40+ Passive Income Ideas and Ways to Make Extra Money
Do you want to earn $100, $1000 — or even more — on the side? You can start earning extra income today with the help of this list of ideas I’ve put together. Spend an hour or two each day working on items that are practical for you, and you can build alternative income sources to help you improve your financial situation while many of the items on this list are passive income ideas, not all of them are. Some items require you to actively work for success.
While compiling this list, I did my best to avoid scams, and stick with practical ideas that work. I have tried many (but not all) of these ideas. Some of these helped me earned a few dollars here and there, but there are some that helped me earn extra money on the side every single day — and some are still providing me with revenue! Note that not all ideas will fit your skills and abilities. What works for you depends on your abilities and your current financial situation.
Passive Income Ideas
Passive income involves ideas or methods that, once you set in motion, require minimal maintenance work. The following money making ideas are mostly passive, and are proven to work.
While compiling this list, I did my best to avoid scams, and stick with practical ideas that work. I have tried many (but not all) of these ideas. Some of these helped me earned a few dollars here and there, but there are some that helped me earn extra money on the side every single day — and some are still providing me with revenue! Note that not all ideas will fit your skills and abilities. What works for you depends on your abilities and your current financial situation.
Passive Income Ideas
Passive income involves ideas or methods that, once you set in motion, require minimal maintenance work. The following money making ideas are mostly passive, and are proven to work.
1. Earn Higher Interest on Your Savings
One of the easiest ways to increase your passive income is to shift your savings to a bank that pays a higher yield on your savings — for example, Discover Bank and EverBank pay almost 1% for your money. Although it doesn’t sound like much (especially in this low interest environment), little things do add up and eventually interest rates will rise.
2. Build a CD Ladder
For a slightly higher yield, build a CD ladder. Break your money into smaller chunks and buy a series of 1-year high yield certificates of deposit. To learn more about this, take a look at How to Create a CD Ladder.
3. Lend Money via Social Lending Network
Lending Club is a platform where you can lend your money to other people. You’re the bank. Each note is only $25, so you can invest $1,000 and lend money to 40 people. There are many grades of loan (from safest to riskiest) and investors earn, on average, between 5% and 7% annualized returns. For more information, check out Investing and Making Money with Lending Club Peer-to-Peer Lending and my real money Lending Club Portfolio.
4. Invest in Dividend Paying Stocks or Funds
If you’re looking for current income, investing in the dividend paying stocks (or dividend funds) is a good way to earn money regularly. Pay particular attention to the S&P Dividend Aristocrats; these are companies that have long histories of increasing their dividend payouts each year.5. Use Cash Back Reward Credit Cards
You buy stuff every day: Why not make the most of your purchases? Take a look at these credit cards that pay 5% cash back on your purchases. When you make your day-to-day purchases, use a rewards card and get money back. My family receives several hundred dollars a year from using these cards.6. Get Cash Rebates When Buying Online
When you shop online, go through Ebates. This web site provides you with extra cash back (on top of your credit card cash back) when you buy through them. Install the browser toolbar for even better results.7. Earn Money When You Search
You probably do a couple of web searches each day. If you do all your web searches through Swagbucks.com (instead of Google or Bing), you can collect points called SwagBucks. Trade your SwagBucks for a variety of prizes, including gift cards for Amazon.com, Walmart, PayPal, and more.
8. Real Estate Investing
This is mostly passive once you have it all set up, but it does take a lot of work at the beginning. Real estate investing also requires occasional maintenance. Currently, we invest in a couple of rental properties and earn about $500 profit from each per month. You can read more about my rental properties at MoneySmartLife.com: How and Why I Became a Landlord.
If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, you can gain exposure to real estate investing through Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). REITs invest in real estate and mortgage, and pay out 90% of the taxable income to shareholders annually.
Ways to Make Extra Money
In addition to the passive income ideas listed above and other broad income generation ideas such as starting a business, getting a second job, and learning how to invest, here are specific money making ideas you can try. Most of these items require ongoing work to maintain the income.
1. College students: Sell your used books and textbooks at the end of the semester.
2. Sign up for Cash Crate, complete surveys, and refer your friends.
3. Freelance using UpWork, Guru, Freelancer, Amazon Mechanical Turk and other similar sites for leads.
4. Make money with YouTube.
5. Make money on Twitch.
6. Make money blogging. This blog has been providing me with daily income since 2007. You can learn more about blogging and start start your own blog. Use the following articles to learn more about starting a blog:
o How to Start a Blog for Fun or Profit – Introduction to a Series at Cash Money Life.
o 28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website at Daily Blog Tips.
7. Write for money using a platform site like HubPages.
8. You can also write for TextBroker and Constant Content. Apply to write for various websites that hire freelance staff writers.
9. Ghostwriting. This is very similar to the idea above, but you write anonymously and the assignments are usually longer. You can ghostwrite articles, blog posts, and even books.
10. Offer basic services, including babysitting, housekeeping, gardening, dog walking, painting, snow removal, and other similar “odd jobs.” These basic services can provide income for motivated teenagers — and most of these can be done right in your neighborhood.
11. Offer skilled services such as tutoring, resume writing, business consulting, blog development, and logo design.
12. Turn your hobbies into income streams. Many hobbies, like photography, videography, quilting, gardening, and woodwork are ideal revenue generators.
13. Sell handmade products on Etsy.
14. Write and sell eBooks. This is easier than ever with the help of Amazon and the Kindle.
15. Enter contests and giveaways (use Google Alerts) and sell the prizes.
16. Search for freebies and sign up bonuses. For example, you can typically get a $100 bonus from a credit card sign up.
17. Turn your everyday spending into college savings with Upromise.
18. Become an Amazon Associate, and ask your friends to use your affiliate link when they make purchases.
19. Sell unused items on eBay or Craigslist. You can also buy bulk items and resell them individually.
20. Sell your collectibles.
21. Start a bulk candy vending machine business.
22. Mystery shopping.
23. Find missing money using sites like MissingMoney, Where’s My Refund, TreasuryHunt, PBGC database, and GovBenefits.gov.
24. Create and sell CafePress T-shirts.
25. Set up niche online store. Some good examples are Amazon.com aStore and eBay Niche Store.
26. Participate in paid focus group studies.
27. Sell your body parts and fluids.
28. Collect cans and bottles for recycling.
More Income Resources
1. 19 Great Passive Income Ideas That You Can Build Now at Wealth Pilgrim
2. 65 Home Business Ideas You Can Do From Your Kitchen Table at Good Financial Cents
3. 15 ways to make $200 quick at Christian PF
4. 10 Unusual Ways to Get Money Fast at Cash Money Life
5. 25 Ways to Make Money Today at WiseBread
6. Multiple Income Streams: 10 Ways to Earn Extra Income at The Dough Roller
7. 5 Ways To Make Some Extra Money at Bible Money Matters
8. 52 Ways to Make Extra Money at Prime Time Money
9. Everyman’s Guide to $30 / Month in Passive Income at Money Smarts Blog
10. Spend less than you earn – the wrong way to think at Brip Blap
11. 20+ Free Passive Income Resources at Life Optimizer
12. Passive Income: How to Earn More and Work Less at About.com
13. 8 Ways To Earn Passive Income Online at iSiteBuild.com
14. Automate Your Income to Simplify Your Life at Zen Habits
15. Passive Income is the Key to Freedom and Retirement at All Financial Matters
16. Defining Alternative Income at Lazy Man and Money
17. 40 Ways to Make Money on the Internet at Dumb Little Man
18. 102 Ways To Generate Extra Cash at Savings Advice
Below are various sources and types of income to lay the foundation for this discussion.
Sources of Income
· Primary Income – The most common form of income is the money you earn by working for someone. In return for your time and effort, your employer provides you with money in the form of a wage or a salary, plus benefits.
· Alternative Income – Money earned from sources other than your job. This can be money you earn from blogging, selling stuff on eBay, investment income, online business revenue, or other projects.
Types of Income
· Active Income (or Earned Income) — You are working for money. The key characteristic of active income is the cost of time. You must trade time (a limited resource) for money. If you stop, the income also stops.
· Passive Income (or Residual Income) — Money is working for you. This is the opposite of active income. Once you stop spending time on these income sources, the income flows don’t necessarily stop. Of course, there are varying degrees of passivity and it’s desirable to have highly passive alternative income sources.
Here’s an illustration of active-passive income spectrum:
Create an overall strategy that allows you to diversify your income by building multiple income streams and purposefully moving toward more passive income sources.
For additional information, please take a look at Building, Diversifying, and Shifting Your Income Streams.
Why Should You Care About Alternative Income
Alternative Income is an Essential Component Of Financial Freedom
In my 5 stages of financial health article, I share an illustration that depicts Power Wealth Building. As you can see below, alternative income increases your total income and accelerates your wealth building capacity. Moreover, we associate financial freedom with independence from our primary source of income, so alternative income that can eventually replace primary income. Cultivating alternative income will take you a step closer to financial freedom.
There are several advantages to having multiple income streams:
· If you lose your job, your income is lowered as opposed to disappeared.
· The higher you are on the career ladder, the harder it is to find an equivalent paying job.
· Multiple income streams will help you reach your financial goals faster.
· Multiple income streams give you a taste of financial freedom. For most people, financial freedom is occurs when you no longer need your job to cover your living expenses.
· Multiple income streams give you greater flexibility and leverage. You’re in a much more powerful position when you know that you are not 100% dependent on your job to make do.
I believe that the concept of having a career is dead (with a few exceptions). It’s too risky to rely on one source of income, especially when most employers do not hesitate to cut jobs to make their numbers look good. It’s imperative for everyone to minimize their income risk by building multiple income streams.
For additional information, please take a look at Building Multiple Income Streams As A Career.
The Time and Effort to Build Alternative Income Streams
I received several comments about time an effort it takes to build and grow alternative income streams. Why should you try to build another income stream when you could work a few extra hours at work to get the same amount? Here are two good reasons to build an additional income stream, rather than work more at a job (or get a second job):
1. Building your primary income (i.e., your job/career) took a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money as well. Many jobs require a college degree and some require even more education and training. I think 4 years of college is a lot of time, effort, and money! Compare all of that time to spending 3 hours a day for a year to build an income stream that could produce $1,000 a month.
2. Once you set up an income stream (particularly a passive one) you could shift your focus to other streams and it continues to produce. For example, if you have $10,000 in a savings account earning 1% per year, you will continue to receive $100 a year even if you stop paying attention to that income stream. On the other hand, if you stop working, your paycheck will stop.
How to Make More Money with Multiple Income Streams
I have a simple framework that can be used to create multiple income streams. There are endless possibilities when it comes to business ideas, and you can apply this framework to many of them.
7 Key Factors to Building Successful Income Streams
Building multiple income streams is simple, but not easy. Based on my own experience, I feel that there are 7 key success factors:
1. Passion — Do what you love.
2. Expertise — Focus on what you are good at.
3. Patience — Don’t expect to see the desired results right away.
4. Persistence — Not everything you try will be successful; keep trying.
5. Diversify — Don’t stop at the first thing that works; keep looking for more and different ways.
6. Little by little — Trickles of money from many streams combine to provide a decent amount of money.
7. Commitment — Some ideas take more effort than others.
For additional information, please take a look at 7 Key Factors to Build Successful Income Streams.
Becoming a Part-Time Entrepreneur
As we established above, it’s unwise to rely on one source of income and bet the farm on your career. One option is to become a part-time entrepreneur. Being a part-time entrepreneur allows you to maintain your regular income plus benefits, while at the same time giving you the opportunity to explore and expand your alternative income streams. As a part-time entrepreneur, you can afford to make mistakes and take on more risks. You can also go at your own pace as you develop your income streams.
For additional information, please take a look at Why Should You Become a Part-Time Entrepreneur.
How to Start Making More Money
If you are looking for a concrete place to start as you develop alternative income streams, here is my 4-step guide:
1. Start with ideas related to things that you enjoy doing. Get away from the stuff that you do not like. And you’ll spend a lot of time getting your business going, so you might as well do something you like.
2. Create proper business plan. Even if you have a very simple business, a good business plan can help keep you on the right track, providing you with direction. Small Business Administration (SBA) has some of the best resources on the web to get you started. At the very least, make sure your business is viable.
3. Implement and execute. The best plans and ideas don’t mean a thing unless you can turn them into reality. It takes some courage and a lot of willpower to make things happen, and you need to be persistent in your efforts.
4. Learn and improve. Even if your business fails, it’s a success if you learn something from the experience. Very few people are successful on their first attempt at starting a busines, so don’t give up. Your task is to learn from past failures and turn that cumulative experience into an eventual success.
40+ Alternative Income Ideas and Resources
If you want access to some great business ideas, head over to 40+ Alternative Income Ideas and Resources, where you’ll find over 40 income building ideas and resources.
Using the Extra Income
Once you have extra money flowing in, it’s time to use the cash to help you achieve your financial goals. Here are some ideas:
· Pay off debt
· Start an emergency fund
· Save and invest
· Reinvest in your income streams to make them bigger and better
· Research and start a new income stream
· Buy a new income stream
· Spend it and enjoy life
Lastly…
I’d love to hear your comments regarding this guide so that I can make it more useful.
This article collect from moolanomy.com
If you don’t want to get your hands dirty, you can gain exposure to real estate investing through Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). REITs invest in real estate and mortgage, and pay out 90% of the taxable income to shareholders annually.
Ways to Make Extra Money
In addition to the passive income ideas listed above and other broad income generation ideas such as starting a business, getting a second job, and learning how to invest, here are specific money making ideas you can try. Most of these items require ongoing work to maintain the income.
1. College students: Sell your used books and textbooks at the end of the semester.
2. Sign up for Cash Crate, complete surveys, and refer your friends.
3. Freelance using UpWork, Guru, Freelancer, Amazon Mechanical Turk and other similar sites for leads.
4. Make money with YouTube.
5. Make money on Twitch.
6. Make money blogging. This blog has been providing me with daily income since 2007. You can learn more about blogging and start start your own blog. Use the following articles to learn more about starting a blog:
o How to Start a Blog for Fun or Profit – Introduction to a Series at Cash Money Life.
o 28 Ways to Make Money with Your Website at Daily Blog Tips.
7. Write for money using a platform site like HubPages.
8. You can also write for TextBroker and Constant Content. Apply to write for various websites that hire freelance staff writers.
9. Ghostwriting. This is very similar to the idea above, but you write anonymously and the assignments are usually longer. You can ghostwrite articles, blog posts, and even books.
10. Offer basic services, including babysitting, housekeeping, gardening, dog walking, painting, snow removal, and other similar “odd jobs.” These basic services can provide income for motivated teenagers — and most of these can be done right in your neighborhood.
11. Offer skilled services such as tutoring, resume writing, business consulting, blog development, and logo design.
12. Turn your hobbies into income streams. Many hobbies, like photography, videography, quilting, gardening, and woodwork are ideal revenue generators.
13. Sell handmade products on Etsy.
14. Write and sell eBooks. This is easier than ever with the help of Amazon and the Kindle.
15. Enter contests and giveaways (use Google Alerts) and sell the prizes.
16. Search for freebies and sign up bonuses. For example, you can typically get a $100 bonus from a credit card sign up.
17. Turn your everyday spending into college savings with Upromise.
18. Become an Amazon Associate, and ask your friends to use your affiliate link when they make purchases.
19. Sell unused items on eBay or Craigslist. You can also buy bulk items and resell them individually.
20. Sell your collectibles.
21. Start a bulk candy vending machine business.
22. Mystery shopping.
23. Find missing money using sites like MissingMoney, Where’s My Refund, TreasuryHunt, PBGC database, and GovBenefits.gov.
24. Create and sell CafePress T-shirts.
25. Set up niche online store. Some good examples are Amazon.com aStore and eBay Niche Store.
26. Participate in paid focus group studies.
27. Sell your body parts and fluids.
28. Collect cans and bottles for recycling.
More Income Resources
1. 19 Great Passive Income Ideas That You Can Build Now at Wealth Pilgrim
2. 65 Home Business Ideas You Can Do From Your Kitchen Table at Good Financial Cents
3. 15 ways to make $200 quick at Christian PF
4. 10 Unusual Ways to Get Money Fast at Cash Money Life
5. 25 Ways to Make Money Today at WiseBread
6. Multiple Income Streams: 10 Ways to Earn Extra Income at The Dough Roller
7. 5 Ways To Make Some Extra Money at Bible Money Matters
8. 52 Ways to Make Extra Money at Prime Time Money
9. Everyman’s Guide to $30 / Month in Passive Income at Money Smarts Blog
10. Spend less than you earn – the wrong way to think at Brip Blap
11. 20+ Free Passive Income Resources at Life Optimizer
12. Passive Income: How to Earn More and Work Less at About.com
13. 8 Ways To Earn Passive Income Online at iSiteBuild.com
14. Automate Your Income to Simplify Your Life at Zen Habits
15. Passive Income is the Key to Freedom and Retirement at All Financial Matters
16. Defining Alternative Income at Lazy Man and Money
17. 40 Ways to Make Money on the Internet at Dumb Little Man
18. 102 Ways To Generate Extra Cash at Savings Advice
This guide is intended to provide readers with ideas, how-to tips, and resources on building multiple income streams and generating extra income. If you are interested in earning more money and becoming less dependent on your job, this is the guide for you. On the other hand, this guide is not about getting rich quick or making easy money.
Below are various sources and types of income to lay the foundation for this discussion.
Sources of Income
· Primary Income – The most common form of income is the money you earn by working for someone. In return for your time and effort, your employer provides you with money in the form of a wage or a salary, plus benefits.
· Alternative Income – Money earned from sources other than your job. This can be money you earn from blogging, selling stuff on eBay, investment income, online business revenue, or other projects.
Types of Income
· Active Income (or Earned Income) — You are working for money. The key characteristic of active income is the cost of time. You must trade time (a limited resource) for money. If you stop, the income also stops.
· Passive Income (or Residual Income) — Money is working for you. This is the opposite of active income. Once you stop spending time on these income sources, the income flows don’t necessarily stop. Of course, there are varying degrees of passivity and it’s desirable to have highly passive alternative income sources.
Here’s an illustration of active-passive income spectrum:
Create an overall strategy that allows you to diversify your income by building multiple income streams and purposefully moving toward more passive income sources.
For additional information, please take a look at Building, Diversifying, and Shifting Your Income Streams.
Why Should You Care About Alternative Income
Alternative Income is an Essential Component Of Financial Freedom
In my 5 stages of financial health article, I share an illustration that depicts Power Wealth Building. As you can see below, alternative income increases your total income and accelerates your wealth building capacity. Moreover, we associate financial freedom with independence from our primary source of income, so alternative income that can eventually replace primary income. Cultivating alternative income will take you a step closer to financial freedom.
Career Versus Alternative Income
Next, I’d like to briefly touch on the question of career versus alternative income. I believe that building multiple streams of income should be the career of choice for the majority of us today.There are several advantages to having multiple income streams:
· If you lose your job, your income is lowered as opposed to disappeared.
· The higher you are on the career ladder, the harder it is to find an equivalent paying job.
· Multiple income streams will help you reach your financial goals faster.
· Multiple income streams give you a taste of financial freedom. For most people, financial freedom is occurs when you no longer need your job to cover your living expenses.
· Multiple income streams give you greater flexibility and leverage. You’re in a much more powerful position when you know that you are not 100% dependent on your job to make do.
I believe that the concept of having a career is dead (with a few exceptions). It’s too risky to rely on one source of income, especially when most employers do not hesitate to cut jobs to make their numbers look good. It’s imperative for everyone to minimize their income risk by building multiple income streams.
For additional information, please take a look at Building Multiple Income Streams As A Career.
The Time and Effort to Build Alternative Income Streams
I received several comments about time an effort it takes to build and grow alternative income streams. Why should you try to build another income stream when you could work a few extra hours at work to get the same amount? Here are two good reasons to build an additional income stream, rather than work more at a job (or get a second job):
1. Building your primary income (i.e., your job/career) took a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money as well. Many jobs require a college degree and some require even more education and training. I think 4 years of college is a lot of time, effort, and money! Compare all of that time to spending 3 hours a day for a year to build an income stream that could produce $1,000 a month.
2. Once you set up an income stream (particularly a passive one) you could shift your focus to other streams and it continues to produce. For example, if you have $10,000 in a savings account earning 1% per year, you will continue to receive $100 a year even if you stop paying attention to that income stream. On the other hand, if you stop working, your paycheck will stop.
How to Make More Money with Multiple Income Streams
I have a simple framework that can be used to create multiple income streams. There are endless possibilities when it comes to business ideas, and you can apply this framework to many of them.
7 Key Factors to Building Successful Income Streams
Building multiple income streams is simple, but not easy. Based on my own experience, I feel that there are 7 key success factors:
1. Passion — Do what you love.
2. Expertise — Focus on what you are good at.
3. Patience — Don’t expect to see the desired results right away.
4. Persistence — Not everything you try will be successful; keep trying.
5. Diversify — Don’t stop at the first thing that works; keep looking for more and different ways.
6. Little by little — Trickles of money from many streams combine to provide a decent amount of money.
7. Commitment — Some ideas take more effort than others.
For additional information, please take a look at 7 Key Factors to Build Successful Income Streams.
Becoming a Part-Time Entrepreneur
As we established above, it’s unwise to rely on one source of income and bet the farm on your career. One option is to become a part-time entrepreneur. Being a part-time entrepreneur allows you to maintain your regular income plus benefits, while at the same time giving you the opportunity to explore and expand your alternative income streams. As a part-time entrepreneur, you can afford to make mistakes and take on more risks. You can also go at your own pace as you develop your income streams.
For additional information, please take a look at Why Should You Become a Part-Time Entrepreneur.
How to Start Making More Money
If you are looking for a concrete place to start as you develop alternative income streams, here is my 4-step guide:
1. Start with ideas related to things that you enjoy doing. Get away from the stuff that you do not like. And you’ll spend a lot of time getting your business going, so you might as well do something you like.
2. Create proper business plan. Even if you have a very simple business, a good business plan can help keep you on the right track, providing you with direction. Small Business Administration (SBA) has some of the best resources on the web to get you started. At the very least, make sure your business is viable.
3. Implement and execute. The best plans and ideas don’t mean a thing unless you can turn them into reality. It takes some courage and a lot of willpower to make things happen, and you need to be persistent in your efforts.
4. Learn and improve. Even if your business fails, it’s a success if you learn something from the experience. Very few people are successful on their first attempt at starting a busines, so don’t give up. Your task is to learn from past failures and turn that cumulative experience into an eventual success.
40+ Alternative Income Ideas and Resources
If you want access to some great business ideas, head over to 40+ Alternative Income Ideas and Resources, where you’ll find over 40 income building ideas and resources.
Using the Extra Income
Once you have extra money flowing in, it’s time to use the cash to help you achieve your financial goals. Here are some ideas:
· Pay off debt
· Start an emergency fund
· Save and invest
· Reinvest in your income streams to make them bigger and better
· Research and start a new income stream
· Buy a new income stream
· Spend it and enjoy life
Lastly…
I’d love to hear your comments regarding this guide so that I can make it more useful.
This article collect from moolanomy.com
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