Eighteen Creative Ways to Make Money for the Unemployed

More Ways to Generate Extra Money

For most of my life I worked at hourly or salary jobs at big corporations. I quit full time work to raise our kids. Luckily I have never had to go back to a full time job. When my kids were little I made web sites just to keep from losing brain cells. Then I found out I could make money by putting ads on my web sites and that was it - no more full time work for me. Actually I do work full time, only it is in a spare bedroom and only whatever hours I want to work.

Part of making money from nonjob sources is that it just kind of requires a different mindset. Listed below are my creative ways to make money without a regular job.

Alternative Income Ideas

1. Take photos, upload them to stock photo sites, and get royalty payments when people buy your pics at places like iphotostock.com.

2. Write an ebook and have affiliates sell it for you for a share of the profits at Clickbank.

3. Clear out your clutter and have a garage sale, or sell your stuff on Ebay or Craiglist.

4. Make crafty items and sell them on Etsy.

5. Write articles, either for money upfront or a share of the ad revenue, at places like Hubpages, Associated Content and Squidoo.

6. Check your change for old, collectable coins.

7. Sell your old jewelry or other gold items at a pawnshop or precious metals dealer. (Don’t just send your money into to one of the web places that buys gold as their prices are often uncompetitive.) Shop around locally for the best price.

8. If your state has a bottle refund law, return your old bottles to the store for a redemption credit.

9. Go to garage sales and thrift shops and resell items on Ebay. There are actually people who do this for a living. The ones that I know of that make a full time income specialize in a specific type of product, like wedding dresses or body building equipment.

10. Turn your hobby into a business. The tax savings for small business owners in the U.S. are huge. You can set up your own 401K plan, deduct health insurance costs, and deduct business related expenses like your Internet cable fees, software, etc.

11. Write and self publish your own books at places like Lulu.com.

12. Make cool blogs or web sites and then sell them at flippa.com.

13. Cut coupons and sell them on Ebay. Check it out – there really is a market for this kind of service.

14. Enter free contests and sweepstakes. We have a retired friend who does this and has won all sorts of prizes over the years including a couple of all expense paid vacations to exotic locales. One of her tips is to listen to radio stations during the day that have call in contests.

16. Sell your old gift cards on Ebay before they expire or service fees erode all of the value.

17. Buy TIPS – Treasury Inflation Protected Securities. They pay interest rates guaranteed to keep up with inflation. (Because of taxes, they are best held in a tax deferred retirement account.) They are sold at auction 4 times a year. You can buy them without any sales charges through Fidelity.com.

18. Start a vegetable garden and grow your own food.

There you have it. Eighteen ways to make extra money all without waiting for someone to hire you.

Extra Income Resources:

40+ Alternative Income Ideas from Moolanomy.com

Five Ways to Create Passive Income at Genius Types

Tips to Make Money When You are Unemployed from Always Frugal

Creative Ways to Earn Extra Income

With 401Ks imploding, home prices melting down faster than the polar ice caps, and jobs disappearing faster than the Amazon rain forest, it's not a bad idea to try to make a little extra income any way you can these days. Listed below are four easy ways to make some extra money each month.

1. Make your money work for you by moving your checking account to a high yield checking at a credit union. We went from making 0% annually at a local bank to 3.7% at a local credit union. If we keep $3,000 on average in our account, that is an extra $111 a year we will be earning in interest. Over ten years time we will have made over $1,110. plus $204.28 if we reinvest the money we save into the same account (assuming a 3.7% constant interest rate), for a total of $1,314.28. That is not a bad return on our time the few hours of time it is taking to switch over accounts.

You can find a list of high yield checking accounts at: http://bankdeals.blogspot.com/.

Your own 10 year savings total of switching to a high yield checking account can be calculated by using the periodic savings calculator at: http://www.hcuonline.com/HCU_Calc_PeriodicSavings.html

2. Make your own blog and earn income by putting ads on it. The blogger behind Get Rich Slowly (http://www.getrichslowly.com/) quit his day job when his blog started making $60,000 a year. I'm sure, as they say in the diet ads, that those results aren't typical. But for many people blogs could be an extra $100 or $200 a month in income. If you want to blog to make money and not just for fun or self expression, be sure to pick a topic that will attract ads. You can't just pick any old topic and expect to make money. A blog on reviews of car stereos is most likely going to make more advertising money than a blog about 100 different kind of egg recipes, because car stereos are expensive and something people will buy online, while eggs are an inexpensive, offline purchase.

The cool thing about blog income is that you can make money from ads while doing something totally different. Your ads still show 24 hours a day whether you are working on your blog, showering or sleeping. I just made a couple of dollars in Adsense money on one of my other blogs while I was taking out the garbage cans. Once I made fifty cents in the time it took to pull up my socks. I know these are small amounts but with enough blogs and enough time the income really adds up over the years.

Dan Lyons, who man wrote the now defunct, once famous Fake Steve Jobs' blog, laments in a recent article in Newsweek, that blogging isn't the road to riches. Well, I think that is partly true. Blogging about Steve Jobs probably isn't the road to riches, because people looking to read a funny blog about an eccentric Silicon Valley billionaire aren't necessarily in the market to buy anything. If Mr. Lyons, a technology writer, had written a blog about the best flash drives to buy online, his results may have been quite different, even if he had a lot less readers. If setting up your own blog seems too daunting a task, visit the site Always frugal for creative ways to earn extra income by wrtiting articles for other people's web sites and blogs.

3. If you have any unused gift cards lying around, those can be found money. In fact, it is a good idea to use them up now before the stores they are from go out of business. I found that out the hard way when Mervyn's started closing down. They refused to honor a $50 gift card I had gotten as a gift one Christmas, tucked in a drawer and forgotten about. The good news though was that I also had a Linen's N Things gift card that I sold on Ebay before it expired for almost full price, less Ebay expenses. The gift card was worth $50 and to my amazement it sold for $45, only $5 less the original value.

4. If you pay your charge cards off each month, then reward cards can help to make a little extra income each month. I have Amazon personal and business rewards VISA cards. With the cards I get 1% back on the regular purchases, and 3% back on Amazon purchases. I'm a member of Amazon prime, so I don't pay for shipping costs, after my once yearly prime fee. (I order from Amazon on a weekly basis including many staple items, so for me the Amazon prime fee comes out to less than $1 shipping charge per order.)

Recently I bought a GPS for my husband as a gift. The one I wanted was on a coupon sale at Costco, but I actually ended up getting the device cheaper at Amazon because of the 3% VISA card rebate on Amazon purchases, the free shipping from being in the prime club and no sales tax on my purchase. Plus with Amazon I didn't have to even go to the store. I ordered the GPS online and the package was delivered right to my door 2 days later. I'm self employed so to me not having to take time out of my day to go to the store is worth a lot, in addition to the amount I saved on the GPS itself.

I also use my rewards card for groceries these days. I spend at least $200 a week at the grocery stores, so by using my VISA rewards card that gives me an extra $104 a year in Amazon gift certificates (which I use to order seleted bulk grocery items from Amazon). Over ten years switching from cash to my rewards card for groceries alone should earn me an extra $1,040 of Amazon goods. It only took me a few minutes to apply online for the Amazon cards, so $1,040 in gift certificates over ten years is a pretty good return on my time.