Help me pay my rent and live happily ever after

July 29, 2006 3:45 PM

In the next few months I'm planning to move out of the family home for the first time and rent a place with a couple of friends. I have a decent income (i work 9-5 5 days a week), but would like to earn something on the side to pay my monthly rent, and leave me with my existing income to enjoy.

I'm 23, and living in the UK. i've spent the last 6 years working in web design/development, but can do all sorts of photoshoppery and video work as well. Although this is something im skilled at, i dont think doing this freelance in my evenings and weekends will leave me with enough free time to enjoy myself. I can also do the usual install/repair/maintain PC's, but again, this could end up really really sucking.

My final thought.....is running/maintaining an adult website (as a "webmaster"). I keep hearing that theres money in it, but ive no idea what it involves or if i could run such a site using a domestic broadband account (probably violates a ToS). It's a little unsavory, but it might be worth it (and im hardly a prude).

I'd also like to invest some money, or buy stock in someone like Google so that I can reap some reward in the future. But again, I know nothing about doing this.

I only need an extra £300ish a month to cover the rent. What options do I have? Suggestions?

posted by lemonfridge to work & money (3 comments total)

I'm going to shoot down a couple of your ideas and I'm sorry for it:

First is, if you're freelance, you can just tell somebody that you're "busy" and can't help them tonight while you go get hammered at a bar. Sure, it's not professional but you're not claiming to be. Depending on the level of involvement you have (are you the guy they call at 3AM when stuff doesn't work or are you the guy who comes over and cleans crap outta the system to keep it in good running shape as your time allows?)

Running an adult website would definitely run afoul of most ToS but there are options, previously discussed. I think there would be a lot of start up costs and you'd have to individualize yourself... Most money comes from ads but Google won't touch you, so you'll have to figure all that out (I'm sure it's not hard but there are probably unsavory folks who would take advantage of you).

Investing money is a tricky thing. Don't throw your money at any stock in particular, especially technology stocks, unless you're holding for the long term. Fool.com has lots of great information about how you should really invest, unless you're willing to take a lot of risk (ie. buying Google is risky but can be massively profitable over the long term, buying a mutual fund or index fund or {and this is really where you should start looking for short term, safe investments} money market accounts and certificates of deposits or even treasury notes and bonds {these typically have long wait times to get your money back out} may be where you should look.)

So, I like the idea of you freelancing and doing what you want when you want. If you've done it in the past, you probably have a pretty decent network of contacts to ask if they need anything. If you're a one man shop, you can show them how flexible you can be and how nice it is to work with only one guy and not a whole company of folks.

Just to finish up, investing will not get you lots of money really fast. It can, but more often, you will lose lots of money really fast, unless you know what you're doing. And even then, you still may lose lots of money.
posted by ajpresto at 4:21 PM on July 29, 2006

Does your £300/mo figure take into account utilities and any other new, recurring costs you'll see as a result of moving out (eg, will you be buying your own food more often now? will your commute be more expensive?). If so, great. If not, recalibrate.

There are probably a lot of businesses with ~20 people that need someone to come in for a half-day every week and de-gunk their LAN, that kind of thing. If you're qualified to do that, that's worth looking into. I'm guessing you could charge £30/hr for that, perhaps more. If so, you only need two half-days/mo to cover your additional £300. If you can line up a few clients like that, you're set. And as ajpresto points out, with pixel-monkey freelance work, you can always say "no."

Running an adult website is (from what I've read) a really hard way to make money, simply because there are so many other people doing it: in order to make enough profit to make it worthwhile, you'd need a lot of users, so you'd need to come up with an interesting angle and be constantly busy administering the site. If, however, you could get contract work from an existing porn site, hey, go for it.

ajpresto also has good advice on investing. Two words: mutual fund.
posted by adamrice at 4:40 PM on July 29, 2006

A porn site on residential broadband? Are you crazy? Even setting aside the ToS/AUP problem, you get, what, 30kB/s upload? 45kB/s? That's nothing. Visitors are not going to wait around for 5 hours while their 100MB clips download, they want it fast. Busy pron sites go through heaps and heaps of bandwidth (in the thousands of GBs per month range at least, I would guess.)

From what I have read about the online porn industry there are essentially two tiers -- the people that actually generate content (i.e. photographing and filming scenes) and everybody else. There's only serious money to be made if you are in the former. The latter consists of the majority of crap that clogs up Google results -- sites that are essentially devoid of content, but whose only function is to refer to you some other website with a referral code that gets them some small payment.

So unless you're actually willing to roll up your sleeves and get into the production side of porn you will probably spend hours and hours setting up a million different teaser websites under countless domain names (and other grey-hat SEO bullshit) to result in a very small payout. To say that this line of work is saturated with people all competing for clicks would be an understatement.

Again, I have no actual knowledge of the field but this is what I have read elsewhere. It may not be true.
posted by Rhomboid at 4:57 PM on July 29, 2006