Comments on: How can I convert 80 hours of free time into $500 per month?

Question: How can I convert 80 hours of free time into $500 per month?

(bb|[^b]{2}) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 19:55:16 -0800

I'm looking for the most creative use of my time from 9 AM to 1 PM, Monday through Friday, that will result in me making an extra $500 per month.

I want to be free of debt by the end of 2009, but to accomplish this I need to make exactly $500 per month from now until New Year's Eve 2009. I've been self-employed for the last four years, and make enough to live comfortably, but not enough to pay down my debt in a timely manner. I can carve 20 hours out of my week to do something, but what?

Having been my own boss for quite some time, I'd like to stay away from being someone else's employee, but other than that, the sky's the limit. If my particular skill sets are important to better answer the question, I'll gladly list them below, but for now I wanted this to remain as broad and open as possible.

By: All.star

All.star — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:03:24 -0800

Give plasma. Obviously you won't make $500 a month doing it, but it would be some extra cash.

By: zarah

zarah — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:11:05 -0800

When I was in university I supplemented my crappy student loans with money made from dog walking at lunch time. I made flyers and plastered them up in the vicinity of my school and ended up having a handful of regular clients until I graduated.

By: The corpse in the library

The corpse in the library — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:15:48 -0800

Do a blog. Have readers. Run ads.

By: k8t

k8t — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:18:15 -0800

Can you get up before 9am? Working at a bakery or cafe might work. It is tough to fill those opening shifts.

By: greta simone

greta simone — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:18:24 -0800

That's only 6.25 an hour. That, sir (or madam) is less than the minimum wage. So you could pretty much do anything that fits into that time-slot. Slinging burgers? Scooping ice cream? Telemarketing? Pick your poison.

By: IndigoRain

IndigoRain — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:18:57 -0800

Not likely, corpse. I have a website and it nets me $20 a month from Adsense, and maybe $5 a month from Amazon referrals. Granted it's not a blog but it's not easy to earn money that way anymore.

By: (bb|[^b]{2})

(bb|[^b]{2}) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:19:22 -0800

Having been my own boss for quite some time, I'd like to stay away from being someone else's employee

By: greta simone

greta simone — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:19:29 -0800

Oh, didn't catch the part about not being someone else's employee. So scratch my previous post.

By: turgid dahlia

turgid dahlia — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:19:57 -0800

Mow lawns.

By: Cool Papa Bell

Cool Papa Bell — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:22:54 -0800

Find some underserved area of town and open up a small snack bar / kiosk type thing. I'm always shocked when I see a Little League game going on, and there's no snack bar. Be the neighborhood ice cream man.

By: jak68

jak68 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:28:34 -0800

tech support? I put up flyers in the neighborhood and got a lot of loyal clients whose computers I fix by appointment.

freelance writing or editing? Put an ad in craigslist offering your services? Put up flyers around universities?

Depends on what your skill set is; put up flyers accordingly?

If you only have to hit 6 bucks an hour, I imagine you'd have potentially have a lot of options. Depends on what you can do I guess.

When I was paying down my school loans I worked evenings at a bookstore after a full day of work at my regular job. It did the trick, I paid them off way early and then happily quit the bookstore. Easy job, kind of fun even, low pressure and easygoing coworkers and customers. Very painless.

By: Inspector.Gadget

Inspector.Gadget — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:36:45 -0800

Panhandle. I'm not kidding.

By: kuujjuarapik

kuujjuarapik — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:39:00 -0800

Walk dogs.

By: lia

lia — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:40:24 -0800

if you're in a city or the kind of suburb that will sustain it: walk dogs! charge between $10-15 per hour or half hour per dog and the money ads up.

By: lia

lia — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:40:57 -0800

err, adds up. also: damn you kuujjuarapik!

By: lizjohn

lizjohn — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:46:30 -0800

You could try being a guide for ChaCha. You sit around and answer questions via the internet. It doesn't pay well, but there are no set time commitments, you log-on when you choose. You just have to maintain a certain number of questions a week to qualify for the better money ($.20/question vs. $.10/q).

By: djgh

djgh — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:58:01 -0800

Likewise Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Also, sign up to things like Quidco and TopCashBack, so for any spending you do through them, you get a percentage back (those are UK based, but I'd imagine that there are US ones).

Mystery shopping might also be quite fun, and make you some money.

By: meta_eli

meta_eli — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:12:07 -0800

Likewise Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Seems unlikely that you could make anywhere near $6/hour on the Turk

By: not that girl

not that girl — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:37:56 -0800

Were I in your position, I'd go for a minimum-wage job: bookstore clerk, coffee shop employee, whatever. I hear that you don't want a boss, but I don't think I'd want to take on anything where I had a lot of responsibility or had to work at marketing even in a low-key way. The kind of job where if it turns out not to be as mellow as you'd like, or your boss is a jerk, you could just walk away. A friend of mine recently spent a year working a few shifts a week at a party store to supplement her professional income, and she found it kind of restful to have the kind of job where the work is immediate and short-term (stock those shelves, cash out those customers) and she could just walk away at the end of her shift.

By: turgid dahlia

turgid dahlia — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:45:36 -0800

not that girl has a point. Anything where you're your own boss is going to have a negative impact on the money you make per hour. For example, working at Borders (or wherever) and earning x per hour for 4 hours per day, or doing your own thing and earning x for 3 hours per day, with an unpaid hour devoted to administration, paperwork, managing customers, bookings, appointments, whatever.

By: elisynn

elisynn — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:15:15 -0800

Not a regular gig, but you can sometimes check and see if local universities/colleges need participants in studies and experiments--the renumeration isn't so bad. The extra cash came in handy a few times when I was at school.

By: PercussivePaul

PercussivePaul — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:03:53 -0800

You could operate a food cart like the ones they have in Portland. 9am to 1pm gives you a chance to catch the lunch rush.

By: cwhitfcd

cwhitfcd — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:04:08 -0800

Online poker

By: djgh

djgh — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:19:24 -0800

I've been thinking more about this, and what you need is a paying job where you don't have to do a huge amount. So for the below AskMe, substitute 'reading time' for something else that will pay you money (filling out questionnaires online, playing online poker (if you're good enough) etc.). The money you make on the second one doesn't have to be good, but if you're on $6 and hour doing X, and earn an extra $1 an hour on Y whilst doing X, then I guess you're making more than you should.
AskMe question

By: WCityMike

WCityMike — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:36:26 -0800

Inspector.Gadget: "Panhandle. I'm not kidding."

You are currently self-employed. This suggests to me that a money-raising technique that would heavily damage your reputation, like panhandling, would be an extremely bad idea.

By: arcticwoman

arcticwoman — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 10:07:38 -0800

9am isn't quite early enough to have a paper route (I get $500 a month from mine, and I deliver from 5:30 am to 7am), but you could get a flyer route or two. My roommate delivers flyers Tuesday and Thursday mornings and makes a couple hundred bucks a month. No, you aren't your own boss - but you never have to see your boss or any other employees plus you get exercise and fresh air.

By: zarah

zarah — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:47:49 -0800

I should add that I charged $15 an hour per dog and usually walked 3-4 at a time for 60 min (taking them directly to the nearest dog friendly park), and made aprox. $675 per week. Of course that's useless to you if you don't have a way with dogs, and since 2 more people have suggested it since my first post & you haven't said anything you probably don't like the idea. But just thought I should mention how lucrative it can be.

By: Susurration

Susurration — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:19:07 -0800

Transcription from audio recordings. Good transcriptionists get paid between $20-40 per hour of transcription (more if highly technical or specialist language is involved). I reckon that one hour of audio takes 3-4 hours to transcribe. But you do this in your own space and your own time. Post flyers in various colleges at your local University, or find an online transcription agency to work for.

By: sharkhunt

sharkhunt — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 16:55:23 -0800

It really depends on how creative you are in your quest for $500. If you are a literate sort, you may be able to be a proofreader for local companies, they are always looking for people to come up with a dazzling write up for marketing purposes. you can work as a sub contractor doing that part time. think outside of the box and look for small/medium size companies that need the marketing help.

By: nax

nax — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:22:16 -0800

In-home child care. And you can charge a LOT more than six bucks an hour.

By: jak68

jak68 — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 23:05:21 -0800

sussuration - do you have any transcription agency in mind? Have you done that kind of work?

sharkhunt - do you have any proofreading/write-up subcontracting company in mind?

By: napdynmite

napdynmite — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:25:32 -0800

Offer to sell less tech-savvy friends' and families' stuff on eBay at a small profit.

By: Dave Faris

Dave Faris — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 09:11:54 -0800

Play a MMORPG like World of Warcraft, and grind out high level characters, gold, and rare magical items to sell for cash on eBay. (Note : breaks WoW TOS.)

By: rintako

rintako — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:45:12 -0800

For someone that is self-employed, I am surprised you haven't come up with a way to turn 4 hours everyday into $500 (sorry to be Frank but it is quite surprising.)

What are you good at? You can sell advice and expertise at a high price. If you're good at computers, look at Geek Squad. They charge like 90 to install a stick of RAM into the computer. You can probably do it for 30-50 for someone.

You can also start a website. I'm a student, and I make about $500-700 every month on my blog. And the thing is, I haven't done anything to it since February.

Tutor somebody. Perhaps you have strong educational background? Teach music. Like Marge says, you only need to be one lesson ahead of the student ;) (Actually I'm just joking, there are many different learning levels)

Become a door-to-door salesmen such as Amway.

Or you can just get a job that has a 4 hour shift during that time. Why 9 and not earlier?

By: mikewas

mikewas — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:32:24 -0800

Seconding the tutoring idea. Looks like you might know some math - find some underachieving kids of type-A parents who'll pay you $50 an hour for math tutoring.

By: bottlebrushtree

bottlebrushtree — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:49:37 -0800

Cat sitting for people, go to their houses and feed the cat and change the little. We pay something like $20/day when we go away.

Offer to help people sell stuff on ebay and do the logistics

Scan people's pictures or CDs in for cash

By: Elminster24

Elminster24 — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:53:45 -0800

There's a few things I'm wondering here. First, you mention you are self-employed and comfortable in your lifestyle. Instead of looking for another job, why not look for creative ways to increase the amount you make from your main job? If you have an established business, it seems it would be easier to leverage that into an extra $500/mo than starting fresh at something else that will inevitably be capped in earning potential (especially if you follow the advice of some here and get a minimum wage job).

In response to those suggesting start a blog--I would disagree. A blog can be profitable but is a HUGE time sink in terms of time spent writing and marketing for the site, and there is no guarantee of making jack.

I have a site I built that aggregates eBay auctions for a specific niche and I make commissions off of that (typically $300-$500/mo) with it just sitting there, but I coded the site from scratch.

It would help if you could clarify what your main profession is as there may be side jobs that could spring from that.

There's also the flip side of this which is, rather than looking for ways to make MORE money, look for ways to spend LESS. Make some lifestyle adjustments. I won't list out ways to do that here since there's a million and one places to find that info online but if you're smart enough to be posting here, you're smart enough to figure out ways to cut expenses.