Best Cheap

Everyone wants to make more money. Wealth doesn’t buy happiness, but sometimes having a little bit more cash around makes life easier, and that can lead to happiness or at least make being happy a more realistic goal.

BestCheap.org started out as a money-making hobby–though it has grown into a passion for helping other people make more money and deal with their money better, it was once just an idea for making money.

Here are lots of tips to make money. Making money doesn’t mean taking out a second job, selling all your stuff, or investing in some crazy get rich quick scheme. All of the ideas for making money below are things you can do with a small time investment–all ideas that can lead to big financial returns.

If you have a hobby, there’s probably a way to use it to make money. There’s not a single hobby I can think of that can’t be turned into a money making venture, unless maybe if your hobby is burning fresh $20 bills.

A perfect example of turning a hobby into profit is my writing for BestCheap.org. Right out of college, I was struggling with debt. I had student loans to pay back, and I found myself spending most of my time writing and not much of my time actually working. Thank God I found a way to write and make cash at the same time–using Google Adwords and Adsense, I was able to start a series of blogs and websites featuring my own writing that turned clicks into revenue. Now I write full-time for BestCheap.org and a few other advice sites, and get paid well enough just for writing that my student loans are a thing of the past.

Even if your hobby is less obviously profitable, like collecting, you can turn a small profit or at least participate in your hobby for free. A buddy of mine collects classic roleplaying games and books from the 70s and 80s. Some of these books and games are quite valuable since they were printed in limited editions. Now, he buys low and sells high, keeps the books he really loves, and makes a few hundred bucks a month dealing in his favorite hobby.

There’s no reason you can’t use your home Internet connection to make cash. Services like Textbroker.com offer anyone the opportunity to work from home and make decent money. Textbroker is specifically aimed at writers, but you don’t have to have an English degree to write the kind of content that Textbroker’s clients are looking for. Working just four or five hours a week for Textbroker is an easy way to make an extra $50 to $100 a week.

If you’re not a writer, there are other at home business opportunities to help you make cash without leaving your front door. Drop shipping has become a huge market for people who want to work a few extra hours a week for a new income source. Building your own websites takes a little bit of time and creativity, not to mention maintenance work from time to time, but using online ads for a new income source is one of the more popular ways to earn a little extra scratch these days.

One of the oldest tricks for earning extra cash is to invest a little bit of cash in the hopes of watching your money earn its own money. When I was a junior in high school, my economics teacher brought in an investment specialist who dealt mostly in retirement accounts and mutual fund investments. He explained to us the ins and outs of investing and showed how a small investment in high school could become a huge nest egg in just a few years. I was inspired–I dropped $1,000 into the most aggressive mutual fund I could find, and four years later after graduating college, I had over $3,000 just sitting there earning money. I cashed out and paid about half of my student loans right off the bat.

But not everyone will have that kind of quick success with such a small investment. I lucked out and picked a mutual fund that performed incredibly well for a short amount of time, and cashed out before the bubble burst.

There are other ways of making your money earn money besides stock and mutual fund investments. Certificates of Deposit are low-risk, low-yield short-term investments that require a small minimum purchase amount and offer much better interest rates than standard savings accounts. My wife inherited $100,000 in her teens and was smart enough to buy a 5-year jumbo CD that yielded 3% interest. She just recently cashed out and found herself with an extra $17,000. That’s a decent amount of money to make for no work at all, just five years of patience.

One interesting short-term investment that carries little risk is investing in so called penny stocks. These are stocks that trade for as low as one cent a share, and thanks to market fluctuations, their price can shoot up enough that a small investment can turn into a huge one-day financial gain. Of course, any stock market investment carries high risk, but if your initial investment is just a few bucks, you don’t have much to lose.

Turning money you’ve already earned into an asset that makes money is the easiest way to increase your income, even if investing requires a little more time than turning your hobby into profit or working from home.

Not every attempt to make money will pan out. The trick is to stay confident and always be willing to alter your money making ideas to adapt to changes in your budget or your financial goals. Don’t let a small failure become a huge setback. There are always new ways to make money and small changes you can make to your money making ideas to try.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 1st, 2011 at 9:33 am and is filed under Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.