How To Make Some Extra Bucks - By Doing Nothing

I love the title - do nothing and make some money at the same time. Almost nothing, that is…

1. Put aside the change

Put aside all the coins that you receive everyday into a piggy bank - yeah, mummy is always right. Just continue to do what you were trained to do from young. After some time, you will be surprised that you have some substantial amount of money in your savings.

2. Terminate your gym membership

No, don’t get me wrong. If you are actively utilizing your gym membership, by all means go ahead and exercise. After all health comes before wealth. But, if you are not using them and paying hundreds of dollars every month hoping that you will be using them soon (and this has been going on for a year or so), it is about time you looked into terminating the membership immediately and try to exercise at home instead using simple equipments such as the skipping rope and dumb bells.

3. Change to regular petrol

Unless you own a very new car and too sensitive to the performance of your car, you can always change to the regular petrol from your premium petrol. This will save you a few cents for every litre and for the few hundred litres your car is going to gulp down over a few weeks or months, you should be having a thicker wallet.

4. Use credit card instead of cash

Let me warn you first - you have to be extremely disciplined to follow this step, or else you will end up cursing me for giving you this idea. Credit card companies usually give out points to their customers for every swipe of the card that you make. Just make sure you record every transaction that you make with your card and before the end of every month, make a full settlement on your card. This way, you are not charged for your card, but you get something free instead for this service. At times, after a certain period of accumulation, you can even go for a free vacation! That’s a brilliant idea, wouldn’t you agree?

5. Disconnect your cable TV

For a person who is concerned about his finance, cable TV would sound too luxurious. Instead of being a couch potato, the time can be utilised to earn additional income or exercising or doing some better things. Or at the least, try to minimize the channels or switch to a lower plan, if available.

After following the steps mentioned above, you would have made some amount of money. Well, a dollar saved is a dollar made!

What Can You Do To Supplement Your Income?

There are many things out there you can do to supplement your income. However, since most of the time people don’t get to do what they love to do in their primary jobs ( they are most like to be working for the paychecks) first of all you have to ask yourself a few simple questions. This is an important step as you want to enjoy yourself as well as earning some income at the same time.

• What is your hobby?
• What is it that you can continue to enjoy to do even though there’s no money involved in it?
• Can you get support from your family members in what you intend to do? (not necessary but you will soon find that it will be much easier if you had their support or understanding)
• Do you need any special facilities or equipments and how much cost would be incurred?

Having thought about all these questions mentioned, you have various choice of jobs that you can start-off as a part-timer or as a hobby. Besides generating some income for you, it can continue to be your favourite past-time. You can relax yourselves and free yourselves from the daily stress.

Among the popular choices that you have:

• Teach part time - This can include at colleges/institutes or giving private tuition.
• Baby sit - If you find that you love kids, you can always offer baby sitting service, starting from your relatives.
• Designing websites - You can help to design and maintain websites for the small business owners and gradually as your skills improve, you may even offer your services to the corporate group as well.
• Service computers - Usually customers find it difficult to troubleshoot or maintain a pc (from viruses, de fragmenting, installation of software,etc.) after their warranty period is over. Why not offer your service in this area?
• Tailoring service - If your service is good and you are good with your hands, you are sure to have your hands full especially during festive seasons.
• Bridal & make-up service - This seasonal service is also good for a part-timer who is artistic and creative. Together with this, you can have decoration service also included.

The examples given above are merely to jumpstart in case you are having difficulties looking for ideas. But hey, the sky is the limit. You don’t have to limit yourself to these jobs alone as you can come up with your own method to supplement your income as you should know best what you are good at!

Successful Bloggers

Over the weekend, I had the chance of meeting 2 of my old friends. 1 of them is an engineer while the other was in the IT industry. Though the meeting was on separate occasion with each individual, surprisingly, I had 1 common topic for discussion. You guessed it right! It was on how to make more money.

• Both of them were very keen and enthusiastic about generating a higher income for themselves and their family but didn't know how.
• Both of them wanted to start off some business, but didn't know what business they should venture into.
• Both agreed that they lacked in marketing skills which is of utmost important to have in running a business.
• Both had limited funds for investment in the business.

BUT,

• Both had Internet connection + computer facility at home.
• Both had spare time that they could devote to everyday.
• Both had some experience/expertise that they could share with others for their benefit.

So, I suggested that while they were thinking about a more appropriate business plan, why not do some blogging. To my surprise, they were quite unfamiliar with that term. One of them even kept pronouncing 'BLOG' as 'BLOP'!!! And continued to explain how you go about doing it and how bloggers make money and what were the potentials for the bloggers. So, in that process of finding more resources for them, I stumbled upon a list of really successful bloggers.

This brought back the confidence in me to continue blogging. Reason No. 1 was for the amount of these successful bloggers made and Reason No. 2 was the notion 'everyone is blogging these days, so you can't make it' wasn't true. At least not in the case of my friends. So there still must be a BIG opportunity out there in blogging. Ok, enough of the talk, let's look at the list of bloggers who has started bringing in the $.

List of Successful Bloggers (Source: BusinessWeek)

boingboing.net
Launched: January, 2000
Revenue: Over $1 million a year

icanhascheezburger.com
Launched: January, 2007
Revenue: Estimated $5,600 a month based on ad rates and self-reported traffic data

shoemoney.com
Launched: October, 2005
Revenue: $12,000 a month

overheardinnewyork.com
Launched: July, 2003
Revenue: Estimated $8,100 a month based on ad rates and self-reported traffic data

kottke.org
Launched: March, 1998
Revenue: Estimated $5,300 a month based on ad rate

talkingpointsmemo.com
Launched: November, 2000
Revenue: Estimated $45,000 a month based on ad rates and self-reported traffic data

perezhilton.com
Launched: September, 2004
Revenue: Estimated $111,000 a month based on ad rates and self-reported traffic data

gothamist.com (and 13 other sites in the "-ist" network)
Launched: January, 2003
Revenue: Monthly average of $50,000 to $60,000 over the past 12 months

techcrunch.com
Launched: June, 2005
Revenue: $200,000 a month

gofugyourself.typepad.com
Launched: July, 2004
Revenue: Estimated $6,240 a month based on ad rates and self-reported traffic data

mashable.com
Launched: July, 2005
Revenue: Estimated $166,000 a month based on ad rates and self-reported traffic data

problogger.net (multiple sites)
Launched: November, 2004
Revenue: Over $100,000 a year

michellemalkin.com
hotair.com
MichelleMalkin.com launched: June, 2004
Hot Air launched: April, 2006
Revenue: NA

What is some of the best financial advice you’ve received?

For the first time ever, I got tagged and I'm responding to it! Silicon Valley Blogger from The Digerati Life tagged me to answer the question:

What is some of the best financial advice you’ve received?

Since I was brought up in an environment where 'Money is not everything' and 'Money is the root cause of all evil', you can't expect much of financial advises. Instead, focus was given on education of oneself to secure a promising job and hence, a bright future. (Reminds of of the famous book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad).

However, if you ask me what is some of the best financial lessons I've learnt, then, I can point out one or two.

Compounding interest will definitely be an eye opener for me to the financial world. When I was about to purchase my house, I started to look into all places where I may possibly have stashed away some cash.
My search revealed a mix of good news and bad news.
The good news - I had some amount of cash stashed away.
The bad news - I had it for a few years and it was all kept in a normal savings account!

Savings account only gave a miserable 0.2% interest per annum. At least if I had the initiative to transfer them to Fixed Deposit account, I would have made a 3.5% - 4.0% per annum. Hmmm.. looks like my money was resting in a corner without doing any work for me. My mistake!

The top 20 jobs most likely to survive a recession

Though the top 20 jobs are listed down, it is important to note here that only highly skilled people are in demand always, whether it is a technical or non-technical job.
So, in order to be still saleable, it is recommended that you should upgrade yourself with additional paper qualification, whether it is a degree or a simple plain certificate. Other than that you can also opt to check out certifications, such as the brainbench certification, some of which are provided for free on the Internet.

Jobs that most probably will survive a recession:

1. Sales representative/business development

2. Software design/development

3. Nursing

4. Accounting and finance executive

5. Accounting staff

6. Networking/systems administration

7. Administrative assistant

8. Business analysis (software implementation)

9. Business analysis (research)

10. Finance staff

11. Project management

12. Testing/quality assurance

13. Product management

14. Database administration

15. Account/customer support

16. Technology executive

17. Electrical engineering

18. Sales executive

19. Mechanical Engineering

20. Government contracts administration



Source:
Copyright 2008 Wellington Newspapers Limited
All Rights Reserved
The Dominion Post (Wellington, New Zealand)
September 6, 2008 Saturday