I am employed as a senior software engineer at Microsoft, on the side I like to steal from parked cars with clearly visible valuables in suburbs adjacent to our office. You can make a fortune selling this garbage on the internet with little risk, I make usually an extra $800 - sometimes $2000 in a good week if multiple high end laptops.
I somehow ended up on the government's poor people list despite being nowhere near poor, from my rural hometown, and I get enough money for a handful of AI subscriptions (to give you an idea) through the direct benefits program. I also get "for the family" notebooks and bags at the start of the school year, a phone every few years, a mixer-grinder now and then, sweets once a year, and more similar, all beautifully adorned with our chief ministers face. In practice I give the coupons and gifts away to one of the others in that rural area, and only keep for myself the box of sweets if I happen to be there - I live primarily in the city.
The local politicos know this mistake but weren't able to get anyone to fix it and remove me from the list. By now, they automatically know not to deliver the goodies to our address.
But as of the last couple of years, the money automatically shows up in my bank account, it's been digitized. So yeah it's an "income source" of around 13k INR a month. And I get credits back in the bank account as well for the cooking gas we consume, which is small since we don't live there much.
When I visit that bank next, I hope to get the whole damn thing cancelled. Hopefully the digitisation also means more quickly being able to cancel it.
I don't know if it counts, but I document German bureaucracy for immigrants. The income is from commissions on the various things they need for the process, like a bano account, health insurance, certified translations etc.
In the last two years I've also made money from consulting the government on how to better help immigrants. It's not steady income, but it's good to know that they are trying to improve.
I teach some music private lessons and play jazz gigs. An easy side hustle that should require not more than 10 years of work for a couple of hours a day to qualify if you apply yourself. You could be a hundredaire! :-)
"Jazz Musician": someone who puts a $10000 horn in a $1000 car to play a $100 gig
Can confirm, have made hundreds from playing music after four years of several hours a day. Still probably only made 25% the cost of instrument and strings though.
I quit my engineering job at Apple in 2023 to buy an aluminum Olson-Grumman step van, and start a mobile knife sharpening business, in Seattle. burlyburr.com Each knife takes maybe 5 minutes and I charge $2/inch, mostly working on summer weekends in the farmers markets. Makes over $150/hr when business is lined up. Sporadic work though.
I'm leasing my kidney. I'm 27 and did the calculation, it's just more profitable than selling. Picked this trend up on TikTok and can recommend. When I retire I plan to get it back.
I think stuff like this needs to grow organically from a combination of passion and (social) opportunity. You may want to look around where you live, for gatherings, events, markets, and take the time to see if something speaks to you?
Modern life for many is too fast. We can consciously slow down and feel and listen and explore, and if we practice enough we can do that without pressure or direct goal, and then when you don’t expect it something will show up that matches.
Let me tell you something that does not make money: selling fiction books as an independent author (through physical copies, Kindle ebooks and Kindle Unlimited). Family member is a good writer, has been trying to "make it" for a few years already (published multiple books, has good reviews), and the monthly profit is still not enough to buy a pizza.
For small and occasional activities it may be worth asking a tax professional how the local laws treat hobby income. In the past it has simplified my declaration of tax activity by avoiding business red tape for that class of income and I could declare expenses against it at small scale. It does have to be occasional or unserious enough to be classed as a hobby.
I don’t but I know someone who works in IT with a side gig of doing renovation. It’s definitely not very unusual though. The trick is to find small jobs that professionals try to avoid but big enough that ordinary people can’t do.
Aside from that - as for parent poster's story about needing to register a company, perhaps they are living in a particularly onerous jurisdiction. But more generally, many jurisdictions allow you to be a Sole Trader with fairly minimal registration. Filing taxes - well, hopefully you do that already, and adding your Sole Trader income is likely not that much work on top. (Selling overseas and dealing with overseas taxes? There's often companies that will handle all the overseas taxes on your behalf, and they might only take 10% or less of the sale with no upfront cost as payment.)
If you're not sure about this stuff, see if your city has a Small Business Development Center where you can ask their advice. This stuff is probably all online, and if not they might have leaflets & books on what you need to know. Places like that will often have open hours with someone from the Tax Office as well where you can ask your questions.
Especially, don't put up walls for yourself that weren't already there. This stuff really may not be as complicated as you think.
Farmers' market produce was once a go-to for our basic funding requirements; and pretty much all of those were wild harvested from perma-jungle that we leased or from surrounding state/public roadside, and from trees and edible weeds that i was also payed to trim and maintain - so i knew they were all pesticide, herbicide free.
Also did some sales of goat milk, which as it was unpasteurized and unprocessed, was not for human consumption. A primary customer was the exotic mammals nursery at the local zoo. Turns out goat milk is a pretty good stand-in for the needs of everything from foxbats, to marsupials, to simians; with perhaps a little adjustment by the veterinarian caretakers in each of those cases.
I've been an occasional writer of technical documentation, including for private and government grant proposals ~ that may seem strange to have your lawn-care, goat-wrangling, tour-guide, dive-instructor as the uncredited primary author for a multi-year, multi-institution, multi-million dollar educational research program: but hey, whatever gets the job done, and since I identified the grant(s) and matched them to the service providers, educators, researchers, and institutions they paid me to write them. Several of those ran for a little less than ten years with renewal and reapplication - minimal reworking of the original grants to meet each years' new parameters.
Provided safety training and outdoor activity orientation in a National Park which included both whitewater rafting and back-country mule rides. Is that unusual?
Collected offshore water samples for e. coli detection and genetic analysis to determine near-shore pollution sources. Is that unusual?
Pulled used vehicle tires from landfills for recycling into rubberized asphalt, with selections of those shipped to form a seismic damper layer at an international airport built on a man-made island? Is that usual?
The list really does go on: astronomy equipment digital control interface software, bare-metal unikernel design, commercial dish washer, electric and hydrogen kiln control hardware redesign and implementation, commercial game meat processing, electronic flight-bag software design, commercial video monitoring installations, high risk personnel protection, methane-digester design (with vapor scrubbing for safe appliance use in a mixed methane:propane system including off-grid refrigeration), NiFe alkaline power cell reconditioning, PC repair including refloat of 'dead' GPU hardware solder points (oh, back in the day of the 9800), isolate and safety testing of lambic fermenting polycultures for more than one microbrewery - many of the HN crowd may have actually tasted the semi-sour Weisen from one of those, before the shop got bought out by AB Inbev, ... it's been a while since i really made a list, and just now I realize it does just go on-and-on, ... there's rattlesnake meat sold to a restaurant, gentle breaking of horses, house demolition and historically accurate restoration of a 'listed property', underwater asset reclamation...
The thing I realize is that I may never have made very much revenue from any of them; but each needed done, I was willing and able.
It sure beats saying to myself; "I made widgets to make other people wealthy enough to lose tough with their humanity."
A honey farm rehab with the first task on the first day: get a beehive out of the church apse today, because the wedding is scheduled tomorrow - with a sawsall and a shopvac with an inline bee-safe collection box: relocate the hive, dont kill the queen and most of the workers.
Progressing to controlling mite infestation to prevent further population collapses, without using any chemicals beyond superfine cane sugar and crystallized sterile honey powder ~ dusting to induce healthy hygenic actions and relocating the hives into an elevated, bottomless position with oil on water traps to catch mite and other pestfall.
Induce queen cell production (using a #2 pencil as the 'oversized' cell template), expand from 6 struggling hives back to 26 active producing hives with on-site queens and brood comb splits). Build new top-bar hives.
......
Cooperage - white oak wine barrels from scratch by hand, without jigs or templates, from raw lumber to staves and oak 4 plank heads, with mild steel assembly rings and permanent hoops (chimes, quarters, and bilges) made from repurposed marine keel strake strips from salvaged sailboats.
......
Braided kangaroo and bovine rawhide into riata: 6 and 8 strand weaves in 55' to 60' for ushnad bre by working vaquero in Sonora, Chihahua, and elsewhere. [Wow, was that really 40 years ago? Man, time flies!] Sold a few, hand braided nylon halters and other saddle tack about the same time from broken and unraveled nylon-poly rodeo ropes.
......
Tour guiding - Back country (multi-day, horse+mule and hiking in diverse climates and ecosystems), high altitude star-gazing with Celestron telescopes, and lava flow multi-mile hiking to experience active flows.
......
Sub-grade elevation precision assurance for municipal scale drainage and water management construction : convert surveyor placed elevation pins into verifiable slope gradient guidelines and grade check every foot of the excavation using plumb-line and laser-level, 0.2 to 2.0% slopes with tested compaction for pre and post pipeline installation - installation sites included one MLB spring-training campus.
/todays installatment of 'unusual things i have done for a little income'
I am employed as a senior software engineer at Microsoft, on the side I like to steal from parked cars with clearly visible valuables in suburbs adjacent to our office. You can make a fortune selling this garbage on the internet with little risk, I make usually an extra $800 - sometimes $2000 in a good week if multiple high end laptops.
Well AI certainly can't do THAT
of course, you're also harvesting credentials from these laptops
Are you serious?
This is an internet forum… not a court…
It is clearly a joke.
I somehow ended up on the government's poor people list despite being nowhere near poor, from my rural hometown, and I get enough money for a handful of AI subscriptions (to give you an idea) through the direct benefits program. I also get "for the family" notebooks and bags at the start of the school year, a phone every few years, a mixer-grinder now and then, sweets once a year, and more similar, all beautifully adorned with our chief ministers face. In practice I give the coupons and gifts away to one of the others in that rural area, and only keep for myself the box of sweets if I happen to be there - I live primarily in the city.
The local politicos know this mistake but weren't able to get anyone to fix it and remove me from the list. By now, they automatically know not to deliver the goodies to our address.
But as of the last couple of years, the money automatically shows up in my bank account, it's been digitized. So yeah it's an "income source" of around 13k INR a month. And I get credits back in the bank account as well for the cooking gas we consume, which is small since we don't live there much.
When I visit that bank next, I hope to get the whole damn thing cancelled. Hopefully the digitisation also means more quickly being able to cancel it.
Which Indian state is this? I'm assuming something southern.
My guess is Tamil Nadu ?
I don't know if it counts, but I document German bureaucracy for immigrants. The income is from commissions on the various things they need for the process, like a bano account, health insurance, certified translations etc.
In the last two years I've also made money from consulting the government on how to better help immigrants. It's not steady income, but it's good to know that they are trying to improve.
I'm playing monsters in low-budget horror movies.
It’s fun to watch them with friends and family from time to time to laugh about the horrible acting.
I teach some music private lessons and play jazz gigs. An easy side hustle that should require not more than 10 years of work for a couple of hours a day to qualify if you apply yourself. You could be a hundredaire! :-)
"Jazz Musician": someone who puts a $10000 horn in a $1000 car to play a $100 gig
Can confirm, have made hundreds from playing music after four years of several hours a day. Still probably only made 25% the cost of instrument and strings though.
After 30 years I've made thousands! Of course, the collection of instruments and their respective value goes up on the same line, sooo.... ;-)
The most annoying part is having to declare everything properly on the tax returns even when its peanuts. sigh.
I quit my engineering job at Apple in 2023 to buy an aluminum Olson-Grumman step van, and start a mobile knife sharpening business, in Seattle. burlyburr.com Each knife takes maybe 5 minutes and I charge $2/inch, mostly working on summer weekends in the farmers markets. Makes over $150/hr when business is lined up. Sporadic work though.
I'm leasing my kidney. I'm 27 and did the calculation, it's just more profitable than selling. Picked this trend up on TikTok and can recommend. When I retire I plan to get it back.
Was a no-brainer.
As a graduate student, I used to rent my body to Science, by participating in medical school experiments. Nothing injected, but blood drawn.
I spent an afternoon in an iron lung, and a couple nights in the hospital, trying to sleep while med students messed with my air supply.
I think stuff like this needs to grow organically from a combination of passion and (social) opportunity. You may want to look around where you live, for gatherings, events, markets, and take the time to see if something speaks to you?
Modern life for many is too fast. We can consciously slow down and feel and listen and explore, and if we practice enough we can do that without pressure or direct goal, and then when you don’t expect it something will show up that matches.
I doubt your neighbor started with the idea.
Let me tell you something that does not make money: selling fiction books as an independent author (through physical copies, Kindle ebooks and Kindle Unlimited). Family member is a good writer, has been trying to "make it" for a few years already (published multiple books, has good reviews), and the monthly profit is still not enough to buy a pizza.
If they story is genuinely good, they can adopt it into a film or animation.
For small and occasional activities it may be worth asking a tax professional how the local laws treat hobby income. In the past it has simplified my declaration of tax activity by avoiding business red tape for that class of income and I could declare expenses against it at small scale. It does have to be occasional or unserious enough to be classed as a hobby.
I work in healthcare by day, but I have an OnlyFans for my feet that makes me an additional $17,000 a month on average.
I write news articles on nasengetu.com, and make calculators & tools for a living.
I don’t but I know someone who works in IT with a side gig of doing renovation. It’s definitely not very unusual though. The trick is to find small jobs that professionals try to avoid but big enough that ordinary people can’t do.
I'd keep in mind that even though someone may find an activity profitable, it's often largely affected by the local laws and tax policies.
For example are a myriad of 10s-100s of bucks/month I could theoretically make that have demand and in many countries someone might do, but here it's
1) required to have a company
2) static taxes are several thousand/year
3) dealing with requisite liabilities and insurance lifts the monthly fees to some hundreds/month
So check those first before diving deep
All of those things are optional.
I promise you can sell something to your neighbor for $10 without filing taxes and registering a company.
To believe otherwise is like the Top Gear story about the German guy who insists you need a license to drive a car.
To save others a search, the Top Gear story (it's only 40 seconds):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3EBs7sCOzo
Aside from that - as for parent poster's story about needing to register a company, perhaps they are living in a particularly onerous jurisdiction. But more generally, many jurisdictions allow you to be a Sole Trader with fairly minimal registration. Filing taxes - well, hopefully you do that already, and adding your Sole Trader income is likely not that much work on top. (Selling overseas and dealing with overseas taxes? There's often companies that will handle all the overseas taxes on your behalf, and they might only take 10% or less of the sale with no upfront cost as payment.)
If you're not sure about this stuff, see if your city has a Small Business Development Center where you can ask their advice. This stuff is probably all online, and if not they might have leaflets & books on what you need to know. Places like that will often have open hours with someone from the Tax Office as well where you can ask your questions.
Especially, don't put up walls for yourself that weren't already there. This stuff really may not be as complicated as you think.
I rent out tables for local ComicCons.
Good money in it, but a lot of the people who rent your tables won't keep them clean.
so you are sayng your job is "tables" , sry Tim Robinson skit reference
Hello IRS
Someone reportedly made it into a source of passive income.
"Set up my OpenClaw to report people to the IRS for tax fraud... expect to collect over $500,000 this year" https://x.com/camolNFT/status/2043463812267811272
Do you earn more than $13,000 on the side?
K1 "income" isn't especially unusual, but if we're asking, after W2, and the various 1099 types, more people should know about K1 distribution.
it's pretty hard to define - unusual in my life.
Farmers' market produce was once a go-to for our basic funding requirements; and pretty much all of those were wild harvested from perma-jungle that we leased or from surrounding state/public roadside, and from trees and edible weeds that i was also payed to trim and maintain - so i knew they were all pesticide, herbicide free.
Also did some sales of goat milk, which as it was unpasteurized and unprocessed, was not for human consumption. A primary customer was the exotic mammals nursery at the local zoo. Turns out goat milk is a pretty good stand-in for the needs of everything from foxbats, to marsupials, to simians; with perhaps a little adjustment by the veterinarian caretakers in each of those cases.
I've been an occasional writer of technical documentation, including for private and government grant proposals ~ that may seem strange to have your lawn-care, goat-wrangling, tour-guide, dive-instructor as the uncredited primary author for a multi-year, multi-institution, multi-million dollar educational research program: but hey, whatever gets the job done, and since I identified the grant(s) and matched them to the service providers, educators, researchers, and institutions they paid me to write them. Several of those ran for a little less than ten years with renewal and reapplication - minimal reworking of the original grants to meet each years' new parameters.
Provided safety training and outdoor activity orientation in a National Park which included both whitewater rafting and back-country mule rides. Is that unusual?
Collected offshore water samples for e. coli detection and genetic analysis to determine near-shore pollution sources. Is that unusual?
Pulled used vehicle tires from landfills for recycling into rubberized asphalt, with selections of those shipped to form a seismic damper layer at an international airport built on a man-made island? Is that usual?
The list really does go on: astronomy equipment digital control interface software, bare-metal unikernel design, commercial dish washer, electric and hydrogen kiln control hardware redesign and implementation, commercial game meat processing, electronic flight-bag software design, commercial video monitoring installations, high risk personnel protection, methane-digester design (with vapor scrubbing for safe appliance use in a mixed methane:propane system including off-grid refrigeration), NiFe alkaline power cell reconditioning, PC repair including refloat of 'dead' GPU hardware solder points (oh, back in the day of the 9800), isolate and safety testing of lambic fermenting polycultures for more than one microbrewery - many of the HN crowd may have actually tasted the semi-sour Weisen from one of those, before the shop got bought out by AB Inbev, ... it's been a while since i really made a list, and just now I realize it does just go on-and-on, ... there's rattlesnake meat sold to a restaurant, gentle breaking of horses, house demolition and historically accurate restoration of a 'listed property', underwater asset reclamation...
The thing I realize is that I may never have made very much revenue from any of them; but each needed done, I was willing and able.
It sure beats saying to myself; "I made widgets to make other people wealthy enough to lose tough with their humanity."
One person's unusual is other peoples' every day.
A honey farm rehab with the first task on the first day: get a beehive out of the church apse today, because the wedding is scheduled tomorrow - with a sawsall and a shopvac with an inline bee-safe collection box: relocate the hive, dont kill the queen and most of the workers.
Progressing to controlling mite infestation to prevent further population collapses, without using any chemicals beyond superfine cane sugar and crystallized sterile honey powder ~ dusting to induce healthy hygenic actions and relocating the hives into an elevated, bottomless position with oil on water traps to catch mite and other pestfall.
Induce queen cell production (using a #2 pencil as the 'oversized' cell template), expand from 6 struggling hives back to 26 active producing hives with on-site queens and brood comb splits). Build new top-bar hives.
......
Cooperage - white oak wine barrels from scratch by hand, without jigs or templates, from raw lumber to staves and oak 4 plank heads, with mild steel assembly rings and permanent hoops (chimes, quarters, and bilges) made from repurposed marine keel strake strips from salvaged sailboats.
......
Braided kangaroo and bovine rawhide into riata: 6 and 8 strand weaves in 55' to 60' for ushnad bre by working vaquero in Sonora, Chihahua, and elsewhere. [Wow, was that really 40 years ago? Man, time flies!] Sold a few, hand braided nylon halters and other saddle tack about the same time from broken and unraveled nylon-poly rodeo ropes.
......
Tour guiding - Back country (multi-day, horse+mule and hiking in diverse climates and ecosystems), high altitude star-gazing with Celestron telescopes, and lava flow multi-mile hiking to experience active flows.
......
Sub-grade elevation precision assurance for municipal scale drainage and water management construction : convert surveyor placed elevation pins into verifiable slope gradient guidelines and grade check every foot of the excavation using plumb-line and laser-level, 0.2 to 2.0% slopes with tested compaction for pre and post pipeline installation - installation sites included one MLB spring-training campus.
/todays installatment of 'unusual things i have done for a little income'
that one IRS intern TwT
nice try