There are many easy ways to make $100 a month, or even an extra $500 a month or more.
Taking action and committing to doing something is the hard part. Here are some clever ideas to make extra money this month.
1. Share Your Opinion While Watching Nextflix for Extra Cash
Income Potential: $100 – $500 per month
Skills Needed: None, other than a little free time and an opinion.
If you’re unsure where to get started and have struggled to take action in the past, I recommend starting with online surveys.
You will not get rich overnight by taking surveys, but there are zero entry barriers, and you can fill out surveys in the little bits of spare time you would generally waste during the day.
There are two sites I wholeheartedly recommend for anyone looking to start taking online surveys: Survey Junkie and Swagbucks. They are both legit, have been in business a long time, and have paid millions to their users.
The key to making money with surveys is to sign up for a few different apps and actively participate. Some offers are better than others. But typically, the more you complete, the better your chances of being offered well-paying surveys.
2. Become a Virtual Assistant and Make Extra Money
Income Potential: $25 – $50+ per hour
Skills Needed: Not much to get started except a willingness to learn and follow directions. You can make more if you have specialized skills.
This is a broad category with lots of options to specialize in. If you don’t know where to start on your side hustle journey, I’d recommend at least trying out being a virtual assistant to see if it’s something you like.
Business owners are always in need of good people who can help them with their email, marketing, financials, creative design, etc. If you have any talent or skill, you can probably find someone willing to pay for it! So what does a virtual assistant do?
Here are a few ideas:
- Email management
- Data entry
- Social media management
- Customer service
- Editing/proofreading content
- Creating graphics
- Online marketing
3. Work from Home as a Virtual Bookkeeper
Income Potential: $60-80+ per hour
Skills Needed: No degree or experience is required to get started, but you need to be comfortable with numbers.
Becoming a bookkeeper from home is one of my favorite side hustle ideas (or even full-time business ideas). If you like numbers and the zen of a balanced bank account, starting your own virtual bookkeeping business may be for you. You would only need two or three clients to make an extra $1000 a month!
So many small business owners are great with big ideas and big vision but need someone to help them keep their books in order and make sure they are making a profit. You can step in and be their right-hand business partner and CFO.
The best thing about bookkeeping is that you can work from home with flexible hours, with very few startup costs. If you niche down to serving a certain type of business (say online companies, or real estate investors), you can charge $60-80 per hour or even more.
One freelance bookkeeper we talked to started a bookkeeping side hustle while he was a teacher and made $75 an hour. He eventually grew it so much that he was able to quit his teaching job and go full time.
4. Make Money on the Side Tutoring
Income Potential: $15 – $100+ per hour
Skills Needed: Subject knowledge in whatever you’re teaching or the ability to learn.
Whether you are a teacher wanting to get paid during the summer or just someone who likes to learn and teach, tutoring can be a rewarding way to make extra money.
If you enjoy teaching others and have an inner nerd, tutoring can be a great way to earn some extra cash. You can tutor in almost any subject you think of – math, science, computer/software skills, reading, English, etc.
The more specialized your skillset, the more you can potentially charge. For example, I recently ran across a guy who makes $100-160 per hour tutoring standardized tests like the GRE or LSAT!
But you don’t have to become an entrepreneur and start your own tutoring business. There are plenty of opportunities locally and online. You can post ads on Craigslist or Facebook or apply to work with one of the many online tutoring companies like Wyzant or Tutor.com. You could even go down to your local schools and see if you can get on a list of recommended tutors if parents are looking for extra help for their kids.
5. Make Extra Money With Cash Back Apps and Credit Card Rewards
Income Potential: $500 – $2,000 per year
Skills Needed: None, just good credit. If you want to collect credit card sign up bonuses.
I have a goal every year to make $500 from cashback apps and $1,000 from credit card sign-up bonuses (not including the actual cashback from credit card purchases).
While this is not life-changing money, it’s a noticeable amount. It takes almost no effort, so it’s passive income (my favorite kind of income).
CASHBACK APPS
So how do cashback apps work? You link a credit card for local shopping or use their portal for online shopping you would do anyway and earn anywhere from 1 – 20% cashback without thinking about it (I average around 2-5% back typically). This is in addition to any cashback your credit card gives you!
The short version is, that there are three apps I have on my phone that I recommend everyone should have to make passive income:
Rakuten – By far the biggest and most diverse player in the cashback app space, Ebates offers cash back at hundreds of online retailers. Since my family buys almost everything online these days, we always get a few percent back just by shopping through Ebates. They send me a deposit to my PayPal account once per quarter 🙂
Drop – This is another app I love because I just link my credit card, and it adds points to my account when I do my normal shopping at stores like Target, Starbucks, Trader Joe’s, etc. (ok, let’s be honest, my wife is usually the one earning these points).
The cool thing about Drop is that they also have other in-app offers you can sign up for to get extra points. For example, I just signed up for a proposal that will pay me $50 for creating a savings/investment account with SoFi Wealth, a newer player in the robo-advisor space. I love making money by trying out new apps that help me save money – win-win for me!
Dosh – This is a great companion app for Drop and Ebates. Where Ebates lets your earn cashback for online shopping and Drop lets your earn money for everyday retail shopping, Dosh adds in a lot of local restaurants and other retailers that aren’t on Drop.
And just like Drop, all you have to do is link your credit card and wait for the points to hit your account. I never even think about the app until I get a notification that I got some free money after going out to eat with the family or picking up something at the pharmacy.
With sign up bonuses from these apps, you can pretty easily make $20 fast before you even start earning cash back.
CREDIT CARD BONUSES
Credit card sign-up bonuses are another gold mine to earn free money for minimal work. I wholeheartedly recommend this strategy with a couple caveats:
- This will only work if you have good to excellent credit
- DO NOT use this strategy if you are not responsibly using your credit cards by paying the balance in full every month
No amount of credit card rewards are worth it if you are paying late fees or exorbitant interest rates.
To make this work (to qualify for the best cards), you need to have and maintain a good credit score. I like to use Credit Karma to keep track of my credit score for free.
One card often recommended to beginners is the Chase Sapphire Preferred. By using the sign up bonus and travel rewards cash back opportunities, you can travel for free with credit card rewards and points.
6. Selling on eBay to Make Extra Money
Income Potential: $500 – $10,000+ per month
Skills Needed: An eye for a good deal at garage sales/thrift stores
I first saw the potential of this side hustle when I interviewed one of my friends Nathan. He shops garage sales, estate sales, and thrift stores looking for bargains and resells them on eBay.
When I interviewed him he was making around $300 a month, but he’s now consistently up to $600 per month selling on eBay!
I was skeptical at first because I thought it required a lot of specialized knowledge to find good deals, but Nathan has a great system for finding deals and sticks to things that he knows sell well on eBay so he doesn’t have to be an expert on everything. The more I’ve learned, the more I think this may be the perfect way to make a couple hundred a month or more for the average person who can only spend a few hours a week on their side hustle.
7. How to Make Money as a Handyman / Landscaper
Income Potential: $15 – $40+ per hour
Skills Needed: Good with your hands and small home projects, or willing to do manual labor for money 🙂
While everyone wants to make money online these days from the comfort of their couch, there are a lot of opportunities to make extra money out there in the real world if you’re willing to actually put in a little effort.
One of the easiest ways to make a solid income (you could certainly make $200 a month, $500 a month, or more without much effort) is to offer your services as a handyman on small house projects.
If you don’t have a single handy bone in your body (like me), then you can mow lawns, clean out gutters, or wash windows. If you have more skills you can charge more for other house projects like fixing a gate, installing a ceiling fan, or even minor plumbing services.
Finding work might be the easiest part of this side hustle. Post on your neighborhood Facebook page, Craigslist, or just go knock on your neighbor’s doors. Almost everyone I know is always looking for a reliable handyman they can call on when needed. There are also “gig economy” platforms like TaskRabbit that connect people with skills with those that need help.
8. Earn Extra Income with Real Estate
Income Potential: Unlimited
Skills Needed: Hustle and the ability to learn basic sales skills
There are so many paths to making extra money every month in real estate, there’s no way I can talk about them all here. But here’s a list of the ways we’ve made money and some of the prerequisites:
- House hacking – Want to live for free? Buying a single family house and renting out the extra bedrooms, or buying a 2-4 unit property and living in one unit and renting the others is a great way to earn an extra income each month. This is real estate investing with training wheels, and is a great place to get started if you’ve never considered getting into real estate.
- Buy rental properties – If you have the capital to invest in a down payment, you can buy rental properties that produce income every month. We aim for a 10% cash on cash return and about $300 per month cash flow after all expenses. With a little creativity, you can even learn to invest in real estate with little or no money!
- Become a real estate agent – My wife got her real estate license originally to save us money on our own transactions, but now she is a very part-time agent (10 hours or so a month) for friends, family and referrals and makes $15-20k per year after paying all the dues and fees to keep up her license.
- House flipping – If you really want to get actively involved, you can scour the market for great deals that need work, fix them up, and sell for a profit. While we prefer rental properties, we won’t pass up a good deal on a flip and usually end up doing 1 per year or so for a nice profit.
- Crowdfunding – The most passive of all the options if you have the cash to invest. We’ve started investing in crowdfunded commercial real estate deals for additional passive income and diversifying our portfolio.
If you’re looking to buy your first rental property, I recommend checking out Roofstock, the only online platform I’ve found dedicated to helping buyers find cash-flowing rental properties.
If actively managing real estate isn’t your cup of tea, but you want to earn passive income, there are two crowdfunding platforms I use and recommend:
How to Get Started in Real Estate Crowdfunding
If you’re brand new to real estate and don’t have much money to invest, I recommend starting small. Two platforms I like are Groundfloor and Fundrise. If you want a little more information on how to start investing in real estate with as little as $10, I wrote a comparison of Groundfloor vs. Fundrise and detailed my returns from each.
Groundfloor – Groundfloor allows you to participate in loans backed by real estate (as little as $10 per loan). I’ve personally gotten an annualized return of 12.5% over the past couple of years across all the various loans I helped fund.
While that is certainly no guarantee of future results, I do think that real estate is one of the safer ways to invest in debt because you have a hard asset behind the loan (unlike with peer to peer lending, where the only thing you have is a credit score and a promise to pay).
Fundrise – Fundrise lets you invest in a diversified real estate portfolio with as little as $500. Because it is a private fund and your money is tied up for 3+ years (unlike a public REIT), the returns tend to be higher, and the low minimum makes it an excellent introduction to crowdfunding.
Our own personal Fundrise portfolio is highly diversified across equity and debt deals and in different geographic locations. I like that Fundrise gives you details on all of the individual properties you are invested in through the fund.
9. Earn Extra Income Blogging
Income Potential: $500 – $10,000+ per month
Skills Needed: Have an opinion and a willingness to learn new things
I am always skeptical of the bloggers who tell you how much money they make by selling courses about blogging. It can seem a bit like a pyramid scheme.
But there are real bloggers out there making extra money without a course to sell you. I am one of them.
As a brand new blogger who knew absolutely nothing, I made a little over $2,000 my first year of blogging.
In my second year, I made over $35,000!
Blogging is not as easy as the gurus make it sound, but it’s also not rocket science. It takes hard work, patience, and the willingness to keep trying new things.
It’s not a quick payoff, but after a year or two of blogging, it is certainly doable to make $500 a month on the side and possibly way more.
10. Freelance Writing
Income Potential: $500 – $5,000+ per month
Skills Needed: Attention to detail, research, and writing skills
If starting your blog isn’t your thing, but you enjoy writing, becoming a freelance writer is an excellent side hustle to consider.
There is a huge demand for content from bloggers and other businesses looking to establish a web presence.
In my blogging niche of personal finance, people pay anywhere from 10 – 25 cents per word. A 1,000-word article translates to $100 – $250 in your pocket.
If you can write just a few articles per month, you can easily make several hundred dollars a month – and then continue to scale.
11. Make Money on the Side Delivering Food
Income Potential: $15 – $30 per hour
Skills Needed: A driver’s license and reliable transportation
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably aware of the many choices in food delivery. Uber Eats, Postmates, GrubHub, DoorDash…
All of them rely on the gig economy to offer their services. They need reliable drivers to deliver food to customers.
If you have extra time during the day (especially at lunch or dinner), you can earn $50 in just a few hours!
Take Action to Make Extra Money This Month
Sure, it’s essential to do your research and find some side hustle options that appeal to you. But if one of these ideas resonates with you, then take action and start earning extra money now!
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This article was produced by Wealthy Nickel and syndicated by Wealth of Geeks.
Featured Image Credit: YAY Images.
Andrew is the founder of Wealthy Nickel where he writes about all things personal finance. He has a passion for helping people pursue financial freedom through saving money, making money, and building wealth. Andrew documents his family’s journey to financial independence through side hustles while raising 2 kids on a single income
