While this list is tailored for helping students find ideas for generating income, I suspect it might come in handy for others with limited start-up money, looking to generate some side income. Please let me know of any additional ideas I have missed (I am sure there are many). Here we go-
- Pizza delivery
- Tutoring
- Waiting on tables
- Bar tend
- Buying and selling on Ebay
- Start a blog/website and sell ads, affiliate programs etc.
- Lawn mowing
- Computer tune-ups
- Baby sitting
- Create and sell e-books
- Monetize your hobby (E.g., photography, woodwork, crafts etc.)
- Walking dogs
- Participate in paid surveys (online, on-campus, etc)
- Garage sale
- Donate plasma (if you are not squeamish)
- If you have a truck, offer to move stuff for some nominal fee
- If you have a car, offer trips to Walmart for a nominal fee (newly arriving international students don’t own a car for at least a couple of semesters, many times more!)
- 0% APR credit card arbitrage (More info here)
- Mystery shopping (Lot of scams, very few legitimate offers. So, do your research first)
- Web designing
- Free lance jobs (I used to think this is limited to writers and other fine arts majors. But these days you can also find freelance work in coding too!)
- Coffee club: Buy a decent coffee machine and some good coffee beans, and offer to save your lab-mates a trip to the coffee shop for fixed weekly/monthly fee
- If you are a good cook: Offer lunch boxes!
- Teach (swimming, driving, dancing, language, tennis etc.)
- If your apartment/university has large movie screens you can rent out, offer movie nights
for a nominal fee(UPDATE: Please see comment by “anonymous” below). You can do this at home also if you can find a good large screen second hand TV. - Become a movie extra
- Part-time Customer Service Rep
- Part-time Receptionist
- Sales Clerk/Cashier
- Lab/Teaching/Research Assistant
- Amazon mechanical turk (More info here)
- Teach at local community college
- Journalist for local newspaper
- Modelling
- Become a consultant (More infohere)
- Work at the university library – librarian, shelving, proctoring, database maintenance etc.
Additional Information:
- Discussion on Fatwallet Finance Forum
- Bored Money and side income ideas on My Money Blog.
- College Jobs by Jim on Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.
Nice list. As a college student, I’ve found mystery shopping to be the best flexible money maker, especially since half the time I get free food as well. Check out volition.com for a list of legit mystery shopping companies.
Sign up with all the local temp agencies.
Lauren, anonymous: Thanks for the tips! I dont believe I forgot to mention signing up with temp agencies!
ISPF- Great list. I need to incoporate more of these. I’m looking to start tutoring spanish again over the summer. It’s so easy, but brings in good money.
Take care.
Brett: Good Luck! I am a bit jealous though – I wish there was a market for Indian languages too
It is a copyright violation to rent a movie and then charge people to watch it – that is what that whole FBI warning at the begining is about. Charge for the snacks and let people watch the movie for free…
So true. Honesty and evrehytnig recognized.
Anonymous: Good catch, Thanks! I have updated the text to reflect this.