How to make good money

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I really want to make some good money. I've not been a good earner over the years but recently my psychology has changed quite a bit and now I believe that I am more motivated and more able to make money.

I'm selling on ebay at the moment but it looks hard to step this up to make more than a comfortable subsistence living. I am wanting to earn an excess amount of money so as to be able to invest or trade in higher value items and realise greater returns for the time put in.

I think that my strength is to trade through analysis, ie, researching a particular market to a higher degree than most others operating in that market and make trading decisions based on this information.

Any other financially ambitous people, or ones with realstic ideas about being effective in this area?

I lived in Vegas from '06 to '08 and thought I'd be one of the locals and make some extra money playing poker. And I studied both baseline odds and tells. I took it seriously.

One thing, just like baseball, it is streakier than all the college statistic classes emphasis on a nice smooth 'normal' bell-shaped curve would lead a person to believe.

I broke even, which I now view as a sign of success.

Please be careful. The upswings and downswings are both wicked and inevitable.

I'm interested in making more money so I can retire early. I have been reading Penelope Trunk's blog and I would highly reccomend it for ideas on marketing and navigating in the career world. She also has aspergers, so there's stuff about that too.

UPDATE: So I posted the suggestion to read Penelope's blog and then I went over to see if she had posted anything in the last day and lo and behold she had a new post about her boyfriend/partner beating her up. Perhaps her advice is not the greatest...... sorry.

Interactive brokers.

Go nuts.

I am sorry about Penelope getting beat up. That can happen to good people, too. And I think it is a very human response for a person to blame themselves.

Thanks Ynnep. I had a good look at that blog and found it interesting. I'm a bit disappointed there havn't been more replies in this thread. Surely, there must be some business minded aspies out there with ideas to share. I refuse to accept that we are somehow condemned to struggle and subsistence living even though this seems to be a common theme for aspies in relation to work and money.

I lost too much money at the casino.

Since there seems to be an interest in gambling, I will share some of my thoughts about this.

I have lost money gambling. Not a crippling amount but enough to get a shock and make a firm decision not to gamble.

I tend to agree with the view of gambling that says something like: a house with a [practically] infinite amount of money will eventually always win against a player with a finite budget. It seems to me that it would be very very hard to stop gambling if you were to keep on winning, and so the only reason you would stop is if you lost all your money and couldn't gamble any more. Thus, in practical terms, the end of gambling is always loss. I don't really want to gamble all of my life because there is always the probability that I will lose everything and living with this probability is upsetting.

However, I do come back to gambling in my thinking from time to time, trying to imagine if there is a way to circumvent the seeming inevitability of financial ruin and misery that it appears to offer. I find Roulette appealing because it is very simple and the odds seem reltively good.There is no expertise or complicated calculations involved. I seem to remember that there are something like 33 possible slots that the roullette ball can land in. 16 of these are red and 16 are black, while there is 1 that is of neither colour. One can bet on any combination of outcomes but perhaps the simplest way to bet is on either red or black. Now, if one bets on red, say, one has a 16/33 chance of winning. That's just less than half or 48.5%. That's a 'quite a good' chance of winning. In terms of pure probability, the odds are fractionally in favour of the house and so, in theory, the house is more likely to win eventually, and, in practice, the house is more likely to win because the player will only be able to play until he or she loses everything, whereas the house has a practically unlimited budget.

Here is my suggestion, which I expect to be critiqued so as to disabuse me of any delusion of success, for how to 'beat' the house.

1. Don't make gambling your only source of income.
2. Don't bet more than you can afford to lose.
3. Set an absolutely fixed amount which you will gamble each day/week/month.
4. When you lose this amount, stop playing until the next time you have budgeted for being able to lose a certain fixed amount.
5. When you win, keep playing until you reach an absolutely fixed amount that you have calculated as a reasonable return for the time and effort you are putting in, and that, if repeated would grow your income significantly more than you would get from working at what ever other job or business that it is realistically possible for you to do.

There are no guarantees of success with this system as you can't predict what the roullette wheel will do. But there is, ststistically, a 48.5% chance of significant success. There is also a corresponding 51.5% chance of failure, but if you stick to your rules absolutely, that failure will never ruin you.

Feedback wanted!

I think real estate is again becoming a possibility. There are loads of forclosures and short sales. If you can find an inexpensive house that would rent for more than the monthly payments and expenses. Live in one, buy and rent others over several years until you have enough to live off of the income.

It is very hard to make a lot of money, unless you work with other people's money.

At a minimum, you need to at dress to the expectations of the folks you are working with--its their money and their rules.

Traders have the same manner of rules: risk limits and what not.
Why not trade? You get better odds than in gambling, and "trader" makes you sound better than "gambler".

I've made money selling really cheap, low-end gadgets before. It's easy enough to do through eBay, and even sell directly to small shops, but you do need to buy in bulk to make it worth your while.

I've also sold phone cases in bulk, this can work too.

Essentially, I got lots of stuff I knew there was a large demand for really cheaply and sold it off in bulk. Quite an easy, fairly low-risk way to make money if you buy the right product.

If you're willing to put more work into something which may not make you money at first, set up a website on something you like, stick ads and affiliate links on it, and build it up. If you get a decent number of hits, you can make real money from that eventually. It won't happen overnight though.

I quite like the idea of getting into property. A big challenge at first is how to get enough money to buy that first property. This is something I need to look into. I understand that borrowing from banks is not easy at the moment. I don't want to approach parents for money for various reasons. Perhaps there's a way to build up to buying a property by buying and selling things of progressively higher value. I need to look into this. As well as income from renting out properties, I like the idea of buying one in need of work, doing it up, and selling it. This seems like a way to make a substantial chunk of money at a time.

Trouble is, I don't think I can stick to such rules. Thinking and perspective tends to change and so even if I say: 'right, that is my limit', at one point, at a later point I will see things differently and will change that limit.

Also, I think gambling is a bit of a distraction from making sure financial progress. There is nothing guaranteed about an income from gambling and so it is not worth focusing on when it is guaranteed financial progress that is wanted.

I've read a little bit about trading Forex and I am interested in this. I understand that it takes a lot of study to learn though, and realistic profits are pretty meagre for the little guy. It also has the problems associated with gambling of [not] sticking to limits and of lack of guarantees of success.

Online retailing through ebay is working for me at the moment although it is hard to see how to grow this into something that will generate more than what I would call a comfortable subsistence income. But I am looking for ways to do this. Product choice is key. I need to research more product areas to see what I can discover.

Well done, with your selling success, by the way. I'm not so attracted to large volume, low value selling because then a lot of time is spent packing for not much profit. However, it is easier to sell cheaper things as there are more customers with, say, £10 to spend on an item, than there are with £100 to spend.

I want to remain a one-man-band as well, rather than having employees, so I need to keep the workload down.

What I would like is to discover a higher value product for which there is good demand. I'd like to grow into increasingly higher vlaue products so that I was making larger sums per transaction/amount of work. Ideally, from there, I would go into property.


Perhaps I need a business plan to see exactly what is required to get to where I want to be.

It sounds like your current eBay business can help you with that. I don't think you've told us what you're selling, but surely you can reinvest some of your profit into buying higher value items?

I had a friend who made a few grand in about a month selling USB drives through eBay. Of course, he also had more P&P costs than me since he shipped out to each individual customer, as you do. I may have made a little less revenue selling in bulk, but I also cut down on costs with less P&P and eBay seller fees.

Really, though, making a livable amount of money on this kind of thing really is surprisingly easy, and if you save a bit you can start trading in the kind of things you really want to get into.