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 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.
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 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.
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."
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
Are you serious?
This is an internet forum… not a court…
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.
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'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.
that one IRS intern TwT
nice try
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.
Hello IRS
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
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 ?
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.