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.
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.
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.
