How to make $100 a day? If you could scrounge up an extra $100 a day, five days per week, you’d be bringing in approximately $2,000 extra per month or over $24,000 per year over and above your day job. That could change your life by allowing you to pay off debt, save up a down payment for a house, or travel extensively.
Or maybe you keep your expenses low and you’re able to survive on $24,000 per year; this means that you could essentially quit your current job and make your side gig your main (or only) source of income.
Of course, if you learned how to make $100 a day and you put these strategies to work seven days per week, you’d be looking at about $3,000 per month or $36,500 per year, if you work holidays and don’t take a sick day.
Are you ready to get started? Check out these ideas on how to make $100 a day and watch your life change before your eyes. Some of these ideas aren’t sustainable for the long term, so choose a handful and rotate them throughout the month for maximum results.
WHITTLE DOWN YOUR COSTS
When it comes to making money, it’s just as important to look at ways to save money. Carving out room in your budget might not make you 100 dollars a day, but it can reduce your expenses to the point where you can take a few days off from earning and still net the same amount of cash.
The first thing you should do is write down everything you are spending over the course of a month, then divide everything up into categories. You’ll likely have money spent on food, utilities, going out, and a few other categories. Here are some tips on ways to save some dough.
SAVE MONEY ON FOOD
If you have a discount grocery store such as Aldi or Save-a-lot, this is one great way to save money on your weekly shopping. Cut down on the amount of meat and junk food you’re eating and eat more veggies, cheap protein (like eggs) and whole grains instead. Incidentally, this is also a great way to save money on healthcare costs, because a diet high in meat and junk is more likely to cause medical issues.
If you’re eating out, be the person in your group who looks for coupons. You can also try ordering an appetizer as a meal rather than a full entree. Or split a meal with a friend. This will save you dollars and calories.
SAVE MONEY ON UTILITIES
Cancel your cable and sign up for Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime. Let’s be honest; you’re not watching most of those extra channels anyway. For $10 or $12 per month, you can have plenty of television shows and movies at your fingertips with one of the streaming services.
As for your other utilities, think about how much electricity or gas you’re using and pare it down. Wear a sweater during the winter in the house! Shut off lights and ceiling fans when you leave a room. Think back to all of the annoying suggestions your parents made when you were a clueless teen and put them into practice pronto.
SAVE MONEY ON GASOLINE
Consolidate your trips around town by running errands just one day per week. Don’t drive around as something to do. If you live close enough to where you work, consider biking or even walking on nice days. Carpool. Or bum rides! You have conserved gasoline before — remember when you were 16 and you had to make a tank of gas last? Do what you did then.
Most people who want to know how to make $100 a day already have day jobs. After you cut down on some of your expenses, working with your place of employment is a great second step when it comes to boosting your income. Of course, if you hate your job and this exercise was meant to help you eliminate it, ignore this section. If not, though, give some of these strategies a try.
ADJUST YOUR FEDERAL WITHHOLDING
With nearly 80 percent of Americans getting an income tax refund each year, there are a lot of people giving the government an interest-free loan. If you are getting tax refunds each year, you’d have more money in your pocket each month if you adjusted your withholding. See a qualified tax professional to walk you through the best option for having the right amount of taxes withheld.
ASK FOR A RAISE
If you like your job and you’re good at it, asking for a raise might help you like it a whole lot more and it will also raise your income. Now, you’re not going to be able to ask for an extra $100 a day unless you already have a pretty hefty income. But if you make $100 extra per week, that will reduce the number of days you have to hustle to make your goal of $2,000 or $3,000 each month. Here are some tips on asking for (and getting) a raise on Forbes.com.
WORK OVERTIME
Unless you have a salary position, asking for overtime is a good way to raise your income substantially. If you make $20 per hour as your base pay, you’d make $30 per hour as overtime pay; if your employer allowed you to work just three hours of overtime per day (or 15 hours per week), you could come very close to making 100 dollars per day over your base pay.
SWITCH SHIFTS
Some workplaces offer a shift differential. While it’s unlikely to equal $100 per day, making an extra dollar or two per hour can make a difference when it comes to your monthly income, reducing the number of days you need to try to cover your $100 goal.
SELL BODILY FLUIDS
You already have bodily fluids floating around, so selling them isn’t going to put you out too much. Going to the appropriate facility will take time out of your day, of course, and this might cause you some inconvenience. Also, there are some factors that can make this strategy undesirable or impossible for you. Still, selling your body fluids might be worth considering.
SELL PLASMA
Many people donate blood because it helps patients in need. Donating plasma is another option, and it’s one that will pay off not only for the patients receiving it but for you as well. Because it’s more time-intensive than typical blood donation (it takes about 90 minutes), donors are compensated an average of $30 to $40 per donation.
You can donate plasma twice per week, so while it’s not how to make $100 a day, you can make $60 to $80 per week (or more, if you’re over 175 lbs, because heavier people have more plasma to give and might be paid more, depending on the facility).
SELL BREAST MILK
Are you a lactating mother? If you have a big enough supply, you can actually sell your “liquid gold” for an average of $2.50 per ounce. You’d need to pump and sell 40 ounces, or five 8-ounce bottles, to make a hundred dollars per day at that price. Bump your rate up a bit, to $3.00 per ounce, though, and you would only need to pump 33 ounces (a bit over four bottles) to sell.
SELL SPERM OR EGGS
Yes, you can sell your sperm or eggs. The harvesting procedure varies substantially, as you might imagine, and therefore eggs are worth more than sperm. Selling sperm three times per week could earn you as much as $1,000 per month; it’s not exactly $100 per day, but it is not much less than $100 per specimen.
If you’re a woman, you could earn $8,000 to $10,000 or more for selling your eggs to a couple or a single woman who is having trouble conceiving. It takes some time to get the whole process started, so it’s not a consistent $100 per day, but over the course of the first year donating, most women can donate twice, so you’d make about $18,000 for two full cycles.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE GIG ECONOMY
One popular way to make money in the 21st century is to take advantage of what is called the gig economy. Short-term or contract jobs are prolific, and you can snap up some of them when you have time to add to your overall income and, with any luck, figure out how to make $100 a day. Check out some of these ways to earn money.
DRIVE FOR UBER OR LYFT
In just about any city in the United States, you can log into your Uber or Lyft app and catch a ride to anywhere local or within four hours (the time limit enforced by Uber). You need to have a clean, late model car. While there are no official numbers as to how much drivers make, a good estimate is that many make about $15 per hour. Drive just under seven hours and rack up $100. (You can make more if you can go back and forth to an airport or if you don’t mind braving the traffic during rush hour or on the weekends.)
SIGN UP WITH UPWORK
If you have experience as a virtual assistant, a web designer, a writer, or one of several other featured careers such as marketing or accounting, you could pick up assignments on Upwork (formerly Elance/ODesk). You need to set up an account and bid on jobs; once you get the hang of it, you could easily make $100 or more per day. Check out this list of tips for succeeding on the platform.
CHECK OUT CRAIGSLIST
Craigslist has a reputation for being shady, but using common sense should keep you out of potentially sticky situations. If you peruse the “gigs” section of your city, you’ll see some money-making opportunities that might appeal to you. This can be anything from computer work or helping at a party to cleaning houses or modeling. Depending on what’s needed and what you can offer, you might be able to put this on your “how to make $100 a day” list.
DO 20 FIVERR TASKS
Fiverr is a site that allows users to post what they’ll do for five bucks. The possibilities are endless, and you can probably think of something that will take you 10 minutes or less to do online. Consider what you can do easily, whether it’s drawing a caricature, writing a limerick, or putting together a list of ideas for a blog. If you could wrangle up 20 Fiverr gigs, there’s the extra money you need to make in a day!
SELL YOUR HANDYMAN (OR HANDYWOMAN) SKILLS
Do you feel most at ease when you’re tinkering with tools or puttering around the house? Rather than use up all of your energy fixing up things around your own home, why not make some money by spending your time puttering at someone else’s? Here are some ways how to make $100 a day by just doing what you are good at.
MOW LAWNS (OR RAKE LEAVES OR SNOWBLOW)
During the spring and summer months, you can really make bank by mowing lawns. Depending on the typical lawn size in your area, you could charge $20 to $50 per lawn that you mow, trim, and blow. Knock out two to five yards per day and there’s your $100! This will be much easier and faster if you have a ride-on mower, of course.
If you live in a climate where the leaves fall and snow accumulates, you can switch your focus during the cooler months to raking and shoveling or snowblowing. Approach the same clients you mow for during the summer for a constant stream of income.
DETAIL CARS
Do you love cars? Detailing is a great way to make some extra cash. For a regular-sized car, charging $50 to $100 for a wash, wax, glass cleaning, interior polish, and tire cleaning means you would need to take on one or two clients per day. If you’re detailing trucks or vans, you could charge double and do one every day or two to meet your one-hundred dollar per day goal.
TRIM TREES AND CLEAN GUTTERS
There are many people who don’t want or know how to clean out their gutters, trim their trees, or winterize their sprinkler systems. If you do know how to do these tasks and don’t mind getting your hands dirty, you could charge $100 to trim a small tree (and up to $1,000 to trim very tall trees, assuming you have the equipment required). You can also charge $100 or more to clean the gutters of a 2,000 square foot house.
DO INTERIOR CHORES
How many people have a “honey do” list that just never gets done? Whether it’s changing canister light bulbs, tightening door handles, touching up nicks in the paint, or fixing a running toilet, there are non-handy (or simply very busy) people who will pay $25 per hour or more for you to come in and take care of these chores. Ask around and you’re likely to find many who will take you up on these services and who will refer you to their friends.
HELP PEOPLE CLEAN UP, ORGANIZE AND MOVE
In addition to or in lieu of handyperson skills, you could put your cleaning and organizing experience to work for you in order to make some extra cash. Here are some ideas on how to make $100 a day just helping other people clean up.
CLEAN HOUSES
Cleaning houses can be the day-to-day cleaning like laundry, making beds, vacuuming, and wiping down bathrooms, or it can be the deep cleaning that many people don’t have time to do, like cleaning out the oven, scrubbing out the track of the sliding glass door, or washing windows. You could charge $25 to $45 per hour, so cleaning one house per day is likely to help you achieve your goal of making $100.
If you really end up liking this line of business, you can do what housecleaning guru Jean Hanson did and start your own million-dollar housecleaning business!
ORGANIZE HOMES
Organizing is different from cleaning in that your main task is to find a home for all of the items that are floating around in your client’s house with no permanent place to be stored. In many cases, this will entail major decluttering as you help people decide what to give away, what to throw away, and what to sell. After that, it’s largely a matter of coming up with storage solutions.
One hint: Figure out how to make $100 a day by giving a project-based quote for organizing rather than charging by the hour, particularly if you’re a fast worker.
BE AN IMPROMPTU MOVER
Many people who are in the process of moving think they can save money by doing it on their own. If you’ve ever moved, however, you know how it often goes: A few hours in, the person relocating is wishing they’d hired movers after all and might even be saying out loud, “we will never do this ourselves again!”
This is where you show up and swoop in with your muscles, your pickup truck, and your packing tape.
You can find clients by hanging around at a local apartment complex on the last weekend of the month, which is when many people move. When you hear those cries of frustration, pop in with an offer to help for a few hours for $100. Charge more if they want you for the whole day. While you probably can’t do this every day, it’s a great way to make some extra cash on weekends.
HOST AN ESTATE SALE
When people move or when they need to clean out the home of a parent or another elderly relative, there’s often a ton of treasure (or, let’s be honest, junk) left behind. Offer to host an estate sale in the home. The homeowner doesn’t have to stick around, and you just work for a percentage of the proceeds.
This will take some prep work because you’ll need to clean and price items and you’ll also want to do some marketing and ads (free ones on Craigslist and around the neighborhood will suffice). But at a sale where you are unloading furniture, old books and random knick-knacks, you should be able to make a few hundred dollars.
PUT YOUR SPACE TO WORK
You likely have space in your home, garage, or yard that you’re not using all the time, so why not charge others for the privilege of using it? Here are some ways you can start making money by renting out your space.
RENT OUT A ROOM
Do you have an extra bedroom in your home? Rent it out by the year, by the month, or even by the night. If you don’t mind having a constant roommate, look for a tenant who will live in your home with you and pay a lease.
To make even more money, however, you can list your room on Airbnb. If you live close to tourist attractions or in another desirable location, you could charge $100 or more per night for the room. The disadvantage (though some might call it an advantage) is that you’ll have a steady stream of strangers parading in and out of your home. Still, this is a relatively passive way to make a hundred dollars a day.
RENT OUT STORAGE SPACE
If having people sleeping in your home and using your hot water isn’t your thing, don’t worry: You can rent out that room as storage space. You can also do this with an unused garage bay, the basement, the attic, a barn, or any other space in your home that you’re not using for your own storage.
You’re not going to be able to charge a huge amount, but you should be able to make some extra money that can allow you to take a day or two off per month as you look for ways how to make $100 a day.
RENT OUT PARKING SPACE
If you live within walking distance to a popular fair, to the fireworks on the 4th of July, to the beach, or to some other attraction that makes parking space a scarce commodity, you can allow people to park in your driveway, in your garage, or even on your front lawn for a fee. Charging $10 per car means you need to allow 10 cars to park on your property to make a hundred bucks per day.
While your neighbors probably won’t say anything if you have 10 cars on your front lawn on July 4 each year, they’re sure to complain if it becomes a regular habit, so you’ll need to balance this suggestion with your local reputation (and with the demands of your HOA, if applicable).
USE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE EXTRA CASH
You can make money online if you are computer-savvy or if you have the ability and desire to learn. The following suggestions don’t take much in terms of equipment or specialized know-how.
WRITE AN EBOOK
Even if you don’t have a Kindle or Nook yourself, surely you know people who carry around their e-readers all the time. You could write Kindle books and sell them, netting $100 per day if you are a prolific and popular writer. It’s not all passive income; in addition to writing the books, the secret to making money online in this way is promotion and marketing.
WRITE A BLOG
There are a lot of ways to monetize a blog, so this is a great strategy if you’re wondering how to make $100 a day. In order to make that much, you will need to put in a lot of legwork. Choose a niche that you know very well because you’re going to need to come up with a lot of content.
A few ways to have a money-making website or blog is to employ the use of Adsense (or one of these alternatives) when it comes to choosing the main keyword. You might decide to place PPC ads and look for ways to improve your click-through rate. You can also try your hand at affiliate marketing, adding an affiliate link into some of your posts.
While an in-depth guide to making money with a blog is beyond the reach of this article, you can check out what Michelle Schroeder-Gardner does to make $50K per month online. Now that’s impressive!
START A YOUTUBE CHANNEL
Becoming a YouTube star is on the bucket list of many teenagers, but that doesn’t mean that you should write it off as an impossibility. Sure, you might not become the next PewDiePie, but if you have the knack for storytelling, humor, demonstrating DIYs, or just vlogging about your day in an interesting way, you could garner up enough subscribers to meet your $100 per day goal.
Even if you don’t, your channel could funnel people to your monetized blog or your ebook, so YouTube could become a part of your money making strategy regardless.
BECOME A SOCIAL MEDIA MAVEN
Are you a whiz at all things Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more? If so, you can use your own social media profiles to direct interest to your YouTube channel or your blog. You can also make money by managing other people’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts. Go ahead and market yourself as a social media expert or a social media manager and watch the dollars roll in.
USE YOUR SKILLS
If you aren’t techy and you don’t want to clean houses, you probably still have a variety of other skills that you can use to make money. Do any of these sound appealing?
BEEF UP DATING PROFILES
Have you done your share of perusing dating sites? There are plenty of lonely hearts out there who would love nothing more than to find romance on a website like Tinder or OkCupid but they don’t know how to create a good profile that will attract the right kind of attention.
Lisa Hoehn charges $100 to $500 for a dating profile, and you can, too, if you know what you’re doing. Bang out one per day and you may have stumbled onto how to make $100 a day without much effort at all.
SERVE DRINKS
Maybe you’ve never gone to bartender school but you still know how to mix up a mean martini, margarita, mai tai or Manhattan. If that’s the case, you might be able to find some gigs serving drinks at private parties. Even if you charge a nominal fee to show up, you can rack up tips all night long, putting you well on your way toward your $100 per day goal.
STYLE HAIR AND DO MAKEUP
Similarly, you might not be a professional hairdresser or cosmetician, but if you know your way around a blowdryer, bobby pins, and blusher, you could do hair and makeup for brides and their attendants, teens heading off to prom, or young ladies who are about to march across the stage wearing a cap and gown. Spring is a great time of year for this type of gig-based business, so let the money-making commence!
COOK A MEAL
With the popularity of Hello Fresh, Blue Apron, and a big handful of other companies that deliver ready-to-cook foods to busy people, you might have gotten the message that there are a whole lot of individuals out there who don’t know how or don’t have time to prepare meals from scratch. If you do and you’re good at it, you could start a business delivering ready-to-heat meals that families will love.
Consider marketing this to young people who want to impress a new significant other with their stellar cooking skills, to families who have recently had a baby, and to busy working couples or single parents who just don’t have time to whip up a delicious concoction for dinner every night. If you had a few regular clients, you could add this to your ideas for how to make $100 a day.
An important factor that goes into making extra money is the willingness to go out on a limb and try different strategies. Don’t settle on just one idea; experiment to see what makes you the most money over time.
Have you found a great idea on how to make $100 a day that wasn’t mentioned above? Share it in the comments below!