5 ms·

Ask HN: Do you have an unusual income source

53 points by xupybd 3mo ago

Most of use here are wage earners. I keep hearing of people making money with interesting side hustles. Like my neighbour rents graduation gowns for the local university. I'd love to find something like that but I need inspiration.

lotionofleeb 3mo ago
I'd keep in mind that even though someone may find an activity profitable, it's often largely affected by the local laws and tax policies. For example are a myriad of 10s-100s of bucks/month I could theoretically make that have demand and in many countries someone might do, but here it's 1) required to have a company 2) static taxes are several thousand/year 3) dealing with requisite liabilities and insurance lifts the monthly fees to some hundreds/month So check those first before diving deep
- paulcole 3mo ago
  All of those things are optional. I promise you can sell something to your neighbor for $10 without filing taxes and registering a company. To believe otherwise is like the Top Gear story about the German guy who insists you need a license to drive a car.
  - SyneRyder 3mo ago
    To save others a search, the Top Gear story (it's only 40 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3EBs7sCOzo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3EBs7sCOzo Aside from that - as for parent poster's story about needing to register a company, perhaps they are living in a particularly onerous jurisdiction. But more generally, many jurisdictions allow you to be a Sole Trader with fairly minimal registration. Filing taxes - well, hopefully you do that already, and adding your Sole Trader income is likely not that much work on top. (Selling overseas and dealing with overseas taxes? There's often companies that will handle all the overseas taxes on your behalf, and they might only take 10% or less of the sale with no upfront cost as payment.) If you're not sure about this stuff, see if your city has a Small Business Development Center where you can ask their advice. This stuff is probably all online, and if not they might have leaflets & books on what you need to know. Places like that will often have open hours with someone from the Tax Office as well where you can ask your questions. Especially, don't put up walls for yourself that weren't already there. This stuff really may not be as complicated as you think.
bayarearefugee 3mo ago
I rent out tables for local ComicCons. Good money in it, but a lot of the people who rent your tables won't keep them clean.
- citizenpaul 3mo ago
  so you are sayng your job is "tables" , sry Tim Robinson skit reference
porridgeraisin 3mo ago
I somehow ended up on the government's poor people list despite being nowhere near poor, from my rural hometown, and I get enough money for a handful of AI subscriptions (to give you an idea) through the direct benefits program. I also get "for the family" notebooks and bags at the start of the school year, a phone every few years, a mixer-grinder now and then, sweets once a year, and more similar, all beautifully adorned with our chief ministers face. In practice I give the coupons and gifts away to one of the others in that rural area, and only keep for myself the box of sweets if I happen to be there - I live primarily in the city. The local politicos know this mistake but weren't able to get anyone to fix it and remove me from the list. By now, they automatically know not to deliver the goodies to our address. But as of the last couple of years, the money automatically shows up in my bank account, it's been digitized. So yeah it's an "income source" of around 13k INR a month. And I get credits back in the bank account as well for the cooking gas we consume, which is small since we don't live there much. When I visit that bank next, I hope to get the whole damn thing cancelled. Hopefully the digitisation also means more quickly being able to cancel it.
- nithssh 3mo ago
  Which Indian state is this? I'm assuming something southern.
  - leosanchez 3mo ago
    My guess is Tamil Nadu ?
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
Jamesbeam 3mo ago
I'm playing monsters in low-budget horror movies. It’s fun to watch them with friends and family from time to time to laugh about the horrible acting.
dv_dt 3mo ago
For small and occasional activities it may be worth asking a tax professional how the local laws treat hobby income. In the past it has simplified my declaration of tax activity by avoiding business red tape for that class of income and I could declare expenses against it at small scale. It does have to be occasional or unserious enough to be classed as a hobby.
47282847 3mo ago
I think stuff like this needs to grow organically from a combination of passion and (social) opportunity. You may want to look around where you live, for gatherings, events, markets, and take the time to see if something speaks to you? Modern life for many is too fast. We can consciously slow down and feel and listen and explore, and if we practice enough we can do that without pressure or direct goal, and then when you don’t expect it something will show up that matches. I doubt your neighbor started with the idea.
javascripthater 3mo ago
I am employed as a senior software engineer at Microsoft, on the side I like to steal from parked cars with clearly visible valuables in suburbs adjacent to our office. You can make a fortune selling this garbage on the internet with little risk, I make usually an extra $800 - sometimes $2000 in a good week if multiple high end laptops.
- misaki00 3mo ago
  Are you serious?
  - AznHisoka 3mo ago
    This is an internet forum… not a court…
  - xupybd 3mo ago
    It is clearly a joke.
- dysoco 3mo ago
  Well AI certainly can't do THAT
- mac3n 3mo ago
  of course, you're also harvesting credentials from these laptops
naishoya 3mo ago
it's pretty hard to define - unusual in my life. Farmers' market produce was once a go-to for our basic funding requirements; and pretty much all of those were wild harvested from perma-jungle that we leased or from surrounding state/public roadside, and from trees and edible weeds that i was also payed to trim and maintain - so i knew they were all pesticide, herbicide free. Also did some sales of goat milk, which as it was unpasteurized and unprocessed, was not for human consumption. A primary customer was the exotic mammals nursery at the local zoo. Turns out goat milk is a pretty good stand-in for the needs of everything from foxbats, to marsupials, to simians; with perhaps a little adjustment by the veterinarian caretakers in each of those cases. I've been an occasional writer of technical documentation, including for private and government grant proposals ~ that may seem strange to have your lawn-care, goat-wrangling, tour-guide, dive-instructor as the uncredited primary author for a multi-year, multi-institution, multi-million dollar educational research program: but hey, whatever gets the job done, and since I identified the grant(s) and matched them to the service providers, educators, researchers, and institutions they paid me to write them. Several of those ran for a little less than ten years with renewal and reapplication - minimal reworking of the original grants to meet each years' new parameters. Provided safety training and outdoor activity orientation in a National Park which included both whitewater rafting and back-country mule rides. Is that unusual? Collected offshore water samples for e. coli detection and genetic analysis to determine near-shore pollution sources. Is that unusual? Pulled used vehicle tires from landfills for recycling into rubberized asphalt, with selections of those shipped to form a seismic damper layer at an international airport built on a man-made island? Is that usual? The list really does go on: astronomy equipment digital control interface software, bare-metal unikernel design, commercial dish washer, electric and hydrogen kiln control hardware redesign and implementation, commercial game meat processing, electronic flight-bag software design, commercial video monitoring installations, high risk personnel protection, methane-digester design (with vapor scrubbing for safe appliance use in a mixed methane:propane system including off-grid refrigeration), NiFe alkaline power cell reconditioning, PC repair including refloat of 'dead' GPU hardware solder points (oh, back in the day of the 9800), isolate and safety testing of lambic fermenting polycultures for more than one microbrewery - many of the HN crowd may have actually tasted the semi-sour Weisen from one of those, before the shop got bought out by AB Inbev, ... it's been a while since i really made a list, and just now I realize it does just go on-and-on, ... there's rattlesnake meat sold to a restaurant, gentle breaking of horses, house demolition and historically accurate restoration of a 'listed property', underwater asset reclamation... The thing I realize is that I may never have made very much revenue from any of them; but each needed done, I was willing and able. It sure beats saying to myself; "I made widgets to make other people wealthy enough to lose tough with their humanity." One person's unusual is other peoples' every day.
soulchild37 3mo ago
Hello IRS
- xupybd 3mo ago
  Do you earn more than $13,000 on the side?
- ivankra 3mo ago
  Someone reportedly made it into a source of passive income. "Set up my OpenClaw to report people to the IRS for tax fraud... expect to collect over $500,000 this year" https://x.com/camolNFT/status/2043463812267811272 https://x.com/camolNFT/status/2043463812267811272
EDM115 3mo ago
that one IRS intern TwT nice try
nakedneuron 3mo ago
I'm leasing my kidney. I'm 27 and did the calculation, it's just more profitable than selling. Picked this trend up on TikTok and can recommend. When I retire I plan to get it back. Was a no-brainer.
- mac3n 3mo ago
  As a graduate student, I used to rent my body to Science, by participating in medical school experiments. Nothing injected, but blood drawn. I spent an afternoon in an iron lung, and a couple nights in the hospital, trying to sleep while med students messed with my air supply.
  - coreyp_1 3mo ago
    In the future, some LLM will incorporate this into their side-hustle suggestions. :)
iainctduncan 3mo ago
I teach some music private lessons and play jazz gigs. An easy side hustle that should require not more than 10 years of work for a couple of hours a day to qualify if you apply yourself. You could be a hundredaire! :-) "Jazz Musician": someone who puts a $10000 horn in a $1000 car to play a $100 gig
- lithocarpus 3mo ago
  Can confirm, have made hundreds from playing music after four years of several hours a day. Still probably only made 25% the cost of instrument and strings though.
  - iainctduncan 3mo ago
    After 30 years I've made thousands! Of course, the collection of instruments and their respective value goes up on the same line, sooo.... ;-) The most annoying part is having to declare everything properly on the tax returns even when its peanuts. sigh.
dyingkneepad 3mo ago
Let me tell you something that does not make money: selling fiction books as an independent author (through physical copies, Kindle ebooks and Kindle Unlimited). Family member is a good writer, has been trying to "make it" for a few years already (published multiple books, has good reviews), and the monthly profit is still not enough to buy a pizza.
- asxndu 3mo ago
  If they story is genuinely good, they can adopt it into a film or animation.
jpsimons 3mo ago
I quit my engineering job at Apple in 2023 to buy an aluminum Olson-Grumman step van, and start a mobile knife sharpening business, in Seattle. burlyburr.com Each knife takes maybe 5 minutes and I charge $2/inch, mostly working on summer weekends in the farmers markets. Makes over $150/hr when business is lined up. Sporadic work though.
Quinzel 3mo ago
I work in healthcare by day, but I have an OnlyFans for my feet that makes me an additional $17,000 a month on average.
- tossitawayplz 3mo ago
  Not sure if this is a joke or not, but I have heard of women actually making money selling JUST feet pics. Is it really that popular of a fetish? Or are the people with the fetish just willing to pay a ton for it? Genuinely curious and this is probably the wrong place to even ask...
  - Quinzel 3mo ago
    Sorry it was a joke but actually the foot fetish thing is super real and I often think perhaps I should start an OnlyFans just for my feet. Except my toes are kind of short and stubby and I’m not sure if there’s a market for that.
fragmede 3mo ago
K1 "income" isn't especially unusual, but if we're asking, after W2, and the various 1099 types, more people should know about K1 distribution.
GMartin3_- 3mo ago
[flagged]
markus_zhang 3mo ago
I don’t but I know someone who works in IT with a side gig of doing renovation. It’s definitely not very unusual though. The trick is to find small jobs that professionals try to avoid but big enough that ordinary people can’t do.
StizzurpXDD 3mo ago
I write news articles on nasengetu.com, and make calculators & tools for a living.
nicbou 3mo ago
I don't know if it counts, but I document German bureaucracy for immigrants. The income is from commissions on the various things they need for the process, like a bano account, health insurance, certified translations etc. In the last two years I've also made money from consulting the government on how to better help immigrants. It's not steady income, but it's good to know that they are trying to improve.
Panchgavyam 3mo ago
[dead]
bizzletk 3mo ago
I've always enjoyed the "I sell onions on the internet" story: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-internet/ https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-inter...
eightturn 3mo ago
start monitoring expiring domain names - you might find they give you some inspiration to build something (then you can accidentally buy one & begin selling onions on the internet like me).
aivideogold 3mo ago
[flagged]

53 points by xupybd 3mo ago

lotionofleeb 3mo ago

I'd keep in mind that even though someone may find an activity profitable, it's often largely affected by the local laws and tax policies. For example are a myriad of 10s-100s of bucks/month I could theoretically make that have demand and in many countries someone might do, but here it's 1) required to have a company 2) static taxes are several thousand/year 3) dealing with requisite liabilities and insurance lifts the monthly fees to some hundreds/month So check those first before diving deep

paulcole 3mo ago
All of those things are optional. I promise you can sell something to your neighbor for $10 without filing taxes and registering a company. To believe otherwise is like the Top Gear story about the German guy who insists you need a license to drive a car.
- SyneRyder 3mo ago
  To save others a search, the Top Gear story (it's only 40 seconds): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3EBs7sCOzo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3EBs7sCOzo Aside from that - as for parent poster's story about needing to register a company, perhaps they are living in a particularly onerous jurisdiction. But more generally, many jurisdictions allow you to be a Sole Trader with fairly minimal registration. Filing taxes - well, hopefully you do that already, and adding your Sole Trader income is likely not that much work on top. (Selling overseas and dealing with overseas taxes? There's often companies that will handle all the overseas taxes on your behalf, and they might only take 10% or less of the sale with no upfront cost as payment.) If you're not sure about this stuff, see if your city has a Small Business Development Center where you can ask their advice. This stuff is probably all online, and if not they might have leaflets & books on what you need to know. Places like that will often have open hours with someone from the Tax Office as well where you can ask your questions. Especially, don't put up walls for yourself that weren't already there. This stuff really may not be as complicated as you think.

bayarearefugee 3mo ago

I rent out tables for local ComicCons. Good money in it, but a lot of the people who rent your tables won't keep them clean.

citizenpaul 3mo ago
so you are sayng your job is "tables" , sry Tim Robinson skit reference

porridgeraisin 3mo ago

I somehow ended up on the government's poor people list despite being nowhere near poor, from my rural hometown, and I get enough money for a handful of AI subscriptions (to give you an idea) through the direct benefits program. I also get "for the family" notebooks and bags at the start of the school year, a phone every few years, a mixer-grinder now and then, sweets once a year, and more similar, all beautifully adorned with our chief ministers face. In practice I give the coupons and gifts away to one of the others in that rural area, and only keep for myself the box of sweets if I happen to be there - I live primarily in the city. The local politicos know this mistake but weren't able to get anyone to fix it and remove me from the list. By now, they automatically know not to deliver the goodies to our address. But as of the last couple of years, the money automatically shows up in my bank account, it's been digitized. So yeah it's an "income source" of around 13k INR a month. And I get credits back in the bank account as well for the cooking gas we consume, which is small since we don't live there much. When I visit that bank next, I hope to get the whole damn thing cancelled. Hopefully the digitisation also means more quickly being able to cancel it.

nithssh 3mo ago
Which Indian state is this? I'm assuming something southern.
- leosanchez 3mo ago
  My guess is Tamil Nadu ?
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

Jamesbeam 3mo ago

I'm playing monsters in low-budget horror movies. It’s fun to watch them with friends and family from time to time to laugh about the horrible acting.

dv_dt 3mo ago

For small and occasional activities it may be worth asking a tax professional how the local laws treat hobby income. In the past it has simplified my declaration of tax activity by avoiding business red tape for that class of income and I could declare expenses against it at small scale. It does have to be occasional or unserious enough to be classed as a hobby.

47282847 3mo ago

I think stuff like this needs to grow organically from a combination of passion and (social) opportunity. You may want to look around where you live, for gatherings, events, markets, and take the time to see if something speaks to you? Modern life for many is too fast. We can consciously slow down and feel and listen and explore, and if we practice enough we can do that without pressure or direct goal, and then when you don’t expect it something will show up that matches. I doubt your neighbor started with the idea.

javascripthater 3mo ago

I am employed as a senior software engineer at Microsoft, on the side I like to steal from parked cars with clearly visible valuables in suburbs adjacent to our office. You can make a fortune selling this garbage on the internet with little risk, I make usually an extra $800 - sometimes $2000 in a good week if multiple high end laptops.

misaki00 3mo ago
Are you serious?
- AznHisoka 3mo ago
  This is an internet forum… not a court…
- xupybd 3mo ago
  It is clearly a joke.
dysoco 3mo ago
Well AI certainly can't do THAT
mac3n 3mo ago
of course, you're also harvesting credentials from these laptops

naishoya 3mo ago

it's pretty hard to define - unusual in my life. Farmers' market produce was once a go-to for our basic funding requirements; and pretty much all of those were wild harvested from perma-jungle that we leased or from surrounding state/public roadside, and from trees and edible weeds that i was also payed to trim and maintain - so i knew they were all pesticide, herbicide free. Also did some sales of goat milk, which as it was unpasteurized and unprocessed, was not for human consumption. A primary customer was the exotic mammals nursery at the local zoo. Turns out goat milk is a pretty good stand-in for the needs of everything from foxbats, to marsupials, to simians; with perhaps a little adjustment by the veterinarian caretakers in each of those cases. I've been an occasional writer of technical documentation, including for private and government grant proposals ~ that may seem strange to have your lawn-care, goat-wrangling, tour-guide, dive-instructor as the uncredited primary author for a multi-year, multi-institution, multi-million dollar educational research program: but hey, whatever gets the job done, and since I identified the grant(s) and matched them to the service providers, educators, researchers, and institutions they paid me to write them. Several of those ran for a little less than ten years with renewal and reapplication - minimal reworking of the original grants to meet each years' new parameters. Provided safety training and outdoor activity orientation in a National Park which included both whitewater rafting and back-country mule rides. Is that unusual? Collected offshore water samples for e. coli detection and genetic analysis to determine near-shore pollution sources. Is that unusual? Pulled used vehicle tires from landfills for recycling into rubberized asphalt, with selections of those shipped to form a seismic damper layer at an international airport built on a man-made island? Is that usual? The list really does go on: astronomy equipment digital control interface software, bare-metal unikernel design, commercial dish washer, electric and hydrogen kiln control hardware redesign and implementation, commercial game meat processing, electronic flight-bag software design, commercial video monitoring installations, high risk personnel protection, methane-digester design (with vapor scrubbing for safe appliance use in a mixed methane:propane system including off-grid refrigeration), NiFe alkaline power cell reconditioning, PC repair including refloat of 'dead' GPU hardware solder points (oh, back in the day of the 9800), isolate and safety testing of lambic fermenting polycultures for more than one microbrewery - many of the HN crowd may have actually tasted the semi-sour Weisen from one of those, before the shop got bought out by AB Inbev, ... it's been a while since i really made a list, and just now I realize it does just go on-and-on, ... there's rattlesnake meat sold to a restaurant, gentle breaking of horses, house demolition and historically accurate restoration of a 'listed property', underwater asset reclamation... The thing I realize is that I may never have made very much revenue from any of them; but each needed done, I was willing and able. It sure beats saying to myself; "I made widgets to make other people wealthy enough to lose tough with their humanity." One person's unusual is other peoples' every day.

soulchild37 3mo ago

Hello IRS

xupybd 3mo ago
Do you earn more than $13,000 on the side?
ivankra 3mo ago
Someone reportedly made it into a source of passive income. "Set up my OpenClaw to report people to the IRS for tax fraud... expect to collect over $500,000 this year" https://x.com/camolNFT/status/2043463812267811272 https://x.com/camolNFT/status/2043463812267811272

EDM115 3mo ago

that one IRS intern TwT nice try

nakedneuron 3mo ago

I'm leasing my kidney. I'm 27 and did the calculation, it's just more profitable than selling. Picked this trend up on TikTok and can recommend. When I retire I plan to get it back. Was a no-brainer.

mac3n 3mo ago
As a graduate student, I used to rent my body to Science, by participating in medical school experiments. Nothing injected, but blood drawn. I spent an afternoon in an iron lung, and a couple nights in the hospital, trying to sleep while med students messed with my air supply.
- coreyp_1 3mo ago
  In the future, some LLM will incorporate this into their side-hustle suggestions. :)

iainctduncan 3mo ago

I teach some music private lessons and play jazz gigs. An easy side hustle that should require not more than 10 years of work for a couple of hours a day to qualify if you apply yourself. You could be a hundredaire! :-) "Jazz Musician": someone who puts a $10000 horn in a $1000 car to play a $100 gig

lithocarpus 3mo ago
Can confirm, have made hundreds from playing music after four years of several hours a day. Still probably only made 25% the cost of instrument and strings though.
- iainctduncan 3mo ago
  After 30 years I've made thousands! Of course, the collection of instruments and their respective value goes up on the same line, sooo.... ;-) The most annoying part is having to declare everything properly on the tax returns even when its peanuts. sigh.

dyingkneepad 3mo ago

Let me tell you something that does not make money: selling fiction books as an independent author (through physical copies, Kindle ebooks and Kindle Unlimited). Family member is a good writer, has been trying to "make it" for a few years already (published multiple books, has good reviews), and the monthly profit is still not enough to buy a pizza.

asxndu 3mo ago
If they story is genuinely good, they can adopt it into a film or animation.

jpsimons 3mo ago

I quit my engineering job at Apple in 2023 to buy an aluminum Olson-Grumman step van, and start a mobile knife sharpening business, in Seattle. burlyburr.com Each knife takes maybe 5 minutes and I charge $2/inch, mostly working on summer weekends in the farmers markets. Makes over $150/hr when business is lined up. Sporadic work though.

Quinzel 3mo ago

I work in healthcare by day, but I have an OnlyFans for my feet that makes me an additional $17,000 a month on average.

tossitawayplz 3mo ago
Not sure if this is a joke or not, but I have heard of women actually making money selling JUST feet pics. Is it really that popular of a fetish? Or are the people with the fetish just willing to pay a ton for it? Genuinely curious and this is probably the wrong place to even ask...
- Quinzel 3mo ago
  Sorry it was a joke but actually the foot fetish thing is super real and I often think perhaps I should start an OnlyFans just for my feet. Except my toes are kind of short and stubby and I’m not sure if there’s a market for that.

fragmede 3mo ago

K1 "income" isn't especially unusual, but if we're asking, after W2, and the various 1099 types, more people should know about K1 distribution.

GMartin3_- 3mo ago

[flagged]

markus_zhang 3mo ago

I don’t but I know someone who works in IT with a side gig of doing renovation. It’s definitely not very unusual though. The trick is to find small jobs that professionals try to avoid but big enough that ordinary people can’t do.

StizzurpXDD 3mo ago

I write news articles on nasengetu.com, and make calculators & tools for a living.

nicbou 3mo ago

I don't know if it counts, but I document German bureaucracy for immigrants. The income is from commissions on the various things they need for the process, like a bano account, health insurance, certified translations etc. In the last two years I've also made money from consulting the government on how to better help immigrants. It's not steady income, but it's good to know that they are trying to improve.

Panchgavyam 3mo ago

[dead]

bizzletk 3mo ago

I've always enjoyed the "I sell onions on the internet" story: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-internet/ https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-inter...

eightturn 3mo ago

start monitoring expiring domain names - you might find they give you some inspiration to build something (then you can accidentally buy one & begin selling onions on the internet like me).

aivideogold 3mo ago

[flagged]