Most of us were taught from a young age that if we were patient and worked hard, our efforts would pay off. But growing up shows you that life isn’t fair, and you can actually work a grueling job for 40+ hours a week and still have trouble making ends meet. So if you’re looking to take some shortcuts, there might be a way you can earn a little extra cash on the side without putting in too much effort.

Users on Quora and Reddit have recently been discussing some of the easiest and fastest money they’ve ever made, so we’ve gathered their replies below. Some of these are very creative side hustles, while others just involved being in the right place at the right time. But enjoy reading through these stories, and be sure to upvote the lucrative ventures you’d be willing to try out too!

#1

I get paid $50/day to stay in a 15000 square foot fully furnished house on 18 acres in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the US. My duties are 1) turn on alarm when I leave and at night, and 2) feed koi fish. I have the entire property to myself except the 5 days a year when the owners pop by to visit or grab some stuff. This has been happening for the last 5 years.

Image credits: anon

#2

$40 to *fix* the sound on my uncle’s computer. Just needed to be unmuted.

Edit: Tried to tell him just needed to be unmuted. Wouldn’t have any of that and had me come over to “Just do it”. He also refused my refusal of the money.

Image credits: kpraslowicz

#3

I used to get $5 a day for lunch. Went home starving every day for 3 years.

Image credits: Aestheticshampoo

#4

Got an email from a Nigerian prince. Money should be here any day now…

Image credits: PoopySnuggles

#5

Appeared n**e in an indie art film. 2 hours of rolling around on a bed and gazing longingly out a window for $500.

Image credits: anon

#6

Waited in line for iPhone 4 for 12 hours. Sold spot to someone for $500 cash. My SO was still in line and used cash to buy us phones.

Image credits: lolturtle

#7

After a night of drinking me and a buddy stopped at a place and got pizza, we ordered an entire pie although we really didn’t need all of it. We got over there probably 30 minutes before all the bars closed to beat the rush of drunks. Well when the bars did actually let out, we were still sitting there eating. Since we had a bunch of slices left and we sitting by the door where a line was forming, I pushed a slice out onto the top part of the box and said watch this. Immediately I was offered $5 for the slice by some guy who didn’t want to wait in line. Kept doing that for the rest of the pizza, sold the whole thing pretty quickly, paid for the entire pizza and probably ended up with an extra $5-10 for each of us to keep. I doubt the owners would have been happy to know we were reselling their own pizza inside their shop for a profit.

Image credits: unclexbenny

#8

~$700 for taking a big a*s piece of aluminum to the scrap yard. A neighbor was using it as a retaining wall, tore it out, and said I could have it. I think it was part of a bridge.

Image credits: SoCoGrowBro

#9

Drove my cousin to and from college.
He couldnt drive yet, and my uncle was like take him and pick him up, a cab was 60 so for an entire semester 4 times a week, 50 bucks a day. So great.

Image credits: ImAjustin

#10

Got paid to go learn how to speak French in France.

Image credits: sugarminttwist

#11

In junior high I sold 7 Beanie Babies for $950.

Image credits: randomfactaholic

#12

My six year old daughter sold her Fruit by the Foot for $10 the other day at school.

(I made her return the money and we had a talk about being fair and sharing. But inside I was pretty proud of her.).

Image credits: TrixieDawn

#13

Armor trimming.

dingobiscuits:
What’s that?

aMazingBanannas:
In the online game runescape you could trim armor, and this was very desirable and quite hard to do. People would advertise that they would trim people’s armor for free in public chat. This involved trading said person the armor. This person would receive the item and then make off with it, never to be seen again. A very simple scam, and a lot of kids fell for it

Image credits: anon

#14

I get payed to sit here and look at reddit… so I guess I got that going for me..

Image credits: hitdathoe

#15

I showed my p***s to two of my sisters friends when were young for 5 dollars. Pre-internet. Seeing a p***s apparently wasn’t that easy. I had cable and the Playboy Channel came in scrambled. Occasionally you could make out a n**ple…or it might have been a hat. Either way, that’s the best I could do. You kids and your free unlimited p**n. I would have dropped out of school and had carpal tunnel syndrome by the time I was 14.

Image credits: anon

#16

One of my brothers friends copied and pasted the Kony 2012 video when it came out. He was well meaning in his intentions and knew very little about copyright laws being only 11/12. He already was a YouTube partner and it ended up getting a few million views. He made 2K.

Image credits: Al_Capownage

#17

All I had to do was be born, and people STILL give me money every year for it.

Suckers. My mom was the one who did all the work anyway.

Image credits: godlovesaliar

#18

I once worked security at a Hillary Duff concert. Once I got my hands on a set of earplugs, that was some d**n easy money. Just had to stand there and look mildly annoyed.That’s basically my face all the time anyway.

Image credits: PatchRat

#19

Bought some Bitcoins a few years back before they gained their current momentum. It was just after a crash at the time, so in hindsight they were at a “good” price, although I was unaware of this.

Anyways I had completely forgot about them until I read about the bitcoin market crashing again, around April of this year. I thought “Oh well, there goes my money”. I checked to see how worthless they were only to find out they roughly were, and still are, worth about 40-fold what I paid for them!

Image credits: kernelmusterd

#20

Bought a home befote a housing boom. $120, 000 profit in 1 year from selling 1 house.

Image credits: Rachellybean

#21

Sold my car to some bald guy with a beard wandering the desert.

Image credits: Indydegrees2

#22

I used to donate s***m for money. I’d get paid $75 a load. I also donated plasma whenever I could as that paid more.

Free p**n + orgasm + getting paid for it = win

I wonder how many kids have been spawned from my seed?

Image credits: KillerBeeTX

#23

3 hours of live black jack made 1250 dollars. (started with 100 walked with 1350).

Image credits: Rishiku

#24

I was taking an online Intro to Programming class (Java) for easy marks in high school. A few other friends were in it, one of them didn’t really do many of the assignments. About a week before the final project was due (Nothing too complicated, one of the options was a simple game using some of the things we learned).

He said he’d pay me $300 to do the assignment for him and I thought he was joking. So I threw together a nice little Ottawa Senators trivia game and made the GUI pretty using the team colours and logos. This took about 3 hours including lunch.

I send him the project files and what do you know, he shows up the next day and hands me $300.

#25

Went to a casino with the family. Dad handed me 20 bucks for gambling. Did not gamble, made 20 bucks.

Image credits: flyingviolin

#26

Found $40 on the ground. picking it up: 5 seconds tops.
Hourly wage at that rate: $28,800/hour
Yearly Salary at that rate: $57,600,000.

Image credits: lightstuffonfire

#27

I sold WoW accounts when I was in high school (2005-2006) for outrageous amounts of money. I would find people either on Ebay or on forums who didn’t really know how much their account was worth, lowball them, and then sell it on eBay for 2-5x as much. Once you could transfer characters to new accounts though…that’s when the real money was made. Buy an account with 3-5 level 60s for $300 and transfer them all to new accounts. Each new account would sell for at least $200. My friend and I made almost $7000 our sophomore year in high school doing this over a span of about six months and I never had to work through the rest of high school.

Image credits: terrehsquad

#28

Do a 38 day long clinical study for an opiate based painkiller. Walked out with 9500 dollars.

Tldr: paid to take d***s

Edit: if anyone does a study from seeing this I would love to talk about it in detail and be a reference. Also, in case it was missed in the comments, jalr.org is the best resource for the USA.

Image credits: Snarkybasturd

#29

Won an eating competition, 1000 bucks in 2 min.

Also found out what Churros taste like, so win/win.

Image credits: Walletau

#30

Breaking up with my ex. Saved so much money it felt like I had gotten a raise.

Image credits: Owtlaw1

#31

I once sold my drunk friend two pieces of his own toast for ten dollars.

Image credits: suuupbrah

#32

My middle school banned gum for a year so i would go to stores and buy packs of gum in bulk then come into school and sell it to my classmates. I made about $10 every day and i was 12 years old.

Image credits: GavinM34

#33

Easiest/wierdest money I made was when I was backpacking around the country, and one day this Asian guy in a Porsche pulls up in front of the hostel and asks if I wanted to earn some money. For 2 weeks I got paid $100 each day to be driven around in a Porsche, and I would get given a phone and a list of phone numbers to call and figures that I had to read out to each phone number.

He said he was a real estate agent but that some of his clients didn’t like to be spoken to by someone with an asian accent, which I went along with because it was easy money ($100 for 30-40 minutes work), but I’m 99% sure it was gambling figures.

Image credits: dangermouse2

#34

Some guy offered me $450 for my student football ticket (I go to a university that eats drinks and breathes college football, and this was a very minor game that everyone had already been selling their tickets for less than $50) if I would just shoot the s**t and talk about football with him. I told him quite plainly that I have 0 interest in football or sports at all really, don’t know the rules and have never sat through an entire game so his money would be better spent elsewhere.

It was then that my boyfriend pointed out that that’s *probably* not all that he thought he would be paying for.

Image credits: Bilbro-Swagginz

#35

Online gambling. I used to exploit loopholes in online casino deposit bonus payouts.

Basically: deposit money, get 100% additional bonus sign up cash from casino, gamble by playing mathematically perfect blackjack for a few hours to meet payout requirements, expect to lose a very small percentage of initial deposit, collect bonus money essentially doubling your investment, withdraw cash, rinse and repeat with another casino or different account. Made many thousands of dollars over the summer time when I was younger before the casinos caught on and closed the loopholes.

I could make a few hundred dollars a day just from a few hours of “gambling”. When I first learned about the exploit I thought it was too good to be true, did the math, math checked out so I decided to give it a try using $50, $50 turned into $100 quite easily and I used that to bankroll deposit on the next casino, etc. etc. and the money keep growing. In the end turned $50 into thousands of dollars because casinos were expecting people to actually gamble, and it took them many months to catch onto what was happening.

EDIT: Please keep in mind this was many years ago that i did this, back in 2005 I believe. To the people messaging me, you CANNOT take advantages of this anymore, the loophole has been closed for years. And also keep in mind that this is was not really “gambling”, after hundreds of thousands of hands of blackjack the actual return converges on the mathematically calculated expected return based on the odds, its all based on math. While it was fun in the beginning it got very tedious towards the end, especially after using up all the good casinos and having to work my way down the list, less return on the crappy casinos for more effort.

#36

Being a cam w***e! Making over 700 $ for two hours of drunken flirting and self-pleasuring that I would have done anyway without the monetary incentive? Yes please.

#37

In 2012 when hurrican Sandy hit NY I just so happened to arrive on the day of the hurricane. Was totally stranded without power or water in the East Village. NExt day I got a zipcar to charge my phone. Driving around I saw tons of people who needed rides and being me, I stopped and picked up a person. Then I stopped to pick up 2 oldies, and they immediately ask “how much?” “Ten bucks,” I told them.

2 hours later I had driven from the East Village to Upper EAst like 4 or 5 times, and made about $300.

#38

Restoring my bosses computer who knows nothing of computers during working hours (worked in retail at the time). Got 200$ for watching a couple episodes of Samurai Jack.

#39

A girl bet me $20 to eat sushi. I did and it was delicious. She agreed to pay me $5 everyday that she neglected to pay me the $20. I made a solid $40. This was in junior high.

#40

I was offered $5000 to take a p**s on some guy. Turned it down though cause the whole thing seemed a bit sketchy..

And btw, I’m a dude.

#41

I signed up to do extra work for a very s****y but major-studio film while I was in college; it was filming near my campus. For whatever reason, the director liked me and asked if I would be OK with speaking one or two lines to the main character (a famous actress). I said sure. Because I had to spend all day on the set and go to costuming and makeup, I was offered a SAG voucher (I’m not sure if it works that way anymore?) and was paid union rates. Instead of $100, I made a little under $2,000.

#42

Playing poker. I use to live next to the new Cleveland Horseshoe casino. I would go play on Friday / Saturday nights after either an Indians or Cavs game. It would draw a lot of suburbanites who had been drinking and who aren’t good at poker into the casino.

Played the lowest limit ($1 / $2) and averaged about $300 profit per night. With a few nights approaching $1,000 in profit.

#43

I take attendance for athletes at my university. I sit outside a class for 30 minutes and make 8 dollars. If the class is empty, I can leave and still get the pay. It’s not the most amount of money, but it pays for food and drink.

#44

When I started my first holliday job, I worked at the cash register of a big supermarket chain. A woman wanted to pay with a VISA card that was denied. I informed my manager and she cut the card in two, wrote down my name and sent everything to VISA (this is standard procedure).

For this, I recieved 5000 belgian francs (before the euro). I had never had so much money before. With that, I bought my [first cell phone]

#45

I lent my student I.D. to an alumni at a college football game for 50 dollars. Students get in for free, well we pay a sports fee in our tuition. All I did was go in and hand it to him through the gate.

#46

Bought and sold a domain name. Could have bought a motorcycle, should have bought a motorcycle.

#47

I was practicing appeals law. Often a plaintiff lawyer who had won money for his or her client at trial did not like to handle appeals, so if the losing side did appeal, the case would be referred to me. My fee would be contingent, usually 10 %. A sizeable case was referred to me and settled shortly after. I had done no significant work. I was paid $197,000 dollars. I voluntarily relinquished $47,000 to the client.

#48

Beanie Babies. I have hundreds that I bought years ago. Technically I havn’t made much money yet, but trust me I will.

#49

When I was living in Virginia I was renting a room in a townhouse, and one day it snowed a massive 2 inches! As I was clearing my car off, one of the neighbors offered me $80 to shovel her stairs, walkway and car. I insisted that was way too much money for clearing the light fluffy snow, but she wouldn’t listen. Then the neighbor saw me and paid me another $50 to do her walk and parking space. $130 total for about ten minutes of work. This should have been a clue to the insanity I was about to witness on the roads, it took me two hours to drive the 5 miles to work.

#50

I set up a Wii for my mom’s friend’s kid. $20 to plug in the cord to the tv and turn it on.

#51

Picked up a broken clothes dryer off of craigslist for free. Heating element was broken. Crimped the wires back together, sold it on Craigslist for $80.

That’s not the best part, though. I delivered it to this chick’s house, hauled it downstairs for her and hauled off her broken one cause I’m a nice guy, she tipped me $20. Spend $15 on parts to repair that dryer, sold dryer a few days later to a guy who gave me two old washers and a dryer AND $80.

Now my garage is full of f*****g appliances and I’ve got people constantly wanting to give me broken appliances or buy working ones from me, and I can’t keep up. All I wanted was some beer money… :(.

#52

Working as a bank teller. Someone brought in $86 in silver half dollars. All pre-1964 some were pre whatever date was needed so that they were 90% silver. Sold them on Craigslist within the week for $1850. For anybody that is wondering, I did attempt to convince the customer not to deposit them. The customer insisted that they had no value.

#53

Being on Mad TV. Got paid over $500 just for “performing” for a few hours (I was part of a fake band they used in a sketch), and when it aired, I received a $400 royalty check. I received about 10 more checks after that, totaling another $400. Never got to see that kind of easy money again tho 🙁 …

#54

I made $250 over a year from a smoking cessation survey. I didn’t even have to quit smoking, I was in the control group!
Edit: my name is ruby, I am female. Also it was a smoking cessation survey so everyone smoked, I was only shown a pamphlet at the start and the test group got an interactive website with support.

#55

Writing college essays for rich, lazy international students. You won’t believe the extent of their laziness or the depth of their wallets.

2 page essay that’s purely opinion-based and requires barely any research? Meh, that can still be outsourced. $50/page? Wow, that’s a steal! You’re charging an extra $200 because it’s due tomorrow? Sounds fair! How much for a research paper? $150/page with an extra $50/page fee for last minute requests? Hey! I have a research paper due tomorrow!

If anyone wants to get into this business, my tip is:

* It’s all about the kids from 3rd world countries. If they can afford to go abroad just for college, they’re filthy rich.
* International students from the same countries tend to be a tight-knit community and word of mouth spreads fast, so don’t be a d****e.
* Guarantee A- minimum, with a $50 refund for Bs and complete refund for anything below a B-.

EDIT: To answer some common questions I’ve gotten in this thread and in PMs:

> How do you reach these kids?

I lived in various countries growing up so I usually click more with international students. Almost all my clients are actually my friends or friends of friends. A lot of these rich kids are surprisingly really nice, and it also helps if you’re not white since they usually get a lot of racism from white people, especially in their home countries. A lot of the superwealthy Asians & Indians I know are slightly pissed with white people just because white worship is so common in Asia (the entire continent), a lot of the superwealthy Middle Easterners are pissed off with white people thanks to the Islamophobia & getting a hard time in the airports, a lot of the superwealthy Africans are pissed of with white people because…well…sometimes, people don’t expect a black guy to be so rich he can’t be bothered to wear anything other than pyjamas when walking into Hermès.

> Where do you advertise?

I don’t. The people with money doing this want something discreet so the louder and more commercial you are, the more they avoid you. It’s all word of mouth, which spreads incredibly fast in all these immigrant communities. Hell, I work in Asia now and I recently went to a conference where I somehow bumped into the father of this Jordanian girl I used to write essays for. He happily told everyone and that opened so many doors. The people from 3rd world countries don’t see it as unethical, they see it as brilliant I could get As in essays for classes I never took.

> What website do you use to create your essays?

You’re lazy.

> How much did you make?

Well, let’s just say I have an ex-friend after she defaulted on $2,500 even though she can afford to pay me. I earned a lot final years of high school (so many kids too lazy to write their application essays and I had a reputation for being very nerdy), had a dry spell in freshman year since everyone’s new and I don’t know anyone yet, started getting business sophomore year, crazy busy final year (I graduated in 3 years) and had to chase people off when I became a banker since I was working 12-16h days.

Don’t quit your job for this, do it as a side income in college. And you can only do this in college since most colleges offer access to academic articles for free. Once you’re out, maintaining access to those sites that may cost about $1,000/month will definitely break you since the job is so inconsistent. Even if you decide to just buy individual articles, each research paper cost money and you need at least 15 sources for a good research paper. The only way you can make it work is if you can find a college student who’ll lend you his/her access for free.

> How do I not get screwed over?

It’s a trust business and that’s why relationships matter. The girl who defaulted on me pretty much got socially ostracized afterwards. She was already pretty unpopular anyway while I had a pretty solid rep so they know I was telling the truth. She’s extremely bratty and last I heard of her, her friends are only American kids who are still impressed by her wealth. She realized how stupid it was to default on me after it finally dawned on her she still needed someone to write her essays after she got into the school she wanted. She came crawling back offering to pay me back, but I figured I’ll just write that $2,500 as marketing fees to let people know how dumb it is to default.

#56

A friend of mine needed to give a presentation to clients in India, and wanted me to translate the text matter into Hindi. His company was going to go to a professional agency for it anyway, and he figured he could save money by asking me to do it for a smaller fee.

So I did it. For like 150EUR, 10EUR per slide. Took me about 2 hours in all.

What’s funny is that he didn’t need to do this at all. The presentation was in English. All his clients in India would understand English perfectly.

Whatever, corporates.

#57

Invested in Google when it was at $880.

Edit: Also invested in a company called Growlife, traded as PHOT. I bought in at $0.03, now it’s at $0.395. With all of this marijuana legalisation going underway I suspect it will be a lucrative industry in the near future.

#58

I “make” several thousand dollars every March by simply having more tax held out of my paycheck than necessary. Yeah, it’s an interest free loan to the government and I could be using it better elsewhere but I’m sort of a simpleton and I’m happy enough to leave the tax guy every year doing the Wayne’s World “We got five thousand dollars!” song and dance.

#59

Stock market. I made a few good investments about a year ago and I’ve made 250% so far.

#60

I bought a large new apartment complex that had been foreclosed on. I lucked into finding it bullshitting with the previous owner one night when he was drunk at a bar and got to speak with the bank before they put it on the market. Rented out every single unit in 3 months, pocketed every bit of cash I made from it (kept the previous employees) and then sold it about a year later for a $400,000 dollar profit on top of what I had been making from all the rentals.

#61

I had a healed wound on the top of one of my knuckles. Scraped it purposly on a trampoline infront of a friend for 2 bucks. Didn’t hurt at all.

#62

I get quite well paid for babysitting my cousins. They’re nice and behave (quite) well.

#63

Received $100 for participation in a focus group about Digg. Got to the building about 5 minutes late and talk to the receptionist. She says its no problem and will show me to the room shortly. While she is gone, another woman comes out with a check and tells me I’m good to go.

#64

Bouncing at high school parties in my first year of university. $100 bucks for the night plus free beer and food. High school kids always hired too many (usually all guys from my rugby team) and we really didn’t do much except sit around, shoot the s**t and drink free beer.

#65

Cleaning some pool furniture. About a half hour of work for 60$ was great at 16.

#66

Found $40 in the ATM yesterday…

#67

I was trying a freelance site where people get hired for programming or tech-related jobs. One guy was posted a simple question, like “How to check the installed memory amount in Linux” and I answered him with a $5 bid. There were tons of others people on that one, but he accepted my answer. Easiest $5 ever done.

#68

I helped a friend’s dad with his computer. His machine was dying, and I managed to scrape together an old dell(my father had the parts because he supports a couple of sites in a region and had some left over parts). I whip it all together, drop on XP, and hand it over.

Get it all set up, talk to his ISP, make sure everything is working.

He hands me 500 bucks, I would have done it for free. For 500 bucks he could have bought a new computer with much better specification.

Total time at his place, an hour.

#69

Buy d***s. Sell d***s for more than you bought them for.

#70

Blackjack. It’s also the fastest and easiest way I’ve lost money.

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