SubscribeIdeas for Generating (Side) Income with Limited Start-up Investment
While this list is tailored for helping students find ideas for generating income, I suspect it might come in handy for others with limited start-up money, looking to generate some side income. Please let me know of any additional ideas I have missed (I am sure there are many). Here we go- 
- Pizza delivery
- Tutoring
- Waiting on tables
- Bar tend
- Buying and selling on Ebay
- Start a blog/website and sell ads, affiliate programs etc.
- Lawn mowing
- Computer tune-ups
- Baby sitting
- Create and sell e-books
- Monetize your hobby (E.g., photography, woodwork, crafts etc.)
- Walking dogs
- Participate in paid surveys (online, on-campus, etc)
- Garage sale
- Donate plasma (if you are not squeamish)
- If you have a truck, offer to move stuff for some nominal fee
- If you have a car, offer trips to Walmart for a nominal fee (newly arriving international students don’t own a car for at least a couple of semesters, many times more!)
- 0% APR credit card arbitrage (More info here)
- Mystery shopping (Lot of scams, very few legitimate offers. So, do your research first)
- Web designing
- Free lance jobs (I used to think this is limited to writers and other fine arts majors. But these days you can also find freelance work in coding too!)
- Coffee club: Buy a decent coffee machine and some good coffee beans, and offer to save your lab-mates a trip to the coffee shop for fixed weekly/monthly fee
- If you are a good cook: Offer lunch boxes!
- Teach (swimming, driving, dancing, language, tennis etc.)
- If your apartment/university has large movie screens you can rent out, offer movie nights
for a nominal fee(UPDATE: Please see comment by "anonymous" below). You can do this at home also if you can find a good large screen second hand TV. - Become a movie extra
- Part-time Customer Service Rep
- Part-time Receptionist
- Sales Clerk/Cashier
- Lab/Teaching/Research Assistant
- Amazon mechanical turk (More info here)
- Teach at local community college
- Journalist for local newspaper
- Modelling
- Become a consultant (More infohere)
- Work at the university library – librarian, shelving, proctoring, database maintenance etc.
Additional Information:
- Discussion on Fatwallet Finance Forum
- Bored Money and side income ideas on My Money Blog.
- College Jobs by Jim on Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.
7 Comments:
Nice list. As a college student, I've found mystery shopping to be the best flexible money maker, especially since half the time I get free food as well. Check out volition.com for a list of legit mystery shopping companies.
Sign up with all the local temp agencies.
Lauren, anonymous: Thanks for the tips! I dont believe I forgot to mention signing up with temp agencies!
ISPF- Great list. I need to incoporate more of these. I'm looking to start tutoring spanish again over the summer. It's so easy, but brings in good money.
Take care.
Brett: Good Luck! I am a bit jealous though - I wish there was a market for Indian languages too :)
It is a copyright violation to rent a movie and then charge people to watch it - that is what that whole FBI warning at the begining is about. Charge for the snacks and let people watch the movie for free...
Anonymous: Good catch, Thanks! I have updated the text to reflect this.
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