How to make an extra $2000 monthly?

Depends how much money you can invest right now, how much time you have to spend, and how quickly you need to start hitting that $2000 mark.

Need it now? Check out Craigslist gigs (help with moving, quick jobs, website help), or try flipping thrift store and eBay stuff. Pros: Quick, no skills needed. Cons: Unreliable and more time consuming.

Need it reliably? Work on a business and work your ass off in your spare time. Pros: Easy to make more than $2000/mo if it goes well. Cons: Will take a lot of time and effort to maybe work out for you.

Alternatively, invest in a property. Pros: Easy $2000/mo through rent. Cons: Lots of upfront investment & research needed to not screw yourself over as a property manager.

Personally I'm in a similar situation and currently selling on eBay and running a side business. Been at it ~6 months and make 200-400/mo on top of my salary, but looking to ramp up the business more this year.

Edit: One option I overlooked of course is investing. The safer the investment, the more up-front capital you'll need and nothing is truly 100% safe. Gamble on options but be prepared to lose everything, if you really need something immediately.

Find 20 hours of freelance work at $100/hr.

Sounds reductive but I’ve had good success with this when looking for additional income.

Probably the easiest and most likely to work path if you are already a developer.

One option is to try and monetize a hobby you want to do anyway. I’ve just started to do this with my woodworking/cnc/making hobby.

I make art piece wordclocks[0]. I’ve Sold a few with almost no marketing effort. My goal is to sell two per month.

Part of my marketing effort is improving visibility on Etsy and so I’ve started selling much less expensive items on Etsy too[1]. They are not so much for the revenue as for the traffic, ratings, and learning how to best use Etsy. These secondary products are all based on things I’ve designed and made for/with my young kids.

Two observations:

- I’ve really enjoyed the path of developing better processes of how to fabricate things more efficiently

- I’ve really enjoyed getting my kids involved with making. It’s fun to observe them thinking about how to make stuff and working with them to figure things out (they are 3 and 6).

By monetizing my hobby I can also write off tools I’d like to have. Note that I started pretty low cost using tools at my local makerspace[2].

[0] http://www.finewordclocks.com

[1] http://www.etsy.com/shop/FineWordclocks

[2] http://www.as220.org

Not software related, but my sister makes and sells simple candlesticks online for that much each month.

I also resold earbuds/earplugs online for a years to get $1000-1500/mo. Seemed like a viable side project only taking up an hour or so every night to prepare packages, and then an extra 20 minutes to swing by the post office each morning.

Like others said, it's always a good idea to reduce your spending and try to save. You can even use that savings to occasionally fund projects without feeling too bad if something fails.

Ha, that's effectively my take-home from 40 hours a week. Sure wish doing that was easy.

I think the safest way (i.e. no downside, no money spent, small time investment) is negotiating your salary. In your current or new job.

Build (or buy) a product for a niche. I sell plugins for Jira / Confluence and whatnot. Makes a lot more than 2k a month.

If you just care about hitting the $2000 mark, optimizing for time and effort, I'd say just find a product to sell on Amazon and market the hell out of it on Facebook and Instagram.

Run paid ads and make up for small margins with high volume. Try to offer your product at the lowest price among your competitors.

Not sure why you're looking for that value exactly or what your current situation is, but in addition to increasing your income, you can also look at decreasing your expenses.

It may be easier to shave off $500 in monthly expenses and only need an extra $1500.

I have a friend that turns time allocated for other things into paid time. For example, she got certified as a Spin coach, so takes classes a couple of times a week and gets paid to work out. She also does yoga classes and gets paid for that too. Sure, you might not hit $2K/month but it'll get you part way there...

You can probably get about £200/day painting and decorating for people you know. If you're prepared to work weekends it'll get you nearly there after word gets around that you're trustworthy and polite...

I have a question to everyone in this thread: how do you deal with the bureaucracy (taxes and stuff) that comes with a side business? (I'm curious also about how it varies between countries)

I've had good results doing mentoring calls on Codementor.

leetcode

Too overworked at my day job to do much side programming work. I decided to mainly focus on generating passive income through investing. I don't see many things that I think scream out "cheap" but the MLP sector has still not seen much of a recovery from the very steep declines from several years ago. You could look into $EPD, $ET, $MMP. Distributions given off of the units are tax-deferred, so it shouldn't cause much of a tax issue until you would unload the shares. These companies also try and raise distributions quarterly (yes, $ET has not raised in a while, but they took a worse beating than any of the others. When they do raise them, and they will, share price should recover nicely).

You could also look at some CEFs. PIMCO would be the main one I'd consider for bonds. $PDI / $PCI / $PTY. If you would want to get into some equity CEFS you could look at $UTG.

Obviously you can consider a lot of other options if you don't mind them tossing off less income, but your post was bout generating monthly income :)

Open an investment account and sell option spreads. You will need a margin account to do this. Note you can also lose money.