Your work from home idea or extra income idea to make money in your spare time may require some products, materials, or tools before you can start working at those ideas. You may not have the money to buy these necessary items.

The 5 ways to make money when you have none, listed below, could be your answer to saving up a bit of money to do what you really want to do to earn some income for yourself. If any of the ideas below appeal to you, they could even be used as fair income methods themselves, if you put enough time and effort into them.

Also, to further save money, instead of coming up with the fee for a stand at a flea market or craft market to sell your products, consider simply putting up a sign or small simple poster on your front wall, on your gate, on your front door, on the community wall of the local store or clinic, or in the back window of your car, and sell your products from home. If you have Internet, then advertise in local Facebook buy and sell groups, and also start a Facebook page for advertising your products.

5 Ways to Make Money When you have None

1. Seeds

Collect the dry seeds of plants and flowers dying in your garden, or in the garden of a friend. Also keep some pips from fruit like paw-paws, granadillas or cherry tomatoes.

Let the seeds or pips dry out completely, then plant the seeds or pips into makeshift containers you have at home (even a 2 litre plastic juice or soda bottle cut in half lengthways would do) and sell the seedlings a few weeks later.

Let herbs grow a little bigger and you could make money from selling fresh herbs like parsley, rocket, thyme, mint and rosemary.

Grow many flowers and make money from selling fresh flowers or even collect the flower seeds. Keep some seeds for yourself to use for growing more flowers, but sell the rest of the flower seeds in small paper packets or in paper envelopes.

2. Garage Sales, and Buy and Sell

Go through your rooms and garage and sort out everything that you have not used in more than 3 months. Have a garage sale. When you make money from this consider using the money to buy some more second hand items at a local auction or by visiting the people who advertise second hand items for sale in the classifieds of the local paper. Hold another garage sale, selling these recently bought items, at a profit. Keep going to auctions, and keep checking the local classifieds, and keep holding garage sales.

3. Sell items for other people

Keep your eyes and ears open for other people who are trying to work from home. Approach them and ask them if they need help with selling their products. Work out the value of the products and calculate and discuss a fair commission amount that you can earn for the sale of each product. If the person doesn’t want to give you any products to show other people, take photos with you when marketing the products to other people, and take orders and payment, or even tell the people to contact the person providing the products, but using a referral code you give them, so that you can prove you sent the customer. To be sure that the potential client uses your referral code, offer them a tiny discount if they do (and then subtract that discount amount from your commission.)

4. Bake or Cook

Using only or mostly items and ingredients you already have in your home (or garden!), do some baking, or cook meals you can freeze. Make money from selling toffee apples, fridge tarts, soups, stews, cupcakes, muffins, and homemade breads. You will likely need a food licence of some sort – ask at your municipality.

5. Get a Free Blog

If you already have a computer and Internet, get a free Blogger blog, and advertise your services on it. You may be good at Internet research, writing articles, photo-editing, or designing logos. Continuously market the site a lot, by linking to it from a plenty of other sites (this can be as easy as leaving comments on other blogs, or advertising or listing yourself on free online classifieds sites, or linking to your blog from your Facebook timeline – first increase the amount of Facebook friends you have if you don’t have many.)

If you add a lot of content to your blog, and get a lot of visitors, you can also consider placing Google Adsense ads on your site (Apply for a Google Adsense account after your blog is getting at least 50 unique visitors every day), or affiliate program ads, and earn some money when the Adsense ads are clicked by the visitors to your site or when a visitor to your site buys something from the affiliate program advertiser.

© Copyright Terry Flanigan 2019