Ask HN: Do you have an unusual income source Most of use here are wage earners. I keep hearing of people making money with interesting side hustles. Like my neighbour rents graduation gowns for the local university. I'd love to find something like that but I need inspiration. |
"Jazz Musician": someone who puts a $10000 horn in a $1000 car to play a $100 gig
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.
Was a no-brainer.
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.
It’s fun to watch them with friends and family from time to time to laugh about the horrible acting.
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.
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
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.
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.
Good money in it, but a lot of the people who rent your tables won't keep them clean.
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.
nice try
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'