I'm a programmer employed full time. I need to find a way to earn 30,000 dollars or so after taxes to pay for some health related debt I incurred last year. What kind of site or online activity would you start in your free time to make that kind of money?
I've got into ticket scalping lately. It's not legal in many states but it is completely legal in my state as long as you do it online and conduct business using your real name. Check your local laws.
It is really, really easy. All you do is check http://ticketstumbler.com/blog/ for upcoming sales and refresh ticketmaster at 10AM when they're on sale. I don't use a script, though a simple one to get you direct to the CAPTCHA would save 2 seconds which definitely makes a difference in quality of seats.
Don't buy seats at the back of large amphitheaters unless it is for Phish.
It's easiest to sell on Stubhub but using Craiglist can add 8-10% to your margins. It's annoying to have to email/call back and forth with the people though.
Wow, that's genius! Let me make sure I have you straight (I've never heard of this before)...
You check the TicketStumbler blog for hot pre-sale tickets. You buy them for face value when they go on sale (10AM?) hoping they'll get sold out. Then, you flip them on StubHub/Craigslist after they're sold out? What if the show doesn't get sold out?
Also, did I understand you correctly in that TicketMaster gives the best tickets to the first people who buy them, and you might get bad seats buying at 10AM? How can you tell if the seats are good enough?
Yeah, you got it. It's not just presales, there isn't a big difference between buying in a presale and a regular sale. Presale just gives you two shots at it.
The tickets are first come first served so whoever completes the CAPTCHA fastest gets the best tickets. However, some will always be released when people don't actually complete the transaction. So you can keep trying again and again for 15 minutes or so. Whatever you do, do not try to buy different tickets at the same time on the same computer. You cannot buy tickets for two cities at once, you will lose all your tickets. You need a VPN or your cell phone internet if you want to start playing that game.
The best way to decide on a show is to look at the listings on Stubhub for a show by that artist that is already on sale. Assume that to sell a ticket you need to beat the lowest price on Stubhub. This isn't always possible and that's where your intuition comes into play. If you're in doubt about whether or not to purchase, feel free to email me and ask. For now, Leonard Cohen is a really good one to start with. The presale passwords are easy to find on google. Phish will also be announcing more shows soon and they are just about the hottest ticket this summer.
In a small theater, any seat is good enough. In a pavillion, only the front sections or the front of the rear sections are ok. The back of the rear sections in pavilions are a trap. Lawn tickets usually don't have very good margins. In an arena, anything that isn't behind the stage is usually ok. This is because in a pavilion the rear seats are usually the same price as the front seats, but in an arena the upper seats are significantly cheaper.
I haven't had a show yet where I have lost money, but I make my picks carefully. 200% profit isn't very common though. 50% profit is probably a realistic average. I may end up getting rid of Billy Joel/Elton John tickets soon at just a little over cost.
Most of the tickets are on sale 3-4 months ahead of time. You can turn them around very quickly if you're willing to go for the lowest price on Stubhub which may or may not be the optimal strategy. My fastest turnaround was 4 Jimmy Buffett lawn tickets in California that I got for $40 each and sold on Stubhub for $80 each an hour late.
Generally I buy a pair at a time because you are more likely to get 2 good seats together than 4 seats together. Then go back and immediately buy two more. Sometimes I buy 4. It mostly depends on available funds and mood, it's not something I have mathematically optimized.
How do you get around the restrictions that will be placed on Cohen tickets, will call only and must have id and credit card that tickets were reserved with?
Ah, good for him. It's really a great thing for the fans when the shows are will call only. Tom Waits does the same thing; it cuts scalpers out. I didn't investigate it that closely because I wasn't planning on buying tickets for it.
So at best you can make $100 profit per day? Doesn't sound like a winning combination to me.
I don't think that's what the original poster had in mind. He may have been looking for a high-paying consulting gig, you know, the kind that pays $1,000/day.
For the person who has a little more money, but not enough patience or planning to login to the ticket website at 10am, actors like the commenter are creating wealth for this person.
But if the ticket scalper hadn't been scraping the ticket website at 10am in the first place, the ticket would still be on sale.
(Okay, it likely would've gone to someone else who got there after 10 but before the customer. But now you're cheating that person out of the ticket they otherwise would've had. Still zero-sum.)
There are certainly any number of ticket brokers out there that are making six figure incomes.
Right now I'm limited by capital. Volume could scale higher once you start automating the processes as much as possible and using VPNs to get multiple shots, but I'm not quite there yet. One advantage of doing it at low volume is that you can cherry pick only the best shows, like the upcoming Leonard Cohen show. Unfortunately all my free capital is tied up in tickets already so I miss out on Leonard Cohen.
I know it's unlikely, but if anyone wants to loan me money I can comfortably offer you interest rates higher that beat anything you can get on the market right now.
I can vouch for Kevin. Nobody I know works so hard to invest small amounts of money to make moderately larger amounts of money simply to avoid work explicitly labeled as "work."
Yeah, definitely when it doubt big cities are better. But it's also harder to get good tickets for big cities -- I've never been able to get good seats for a show at the amphitheater in the Boston metro area. My biggest success recently has been for Bruce Springsteen tickets in Austin. It was a college stadium that had their own ticketing system instead of Ticketmaster and took a lot longer to sell out than his other shows. I think a lot of the brokers miss non-Ticketmaster shows.
Similarly, I've had success with Seinfeld shows, which are usually at non-Ticketmaster theaters.
That's not my rationalization though it's certainly true. I'm part of a system that allows artists and venues to have nice clean financials by guaranteeing sell-outs. It is certainly not good for fans. As someone who goes to a lot of shows, I would be happy to see the system change.
The higher the risk the higher the payout. As long as it is not gambling. Hell try the stock market, oversell and wait for the stocks to drop then buy.
To make quick cash you must be willing to risk. Risk means that you have a chance to not win, in fact lose. So weigh your options wisely.
Joking aside, I think the easiest way to make $30k after taxes is to drastically cut your living expenses and save $30k. To make $30K after taxes, you'd have to make close to $50K before taxes (I assume you have a decent programmer's salary already, and this'll put you in a high bracket). There aren't many ways to make $50K in a hurry without a long ramp-up period. If you could, everyone would quit their day job and make their freelance business their real one.
You can deduct medical expenses from your earnings. You can file for bankruptcy, which can nullify the debt. Talk to re-financing companies, they also can cut that number down a bit.
If we knew how to just make 30k, I think we all would be doing it, nonestop.
Well first things first you need to realize that the $30,000 price tag takes into account the fact that they think they are charging insurance. If the hospital realizes you are actually paying this yourself, the price will come down.
Second of all you need to realize that there is absolutely no reason for you to pay that amount in a lump sum. Do you think your average person has $30K on hand to pay? Work out a payment plan with the hospital so that you can pay it off a small amount at a time.
Third you need to realize that there is pretty much no way to make $30K after taxes "quickly" as a sidejob. So you need to think long term for the solution.
You may have more leverage than you think. I'm pretty sure in my state (Kansas) your credit rating cannot be dinged for late payment on a medical bill. Used to be the case anyway. It would be handy to know if that was true for you too.
When my father got sick there was a flood of bills. I just sent every creditor $20 a month. I figured they would be happy to get anything since so many people pay nothing. I never made any formal payment plans or arrangments. This worked fine.
Another thing you might do is challenge large bills. I challenged a big bill with several charges, don't remember why, but they ended up adjusting it down more than what I asked for, on different charges than the ones I was objecting to. They could not explain this, just "that's what the reviewers came back with". Give them the opportunity.
"takes into account the fact that they think they are charging insurance. If the hospital realizes you are actually paying this yourself, the price will come down."
Unfortunately it's actually exactly the opposite. The truth is that if you have no insurance you pay more (or at least are billed more). At the minimum get full deductible insurance - it doesn't cover anything (except massive emergencies AKA bills), but they do negotiate good prices for you (usually as part of their full pay plan).
For a tiny example: lots of stores have $4 discount drugs. It's a good deal yes - but my insurance got me a price of $2.16 (I don't see how the pharmacy makes any money at all at that price BTW).
As a starting point don't ever pay more than half of what they ask! Tell them: I'll pay half, or I'll pay nothing - you pick. You'll see, they'll agree. And you can probably get away with paying just a third.
Don't forget to look into all the government and private programs for people in your situation. They exist, and they have lots of hoops to jump through (on purpose, to discourage people from actually using them, while being able to claim they exist) - but if you do it, you can save a lot.
If you can't afford to pay back $30k for health care don't forget to try to negotiate with the hospital/doctors. You should be able to get a large discount on that amount if you agree to actually pay it back (instead of never paying a dime, which is what they're used to).
Just take on a conventional second job to make the money. If you reduce your living expenses at the same time, that will make your earning requirements for the second job lower.
Aside from inventing an innovative idea or finding an existing business idea that is good but not yet being done, that's the only sure way to make the kind of profit you're needing.
I'm sorry you're in such a position and can only hope that you are now cured of the medical ailments that got you into this position in the first place.
Sorry for downmodding you - I blame microscopic arrows and lack of undo.
Your advice is some of the best in this thread. Entrepreneurship is about taking on risk, which is exactly the opposite of predictable money.
Perhaps a second "conventional job" isn't what's called for, but consulting definitely is. The important part is to get paid now rather than hoping to strike it rich through sweat equity.
"I need to find a way to earn 30,000 dollars or so after taxes..."
Learn objective-C and create an iphone app that is novel but incredibly simple. Should be based on a humorous topic (e.g. iFart, Sound Grenade) That should be able to bring in 30k in a day. If you don't have a mac to hack on, turn your pc into a hackintosh.
I find this to be the best suggestion thus far. iPhone apps are making more and more money each day. I believe the percentage is 70/30 nowadays. So If you sell 15,000 copies of your game at a price of $2.99 a piece you will bring in 70% or $31,395 which will be pretty close to bringing you to your goal (still have to pay taxes.)
Problem with iPhone dev is that there's a lead time to ramp up. It takes time to learn Objective C, learn the various SDKs, build your app, get it into the app store, and get people to buy it. By then, the iPhone craze may very well be over.
I'd do this only if you already know Cocoa/Obj-C development and don't have to ramp up your dev skills, or if you're planning to get in it for the long haul and actually build a real business around iPhone apps.
Incidentally, I ran into this same thing with my startup and FaceBook apps. When it came out, I was like "Wow, this is cool, we can surf this wave and get instant adoption." But I was still at my day job, and by the time I'd quit and really had time to devote to it, the Facebook app market was saturated and all my friends were like "Get these damn zombies and throwable sheep off my page!" I ended up not learning the platform, which turned out to be a smart choice in retrospect, since only the Slides/RockYous made appreciable money off it (and I'm not even sure about them - what's Slide's valuation now? It isn't still $500M, is it?)
I think the problem is that there actually is a lot of lead time on this. I think a lot of the explosive apps you see were people that started early and had a lot of failures before they finally got a win. Still a bit of a gold rush going on, but it is a gold rush. Most people strike out.
I've been making iPhone apps for about 7 months now. My third app was approved less than 2 days ago. Here is a brief summary of my experience:
First app
- a 0.99 cents novelty app
- 1 month dev time
- 3 months wait for approval
- sold about 1500 copies to date
- received about $300 from Apple (more on the way)
- sales are down to about 10 copies / day
Second App
- simple, innovative 0.99 cents game that wasn't polished
- 1.5 months dev time
- 2 days wait for approval
- sold about 150 copies in the first few days
- received small amount of money from Apple
- sales immediately dropped to < 1 copy / day after the first week
- app removed from store 3 weeks after release
Third app
- super-simple free noise making app a la sound grenade, ifart etc
- 5 hours dev time
- 1 week wait for approval
- 250 downloads the first day (today is the second day)
- no money yet... an ad-supported version is awaiting approval into app store
No easy route that is legal. if you are innovative, you can find unique business idea - but the sole goal should not be to make money quick, since those endeavors typically don't embody the passion to be successful in the business. See: The Entrepreneur's Manual: Business Start-Ups, Spin-Offs, and Innovative Management by Richard M. White. Though it is out of print, you might find it used on abebooks.com
Bankruptcy is by far the fastest way for this special case where you are using the profit to eliminate a debt. Warning: won't work for student loans from the government.
I am in the process of doing this right now but I can't tell you my secret. I can, however, sell you my secret to making $30,000 for a low price of $500.
It makes me sad that I no longer see it, but just a [dead] placeholder.
I like graying out the obnoxious stuff. I don't mind forcing people to click again to see something that is truly offensive. But I think when stuff disappears completely a certain line has been crossed.
It is really, really easy. All you do is check http://ticketstumbler.com/blog/ for upcoming sales and refresh ticketmaster at 10AM when they're on sale. I don't use a script, though a simple one to get you direct to the CAPTCHA would save 2 seconds which definitely makes a difference in quality of seats.
Some intuition about what will be instant sellouts is needed. This is the best one going on soon: a legendary performer known for rarely touring and he is playing tiny venues. http://www.ticketmaster.com/Leonard-Cohen-tickets/artist/733...
Don't buy seats at the back of large amphitheaters unless it is for Phish.
It's easiest to sell on Stubhub but using Craiglist can add 8-10% to your margins. It's annoying to have to email/call back and forth with the people though.