Everyone loves side money/passive income. The atm post made me think of this. Would love to hear it as lord knows we all need more moolah especially me.
Rental properties, stock trading, computer recycling / resale, scrap metal, dog sitting. (you can really get sucked into dog sitting full time if you are not careful and selective) Formerly auction / abandoned storage unit purchasing -> eBay sales but that took a shit along with PayPal and the proliferation of TV shows along those lines. Basically the more $$ for the least effort. I keep thinking about getting a real job or starting another real business, but I just don't want to commit to the time required.
I rent out the back of my property for trailer/camper storage. Bringing in about $300 a month. I buy, fix and flip cars occasionally. I got a 1995 e34 right now I got that I’m gonna fix a no start issue and double my $ I also modify and upgrade cars for friends/through friends. I don’t really advertise is but I do clutch upgrades, turbocharging cars, fuel system upgrades etc. that can be a real slippery slope as a time suck so I try to limit it. I scour FB marketplace when working in US and bring back to Canada good deals and sell. Also a pretty steady once a month accounting thing I do that brings between 300 and 500 a month for about half a days work.
During the pandemic I made easy money doing Grubhub. $100-150 each evening after work for 2-3 hours on my way home. Haven’t done it in awhile though.
I sell Christmas trees and fireworks. Both are definitely seasonal but provide a years worth of motorcycle and gun money.
Starting my new business tomorrow, chicken rustling. Going to steal em and then rent them out to dumb Yankees for way too much money.
For years it was commercial spearfishing and lobstering. I make better money just working than to dick around with a side hustle and interfere with my real job now.
Purchase at auction / find / set up a booth at various earth day types of events... acquire used computers, laptops, and other electronic devices by various means. Refurbish the ones that might resell, disassemble the ones that won't. Sell the motherboards, RAM, fingerboards and CPUs to a middleman who sells them to precious metals refiners. The heat sinks, power supplies and tower carcasses sell to local base metal scrap yards. Quite often you will come across a computer with resellable RAM, CPU, and more rarely graphics cards. I've gotten 70 bucks for a CPU out of a computer that I found set out on trash day. The RAM out of that one was pretty new as well, but I don't recall the specifics. Several years ago I got in a spot of trouble with the missus with one particular auction lot I had purchased. She was rather perturbed by the 70 computer towers sitting in the dining room. But it was the 200 more in the living room that really set her off!
AU - I cant ket my son see that picture. He likes to pull them apart. Now he has a science experiment going on where hes trying to get the gold off of the contacts with vinegar.
For my full time job, I run a hazardous waste biz. We got a call from a lady whose husband had passed away out in the boonies and the fire department/ state police thought he was running a meth lab in his pole barn. It was one of those marriages where they didn't talk to each other, didn't eat together, didn't sleep in same room etc,. So she legitimately had no idea what was in the pole barn. So I go up there, took me about 15 minutes to figure out wtf he was doing cause it was filthy and unorganized. Hillbilly was smelting gold and metals off of computer chip boards, but on a large scale. I told the fire marshal, look dude, you're not going to run into a lot of 350lb meth addicts buddy. He didn't think that was funny.
I don't mess with that aspect. It is tempting when you have a couple of hundred pounds of RAM that the middleman is willing to pay $20 / pound for, knowing that he's going to sell it for a profit, and then the refiner is going to make a profit... If I'm getting $4 grand for that pile of RAM, there's gotta be 3 or 4 ounces of gold in there. But I know exactly enough chemistry to kill myself trying to extract it.