The challenge of earning money from home is that it can take time for the income to start trickling in. However, here are a few ideas that should generate extra money fairly quickly that you can use to fill the gap between earnings and expenses, pay of debt, or have fun money. Or, you can use these options to test out work-at-home ideas, generate extra money needed to finance a home business, or simply decide if working at home is for you. In some cases, you can increase these side-hustle ideas into a full-time home based career.
Below you’ll find some interesting, sometimes unusual ideas to create additional income including selling or renting your stuff, getting paid to do things you already do and more.
Sell Your Used and Unwanted Items
There are essentially three ways to make money; 1) Sell stuff, 2) Sell skills, 3) Sell knowledge. Of the three, selling stuff, particularly your unwanted stuff is the fastest if it’s a good quality at a fair price. You’d be surprised at how much stuff laying around your home you can sell. Old clothing and accessories, especially name-brand items, DVDs, books, jewelry, kitchen items, gaming and other tech devices, and more.
To learn more, check out:
Spring Clean Your Home for Extra Cash
10 Places to Sell Your Stuff Other than eBay
If you’d like to turn selling stuff online into a full-time income, check out How to Make Money Selling on Amazon FBA
Rent Your Stuff
Maybe you don’t want to sell your unused stuff, but you don’t want to let it sit around either. Why not consider renting it. You’d be surprised the type of things people want to rent from your car or parking spot, wedding dress, surf board, camera and more.
Here are a few sites to check out:
To learn more and get more rental sites, read 7 Things You Can Rent Out for Extra Money
Sell Digital Stuff
Don’t want the hassle of packing and shipping items, consider selling your digital assets. Do you have photos on your compute or phone that you can sell? How about a talent for making logos or graphic design? Are you good a video or audio production? All these can be sold online.
If you have photos, check out this article on How and Where to Sell Your Photos Online. A great place to sell your digital skills is on Fiverr.
While ebooks can also make money, it can take longer than these other options. With that said, if you have an ebook already created, it can’t hurt to look at publishing it.
Sell Your Skill
You could start a service-based business, but if you’re not ready to take that leap, or just want to freelance your skills, there are a variety resources where you find work. Check out places such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, Clickworker, and TaskRabbit.
For a list of more places where you can sell your skill, read: 24 Microwork Sites for Online Jobs
Surveys and Focus Groups
I’m not a huge fan of surveys and focus groups if you need to make a lot of money. But if you participate in several programs, you can make extra money and earn free stuff through surveys and focus groups. Some good survey places to try include:
Inbox Dollars (surveys and more. $5 sign-up bonus too!)
For more surveys, including international survey companies, check out How to Make Money with Surveys Plus Sites that Pay
For information about focus groups, check out this post on How to Get Paid for Your Opinion, which includes a list of focus group resources.
Take Advantage of Rebate Programs
This isn’t a work-at-home job, but it can make extra money. I made $10 on my grocery shop this week by using a few coupons from Swagbucks, getting rebates from Ibotta, and scanning a few items in Shopkick, Ten dollars may not seem like a lot, but I had to go grocery shopping anyway…why not make a few bucks doing it?
What’s ideal about rebate programs is that you’re getting money back on something you’re already doing. If you grocery shop or buy online, chances are you can save and money money back from your purchases. There are people who make hundreds, even thousands of dollars a year simply through rebates on stuff they were going to buy anyway. For example, my daughter and I wear contacts. I buy them at 1-800 Contacts through Ebates and I get money back. What’s really cool is that there are many apps that make it easy to find great deals and earn cash back or giftcard rebates. Here’s a few of my favorites:
Ebates – Ebates used to be for online sales only, but now you can take advantage of offline sales and there’s an app. It works with a ton of stores; so many, I’d be surprised if you didn’t shop at several of them. If you’re going to buy from a store, why not earn money back?
Ibotta– This is another favorite of mine. Download the app, find rebates, shop, scan your receipt, and earn cash back. There are over 500,000 stores in the Ibotta network, and odds are you shop at several of them (i.e. Target, Wal-Mart, CVS and more). It also works with many stores that have loyalty cards, which eliminates the need to scan your receipt. Or you can shop from within the app, which also makes earning the rebate easy.
Swagbucks – This program offers a lot of cool fun ways to earn money. One is by offering coupons. You can earn SwagBucks by printing coupons, and more by using them. Plus, similar to Ebates, you can earn swagbucks by shopping at the stores you shop at anyway, like Kohls and Wal-Mart. You can also earn swagbucks by watching videos, trying out new stuff, taking surveys and more.
More articles on making money quickly:
Check out this post on Ways to Make Money Doing Things You Already Do for more cool apps and resources.
While you’re at it, check out 58 Apps that Pay You for more apps that save you money, pay for surveys and mystery shops, and much more.
Finally, don’t miss 60 Weekly Paying Work-At-Home Jobs, for more ideas on work that pays sooner rather than later.
