Given in no particular order...
Psych. Department Guinea Pig:
Psychology departments need lots of human subjects for experiments of various sorts. To bring in these subjects they typically pay around $20 per hour (this number is based on Wash. U and University of Michigan). If one were able to find these opportunities for 40 hours of the week, this would translate into an income of about $40k per year. Being a full-time psych. guinea pig would have some perks. There definitely wouldn't be any stress or pressure while at work, as your employer would record your successes and failure with equal scientific detachment. Being depressed, insomniac, addicted to drugs, neurotic, etc. would all become career boons, as they would qualify you for more studies.
The real difficulty of this career would be finding enough work. I think working one university aggressively, it might be possible to get 10+ hours a week consistently. In an area with many universities close together (Boston, New York, SF Bay Area, etc.) working full-time might be possible. These areas typically have high costs of living that might or might not be compensated by better psych study payouts than the ones I have personally seen.
Sports Ticket Arbitrage:
On a few of occasions I have bought and sold college football tickets secondhand, usually via Facebook or Craigslist. My impression is that the ticket resale market is a long long way from anything one could call efficient. There is almost always a huge spread in listed prices for tickets of very similar qualities, and many buyers and sellers seem oblivious to opportunities for a better deal. I have the impression that one could consistently make money buy purchasing tickets priced too cheaply and then reselling them at a markup.
This plan differs from scalping in that it would not require any on the street sales job. Tickets can be advertised online, most deals would go down long before the game, and buyers are generally willing to meet you wherever. Assuming the right buyers and sellers can be found on the internet, this job boils down to hanging in a coffee shop downtown and collecting money from strangers a couple of hours per day.
Doing this well would require knowing at what prices to buy and sell, and I am not sure how difficult or easy this may be. Listed prices for tickets are so widely spread as to suggest that it is easy, but I do not know for sure what the relationship between list and eventual sale prices is. I dabbled once in the past and it was pretty easy to turn a $20 profit on a ticket. However, once is not a very large sample. The difficulty is compounded by the caprices of sports: if the team does well, ticket prices go up, if the team does poorly, ticket prices go down, etc. If one could predict these things perfectly, one could simply make the money gambling, so ticket arbitrage may not always be a reliable way to make money.
The biggest difficulty would be to buy and sell tickets in sufficiently large volume. Doing a few profitable deals a week seems doable, but I don't know if its possible to find more than this. Everything would be easier if you attempted this scheme in an area with a dense interest in the sport(s) in question.
StubHub is really already executing this plan, even though they present themselves as an intermediary rather than a middle man.
Math/Science Tutoring:
I know from personal experience that calculus tutors can make $30-60 per hour in Ann Arbor, and I have heard and believed stories that rates are substantially higher elsewhere (most notably in New York City). If one were to tutor full-time, this translates into an income of $60-120k per year.
Obviously, one would want to attempt this scheme in an area with a high density of students. During peak periods (around the time when the local colleges have midterms or finals), if one advertised and marketed aggressively, one might be able to round up 60 hours of tutoring a week or more. I am not sure how much work would be available the rest of the year, and summers would be particularly lean. The 60-120k numbers are almost certainly not attainable, but it might be possible to get enough hours to make 30-60k.
3 comments:
Are you familiar with Amazon Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome)? It would be hard to make much money by individually working on those tasks, but I wonder if there's an arbitrage opportunity.
For example, what if you set up a computer lab near a college campus and paid students to come in and perform these tasks?
I hadn't heard of it, but I just checked it out. It seems like you might be able to find a particular class of recurring tasks and write computer code to do them whenever you find them.
What would you pay the students? I don't have a good sense what kind of scrilla you could come up with doing this stuff. It would also be tough to retain workers, as people would figure out they could do the same sort of crap at home and keep all the profits.
Most of the tasks only pay pennies (and are generally completed by people in third world countries) so it would be tough to make much money off of those. Some tasks pay $10-$20, but I'm not sure how hard they are to complete.
I agree it would be hard to retain workers, but maybe (1) it would appeal to shitheads that want a little money but don't have any skills or initiative and (2) maybe having multiple people performing tasks from the same location would offer some sort of cooperative benefit (like sharing tips or something)
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