The Nickel and Dime Lifestyle: Income Before Your Very Noses

There are many sources of income right in front of our noses that you could actually make a living on just by them alone. One is to make yourself available for research. No, I don’t mean becoming a guinea pig, but I do mean that there are a lot of places that will gladly pay you to try out their products. One of these are pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies like Avon who need volunteers to try out their upcoming product lines before they can meet with FDA approval. If there are any such companies near you all you need do is contact them and speak with their research and development department. Their time is flexible too for working folks.
Another is teaching and psychiatric centers who likewise are badly in need of people to help them with their research. They will pay you ($10 and hour and up) plus meals and very often travel expenses for your time. What they will need ranges from simple blood, urine, or sputum tests to trying out medications for various applications such as depression, Alzheimers, Parkinson’s, sleep disorders, and many others. It isn’t necessary for you to have these disorders to participate because they also need healthy subjects for baseline data and in such programs they need people to take placebos for double blind studies. It is very easy money and they will keep calling you back as new studies are funded.
Yet another means of income that is totally open to your schedule is a matter of putting your knowledge to practical use. These days anyone with a fair amount of technical knowledge of computers can be very useful to customers with a host of technical problems with their home computers and systems. This is very often a matter of reputation and news travels by word of mouth so it is important to get yourself known and become visible.
Another in this genre that is widely overlooked is repairing small engine devices such as lawn mowers, chainsaws, weed whackers, leaf blowers and the like. The current state of affairs in this field is such that shops will charge $50 to just change a spark plug or lubricants and it gets even more outrageous for things like ordinary tune ups and annual maintenance. If you are talking more involved repairs the shops will usually quote such a price that it’s cheaper to throw it away and get a brand new machine. Learning this trade is very easy as there are books on the subject and plenty of broken tools thrown out at curbside for you to practice on. These machines are of a very simple design and in the vast majority of cases repairs consist of a machine not starting or running poorly either of which require only minor adjustments or cleaning and the tool is as good as new. For such a simple and quick fix $20 is a fair price and believe me these are very common complaints. A recent example was when someone gave me a chainsaw which reportedly “ran briefly and stopped” and the owner didn’t’ want to deal with it. Without even looking at it I suspected the problem and with a mere 1/8 turn in adjust the high and low idles on the carburetor (total time invested was less than two minutes) and it ran as good as new. I posted it on Craiglist and within two hours it was sold for $50. Not bad for two minutes work.
On such repairs even something that seems at first to be terminal damage such as a seized up engine can often be repaired in short order, provided the tool was shut off as soon as the problem was noticed. I have been able to resurrect machines that had been seized up with a few mechanic’s tricks and the tools ran beautifully for a few more years. You should see the look on the customer’s face when their “dead” chainsaw or leaf blower is brought back to life and sent away with a word about using a richer fuel mixture next time. It doesn’t take long before word of your talent reaches far and wide and I know of someone who has reached a point where he has to turn away customers, some of whom have been referred to me.
So a little knowledge can go a long way and if you are willing to make yourself available it can be worth it financially with a very quick return.