Easy ways to make money for kids

Flies to the honey-pot, that’s what we are. Can you resist those calls to easy riches? I can’t. I’ve been a student of them for 45 years. Along the way I subscribed to numerous business opportunity newsletters and gave half a dozen MLM businesses a try. But after all that time and effort, If the evidence is anything to go by, there is no such thing as QER – quick easy riches.

Actually, that reminds me of a rather neat phrase you can use in the world of sales. The prospect says, ‘I like it but you have to drop your price’ and the salesman can reply, ‘That’s possible. We can give you high quality, rapid delivery and a low price – just choose any two’.

There is a famous old quote, which says, ‘There is a natural law of business balance prohibiting good quality being available at a cheap price. It can’t be done. To reduce the price, you have to do something cheaper or leave something out. You can’t have quality and low price’.

Let’s see if the idea of ‘pick any two’ applies to QER.

Quick – how can you make money fast, sawn-off shotgun + post office, drug smuggling, hostage-taking + ransom. Evidently you can get your hands on money fast in illegitimate ways, but since jail is the most likely outcome, this option isn’t realistic.

Easy – the lottery is easy, but the odds are so long that in practice, buying a ticket is 99.9% as bad as simply throwing your money away.

Some people inherit. That’s easy enough, if you happen to be named in a will. But how can you achieve that? It’s not within your control, it’s a matter of chance.

Unless I have a blind spot, there isn’t any way to achieve QER. So why are there so many sales pitches saying that it’s only a credit card spend away?

It’s because there are millions, probably billions of hopeful, naive, gullible people who long to believe that QER can be theirs if they can just find the magic to make it happen. But do they succeed? I never have in nearly half a century, Don’t get me wrong, I have made money, sometimes large amounts, but never quick and easy.

On many occasions I’ve been paid $3,000 a day to talk. That’s relatively quick. Was it easy? Definitely not. It took a lifetime of experience to acquire the necessary knowledge and the extra ingredient of being able to present that information to a demanding audience.

Another ‘Quick one’; I sold a database of business organisations. It contained 300,000 records. Rather amazingly, they all fitted on to one CD. My buyer paid $18,000 for it. Despite the fact that handing over the CD and depositing the money to my account only took minutes, in reality, that was neither quick nor easy. To build the database had taken 5 years of painstaking additions and amendments.

The learning point: don’t believe any claims that you can have easy riches by buying something. Doing is what it takes to make money, not buying.

Here are some real ways to make your fortune.

Hustle in the world of real estate. Property is expensive, sales commissions are large. Sell some expensive houses and you’ll have a lot of money.

Buy dilapidated properties, fix them up, rent them to more than cover the financing, then repeat. When the next real-estate boom comes along, sell them.

Start a business which can be replicated throughout a large territory – look at Starbucks, Tim Hortons, Body Shop, Car Hire outlets as examples. Once the company is established, go public or sell it.

Do something very unusual, which is in strong demand. Those two properties naturally conflict, so it will take some searching to find an activity which fits, but the famous Red Adair, who put out oil well fires had just such a one. The entertainment industry is a place where this can be found too. David Blaine, David Copperfield, top sports people and TV celebrities etc are in this category.

Less dramatic, but easier to identify, any occupation where the problems facing the customers are very nasty, scary or expensive. That’s how lawyers and medical practitioners can afford to drive Mercedes cars.

Those are real world ways to make a lot of money. You could do something like that, you could be rich, but it will take hard work and time. That’s reality, don’t waste your money and become frustrated and cynical trying to find the illusory short cut, it doesn’t exist. Forget QER – it ain’t going to happen.

Life is short, do something that you enjoy, if it happens to make you rich, that’s a bonus.