Blood. Sperm. Strip. Sell. Pawn. These will all work.
I tried the “cash for surveys” thing a few years back and can tell you they’re bullshit. They don’t pay you anything; for every survey you fill out you’re entered into a “drawing” for a cash prize that you’ll never win, or they’ll send you a check for $1.25 three months from now. If you do it long enough eventually they’ll start mailing you free shit like shampoo or candy bars for you to use and provide feedback, but none of this helps you now.
Payday/title loans exist for the very **very **desperate but are generally not a good idea. You need to have either a job or a car, they may or may not even be legal in your state, they’ll charge an insane amount of interest that could end up costing you up to and beyond double what you borrowed, and some 90%+ of online operations are illegal offshore companies that will drain your bank accounts dry. Don’t do this.
I’d go with either pawning or selling whatever you have that is valuable, or finding some manual labor to do for cash.
Do this; I have. I put up an ad saying I needed some extra cash for the holidays, briefly went into what I’d do (clean, retail, whatever), and had a temp gig two or three days later. It wasn’t a shitload of money, and didn’t last long, but I made a few hundred bucks, which made a huge difference to my then-broke ass.
Edit: I feel obligated to add the effectiveness of Craig’s List varies greatly depending on where you live. The utility of CL ranges from entirely useless to the tits, depending on your city. In Los Angeles, it was utile, in other places, you’re better off posting flyers to telephone poles.
When I needed to make some bank, I used to sell some of my books to Half Price Books. It depends on what sort of stuff you read – textbooks don’t make much, generally, and nor do tatty romance paperbacks, but game books (like D&D) often bring in boatloads, for example. I’ve made a hundred bucks off a book box: much less than it cost to buy them but more than I had.
I spent some time in London where I did medical trials - and while doing that I discovered a fairly easy, though time consuming way to make cash: most psych students at universities require subjects for their course and thesis experiments.
Given that a pysch student is still a student, when I went to the psych dept to do one experiment (usually easy perception/questionnaire experiments) I’d ask the person running it if any of their fellow students needed a subject. Of course, there were always disorganized students who did not have enough subjects, so I’d usually do four or five.
With a payment of about 5 pounds per experiment and an average time of about 30 minutes, this is not great money - but it was enough for my transport and food. And it is easy, and unskilled.
Find someone who looks like a sucker. Tell them your sob story, and pretend like you will pay them back. Then they can pretend to lend you the money, and you can pretend to pay your bills.
I’ve made around $300 over the years from surveys (cash money, not counting all the gift cards and free stuff) but a) it won’t pay out fast enough for the OP – think 6 to 8 weeks after earning some substantial amount like $25 and b) the time investment largely isn’t worth it anymore. People will spend hours to make $1 or $2 these days.
If you actually want to make the money quickly (and earn it), there are lots of freelance sites where you can do things like write little articles or whatever, or other tasks. oDesk.com (though they will hold your payment for a few days), the Digital Point forums, etc. The pay sucks but if you’re desperate this might be something you’d consider. I used to do this in my spare time to try to earn extra cash, and on a per-hour basis it generally sucks, but you can generally get payments pretty much instantaneously by PayPal. Do a few easy jobs to get some feedback first on whatever site you use.
There’s not a high probability of payoff, but you could check the local newspaper delivery department and see if any of the routes need a sub. Odds are against it on any particular day, especially during the week, but you could get lucky. Try to get paid up front. If it’s a morning route, try finding all the addresses the day before, if you can. It’s much easier to do in the light and when there’s no delivery deadline.
Not entirely. I’m signed up with one called Knowledge Networks and they send real checks. Most surveys pay a buck but some pay more (and once in a while I’ve been invited to an hour-long online focus group that paid $20 or so) and you can redeem when you have $25 worth in your account. So I get a check for $25 every 3 months or so. Woohoo!
Of course, they have the option to use your “points” to enter drawings instead as well, but I always take the cash.
We just had to pawn something to get enough gas money until I get paid Friday. It works. The interest on the loan is small compared to the peace of mind that I can get back and forth to work the rest of the week. It’s a good thing to look into.
Payday loans work too: but the interest rates are atrocious. Don’t get yourself into more than you can handle.
Yeah, this. I buy and read used history books, and there was a thread here on SDMB a few months back about a pricing oddity on used books at Amazon, so I punched in a few titles I could remember off the top of my head. I don’t remember what the thread was about, so it’s irrelevant, but in the process of looking up books, I discovered that a book I bought for under 10 bucks is actually rare and valuable. Several copies were available, the cheapest of which was going for well over 100. If you have any old books, and are willing to part with them, check Amazon and see if any are valuable. You might be pleasantly surprised.
I don’t know where you are, but if you’re in a bigger city where there may be big marketing firms, you could get yourself into a marketing study. I did some of these back in the 90’s and you can make $50 to $150 per study. Some are in the afternoons, and many were at night, like 7pm. These are the kind where you may do taste tests (we did one with malted beverages - that was fun), or watching commercials and rating them. None took more than 2 hours, so they paid pretty well. If you fall into a demographic that gets marketed to a lot, you’ll get more calls, but the key is getting signed up with as many firms as possible. I was never all that into it, but I have a cousin (who got me started) who made $300 a week or so extra after work.
Any odd jobs, in fact. I’m hiring a couple of students to do a lot of the grunt work of moving and painting and cleaning the old place. I’m not going to have them move my china, but they can pack my books without hurting them, and move those books, too.
Oh and if the OP lives in a big city, you can always panhandle at a freeway exit. Those guys pull $20/hour and up. They really stake those spots out though so you might have to negotiate with the Union in order to get corner time.
You’re a student you say? Surely you can offer up your services as a lab rat to your school’s psych department. The one here is always looking for test subjects.
If there is an auto auction place in your city, they often need drivers to collect junkers from used car lots. I did it for a while years and years ago.
When I was a grad student, I made money tutoring athletes through the athletic department. You may also want to try the biology department and the medical school to see if they need subjects. Easiest $50 I ever earned was for an alcohol study, especially since I threw up and got sent home early.
