How To Try Every Side Hustle Scam On The Web (And Find One That Works)

2015

This is the year things started to turn around. This is when we changed the way we think about money. This is the year we started to, finally, make progress. We didn’t know it at the time, but this is when the 3MM plan was born.

Starting net worth: $2,000

Income:

Leslie: $26,100

Ben: $36,000 (Still tutoring three nights per week.)

We are so tired of spinning our wheels financially. We’ve followed all the common advice out there about budgeting and cutting costs. Most of that advice did not help us.

The only advice that has worked for us is:

Pay yourself first.

We have our bank set up to automatically transfer money from each paycheck into a separate account. We focus on completing one major renovation project at a time. Without paying ourselves first, we would never have fixed this place up.

We used the pay-yourself-first method to plan for groceries and entertainment as well. We wanted to move quality-of-life spending higher on our priorities list.

We owe much to that advice, but it still wasn’t enough. We just needed more income. House and Kid aside, our healthcare costs through work had been going up about 8% per year for the last few years. It’s got to the point where almost all of Leslie’s take-home pay was going toward health insurance.

All the budgeting in the world isn’t going to save us from that. So we start to investigate side hustles.

The Phone Farm

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I set up a phone farm. See, there used to be companies out there that would pay you to watch ads. So I plugged in an old phone, hit play, and threw the thing in the drawer.

I think I earned about $20 the first month I did this. I took that $20, and bought a cheap ‘burner’ phone (you know, the kind you preload with minutes and just toss when you want a new one). I kept on re-investing this way until I had five phones (the max allowed by the ad company) showing ads to the inside of my drawer.

This is the stupid sort of thing that college kids do for beer money, but it added about $100 dollars per month to our lives and I can still feel the relief and security that $100 brought us.

Also, dumb as this was, it demonstrated the power of reinvesting profits for business growth. This is one of the core tenets of the 3MM strategy. By the way, money from this phone farm is what would eventually finance our first actual, real, nonstupid business. So in a way, the phone farm changed our lives.

Swagbucks

I’m not embarrassed about this one. I loved Swagbucks and I still use it from time to time. It’s similar to the phone farm idea, only they have really gamified the whole experience. Whenever I’m facing a stack of essays that need grading, I open my laptop and play some Swagbucks videos for background noise.

Swagbucks is most efficient when you get paid in Amazon gift cards, so I use this to help pay for my reading habit. Back in 2015, this helped pay for baby supplies and toys. Today, it’s my second favorite way to pay for the books I read. My favorite way to pay for them is…

mTurk

mTurk is an Amazon company that lets you work on simple, often repetitive tasks for pennies at a time! Sounds terrible, I know, but the way I do it is not bad at all.

I only focus on helping complete academic surveys. These are often posted by students working on their thesis or researchers carrying out legitimate research. I generally make $5-$6 bucks an hour doing this. I like the idea that I’m helping students and researchers, doing a small social good, as it were. I also like the idea that I can make enough to buy a book in the time it takes to watch Frozen. Again. For the millionth time.

mTurk pays in real cash money. I have used mTurk profits to buy an extremely nice laptop, and any number of random little gifts for myself and my family, not to mention that I use it to keep a healthy ‘book budget’ in my Amazon account. Now that I think of it, Frozen alone has probably paid for my last 100 or so books.

Amazon FBA

This is where it all began. This is the moment our lives changed forever.

In our research for side gigs, we (and no doubt, you) have stumbled across Amazon FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon). In short, you can send inventory to Amazon Warehouses and they will handle all the shipping, customer service, and returns for your goods. For a fee, of course.

We followed a guide on a blog that shall remain nameless because,

What they taught us to do was completely dangerous and illegal and we don’t recommend it to anyone.

Basically, it was a complicated way to scam Amazon shoppers into buying customer returns under the belief that they were buying new products. Don’t do this.

While our first experience with FBA was a bad one, we could tell that, even though the people hosting that site were shady and dishonest, there was real profit potential here.

Leslie and I had always wanted to run our own little shop, but any number of things prevented us from doing so. This seemed like our chance.

So we began to build a legitimate online store, with inventory Fulfilled by Amazon. We saved the money from our phone farm and mTurk (and a Christmas gift card) to buy inventory. We used Swagbucks proceeds to buy our packing and office supplies, and we launched our first business for $0 dollars out of pocket.

Flipping

We also spent the summer driving around looking for antique shop flips and had a great time. We love doing this and we just had a blast pushing our daughter around in the stroller, grabbing stuff to sell on eBay and Amazon.

By the end of the year, we had made enough through our store and flipping to put about $13,000 into finishing the basement. We turned half into a TV room and the other half into the office for our store.

There was enough left over (from the side business and our regular jobs) to invest. So we ignored all the advice of our families (the ones always telling us to never invest in the stock market) and bought $5,000 in VOO (VOO is a mutual fund that tracks the S&P 500 and is offered by Vanguard).

Assets

Equities @ Cost: $5,000

Cash/Equivalents: $4,000

Ending net worth

$9,000

On to 2016 ($9,000 – $26,000)

Back to Income Reports

Closing Thoughts

It’s official: Our first business is up and running. Almost all of the pieces are there. We’re just missing one last piece of the puzzle that will let us really take off.

Here at Threemonthmillionaire.com, our goal is to show you how to build a million-dollar business that can be run in three months per year. Everything you need to get started can be found in these guides:

We also publish unbiased reviews of business tools and software. To see some of our top review posts, Check out: