody knows a person better than their friends, so their friends are the best people to make the introduction. Every time you refer someone to a company, and they take the job, you're paid a bonus for the introduction. Offer yourself online as a recruitment consultant, let people come to you, match them up through the website and bank the bonus. Without leaving your house!
Even in the world of Wikipedia and Google, there are still questions that are difficult to answer, or that can't be solved by using the usual routes. Once upon a time people would sit down and look through an encyclopedia, but who's got time for that now? Instead, they just text or message someone in the hope they'll get an answer. And if the question can't be answered properly, at least they might get an amusing response.
That's the idea behind AQA (Any Question Answered), a website that lets you set yourself up as a fountain of knowledge and answer any query that comes your way. So long as you can provide an informative, witty answer within a few minutes of the question being asked, you get paid for every response you make. This is a money-making route that rewards those with quick fingers and quick minds. It relies on your ability to answer large volumes of questions, but it can be made to work.
At the risk of sounding like one of those spam emails you used to get all the time, there could be thousands or even millions of pounds stashed away in a bank somewhere, with you as their heir, and you might not even know it. Over in the UK, the Bank of England estimates that the value they're holding in unclaimed assets - I.e. cash - from estates where people have died with no obvious heir, is in excess of £15bn. In the United States, you would expect that figure to be significantly higher.
This is a good time to look through your family tree. If someone died somewhere at the end of a chain; uncles, aunties, great aunties, cousins, second cousins; with no children of their own, their estate may have been stuck and going nowhere because nobody appeared to claim the money. It might not be all that likely, but it's worth your time to look.
This is a tip that probably only applies to people who live in big cities, but if you do, and you're not already making use of it, read on. There's serious money to be made here. Increasingly, city dwellers don't drive anywhere. The roads are too congested, and it's easier to walk, take a bike, or use public transport. That means they don't have a car, and the car parking space that came with their property is going unused.
If you live in an urban area where parking is expensive and hard to find, you have a license to print money. There are a number of websites you can advertise your parking space to, some of which might even be local to you and specialized. You could be exactly what a wealthy but frustrated commuter has been looking for. Depending on your area, your space could be worth hundreds of dollars a month.
If you have no passion or ability when it comes to design, that's fine, just skip to the next idea. If you do, give this some serious consideration. You've probably never tried to make shoes before, and that's OK, most people haven't. But consider this. Adidas was formed when a completely unskilled German teenager started trying to make running shoes, in his mother's kitchen, using canvas, rubber and her waffle iron. As you can imagine, it didn't go right the very first time, but with practice, it became one of the largest sports brands in the world.
Shoes will always be popular. Designer, boutique shoes sell for thousands of times their material cost. If you have design skills, and you're prepared to take the time to learn how to actually make a shoe, you could be a billionaire. What else are you doing with those design skills right now? What do you have to lose by trying?
What's actually in your shed or garage? A lawnmower you never use (in which case you should go back to point 4)? A rotting pair of wooden ladders? Some half-finished DIY project that you always meant to go back to but never actually have? It probably isn't your car, because that's either on your driveway or in front of your house. So, what is in your outhouse building, really?
If you didn't guess the answer, it's storage. People are constantly on the lookout for storage space. Sometimes it's for the long term, and sometimes it's just for a while, for example people who are in the middle of moving to a new house and need somewhere to place their stuff until it's ready. Like your parking space, your shed or garage is something you already have, waiting to be deployed as a money-making solution.
We've talked about buying a duplex and letting one of the buildings out already, but if you're not quite ready for that step yet, how about temporarily renting out one of the rooms you already own? You don't even have to do it long term if you're not comfortable; students frequently need short term accommodation. Especially foreign exchange or language students.
A student who's come to your area to learn English will probably stay for six weeks. A touring lecturer or professor may stay anything up to six months. They need somewhere to live for that duration and paying nightly rates for a hotel is the most expensive way of doing it. What they really need is someone like you to open a room out for them. If you're feeling industrious, offer cleaning, washing and breakfast services to them and bump up the price accordingly.
You'll need a little money to get this idea off the ground. Find yourself a nice duplex, visit the bank to get a mortgage, and then buy it. Live in one of the properties and rent the other one out. Make sure you're renting to someone who has a steady job, and no poor credit history. There are websites which can help you with vetting.
Make sure you're charging the tenant more than half the cost of your mortgage, and that plus your income from your job should build up over time. Once you have a nice lump sum ready and waiting, buy somewhere new for you to live, and rent out the other half of the duplex, again for a profit. Keep repeating this trick, leaving one home and renting it out to buy another, until you have a property empire which will give you a rental income you can retire from.
Well, don't say we didn't tell you that we were going to look at really boring ways to make money. It doesn't get much more boring that queuing for hours on end. Part of the reason that you can make money from doing really boring things is the fact that nobody else wants to do them. You can think of it as a sort of boredom economy.
This money-making opportunity comes into its own when something major is happening. The launch of a new Apple product is an obvious one, but people also queue for gig or movie tickets when something's in high demand, and not everyone can, or wants to, spare the time to go and queue in person. They'll pay you to do it instead. You can set an hourly rate for your service, or a price per job. Remember that if the queue likely involves you camping out overnight, you can charge far more for that.
Almost everybody has a web presence of some kind, and if you don't, you should consider it. All of us have interests or hobbies that other people don't. You probably even read a few blogs related to things that you're interested in. The blogs that you're reading probably make a little money every time you visit, because that's the magic of Google AdSense.
If you have a website that has a solid, regular viewership, advertisers want to put their products on it. That's where AdSense comes in. It partners with advertisers and matches them with websites based on their interest or specialty area. If you have a blog about fishing, for example, they'll display fishing adverts on your site. If you have a blog about travel, expect to see travel agency adverts appear. It's simple stuff, but it's a way of getting a passive income from your hobby site that grows as it becomes more popular.
Yes, we know. Easier said than done, right? But hear us out on this one. If you don't want to be responsible for homes that other people are living in, maybe you'd be more interested in generating a huge cash lump sum. What's your earning potential in your current job? Is there any prospect of promotion? Speak to your boss and find out what your future looks like. Go for any promotion that will make you more money, but keep living exactly as you are now. Bank all the money that comes from rises on salary.
When we say 'bank', we mean invest. A 25-year-old saving $450 per month in a tax-deferred account with compound interest, traded on the stock market, will be a millionaire by the age of 60, assuming annual investment returns are around eight percent. You might have had to scrimp and save all the way through your working life, but you can retire in style.
When you were growing up, there were probably one or more stores near you that did 'alterations'; they would take in the waist of a pair of trousers or expand the chest of a jacket. They're not as common anymore, because more people are buying clothes that fit them properly. That's because there's a demand for well-tailored clothes.
If you don't have the skills to tailor clothes yourself, find someone who does and work in partnership with them. You can be the manager, and the marketeer. We've all bought a suit or work clothes from a high street store before now and been disappointed with the fitting. You could be part of changing that. Once you have a couple of happy customers, you won't even need to worry about the advertising side of the business. Word of mouth will spread around town, and the people will come to you.
We've already looked at Fiverr as a way of making money from your creative abilities, but if you have a particular flair for poetry, there may be a more lucrative way of selling your creations. If you're truly dynamic, interesting and insightful, there's a company out there who are prepared to offer serious money to use your work.
Blue Mountain Arts release both greeting cards and books, and they constantly accept submissions from anybody who thinks they're good enough to make one. If you have the talent, and you're chosen, they pay up to $300 per poem for rights to use it on greeting cards. If they select it for one off publication in a book, that's a fee of $50. You don't need to be great at math to work out how quickly that can build up. If that doesn't inspire some poetry out of you, nothing will!
Administration positions are difficult posts to fill and price for at major firms. Often, extra staff are only needed for specific projects, or for specific periods of time when it's especially busy. Companies end up hiring someone full time, only for them to be sat doing nothing for a couple of days a week, or half their working day. It isn't efficient for the company or the staff.
That's where you can step in as a virtual admin, filling the time that needs to be filled and charging by the hour. You could work for multiple different companies at different points of the week; and doing it all from home. That's one of the benefits of the internet age! You'd be a far more attractive pick for most companies than hiring regular staff, because they don't have to worry about your tax, holiday or sick pay. They just send you money, and you deal with it all yourself.
You've probably noticed that over the last few years, everybody's got quite big on recycling. We'd like to think it's because companies and governments have developed a deep and sincere interest in saving the planet, but in reality, it's probably because they've realized the value of what's being thrown away. Raw materials have value, and so long as they can be salvaged, they can be used time and again in the construction industry.
You'll want to do a little internet research into what's valuable as a reclaimed material and what isn't, but as a starting tip, anything that contains copper usually has high value. Scrapyards and similar companies pay finders fees for materials and will happily part with their cash if you can bring them the right cargo. Stop throwing out your metal items, and don't be afraid to loiter and root around industrial waste bins to find potential treasure.
Translation is one of the fastest growing industries in the United States of America. The US department of labor currently estimates that demand for translation services will increase by almost 20% over the next ten years. That means that this is the exact right time to get involved and make money from your ability to take words from one language and turn them into another.
You don't have to travel around as an interpreter to earn your money as a translator, either. Websites like Fiverr, Upwork and Gengo are full of people offering to translate text, or translate from audio recordings, for a set price per word or minute. If you happen to be bilingual, you probably do this every day of your life inside your head. Why not take it out of your head, put it on paper, and get it earning money from you? Corporate clients in particular pay big money for good translators.
There's no need to go through the process of getting teaching qualifications in order to teach anymore. If you have a qualification, or a skill - and some good interpersonal skills - there's no reason you can't impart your knowledge or abilities to somebody else. The private tuition industry is booming, especially among adults who want to learn something new but can't spare the time off work to go back to university or college.
Several websites allow you to advertise your services as a private tutor online, including the imaginatively named tutor.com. Whether it's a foreign language or the ability to play the guitar, there will be someone out there who'll want you to supplement what they're leaning elsewhere or teach them from scratch. Depending on what it is you have to teach people, you can charge a lot of money for your time.
If you currently work in an office, think of how many days in a week you phone your IT department to report a technical problem. Then think about how many other people in the office do the same on a regular basis. There's a lot of work, a lot of demand, and not that many people well positioned to do it. We all use computers. Very few of us really understand what makes them tick.
If you could learn that knowledge, you'd be in demand from the moment you acquired it. Think bigger than answering helpline enquiries, although you can easily get into the six-figure range as the head of a busy IT department. Companies need advice on hardware, and software, and infrastructure; especially when they're setting up new premises. You could be the person supplying that advice, and your staff could be the people fitting it.
As it turns out, even the most basic and banal items around your house might have a value you'd never considered. One of them is the mug you drink your coffee from. What might look like a dull, floral design to you might be the missing item from someone else's collection, and they'll pay you a handsome amount to make it theirs.
Some mugs are more valuable than others. The average coffee mug from Disney World, for example, goes for $50. There are some rare mugs that routinely go or $250 a time or more. If you have a mug that has a logo or branding related to a TV show, or a limited-edition print, or just something that isn't available in shops anymore, you'd probably be amazed by how much someone will pay to take it off your hands. Once you know what's valuable and what isn't, you can become a trader.
If you're reading this, and you're not already famous, the chances of you ever becoming a movie star are very slim. But that's not to say you can't have a pretty good claim to fame and make some money out of it at the same time. Your home, no matter what it looks like, would probably make a pretty good TV or film set for somebody.
Studio space comes at a premium for production companies, so it's often more attractive to them to outsource somewhere else. Your home doesn't have to be a palace; it can even be a small apartment and it will be the perfect location to fit the specifications of a script somewhere. You might have to clear off for a few days, or even a couple of months if it's being used for a major movie, but the compensation for your inconvenience will make up for it; the going rate is around $2,000 a day.
You don't need to work for, or with, any major haulage firm to find work as a courier. All you actually need is a car. If you want to make major money from it, though, you'll also need a keen mind for planning. The key to making money as a private courier is to string several jobs together on the same route.
Usually, you'll want to make one major trip a day, so find an item to transport from place A to place B, and agree a price for it. Then hunt down other jobs that are in or around the same route, and factor them in as stops on the way. The average charge for transporting something, although it varies, is around $40. Fit in ten deliveries a day and you're well on your way to a very comfortable lifestyle. Soon you'll be able to hire a second car and driver to help you out. One day you'll need a whole fleet!
There are actually two benefits to keeping bees. The first one is quite important; you're playing a small part in saving the world. Bees are the planet's great pollinators. They play a huge role in feeding many of the crops we eat including coffee and alfalfa, which plays a role in feeding cows. If there were no bees, we'd be facing a food shortage. Because of the over-use of pesticides in farming, bee numbers are under threat. Seriously, consider keeping some bees.
As for how to make money out of them? Honey. Lots and lots of lovely honey. Artisan foods are becoming increasingly popular alternatives to mass produced and sanitized produce, and your local honey start-up could really get your finances buzzing. Once the money's started rolling in, keep more bees and produce more honey. It may not be the most exciting hobby, but the boost to your income should take the sting out of the boredom.
So far, we've discussed renting out your garage, your spare room, and your imaginary duplex. Now let's talk about renting out the things in your home. Sure, you could just sell that hedge trimmer that you never use, but why do that when you could rent it out for a fixed price per day and have it make money for you indefinitely?
This might sound crazy, but people actually do this and make money from it. You could hire out your camera, your lawnmower, your barbecue set - anything you could think of that someone else might want to use for a few days or a set period of time. Websites like Fatllama.com and RentNotBuy.com give you the platform to do it, and you set the price. Just remember to charge a deposit to put people off the idea of stealing it.
You don't need to be a millionaire to become a business investor; you only need to have enough money to make a material difference to a startup company that needs it. We live in the age of crowd funding. There are thousands of individuals and businesses out there, asking the world for funding to support their new idea or product. Often, they'll offer a stake in the company or a percentage return on investment in return for your support.
The key is knowing which firm to back. A lot of technology companies or new inventions sound exciting, but either never see the light of day or don't work as they were supposed to. Look for start-up companies that operate in industries which you know always make money, or established companies that need a little capital for expansion. They may not be exciting investments, but they're more likely to be reliable. Owning 5%, or even 1%, of the right small company could mean your share is worth millions when they're bigger.
Yes, we're serious, you can make serious amounts of extra money from drinking beer. Obviously, the standard advice applies; drink in moderation, know your limits, be aware of the health implications and all the rest, but now that's out of the way, drink beer and make money! "How?" I hear you ask? Because having great tasting beer is the only way that beer companies make money. It's a crowded market, and only quality products get to the market. They need people to sample their products to know that they've reached the right quality.
As an example, World of Beer hired interns last year to sample beers over the course of the summer and help to work out which should go forward onto the market. Each of the interns was paid $12,000 for what was basically a part time gig, drinking beer and giving their thoughts on it. Doesn't that sound like the best job in the world? Not every entry on this list will make you millions, but they can get you enough cash to try one of the options that will.
Whilst it is now legal in various parts of the US to grow a completely different kind of weed, we won't offer that as advice, because in most places you could still get in a lot of trouble that way! Catnip, however, is a weed that grows easily, and is in constant demand everywhere. You could become a catnip farmer with a start-up cost of less than $5 for the seeds, so long as you have somewhere to grow the catnip.
If you're not a cat owner and you're not familiar with the substance, cats go absolutely crazy for catnip. It's used as a treat for them, and sometimes it's placed inside their toys to keep them stimulated. Almost everyone loves cats, and they're never going to stop being household pets, so there will always be a demand for catnip. Who's going to do a better job of supplying it than you?
If there's a sports stadium or concert venue somewhere near you, then you have a potentially endless customer base for up-selling basic goods right on your doorstep. The moment attendees to the gig or sports event walk through the doors into that stadium, they're going to be overcharged for everything from soda to chips. So, if you were to set up somewhere nearby, and sold the same goods for less than that price, really, you'd be doing them a favor.
All you need to do is buy basic goods in bulk; bottled water, soda, snacks, maybe even umbrellas on a wet day, and sell them for more than you bought them for, but less than they'll cost inside the venue. Venues always mark basic goods up by a huge amount, so you have plenty of scope for profit. Then just set yourself up on a street near the venue, selling from your car or behind a table, and let the money roll in.
