31 Ways Real People Make Extra Income

"I dog walk . . . I make $300 a month for a one-hour walk five days a week off of one dog. You can charge more, but I would not charge more than $20 a walk . . . I walk three dogs."

• "When I was in my early 20s, I was living in San Diego. At the end of every semester, I would Dumpster-dive at the local dorms on move-out day. I would load my truck up with stuff from UCSD, SDSU, and USD and then throw a massive garage sale. I made a killing every single time."
• "I had a friend who would make $3,000 to $5,000 a year by Dumpster-diving outside of the maths and engineering buildings on campus. People who wrote textbooks would send them to the department heads to be reviewed and hopefully purchased for the next school year. If teachers didn't like them, they would throw those books out, and most likely a different school would be using those exact textbooks so he'd sell them on Amazon for a fee that would benefit both him and the student."

"I go to thrift stores and yard sales to pick up anything I think I can flip on eBay for a profit.

A couple examples: I bought a scanner for $20 at a thrift store that looked high-tech, and it turned out to be a photo negative scanner that retailed for about $2,500. I flipped it on eBay for $600. Another good one was when I found most of a sterling silver dining set mixed in a huge bin of cutlery. It took me a while, but I looked at every piece in there and bought all the sterling pieces for around $5 total. In today's bullion market, I picked up about $250 worth of silver.

. . . When I was doing this in full force, I made around $10,000 a year extra. It does take a lot of work with packageing, sending things off, answering questions, and providing customer service when something isn't right. Sometimes you have to take a hit on an item — eBay feedback is decently important for small sellers like me. The effort you put in is what you get out."

"I tutor kids. I charge $20 to $50 per hour depending on the client, content, and other factors."

"Babysitting. Easiest money I've ever made. If you're lucky, the kids will be napping half the time, and you'll get to just sit on your [butt] . . . I'm babysitting right now and I'm getting paid to browse Reddit."

"I mow lawns. I only mow for the neighbourhood I live in, so I can walk to every job, so I don't have to buy a trailer. In a good week, I'll make $400 from charging $25 per lawn. It's not year-round income though."

"Donating blood plasma can net $250 to 350 a month if you go twice a week (or whatever the limit is). Typically takes three hours total per week."

"Buy some spray paint and number stencils from Home Depot and paint people's addresses on their curbs. I did that before I went to college, door to door, and just told people I was saving up money for school. I could make around $50 per hour, charging $10 per house. Paid for my whole first year of college and then some."

"It's not me but a friend of mine. Anyway, he's really into Legos. What he does is buy Lego kits on clearance and hit the bins in Lego stores, Goodwill, etc. Then he breaks the kits down and sells them on eBay. He makes about $800 bucks a month after taking out the expenses of purchasing the kits and listing fees.

. . . Find something you're into and knowledgeable about, like golf clubs or Legos or whatever. Then collect items and turn them over on eBay."

"I build custom furniture out of pallets and other scraps I find laying around. I sell them on Etsy.

. . . I'll build things like an "Adirondack" chair out of a pallet and sell it for $100 or $150 each. It takes me about under two hours to build something like that. All the material is found and free, I do occasionally have to buy a saw blade or screws, so there is a little overhead. I build stuff on the weekend, so if you average it out, I guess I'm making around $200 a week. There are weeks when I don't sell anything and others when I ship five chairs or tables or whatever I make out of pallets."

"I caddie. Been out 11 times in the past two months and made $1,300."

"If you live near a large university, they may have a behavioural lab that pays. They're typically one hour or less surveys. Wharton's, in Philly, paid me $10 for a max of one hour (usually 30 minutes) of filling out professors' research surveys. Sometimes you played games and had a chance to win more money. I walked out in under 30 minutes with $20 cash once."

"I umpire softball/baseball games for USSSA. There's also Little League, ASA, and others. I make $30 for an hour-and-10-minute game. Ten games in a weekend, and that's $300. You can also maybe pick some games up after work. It's not so bad if you don't mind a little yapping in your ear."

"Drop Shipping. You make a website that specialises in something (for me, it was camping supplies and slot machines) and list all those items for sale. What you're doing is basically acting as a middle man between the wholesaler and consumer (essentially retail but not really since you don't purchase in bulk). When they buy the item from you, all you do is go on the wholesaler site that you get your [things] from and order that same product using the money they gave you to pay for it. Since they paid a marked-up price, you just keep the difference.

. . . I did this during high school and college to make extra cash. Whenever I sold a slot machine, I would usually pocket like 50 bucks. I remember one day I sold five slot machines and, like, six camping tents. I made like $500 in one day and only had to enter the shipping info for 11 customers. You can usually bank $1,000 to $4,000 per month doing that small scale. The big guys who do this full-time usually have 10 to 50 sites."

"Draw caricatures at events. In the United States, the normal rate for a caricature artist is $100 to $150 per hour with a two hour minimum."

"I make and decorate cakes in my spare time, and it's not too hard if you have any artistic skills at all. A lot of craft stores do Wilton classes, and you can reasonably charge $25 to $40 for a standard cake (supplies usually run about $7 to $8). Learn to work with fondant, and you can charge a lot more."