28 Smart Ways to Make Extra Money

Donating old clothes to Goodwill or some other agency is always an option, but there are also stores like the Buffalo Exchange and Uptown Cheapskate chains that will buy garb in good condition and/or exchange it for store credit. For pricier or rarer items, eBay and Etsy are good options, too.

Focus groups, doing consumer research for a wide range of products and services, can pay up to $200 (and sometimes more) to participants. FocusGroups.org and other sites list available options.

Museums, arts organizations, and civic groups sometimes engage knowledgeable and personable individuals to lead neighborhood walking tours. Though these are generally unpaid positions, those who join the tours understand that they are expected to tip their guide, and that can add up to a few hundred dollars if the group is large and generous enough.

This isn’t just a gig for your teenager. If you have the right personality and credentials (CPR and first aid certifications are helpful) and like kids, this can be a good way to bring in some extra bucks. Rates vary widely, but are at least $10 an hour and sometimes considerably more. These days, you’ll probably want to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before taking a job.

If you live in an area served by the electric scooter companies Bird and Lime, you might qualify to be one of their “chargers.” They supply the equipment. You pick up scooters and plug them in at home, typically for four to six hours (or overnight). Depending on your electricity rates, each charge will cost you somewhere between 10 and 25 cents, and the companies pay out $3 to $5 per scooter.

Sites like Meowtel.com and Catsitter.com for felines, Rover.com for their canine cousins, and Care.com for both (and for human babysitting) will outline the qualifications you need and help find you jobs. Employment sites say that the average pet-sitting rate is $12 an hour, but it can go as high as $20 in some cases.

If you have subject expertise in mathematics, English, history, or just about anything else, you might be able to earn $50 an hour or more doing online tutoring. A number of sources, including Tutors.com, Tutorme.com, and most of the general employment sites, list available jobs.

If you get along well with animals and know how to wield a pooper scooper, check out the numerous websites, including the aforementioned Rover.com and Care.com, that list dog-walking jobs. These generally pay $10 to $15 an hour.

Craigslist and other online classified ad sites (as well as newspaper classifieds) list medical studies that pay participants various fees. They are usually limited to specific demographic groups, defined by age, medical condition, or other factors, but if you find one that’s the right fit, you might make anywhere from $50 to $300 for a day’s worth of your time.

A Google search will turn up numerous marketing and research companies that pay people to take part in comparative tastings of foods in development (for instance, new fast-food items) or eat in restaurants as “mystery shoppers” who report back on food quality, cleanliness, service, and other factors. The payouts vary widely, but sample rates might be $200 to $300 for a focus session or $20 to $40 plus free food and drink for a restaurant visit.

DoorDash, Uber Eats, GrubHub, and other services that deliver meals are always looking for drivers. If you’re at least 18 (slightly older in some cases), have your own car plus a valid U.S. driver’s license and insurance, and own a smartphone, you’ll likely qualify. What you’ll make varies widely according to the company, the area, and the generosity of tippers, but the average seems to be at least $12 an hour.

Numerous websites buy laptops and smartphones — also tablets, desktop computers, fitness trackers, and gaming consoles — for cash or (from Apple or Amazon, for instance) gift cards. Of course, eBay and Etsy as well as various used electronics sites are other options.

Quite possibly the best-known example of gig work these days is driving for one of the two top ridesharing services. Both seem to be constantly hiring. Requirements may differ slightly, but at minimum you’ll need an eligible four-door vehicle plus insurance and a valid U.S. driver’s license, and you’ll need to pass a background check. How much you’ll make is hard to say, but once you deduct your expenses (gas, insurance, car maintenance, taxes, etc.) and the fees the services charge drivers, it will likely be less than advertised. Some drivers report netting only about $12 an hour, and some say they make less than that.

This popular gig employment site connects members with temporary jobs that might include spring cleaning, moving, home repairs, appliance installation, painting, carpentry, running errands, even waiting in line for restaurants, special events, etc. Depending on location and the type of work, these jobs typically pay an average of $36 an hour.

If you’re an expert in certain fields — medical, legal, mechanical, etc. — people will pay you, through JustAnswer, to, well, just answer. Users pay a fee to ask questions and get matched with an expert in the appropriate field. Expect anything from $5 to $90 for a response, depending on the subject and its complexity and on the rating the questioner gives.

Not everyone might feel comfortable having a stranger living under the same roof — taking in a boarder — but renting out a spare room, whether through Airbnb or individually on Craigslist or in some other classified publication, can bring in a small but steady income. Check local laws before doing it, though, and be sure to do a background check, inform your insurance agent, and write up a rental agreement. What you charge, of course, will depend on where you are and what the room is like, but it should be well below the rental cost of a local studio apartment.

The world’s second largest retailer (after Walmart), Amazon has flourished during the pandemic, delivering goods of every kind (including groceries and restaurant meals) all over the country. While it has its own full-time staff drivers and contracts with other delivery services, it also hires a lot of part-time drivers through Amazon Flex. Flex drivers work fixed shifts for $18 to $25 an hour, depending on location, time of day, and the number of packages their vehicle can carry at one time.

Speaking of Amazon, the retail giant’s Mechanical Turk is a business-oriented crowdsourcing site. It basically farms out computer-related tasks that can be performed faster and/or more efficiently by humans than by machines. Photo and video research and screening, information collection, translation, data processing and cleaning, and missing persons searches are among the jobs so-called Turkers undertake. You’ll need to do a lot of work to make any money, though. Minimum payment for a task is one cent, and it has been estimated that the median hourly wage is about $2.

Instead of working for a ridesharing company, consider putting your car to work for a carsharing company. If your vehicle sits idle for days or weeks at a time, sites like Turo.com and Hyrecar.com can make it possible for you to monetize it. How much you can charge depends on your location, and of course on the car. A Ford might go for $35 a day, a BMW for something closer to $100. You’ll keep between 65% and 85% of the total.

If you’ve got a bucket, some car shampoo, a sponge, a chamois, and maybe a battery-operated mini-vac, advertise your services as a car washer. (You can also go door-to-door offering washes, or contact local used car dealers.) What you charge depends on what the market will bear, but $10 or $15 per wash is reasonable — more if you add a wax job. Your investment in materials should be minimal, by the way, but you might want to investigate liability insurance.

The internet is full of listings for stores and websites that buy records, tapes, and discs. Amazon, eBay, and Etsy are also good markets to investigate. Be sure to check LP and CD pricing sites (there are a number of them) before you list your items, though. You might be surprised how valuable some old recordings are.

You can’t (or at least shouldn’t be able to) get paid for donating blood. You can, however, reap a profit legitimately for donating plasma. Plasma is the clear portion of blood, containing various antibodies, proteins, and enzymes, used to make treatments for various diseases (including COVID-19). When you donate plasma, your blood is drawn, the plasma is separated out, and then the blood is returned to your veins. The process takes about an hour. There are numerous plasma donation centers in most cities, paying between $20 and $50 for each donation, and you can donate several times a month.

Numerous services, including Instacart, Shipt, and Postmates hire people to fulfill customers’ grocery shopping lists and deliver them. Some workers find the process more interesting than simply delivering cooked restaurant meals. Depending on the service and other factors, expect to make anywhere from $10 to $25 an hour, plus tips.

These are strictly seasonal pursuits in most of the country, but can be good temporary gigs if you’re not afraid of manual labor and have a good rake and a drop cloth or a snow shovel. (Leaf- and snow-blowers are other options, if they’re permitted in the neighborhood in question.) Leaf-rakers and snow-shovelers report making anything from $10 to $30 an hour, but you can negotiate higher rates for particular hard or extensive jobs. Grateful customers sometimes tip generously, too. Drum up business by going door-to-door as the leaves or the snowflakes fall, or post notices on neighborhood bulletin boards.

This is a kind of yard work that isn’t quite as seasonal as leaf-raking or snow-shoveling (though it’ll slow down in winter in snowy climes). Some investment is required: You’ll need a good power mower, a weed-eater, and maybe an edger, and a vehicle to transport your equipment, but you can make $20 to $50 per lawn, and if you can mow five or six in a day, that adds up nicely. As with other yard work, try getting business by going door-to-door or posting notices on neighborhood bulletin boards.

If you have good credit, you can get a zero-fee cash-back credit card. These work by giving you back a percentage of any amount you charge — typically between 1% and 2%, though some cards offer as much as 5% or 6%. The amount you earn usually gets applied to your bill. If you have a 2% card and spend $100, you’ll owe $98. That may not seem like much, but you can let your credit accumulate to the point where it might make a difference one month. Some cards will also allow you to request a payout by check or direct deposit, or let you redeem your credit for a gift card.

People sometimes have money they don’t know about. Old bank accounts, uncollected refunds, and other unclaimed funds might be waiting for you to discover them. You can find information on HUD/FHA mortgage interest refunds, credit union unclaimed shares, etc. on various government sites. MissingMoney.com and several similar sites are also useful resources.

Unless you’re a widely published photographer, it isn’t easy to make a significant amount of money selling your images to a stock agency, but it’s possible. Agencies to consider include Shutterstock, Adobe Stock, Dreamstime, and iStock. But you’ll need high-quality photos in subject areas that are in demand (this tends to change over time), and a lot of them. One photographer who brings in about $500 a month has 6,000 images online. In addition to accumulating the photos, consider the time it takes to upload them.