Recession Tips: 25 ways to put cash in your pocket TODAY

Here's a panhandler using shock value to try and get some donations.  I saw this guy, and snapped the photo, with his permission, in Hollywood back in 2019.  He had a bunch of weird and funny signs, asking tourists for cash, I'm not sure how this one panned out for him.  

This post is a companion to the one I wrote the other day, "20 legal ways to put cash in your pocket this week."  Like I said in that post, we all have our favorite go to ideas when we need to come up with a little extra cash for some reason.  The point of making this big list is to expand your thinking, to some ideas that maybe didn't cross your mind.  Warning, the links in this video might be offensive to humans, or NSFW.  But you're reading a post about free money, so there's a good chance you don't have a job, so that probably won't be a problem.  

(One) Cash in change you've been saving- Yes, change.  Coins.  Icky physical money.  Yes, it's old school. But it's one of the easiest ways to save some money without really trying.  When I was a taxi driver, years ago, I had a small cup, in the cup holder of my cab, with some change in it.  Sometimes in a taxi, when a fare was, say $6.65, there are people who wouldn't round up and pay me $7.00.  Really.  They wanted that 35 cents in change back.  So that's what the cup was for, change I could grab quickly for those passengers.  Taxi driving, in the mid-2000's, was a mostly cash business.  I was buying gas every day, and food, and I paid for those in whole dollars, and threw the change in the cup.  So my cup of change kept filling up.  

At the time, I was living in my taxi, and had my clothes and personal stuff in a storage unit.  I bought  a little plastic water jug, put it in the storage unit, and started throwing the extra change in there.  Once the change started adding up, I wanted to add more change to it.  It just happened automatically.  Then I started throwing a dollar bill or two in the jug.  When I was in a bind, I'd shake some change out of the jar, to cover what I needed.  Eventually, I bought separate little jugs with quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies.  When I finally had to move out of my storage unit later on, I finally cashed it all in.  The dime jug along had over $100 in it.  I saved over $100 in dimes, without trying.  For real.  Just by paying for things with cash, paying in whole dollars, and throwing th change in a cup, I was saving $30 to $70 a month, without trying.  So if you make this a habit, and get in a bind, cash in some of that change.  

(Two) Cash in aluminum cans/other recyclables you've been saving- This is another habit you can do pretty easily.  If you have a bin for aluminum cans, and maybe glass and plastic bottles, if they can be cashed in where you live, then you have some untapped money growing day by day.  When you're in a bind, cash in those recyclables in and use the money where you need it.

(Three) Tap into a "slush fund" you have for "rainy days"- A "slush fund" is my name for some savings set aside, in a place or account seperate from every day money, and separate from long term savings.  So you may have your checking account to use for every day expenses, and then CD's or a savings account destined to go into retirement, investments or some long term goal.  I've found that having an "in between" savings account, maybe $50 to $200, is good for the mid term things in life that just come up.  With a slush fund, you have a little back-up money when a tire blows on the car, or the kids need money for a trip at school, or whatever.  It's more than can you can easily pull out of the checking account.  You can pull some money out of the slush fund to handle a problem, without having to touch your long term savings for retirement or investments.  So if you have a slush fund, pull some money out of there, take care of the current issue, then build that money back up in the slush fund again.   

(Four) Pull money from savings/CD's- If the reason you need money is big enough, and important enough, and you have a savings account or CD's, you can tap into those to pay the unexpected expense.  

(Five) Pawn something at a pawn shop- Pawn shops go back to anicent China, around 3,000 years ago, and were also around in Ancient Greece and Rome.  That doesn't surprise me.  Since civilization has existed, there have been people who got into a bind and needed some money for an emergency.  Pawn shops loan people money, and hold a physical object as collateral.  The loans are generally fairly small, $20-$500 maybe, most of the time, and the interest rates are pretty high.  But the interest is not that much in total, since the loans are small.  The most popular things to pawn are jewelry, musical instruments, guns, power tools, and electronics, though they make take other items with value.  You take something to a pawn shop, they offer you a certain amount, far less than the value of the item, and they give you cash, and hold the item until you pay off the loan.  You come back, usually within 30 or 90 days, pay off the loan and the interest, and get your item back.  Simple and effective.  There's a reason pawn shops have been around for 3,000 years.  

(Six) Sell something at a pawn shop- Pawn shops also buy physical items outright.  Jewelry, guns, musical instruments, sporting equipment, power tools, and electronics are the primary items they buy.  They may buy other things if the items have inherent value.  Usually they pay 10% to 20% of the current value, so you don't get a high price, but you get CASH RIGHT NOW.  That's the point of pawn shops.  

(Seven) Sell clothes at a consignment shop- These primarily buy women's clothes or baby clothes and gear, depending on the shop.  You take in used clothes, they pick what they like, and pay you cash for those pieces.   

(Eight) Sell something of yours to a friend or family member- Find someone in your immediate life, and sell them something of yours.  "Hey Bob, you know that motorcycle helmet I have in the garage, I'm in a bind, will you give me $50 for it?"  That kind of thing.  

(Nine) Sell collectibles to a local shop- There aren't as many brick and mortar collectibles shops as there used to be.  But if you collect something, and there's a shop that buys those things in your area, then you can sell pieces of your collection.  This can be sports cards, comic books, action figures, high end watches, collectible figurines, stamps, or anything else that people collect.  

(Ten) Sell collectible coins to a local coin shop- This is another kind of collectible, and there are still some physical shops in many areas where you can sell collectible coins.

(Eleven)- Sell used furniture to a local consignment shop- Do you have some high quality furniture that you don't really need or want anymore?  There are furniture consigment shops that may buy it.  In many cases, they may come to your house, check it out, and make an offer.  If you accept the offer, they give you money on the spot, and haul the items back to your shop.  In some cases, you may have to take the furniture to their shop to get it checked out.  

(Twelve)- Sell gold, silver, or platinum to a local shop or jeweler- If you bought gold, silver, or platinum as an investment at some point, you can sell these for cash at a gold and silver shop, coin shops, and many jewelry shops will also buy them, for cash on the spot.  

(Thirteen)- Sell jewelry to a jewelry shop- They may not pay top dollar, but they will likely pay more than a pawn shop for quality jewelry, and gemstones.  

(Fourteen)- Go collect aluminum cans/recyclables, then cash them in- If you don't have a bin of aluminum cans or other recyclables, you can go out and pick some up.  There's a lot of competition if it pays well, but you can find a few dollars worth if you put some time in searching.  

(Fifteen)- Sell record albums, CD's, or DVD's to a local shop- There are lot less of these music shops than there used to be, but they do still exist.  You can still sell used vinyl records, CD's, and DVD's, if you have any, to local music shops. 

(Sixteen) Take money out of the offering plate at church, and leave God an IOU- OK, I'm kidding, DON'T do this.  I just wanted to see if anyone was really reading this far down this list.  

(Seventeen) Take item back to a store (keep your receipts)- If you have some item you bought recently, and have a receipt, like clothes, an appliance, even canned foods, you can take them back to the store and get a refund.  

(Eighteen) Babysit for someone- Does anyone you know need someone to watch their kid(s) today?  This one makes sense more for younger people, like teens, who may do some babysitting already.  Babysitting pays a lot better now than when I watched neighbor kids while in high school.  Back then the pay for watching two demon spawn boys was $1 and hour and all the government cheese I could eat.  I don't like governemtn cheese.  Things have improved since then, from what I've heard.  If you babysit, get word around, see if anyone needs you to sit the kids today.

(Nineteen) Do a job on Fiverr if you're already signed up and active- If you have some basic design/technical skills, and  are already signed up on Fiverr to do gigs, try to get one or two today.

(Twenty) Do a job on Mechanical Turk if you're already set up and active- If you have some design or technical skills, and are already signed up and ready to go on Mechanical Turk, try to score gig today.

(Twenty-one) Offer to do some service for friends or neighbors- See if any of your neighbors have a small project you can to to earn some cash.  Ask them in person, on social media, or use a site like Nextdoor to find some local gig to do and earn some cash.  

(Twenty-two) Teach a skill to someone for a fee- Do you have a skill that someone in your area would like to learn.  Teach the neighbor's daughter how to do a cartwheel for her cheerleader tryouts, teach Aunt Ester how to work Instagram, teach someone how to play a song on their new guitar.  Whatever.  Actually, you can do this online/on-phone as well these days, so it could be a person anywhere.  Be creative.  

(Twenty-three) Do homework for someone for cash/trade- I used to do this for a couple of my roommates in community college, back in the day.  I once read 90 pages and filled out a 7 page worksheet for a $6 pepperoni pizza.  Hey, I was young and needed money.  Work a better deal than that, but you get the idea.  

(Twenty-four) Give someone a haircut (if you know how and they actually want one)- Got some skills with the clippers and scissors?  Give someone a haircut and style for some cash.  People in the hood know about this one, barber skills are highly respected in the hood, homeless shelters, and jails.  But haircuts can be done anywhere. Well almost anywhere.  I saw some guy giving haircuts in the back row at church once, and that didn't go over well.    

(Twenty-five) Ask for money on social media (Good, LEGIT causes only!)-Sites like CyberBeg and Begging Money are two sites left where you can do this.  If you have a LEGIT cause ("I need beer" is not a legit cause), you can log on and ask strangers to help you out.  I've never tried either of these, but they are out there, and you can try them if you want.

(Twenty-six) Ask friend or family for a loan- There's a reason why this is near the bottom of the list.  Loans from family and friends can really help out in a time of need.  They can also turn into long term beefs that keep people from talking to each other for years.  That's why this is so far down on the list.  Do not ask a person close to you for a loan unless you actually intend to pay it back.  

(Twenty-seven) Panhandle money from a stranger- "Panhandling" is asking money from a stranger in the streets.  That's the actual definition, paraphrased.  Panhandling is begging for money, something that has been happening since money was invented.  There are so many people who do it now because there are a lot more down and out people in society these days, and because it works.  You can either just ask a stranger for money somewhere, or make a sign asking for money, and sit or stand in a place where a lot of people will see you.  Crazy as it sounds, about 1% to 3% of people will give a complete stranger a small amount of money.  If you do this, be polite, and say "Thank you."  

There are four main types of panhandling: (1) One on one- asking a stranger for money on the street,  (2) "Flying a sign"- holding a sign in a popular location, asking for money, (3) Running a non-profit organization- have your volunteers ask strangers for money, then pay yourself $250K a year as CEO, and (4) Becoming a politician- Put on a suit, make bullshit promises, and ask strangers for money in the street.  Even if you lose the election, your meals, travel, hotel, and bar tabs get paid for the whole time you're running.  

(Twenty-eight) Put granny on the corner to turn tricks- OK, I'm joking again, don't do this to granny, even if she has false teeth and can take her dentures out and really do a good job.  I just wanted to see if anyone made it to the bottom of the list.  

So there you have it, 25 LEGIT, potential ways to put money in your pocket today.  And two funny ways to give you a laugh and get you to read the whole list.  As an added bonus, I'm going to add one more.  Start your own blog, and put a donate button on it, a "cyber tip jar," as they used to call these, where people can throw you a few bucks to buy a cup of coffee, or buy lunch, or something.  Like this one below... where you can send me a couple of bucks from the money you'll make off these ideas.

Flipping: How I saw my dad make over $1,000 in cash and trade off a $30 investment when I was a kid

If you've ever typed in "make extra money" into Google or YouTube, you've come across "flipping" posts or videos.  Flipping is good, old fashioned, wheelin' and dealin', as they called it when I was a kid.  You buy an item at a low price, and sell it at a higher price, and make a little (or big) profit.  Here's a flea market flipping video I pulled off YouTube, to add a visual to this post.  Nothing exciting, but a good look at a flipper in today's world of Craigslist, eBay, LetGo, Shopify stores, and Amazon resellers, all flipping merchandise to earn money.

Disclaimer

Yesterday was the ten year anniversary of my dad's death.  So I spent some time thinking about all his influences on me.  At the same time, I've spent about four years telling people that this crazy, long, economic downturn is coming.  Something like another Great Recession, but lasting longer, like the long recession of the early 1990's.  I'm a futurist/economics geek, the kind of thing that even computer geeks call geeky.  

No one cared much about my ideas on the economy, until 2020 happened.  But now we are heading into what I think will be the longest and gnarliest part of the three "recessionary waves" I see us having in this decade.  Basically, the 2020 depression* was the warm-up, and now we are heading into the recession where things will really get gnarly, stocks and crypto appear to have just hit a false bottom in July 2022, and real estate and the car/truck markets are beginning to really tank.  Recessions lead to great deals, and it's a great time to do some flipping.  

Recessions are when the whole world goes on sale, and almost nobody wants to buy

This is my dad, Tom Emig, with my little sister Cheri on the left, and me on the right.  This is about 1972, when I was 6 or 7.  A couple of years later, my dad started taking me to gun shows once in a while, teaching me how to wheel and deal, or flip, as we call it now.  His $30 purchase, that I'm writing about in this post, happened about a year before this photo was taken.

My dad loved "wheeling and dealing," or flipping, his whole life.  As a young single guy, he bought and sold about 40 cars, including three classic Ford Thunderbirds (two 1955's and one 1957),  a couple of Chevy Corvairs, and a dragster, among them.  He also bought and sold motorcycles, motorscooters (like Vespas), as well as guns, and anything mechanical that caught his eye at a garage sale or flea market.  He was a long time target shooter, and responsible gun owner.  In fact the local police showed up at his house one morning, when they needed to borrow some ammo to demonstrate a Thompson submachine gun they just aquired.  The ammo for it didn't show up, so they hit up my dad, knowing he could help them out.  My dad was friends with a couple of the officers, and they knew had a .45 auto or two, which used the same ammo.

I grew up waching him negotiate and barter for items at garage sales flea markets, and gun shows.  In those days when I was a kid in the 1970's, family economics was a lot different.  Most men had jobs that paid pretty well, families usually lived off the man's income in most cases, and a large percentage of women were housewives, staying home with the kids.  I'm not saying this is how life should be, ladies, or that women shouldn't work, so hold off the hate comments.  That's just how things were back then.  Most families could live fairly well off one income.  

  

Because of the different economics of those days, where it wasn't two income households straining to pay all the bills, flipping items was more of a hobby for extra money, than a necessity.  You didn't really see full time mechandise flippers, like we do today.  

After getting married, my mom shut down the buying and selling of cars pretty quick, and my dad focused more on supporting his family.  Most of his wheeling and dealing then turned to things he bought at gun shows.  Those were also much different back then.  Most familes had guns then, a lot of men, and a few women, went hunting each fall.  Many others, like my dad, were avid target shooters.  Shooting was a popular hobby, like bowling, golf, or softball.  

So my dad would go off to gun shows every couple of months, on a Saturday afternoon.  Since my mom didn't really like guns, she never asked much about what he bought, only how much he spent.  Usually he would buy pistols, or pieces of them, to rebuild guns, with the boxes of gun parts he had in the basement.  He also reloaded his own bullets, so my dad also bought reloading supplies and equipment.  Later on, he started collecting American military items, thinking of maybe opening a small museum some day.  He bought most of the uniforms and other military gear at gun shows as well.  

After one gun show, when I was 5 years old, my dad came home with this ugly brown case, like a beat up, small suitcase.  My mom didn't like it from the start, just because it was ugly.  She liked it a lot less when my dad said it was full of 30,000 gun oriented bumper stickers, which he paid $30 for.  Mom gave him a hard time for wasting so much money on it.  One of the bumper stickers was the classic, "I will give up my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers," which I thought was really cool.  

My dad made his case.  A guy he met had made thousands of bumper stickers, which were popular in those days, when cars still had actual chromed steel bumpers.  The stickers were all text, black lettering on white, pretty simple looking.  But even back then, when no one had computers or printers, bumper stickers sold for $1 each.  The guy had made 40,000 stickers or something, sold a bunch, then just got in a financial bind, and needed to sell them cheap to pay some bills.  So my dad was happy to buy the case of them for $30.  

From my dad's point of view, he got $30,000 worth of stickers for $30, a great deal.  He paid 1/10th of a penny per sticker.  Every sticker he sold for $1, worked out to 1,000X return.  Not bad.  From my mom's point of view, he spent $30 ($219 in today's dollars) on stupid stickers in a really ugly case.  My dad took the case into the basement, and tucked it away with his gun stuff, near his work bench.  

For the next ten years or so, I watched my dad take some of those stickers from the ugly case to gun show after gun show, and also show them to friends who visited.  He was a draftsman/engineer, a guy who designed machines, and thought of a machine's entire working life, as he was desiging it.  He thought long term by nature.  The bumper stickers were never meant to be a quick flip.  

When he took them to gun shows, he would keep them hidden, in a bag or case, when negotiating on one thing or another.  When the seller would get close to the price my dad wanted to pay for something, my dad would pull out the stickers.  "You know, I have these bumper stickers, you can easily sell them for $1.00 each.  Since we're $10 off on our price, how about if I throw in 10 bumper stickers?"  The seller would usually say something like, "Well, it'll take me a while to sell all those stickers, how about 20 bumper stickers, and we'll call it a deal."  My dad would hesitate a moment for emphasis, and then say, "OK, 20 stickers and we'll call it a deal."  He got $10 in trade off of 20 stickers, which cost him 2 cents total.  Not bad ROI in trade.  I watched him do that time after time after time as I grew up.  He also sold some to people for $1 each, and sold quite a few to dealers for 20 cents or so each, for them to resell.  

I think I was in high school, over ten years later, when dad came back from a gun show, and told me he finally sold the case of bumper stickers, and he still had something like 28,000 stickers left.  He sat down and figured it out.  He made over $300 cash selling those bumper stickers, and got well over $700 in trade as well, over 11 or 12 years.  Then he sold that ugly case, with more than 28,000 "vintage" bumper stickers, for $50.  So, by jumping on a good deal by a motivated seller, on a weird item for that time, my dad made over 11 times his money back in cash, and well over 20 times his money back in trade as well, and saved himself a ton of cash in deals on guns, knives, military gear, and other things.  

The point of this post is that when you're looking for items to resell to make money, it's smart to keep your mind open, and think about more than just the quick flip for a 50%, 100%, or 200% return.  Sometimes an odd item, like the bumper stickers my dad bought, can lead to more money, or a great trade item, over time.  So thanks to my dad, for showing me another trick of old school wheelin' and dealin'.  Now, 50 years after he bought that ugly case, and endured my mom's unhappiness at his buy, I'm telling a new generation of flippers another technique to keep in mind when trying to flip items for some extra cash, or even to earn a living.  

*Yes, the economic downturn in the Spring and early summer of 2020 was an economic depression.  There is a definition,  The traditional definition of a recession is an economic contraction for two consecutive quarters.  Basically, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the measure of economic growth in a country, goes down for six months straight.  That has been the agreed upon definition of a recession for 100 years or more.  Right now politicians and economists are trying to change that definition, to avoid saying we're actually in a recession, right now, in August of 2022.  

An economic depression, if you read the traditional definition linked, is a recession for two or more years, OR a drop of 10% or more in GDP.  Due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the mandatory business shutdowns, the U.S. GDP dropped 31.7% in the second quarter of 2020.  31.7% is more than 10%, three times as much, and yes, that qualifies 2020 as an economic depression.  Just because economists and politicians are afraid to say it, doesn't mean it didn't happen.  If you're reading this, you have survived an economic depression.  It wasn't fun, be we made it through.  So we can all handle another gnarly recession, right?  Sure we can.