Jailbroke iPhones for $20 a pop in highschool. Blew it all on fireworks.
Flipped broken consoles before the market got too saturated to profit. Blew it all on video games.
Currently breeding fish. Blowing it all on more fish.
I'm bad at saving money.
Sounds like a good life to be honest. I'm probably just romanticizing the days I was a little too young to remember, but I wish I were one of those self-taught programmers, hackers, tinkerers. Everything's opaque and user-friendly and/or optimized to the point of illegibility now.
You're never too old to start learning that stuff.
For networking, there's a ton of resources on selfhosting and homelabbing, and big communities here on lemmy and elsewhere. It can be as expensive a hobby as you want, you can stretch an old laptop pretty far, get really cheap stuff from the cloud, or build a data closet in your house/apartment.
If you wanted to learn more about software, Rust has a ton of high quality official documentation available and would be really valuable knowledge for a career.
For the raw hardware tinkering getting the $30 essentials set from ifixit will get you into 90% of consumer devices, and even as a professional I'm usually watching a 5 minute youtube video before dissassembling anything, and that's really all you need.
Currently cooking for friends and family. I let them know what I'm cooking that week; they can opt into any of the meals. I just make extra of those, and they give me $10 per portion.
I flipped cars for a few years. Im a pretty good diy mechanic.
The amount of people who cant be bothered scraping off stickers, and giving a car a good detail astounds me. Take the car home, wash it thoroughly, detail the engine bay and interior, and if you have the skills change the oil, air filter and coolant. Those were usually good for a few hundred per flip but the bar to entry is low, anyone can do that.
Also buying cars with 4 steel wheels with bald tyres and finding a set of cheap alloy wheels with good tyres that someone was flogging off were also a good flip if you could find the wheels and tyres cheap and negotiate the car down. "Mate a set of tyres is $600" when you can find a legal set on nicer wheels for $200.
The best ones were nice cars with 1 big problem, "needs a new clutch" or "blown head gasket" made a few grand off those usually because I could spend as long as I needed to to do the job on the cheap by myself.
In my state title flipping is a felony...
In Australia the limit is 4 per year before you have to apply for a motor vehicle traders licence, but thats per person. The official paperwork on a few of mine may or may not have have had my flatmates details.
Im curious as to how they figure out the difference between title flipping and just some guy selling a car.
Started a lawn service on the fly. Worked great!
All I had was an old car and a lawn mower, didn't even have a phone or pager (1994 or so). Whipped up some flyers and pasted them all over the trailer park communal mailboxes (several parks). Used mom's phone number and checked in by pay phone.
First day, lady called mom wanting to know if I could edge.
"Tell her I can."
"You don't have an edger!"
"I will after I get paid on this next job."
Hauled ass to Home Depot, got an edger, rest is history.
A major leg up was mom (grandma) being old and having old friends that wanted the work done. Once I displayed competency, the referrals rolled in.
Sold weed in college. Overall I came out ahead, despite getting robbed one time.
In the 90s I would buy and sell baseball cards. It wasn't big bucks but it was enough to put gas in my mom's car and buy food every day.
My very first job when I was little was a professional grammar nazi for a publisher. Something that was akin to a favor with benefits. It lasted less than a year. I was able to buy my first game with it.
Selling plasma is kinda my only one.
But if you're healthy enough they pay a lot for it.
If you're lucky enough to have that "Golden Gene" (or whatever it's called) they pay you even more and you get to be a mini-medical-celebrity lmao
Don't do it too much, it has adverse effects. Those big needle marks on your skin they tell you go away with cocoa butter...lies...
I also had a low thyroid stimulating hormone test result after several weeks of biweekly donations
If I hadn't found a job a few weeks later I would be in a really, really bad place. I got lucky.
Some years back, we made a trip to make/selling some simple food at a weekend street-fair (travelling to a bigger town about 100 miles away). One item only but with several ingredients ... non-cheap, fresh , high-quality. Two people, cleared (in today's dollars) about $1000 in two afternoons. It was different from what other vendors were selling, simple, $2 a shot, great-tasting.
Scalping crypto (daytrade tactic), turned 300$ into 2000$ in 24h! Was on employment insurance at the time so it went into essential stuff.
Did click fraud against a UK search engine and earned a few pennies per bot-generated click on a website I ran.
Made a few hundred per month.
It's pretty much impossible these days cos Google dominates the market and click bots are a lot harder to run.
Shoplifting. Lifting hubcaps. Forging checks.
Did a lot as a kid.
Once, no money for food. So posted to craigslist something about a broke dykes dinner. Bunch of fellow gay women showed up, each contributed one item. Memorable night. There was some whipping with green onions in the kitchen. One of the women told me (we were all out of jobs, struggling) that a straight guy would pay her $50 to throw tomatoes at him while he jerked himself off.
Loving the Craigslist anecdote!
But there must have been a couple of rightfully confused girls dedicated into put thumbs into the Hoover dam a la apocryphal Netherlands story.
No euphemisms were included in the making of the above paragraph..
Working... Slow 🥺
short term ways
Yeah I'm only working till I get an inheritance from a mysterious relative. It is short term!
Grindr is a great way to make some quick cash if you like sucking dick.
Everyday on the way home from work I would stop at the thrift store and buy WiFi routers for anywhere from $5 to $7 and then immediately sell them 10 minutes later for $40
That game is over now but it was a good way to put a thousand bucks+ in my pocket every month for almost no effort.
Edit: and about one out of 10 of those sales, I could parlay it into a configuration & setup service for another 40-80 bucks which of course would take me 10 minutes plus drive time.
I haven't tried but -
I once asked what would be a real life equivalent of those small chores you find in video games that earn you a little gold.
Someone answered that driving people around.If you already have a bit of capital, a high yield savings account. Just park your money there instead of a regular savings account.
What percentage of returns can someone expect from these? What amount of parked money would it take to see 1k per year?
