If I quit my job, the daily payout is going to pay the mortgage, buy groceries, pay the bills, etc. And I can save some, but other than having a hell of a lot more free time (which is very valuable, I grant you) it’s not going to financially change my life.
Or I can take that 300/day and keep my real job, which I do like but I also work my ass off, and sock away the additional daily payout and that would be nice. Let’s say for the purpose of this hypothetical I would be doubling my annual pay. So 219k/year.
Or, I can work my ass off in front of an ATM for 90 days a year and make the same as if I kept my real job and the daily payout. Or, if I were so committed, I’d have the opportunity to make a million bucks in one year by working 10 hour days for most of that year. I kind of like the idea of being in control of my earning power.
Of course, if I were 50+ years old and not in financial dire straits, I’d probably just take the daily payout.
Boy, did you miss out on an opportunity. You’re designing the ATM! Screw buttons, screw robots.
Slot the card and type the PIN once. The ATM carries out the entire transaction as fast as possible using the captive card and stored PIN, completely hands off, over and over, as fast as transaction cycle allows. Just stick a big enough basket under the dispenser slot and PROFIT.
Since we’re mutating the hypothetical enough to eliminate the “rat in a skinner box” aspect that OP is clearly jonesing for, I’m sure it wouldn’t be allowed. Because rats. But dammit, if you’re going to automate, why settle for half-measures?
I would consider what lump sum I could sell the ATM card for, and the annual income that lump sum would generate for me. If it was greater than 300 per day, then taking and selling the ATM card is a better choice. That lump sum would probably need to be around 3 million at the lower end.
Of course, that means someone has to think that paying 3 million for such a card is a good deal for them.
If you can get your own ATM, it wouldn’t be very difficult to build a robot to attach to it that continually goes through the motions. I bet I could make one over a weekend with McMaster parts and an Arduino. Probably need to get it refilled every other day.
If I had to physically withdraw the money, then definitely the 300.
I’d probably choose the £300/day, but the unlimited £5 withdrawal does have interesting implications depending on the other rules that surround this magic ATM card. I could, for instance, hand the card off to friends and family to enjoy. Or, if it’s replaceable, to total strangers. The fact that it’s such an effort-intensive way of making money, and eminently traceable could make sharing this card kind of fun, if the ground rules are right.
Two other notes:
There is a Chase bank in my area that dispenses both 20s and fives from its ATM. I also had a go-to WaMu ATM in Olympia Washington that did so (many moons ago, when I sometimes only had $15 in my account). But it’s rare.
That Chase ATM easily takes 90 seconds for a withdrawal, although I could probably bring that down a bit if I got a rhythm going, didn’t have to look at the screen, etc.
As I said, I’m figuring $10,000 would buy me this simple robot. It really doesn’t have to be very complex, and I seriously doubt I’d have trouble finding a grad student who could do it in a couple of weeks and be happy to walk away with $10,000.
If I have a written contract with the magic donor to give me all the fivers I can withdraw, I also suspect I can find an angel investor to loan me that beginning cash wad. Hell, I could probably impose on my parents for part of that money, with the promise of a tenfold return.
At seven and a half million a year, I can pay folks to fix it.
As I see it, this arrangement needs Angel Donor, Megabank, and me.
Angel Donor sets up the account that they keep infinitely refilled with cash. They’re paying all account fees.
Megabank staffs the ATM. They need some motive to keep filling it with fivers. Again, these fivers are being deducted from the balance of Angel Donor’s account. They’re not gifts from the bank.
As I suggested above,
Who’s paying the fees? Me. Specifically, a daily fee of $550.
Hmm…maybe. I figure at some point it no longer counts enough to be an ATM. I was trying to make it resemble an ATM sufficiently that it’d be recognized as such. An ATM that only dispenses $5 is still clearly an ATM, and each transaction is still clearly a separate transaction. An ATM that scans the card once and then just keeps sending out $5s is possibly not an ATM, and it’s highly dubious that those count as separate transactions.
But yeah, if those count, I’m going that way, baby. Minimize the time spent.
If I can get away with these shenanigans, I’m definitely going this path. Sure, it’s a lot more work to begin with, but solving a puzzle like this is awesome work. It’s the kind of thing that I’m doing for free on a messageboard now instead of doing my real work (glares unhappily at the stack of math papers to grade).
If I can’t engage in shenanigans–can’t subcontract, can’t build robots, etc.–then I’m taking the daily lump sum. I have zero interest in the actual act of typing my PIN over and over.
You’ve only shaved my 3 seconds down to 2 :). Remember, it’s about throughput, not latency. It doesn’t matter if a single transaction take a minute as long as you can have a bunch in parallel.
Still, you have a point–we could reduce some of the steps with custom software. Not cheap, so you’ll have to build up the infrastructure slowly. So I’d still start with human button-pressers and expand that until the limits are reached. Then (and with millions saved) one could expand into robots and custom ATMs.
I still don’t feel the numbers add up. If you take the automatic pay option, you’re going to make $109,500 a year. If you take the ATM option and work for three months a year on a normal forty-hours-a-week schedule, you’re going to make about $156,000 a year. And you only get that if you work a full eight hours every day with no breaks. If you take a half hour lunch break and three other ten minute breaks every day, you’re down to $136,500.
To make a million dollars, you’d have to make 200,000 transactions. Assuming a minute each, that’s 334 ten-hour days (with no breaks). That’s eleven straight months without a day off.
It’s not nearly as hard as you think - you can more or less buy a thing off the shelf that will do it. Consider this pen-plotter, for example (I have one on order). All that needs to be done to make it press a sequence of buttons is to replace the pen with a plastic stylus and create a bit of gcode to make it think it’s drawing a dot where the buttons are.
That’s not how private ATMs work - the standalone kind that you may see in convenience stores - they’re stocked by the bank, but owned or rented by the store - the bank puts in the money - the store gets a slice of the fees (and a supply of customers who have enough cash to buy more than they might otherwise)
But, most ATMs also allow deposits. It is a fairly easy software change to allow withdrawal from one account and then deposit into another, instead of getting the actual cash. (Which is a technical - but real - banking difference from a transfer.) So, I’d use the external ATM until I had enough set by to buy my own, and have it custom configured to automatically withdraw and re-deposit $6.15 with every swipe of the card. No need for the PIN because it is auto-deposited into my own account.
And the faceplate would be removable, so I could sit in my comfy armchair while I swipe.
I’d let me friends have a go whenever I was doing something else, and transfer to them whatever money they garnered.
In a way, this would be better than winning the lottery. Because any friends or family who needed money could get their own without my having to lose anything, but they have to put in some effort to get it.
Fun fact: I actually purchased thousands of retail kiosks this year, so I actually know who to call to make this happen. It should only cost about $30k, and that’s including making the housing look nice in my living room.
Yeah, when I said 90 days I didn’t mean 3 months at 40 hours/week. I meant 90 days at 8 hours/day. Regardless, the extra earning power of the ATM option is still more appealing to me because you can more quickly obtain seriously life changing money. Granted, there is a lot of mind numbing work required, but others have come up with some creative ways around that.
I’d probably just hire a few people to swipe all day. Each one deliver 80% of their withdrawals to me and keep 20%. I imagine I’d rake in at least a few thousand a day.
Frankly, I think that even though it was encouraged by the OP, the idea of hiring people to withdraw the money for you, or building a robot, etc…make the hypothetical totally uninteresting because then it basically becomes : “would you prefer to get £ 300/day doing nothing or £ 1 500/day doing nothing?”. Which is hardly a difficult choice.
You can’t imagine how you could spend $2,600 a week? Buy a guitar, a car, a big TV, whack it on a horse, give it to a hobo, burn it… the possibilities are endless!
I pretty much do everything I want to do already. We travel a lot so the only difference would be no more flying coach. No matter how much I had would I be for wasting it just to see it go out the door. That’s pretty much how we got to the position where we can do what we want.
It isn’t quite that easy. If you find a way to hire it out, you are effectively running a (fairly lucrative) small business and there will be problems. You will either have to figure out how to deal with equipment and personnel failures yourself or hire a good manager which adds another layer. The tax implications alone could be a nightmare if you don’t set it up correctly. Granted, this is one of the lowest risk businesses possible but there are still plenty of ways to screw it up.
I think the question is really about how much hassle and risk someone is willing to go through to maximize gains and there are a lot of potential answers.
The issue still remains that no bank is going to install and maintain an ATM that nets them zero dollars in fees. And finding a public ATM stocked with $5s is close to impossible and trying to monopolize it is going to just get you chased off especially since, again, you’re not making them any money in fees. Granted, this is all hypothetical but dream scenarios of sitting on your couch pushing a button or paying hobos to run your card for eight hours a day aren’t ‘realistic’.
I suppose if the mystery provider WAS willing to pay $3-4 a pop in fees, you should just negotiate with them to give you $1000 a day instead of paying out $1400 daily in $5s and fees.
