Ways to make money without work
Posted on Aug 4, 2013 by
Paul WhiteEveryone wants to get rich, but nobody wants to work. Its the American Way. So for the vast majority of us we are in constant search of the magical money tree. Something that takes little effort to get started, but will pay you dividends forever. In this article I review some of the ideas for making money without working, and whether or not they are a viable option.
Installing Solar Panels on your roof and having the utility company pay you for your excess power.
You would think that if you install enough solar panels on your roof, that maybe the electric company would send you a check each month for the access power you generate. It doesn't exactly work that way. Lets say you use 2000 KWH of electricy per month. The utility normally charges you 15 cents per KWH, or in some states it could be variable. Meaning at night it gets cheaper, but more expensive during the day. Even though generating your own electricity could save you 15 cents per KWH, any excess energy you generate will not result in the power company sending you a check. Most companies will roll over a credit on your bill, but they only pay you the whole sale rate fo ryour power. Wholesale is typically 50% of the retail rate. Its possible you could find a utility that would be willing to pay you for your additional usage, but it would likely require generating a large amount of power to be worth their while. I don't see a utility company working deals with someone that has a couple hundred extra KWH at the end of the month.
The second issue is the cost of installing a large solar array is not cheap. You can easily spend $40k - $50k to install enough solar panels to power your home. If you are a skilled handy man, and can do all the roofing, and electrical work yourself, this still only gets the price down to $10k or so. The other problem is Solar panels don't last forever. Depending on the type of panel you get the efficiency could drop by as much as 5% per year.
If the electricity where you live is expensive, then installing solar panels could save you some money, but in states like Texas where power is only 10 cents there is little incentive, especially if you hire a contractor to do the install for you.
Mining for Bitcoin
If you have a computer with a decent graphics card, you can join a mining pool, install some software, and let your computer hash 24/7 to mine for
bitcoin. Bitcoins are currently worth about $105 each. However as more people have gotten into mining, the difficulty level has gone up, and the same hardware that was mining 10 bitcoins per month, today can't even make 1
bitcoin in a month. Its finally reached a point where your computer will cost more in electricty to run than what you will earn mining. The ASIC miners are the only profitable ways to mine today. But as more powerful ASIC miners come online the return on investment will rapidly drop.
The only people who are going to get rich in the
bitcoin game are the guys selling the mining hardware. Unless you are able to buy some monster Terahashing ASIC miner when it first comes out ( expensive ), there is no return on investment by mining for
bitcoin.
Google Adsense
If you have a website or blog with unique content and a good amount of traffic, Google Adsense can be an easy way to generate some extra revenue. My ring of
websites generates about $5 - $10 per day. I might update my blog maybe 2 - 3 times a month. With
websites your only cost is
hosting, which runs about $10 / month, or if you own your own server like me, it costs nothing. If you enjoy writing about your experiences, or your area of expertise, then a blog is a great way to generate a little extra money. Google pays me at the end of the month for the previous month's earnings. Its not a lot, but it helps.
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