So today myself and another person decided it might be interesting to try out the would of stock photography and videos to see if we could generate some simple side income out of it. We thought it would be fun too as we live in different parts of the world so this would give us the ability to take a different variety of pictures from different cultures.

I suppose a big attraction to the idea too is that this seems like something that could generate residual results for a one time effort. That is always appealing as things like that usually end up being better in the long-run. Be interesting to see how this goes.

I was looking at some electronic stores today that seemed to be offering recycling program incentives where you can trade in your old products for a gift card to be used at its stores. I have yet to get rid of my old digital camera and so out of curiosity I looked up at how much credit I could get for it. Apparently, they were offering about $50 for it. That made me think as I know I could probably sell it for at least $100 minimum.

I guess it’s best to trade things in if you know the item that you have is so outdated that no one would really buy it at this age such as CRT monitors. Funny enough, sometimes you can actually buy outdated items like video games for clearance prices and then trade them in to places that will actually offer you more credit than what you paid for the item. Like in that example trading in would definitely make sense if you were looking for an instant profit with old items that may be hard to sell otherwise.

Set it and forget it? I was chuckling at this a bit as I haven’t been paying too much attention to this in awhile. To brush off the cobwebs a bit, I have been trying to find different ways to generate an income as an example of how there are so many things to do out there where the main error that people do is just not doing anything at all I say. Web publishing was obviously one method I have been using and Google Adsense was a program I used.

I haven’t been really paying too much attention to it and low and behold the account generated over one thousand dollars. More specifically, $1031.27 as you can see here:

That isn’t exactly a rags to riches type of thing at all as I know you can make more if you actually dedicated yourself to it. But that sure gives you a clear example on how just doing something can generate the return in the long run. In this case it was pretty nice too as I didn’t really need to do anything different as I found a way to adapt it into what I enjoy doing.

Looking back at what I have accumulated so far, it just dawned on me that I still haven’t thought of what to do with these funds yet. Again, the purpose is to explore other ways to generate an income as well that can fit various lifestyles.

Here is the tally so far:

Stock Investment: $800
Web Publishing: $2130.13
Million Dollar Term: $100
Affiliate Sales: $91.01
Free Money and Credits: $100
Loose Change Savings: $209.23
Selling Items: $55.64

Total: $3486.01

Well this was kind of surprising to me today. A person was telling me that one way that he makes money in his spare time is that he literally goes out and tries to find diamonds at various obscure locations. Sure enough, he has made some money this way. Of all the things you try to do to avoid paying retail prices for items this is definitely something that most people would not normally think of.

In some ways it might sound weird, but I would think that your odds of doing something like this could be better than winning the lottery actually. I just question how productive you can be without using some professional equipment to mass search for the item. It would be like trying to find gold in the river with just a little pan.

My first reaction with this too is that at this day and age even if you can’t find these items the journey itself can probably act like a hedge fund. I’m sure you can find ways to get an audience if you say video documented everything. Hence, you can probably generate revenue and funds that way after too. Even I admit that it sounded kind of interesting where even though it is was probably one of the few ways people made a lot of money way back it’s good to know that there are so many options out there on the things you can do.

Today I saw something funny as I was reading an article about people who were spending so much time a site trying to do earn enough digital points to play various games like poker in hopes to play a game to win more money. The funny thing was that it wasn’t much at all when you look at it from the big picture. For example, it appeared as if it would take someone about thirty minutes to do all these questionnaires of sort to simply earn like $2.

I was just thinking how it was so much more logical to just say work at a regular job and earn a minimum wage then to do that. I then asked someone on why they wouldn’t do so and the only answer I got was that they would never pay for it since they can get it for free. I suppose I see the mindset for this but value wise it just seems strange.

To me it’s only in situations where I don’t have to go out of my way for these types of items that I would be persistent in getting. Example, I think the reward points you spend on credit cards are kind of a bad value when you compare how much you need to buy to get something for free. So I would never intentionally try to get more points just to get an item for free. Instead I am earning it because I know that I am going to use the card or making a purchase anyways. You could be spending all that time and energy finding more ways to save or making money too.