Making Extra Money
 

Went got 5 bags of Aluminum Cans,mashed got almost $6.Not really worth walking the roads all day plus Gas hauling them.

Pick Walnuts $7 a hundred after hulled.Little better but still have to find Trees,Gas getting to them and hauling to the Buyer.

Cut Firewood $35 a Pickup Load $15 for gas to deliver,spend bulk of day getting this done.Better off to just cut for own use.

Ok when I was younger this didn't bother me but the way I'm thinking have to be desperate to deal with this.:Bawling: I don't know maybe I'm looking at this wrong.

big rockpile

Nope. Soon we will need to put the self back into self sufficiency. We will need to produce what we need for our own household and the rest of the population will need to do the same.

No more sitting watching the big screen plaza T.V. waiting on my stuff to arrive. we will get to provide our own stuff. It will be a tough world without all the government entitlements, at least for the 50% or so that live on them now. Those of us who can do for ourselves will be O.K. We will need to stop providing so much super cheap labor for others who contribute nothing, and just do for us.

It is belt tightening time.:run:

What was the price per pound on the cans? I'm still sitting on a bunch. Probably will wait until spring to cash them in.

Since the last big storm there's people on craigslist wanting someone to come in and remove downed trees. You cut and carry and it's free.

I'm sorry I didn't get a Ticket or ask the weight but I had 5 50# feed sacks full.Just not worth picking up unless I come across a bunch but sure as heck not going to walk the roads.

big rockpile

Around here it's 50-55 cents a pound. I go for a walk in the morning and take a bag with me. Sometime sI get just one or two cans and sometimes I hit the jackpot and get a huge bag full. I'm saving mine for next summer. I want to take the kids to a Cubs game and I need every dime I can get!

Hey there Big;
You have been on mind ever since your post about how much you are paid for the walnuts you harvest.

Isn't there a place here on the forum where you could list them for sale, yourself?

I don't like to offer unsolicited advice but I think you could make more selling the walnuts yourself.

The $35 a cord for firewood is too cheap. A cord of firewood ought to be worth more than that.

Can you check with your local agricultural extension office and casually ask the going rate in your area for a cord of wood?


P.S. I just paid $35 for 5 lbs of walnuts from Bulk Foods and an additional $14 for shipping.

Corn detasseling season is 'bout over but might think about it for next year. Good clean exercise, lots of sun, sweat, dew and pollen.

Used to be we would hire bean walkers to wack out volunteer corn. Now with the gmo stuff and variety of chemicals it just gets sprayed. But the itinerants lose on this proposition. Dad was approached by a Mexican back in the late '50s asking about a 40 acre field of beans that had lots of volunteer corn in it. The going rate was $1 per acre at the time. The Mex had his wife and 4 kids at work in the morning and collected $40 by 6 pm and the field was as clean as a whistle.

Just a bit more than a buck a bag! Not much. I pick them up from parking lots and out of trash cans at the gas station or grocery store. I may have to go around picking them up at the next swap meet. I'll hold mine until late winter or early spring when the price goes back up.

When you're a kid you think you have all the time in the world. When you get older you start to think about how much time you've wasted. It's just perspective.

A couple more months and trapping season will be coming. Too bad you can't trap your armadillos and sell them as exotic pets.

I'm occasionally at a steel recycler when someone comes in with a pick up load of beer cans. From the odor my guess is they were coming from a tavern.

Remember hearing about a deal in NO where a guy sold raw oysters to a place, they paid him to haul off the shucked ones and he sold them for road fill.

Similiar to a guy who sold horse bedding at a race track. They paid him to haul it off and he then sold it to mushgroom growers.

Walnuts here are just picked up taken to the Huller,they Hull them pay you for how ever many Hundred # you have,plus we do it on Shares.They want their money then.I don't have any trees I can sell Nuts off of,I do have some I can use the Nuts but not Sell them.

Thats $35 for Level Throwed on Pickup load not a Cord.

I'm not going to drive 80 miles one way to find Row Crops.

big rockpile

It might be better to trade the walnuts and firewood with neighbors for other things you need. I wish I had those kind of neighbors here. Heck, I have the firewood on my property with a bad back. I wish I had people around here that actually wanted to work and I'd hire them to haul the wood up to the house for the winter.

The local feed store has a little system with fresh chicken eggs. A few people have chickens and they bring their extras to the store. Other locals recycle their egg cartons dropping them off at the feed store. The feed store puts the eggs in the recycled egg cartons and sells them for $4 dozen taking a little bit of that for their time and trouble to sell..I think it was 50 cents or $1.

Don't blame you at all.

If you have wood then consider essential oil. Use the fuel to make steam to pass through whatever you would like to collect the oil off of, condense it and siphon off the oil from the condensate.

Another option is dried flowers. A local farmer lost 160 acres to the bank quite a while back. They left him the house, barn and 10 acres. He hired local ladies to tend the flowers, they dried them in the barn and sold 'em to flower shops. He said he made more off that 10 acres than he ever made off the 160.

Back when cans went to 1.00 pound a friend of mine that builds our dumpsters had a system. His wife walks the roads for exercise and being near one of the main waterways lots o beer cans. He had a 6 foot circle pen about 5 feet tall from 2 by 3 wire. Every time she filled it he would take his fork lift and dump them out and run over them. Then reload them, one day she carried them off and they got 1900 dollars from them.

I drop bu the scrap metal yards here daily to pick up old farm tools. AI get alot of parts from cultivators and such. Knowing what they fit they can bring good money. I buy alot of parts off bushhogs too some times the whole thing if alot isnt needed to fix it up. I sel lthe gear boxes or build other things from them. The real money maker there is grabbing the rear wheels. I can get them for 5 dollars and resell them for 25 to 30.

here in new york there is a nickle deposit on soda,beer,water etc... cans and bottles. they add up real fast. the only problem is they can not be crushed when they are returned

I don't even mess with collecting aluminium cans any more. When I was a kid I used to ride my bike an pick them up. A couple hours of bike riding would net maybe a couple bucks worth of cans. I will pick up any metal I see that people are throwing out. On my place there is a lot of metal just laying around. A quick 10 minutes worth of throwing some scrap steel into the back of the truck would pay for all my gas and food and sometimes a little extra. I figured if I was going to town anyway I might as well take advantage of the scrap yard being right in the same area.

About 4 years ago I picked Tamarack pine cones for the Wisconsin DNR. They paid 200 dollars per bushel. My friend and I averaged 20 bucks an hour out in the woods picking cones. If they ever needed more Tamarack cones I would do it in a heartbeat. Every year there are tree nurseries that will pay on the spot for certain pine cones and other seeds. They also buy walnuts as well of which I have plenty of trees that produce them.

Work of any sort is hard to come by around here. Currently I work for a meager 40 bucks a day doing hard labour (average work day is 5-6 hours). I have been tossing around different ideas so I could be more financially self-sufficient. All I need to do is make 160 bucks a week which is how much I make currently by working for someone else (who is a major cheapskate).

An egg used to trade for a lot at the local store too years back, now you can get a dozen for so little it's not worth the wear and tear on a chicken.

Anyone wanting to make extra money needs to cater to wants and not needs no matter what the economy. I can make more washing cars then repairing them.

The best place around here for beer cans is around the fishing camps. They're usually clustered around one of the landings.

Years ago, my FIL made a deal with several of the camps...if they'd throw the cans into the plastic barrels he provided, he'd swap them some fresh smoked link sausage come winter.

I figure he's paying about 10 cents a pound, plus the gas to go get them. But one trip usually nets him over half the bed of his Toyota pickup in uncrushed cans.

I disagree about the chickens. Yes, a dozen of regular eggs are cheap at the grocery store, but have you ever cooked with a fresh chicken egg? It's a beautiful thing watching how scrumptiously rich and fluffy a cake can get. I wont get rich with my chickens and they certainly wont support me, but they do pay for themselves and a little extra. It is worth it because my eggs are free when I sell my extras and my cakes and breads are AMAZING. Yum.

Have to ask yourself, " What do people pay other people to do for them".
No set answer as it differs with location, ofcourse economic climate, & legality.
Man & Truck for hire.
Around here a 3 story latter & being fearless about heights makes a nice sum of quiet money. Professional gutter cleaning starts at $150.

~~ pelenaka ~~

When my brother and I were little tykes, grampa would have us ride in the back of the truck and we'd retrieve the gophers he shot [5 cent bounty] and all the pop and beer bottles next to the road [2 cent bounty!]. He said we always paid for our gas to the feed mill and back. Those were the days. When my grampa and brothers were little they used to steal chickens along the way to town. This was in the horse and buggy days. We were well known as a bunch of chicken thieving gypsys back then. We probably would still be except no one raises chickens anymore back home.

I collect and sell pop cans, walnuts, scrap metal, extra garden vegetables, extra chickens, eggs, along with a continuous summer yardsale where we sell clothes and tools we don't need around the place.

Do I make enough to live on from these sales? No! But any extra money in my pocket helps out in many ways. The other day I sold 3 big bags of crushed cans, and one bag of soup cans. Got a total of $29.26 . Not a whole lot, but it bought us all our lunch when we went clothes shopping for the kids. I had picked up all the cans over the summer months while on my daily walk. I have to walk anyway, so might as well pick up cans and earn a little bit of extra money. Last fall I picked up a ton of walnuts. Didn't do it to make a living but since I needed to get them out of my yard, might as well sell them and make some extra money.

Aluminum cans sell for .25 a pound here. That price doesn't seem to change much. I haul my plastics and such to the recycling place every few months and it is usually the same. Will have to check out the city when we are there.

My dad died three years ago fathers day..
he picked cans as he walked...
he paid his best buddies (Jonsey)'s property taxes with the cans.
after her died...i was sitting (crying) at the viewing,,,,one of the cosmotology teachers came to speak to me (my dad was a janitor at the tech school at the end)
she told me her neice was in a terrible accident, and needed a special wheelchair. at his funeral, she held both my hands, and told me my dad collected cans for awhole year, and got her the chair she needed.
I feel like a million dollars each time I look at a can.
humble is what humble does...

big rock
 

big rock another idea is to save money. money saved is money made....stop spending -buying so much....cut out everything you don't have to have.......
pick up the cans for fun and stockpile till the price goes way up.....pick up the walnuts and crack out for gifts. make wise decisions with your money....get a part time job. advertise you will house sit or dog sit.
i feel that you may have got into debt...........get wife a parttime job at a beer factory.
times are tuff,,here in wv a huge carlot just when belly up,35 people lost their jobs...the health department shut down a grocery and twenty some are out of work. they say people are flocking to disability because they can't find work..............

:::sigh::: I miss the good ol' days of being able to throw a BYOB house party after the bars closed on a Friday night, and having enough cans by Saturday night to pay for all my own beer for the weekend.

Growing up is tough. Now me and the ol' man do good to get through a six-pack a week. It takes a lot of empty six packs before you get one free!

I've done really well the last few years picking up extra work at fairs and festivals, sitting at friend's booths and such. I also used to sell a lot of stuff on Craigslist when I lived downtown and was accessible. Would pick up curb finds, extra stuff friends needed to get rid of, etc and "flip" it. Now I have a couple of house cleaning gigs I do once a week, I sometimes still write a bit, etc. Have a litter of bunnies that will be ready to sell in a couple of weeks. Hoping they will pay for another couple of meat rabbit does so I can ramp up production to meet minimums so I can take 'em to the processor and sell to restaurants that want them. Rabbit poo can be sold for a little bit per bag. It's getting to be berry season, if I had time I could go make a killing picking blueberries and raspberries. We made a small chicken coop out of some pallets we found one time and sold that for a couple hundred pure profit. That was a pretty good deal.

Pretty much everything gets sold on Craigslist. It would be tougher without that being so popular here to market things quickly and for free.

I have chickens and I buy local fresh eggs. I should eat my chickens as I can buy local eggs for $1 a dozen. The first months with layers puts you so far behind you never break even with eggs unless you have a market where you can get $3 plus per dozen.

Beeman,

You are right about the first months. However, this year I bought 1 yr old Golden Comets from an old farmer who only keeps his for a year. I wormed them, and now the eggs are JUMBO. I'm not having any problem selling eggs. I would buy more, but will be moving farther out in the boonies, and it's not as easy to sell eggs there.

You would be amazed at the difference worming makes on poultry.

We eat a few eggs, but most of them get "value added" and sold for $5 each as chicks. We've got five hens, two table top incubators and last year those hens netted us $600 over the year's time. That was after we paid for chicken feed. They mostly forage in the back yard so they don't eat much feed. We also have a freezer full of free roosters, too. The chicks are sold straight run with a "rooster return policy" and when the folks bring me a nice fat tender rooster I refund their money and they are thrilled. Generally I don't tell them the rooster is going straight to freezer camp, but they are just glad to get rid of the noisy thing so they can sleep in.

Judy, off topic but would you post or pm me how you worm your chickens?

It IS difficult to find ways to make money off small acreage these days. I've been working on hubby to take in all the metal around our place, and we've made a few dollars from it. Still another load to go with doors from the firestation. Sold all our unneeded farm equipment, with a few rabbit hutches and some poultry waterers/feeders, dog crates and the like still to go yet. If we end up staying here, we've got to figure out some crop or something that will help utilize the ground and make a few dollars. Hopeing to sell tho and find a smaller place, but this isn't the time to sell. Wish there were nut trees here, I'd be picking them up for our own use if nothing else! Keep those ideas coming, you never know when they will help someone else. Jan in CO

Big Rockpile:

I you haven't requested a copy of my e-Book: How to Earn Extra Money in the Country, please do so at scharabo@aol.com. Not only is it a free download, it has a money back guaranteed if not satisfied. It certainly isn't 'great' literature, but the price is right.

$35 for a load of wood? Here it is $60 if you go and pick it up.
Try selling plant slips. A greenhouse is easy and cheap to build. You can cut wallyworlds price by half and still make money.

Judy, please post about how you worm your chickens. It's sure something I never heard of!
Thanks!