Easy ways to make money for kids

One of the problems we have in a society that has become increasingly untethered from serving direct, tangible needs is that although we all need things, real physical, tangible things like food, furniture and electronics, and tangible services like water and telecommunications, most of what we do professionally is intangible and abstract, like accounting and marketing, or superfluous and menial, like low-paying retail jobs that anyone could do and which can be easily replaced with online purchasing. We need solid, tangible stuff – good luck producing a bag of groceries all on your own if you needed to – and what we’re supplying is usually frivolous or in low demand. For everything we actually need, we must go through a corporation and abide by its system and rules, but for nearly everything we provide in trade with society we’re offering intangible services that lots of people could do and which are usually somewhat avoidable anyway. So we lose a lot in this trade with society, and have difficulty finding ways to make money at it that people really want. Trying to apply our job skills on our own, without these corporate structures, is often difficult or impossible, and leaves us in a difficult bargaining position from which to make money.

One of the ways we can overcome this is to actually produce something ourselves. This is hardly ever done anymore. As a result, corporations manufacture stuff that will cater to the largest segments of demand in the marketplace – that is, they create the things most people will want – and the other stuff is either created by smaller companies or independant artisans (and costs a whole lot more because almost nobody makes whatever it is any more) or it isn’t available at all. As a result, a lot of niche markets either go unserved, or there are a few people serving them and making a whole lot of money at it because there is so little competition.

If we invest the effort necessary to actually build, create, or produce these niche market tangible items, we can sell them easily on the internet, through places like eBay. In fact, most sellers on eBay right now are selling stuff they didn’t manufacture, produce, or make themselves. They’re resellers, and this dependance upon available supplies of their products, and upon the going rates they must pay for them, is one of the major problems right now for eBay resellers and resellers all over the internet. We have everybody being the middle-man, marking up prices to get their share, and few people really making the actual products anymore – it’s almost all large corporations. This means that currently, it’s the people who actually make products that can be sold or resold are the ones with all of the control. When you have a case of “too many chiefs and not enough Indians”, an Indian is worth more than a chief, because Indians are desperately needed. We can be those Indians.

We can use Google to locate schematics for electronic devices that are interesting and nearly nobody’s making these days, such as a mood-altering ELF generator that alters emotions by interacting with the nervous system through extra-low frequency electromagnetics… how many people would pay to have a device in their home that radiates peace and tranquility? We can learn from the internet how to build rare or hard-to-find musical instruments, and make a lot of money serving that niche market. We can design our own clothing lines, creating patterns and sizing them to fit individual measurements, and selling creative clothing (or clothing for niche markets like Renaissance period clothing for Renaissance festival-goers, which always goes for quite a lot) to individuals through the internet. We can even create our own offline (or even online) games that we developed and that only we can provide, and sell them online. By having a tangible, material product, we place ourselves in a better bargaining position with the world once again, because we’re able to provide something that actually delivers tangible value. And few people are willing to take the time and effort to begin to do so for themselves whenever they need a niche market item. There are all kinds of things that can be created using this approach; once you have electronics tools and components, you can sell all sorts of different gadgets and devices just by using different schematics. Home automation systems, for example, are reaching a point where they’re feasible, and because it’s currently a niche market with very little competition, profit margins on the parts for them are absurdly high. There’s plenty of room for competition there, and in lots of other places as well. But these needs currently go unserved, because most people don’t think to do it, most people are basically unskilled or don’t think to apply their skills on their own behalf rather than their employer’s behalf, and because of another mentality that has become commonplace.

In the States (and in many developed countries the world over) by and large the majority of citizens are end-users – people who must consume, but although they have money, these people are at the mercy of whatever terms their suppliers set. This accounts for the increasingly harsh terms of EULAs, the end-user licensing agreements that large software firms like Microsoft create for those using their products. People are hooked – and it’s very disempowering. Society was created to serve the needs of citizens, but as power and control become consolidated, citizens find themselves increasingly serving the agendas of those running the system instead. People have little leverage anymore, or at least keep themselves in situations that prevent them from using that leverage. Breaking away from such systems to some extent or another is the solution – routing around monopolistic systems of politics and production, and going back to doing it themselves. The people who are ahead of the curve in doing this will find themselves in a financially advantageous position, because everyone around them is still at the mercy of the system to a greater extent than they are, and so their own level of disposable income is that much greater by comparison. This means that they will have more purchasing power than their neighbors do.

It used to be, say in the 1950′s, that “keeping up with the Joneses” (maintaining a standard of living that matched or exceeded that of their neighbors) meant buying more stuff. Today, our standard of living is most detrimented not by the stuff we haven’t yet bought, but by the systems that maintain the status quo and the terms of control those systems have: the government with its outrageous taxation, and gigantic consolidated corporations with their strict control over manufacturing and media, the enormous profit margins that that brings with it, and the outlandish terms of sale and licensing that they can demand because there isn’t enough competition. So getting ahead today means not buying more consumer items, but freeing yourself from those less-than-fair conditions as much as possible. It means finding alternate sources of the goods you buy on fairer terms, and producing goods and services that you can sell to others on fair terms as well, without getting short-changed by accepting whatever large corporate entities will pay you for them. Soon (and increasingly) that’s going to mean forming business relationships and supplying market needs as a group of individuals working together over the internet, bypassing large monolithic corporate structures as much as possible – self-organizing collectives of people with skills and abilities who collaborate through the internet. This is where it’s all headed, and it’s already starting. But for the moment at least, it means individuals like yourself creating tangible goods and marketing them to others over the internet. People are just starting to hear about this Do It Yourself Manufacturing concept, and it’s beginning to take off. As a result there isn’t a whole lot of support for it yet, and people are figuring it out together as they go. People are starting to use social bookmarking and social networking sites to find other people with the skills needed to collaborate and produce products together, and in time new sites will be created specifically to serve this purpose. The practical upshot of all of this is that being among the first people to hear about it, you’re already ahead of the curve on this trend. Like a runner in a race who gets to start early, you now have about a year or two of lead-time before everybody else is competing against you to do it too. Don’t waste it.

Take a moment to think about your interests. Try to think of the more obscure stuff. Is there anything involved with those interests that nobody’s doing or making anymore? Might there be demand for that somewhere in the world? The internet will allow you to market things anywhere, after all. The niche market for handcrafted 18th century Peruvian weaving patterns may be small, but if it’s out there and nobody’s serving it, it’s really your game to lose, isn’t it?