How To Flip Money (Legally) – 13 Ways To Trade Up Your Cash

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If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that no one has extra money.

No matter how large someone’s paycheck is, every single dollar is spoken for. I know that for several years after college my wife and I were on the brink of financial disaster every month. One flat tire or an unexpected expense and we were done for.

While we’re no longer living paycheck to paycheck, flipping our money is even more exciting than before.

We used to flip money to pay rent, but now we’re doing it to try and save for our daughter’s college tuition. No, we’re not talking about the money-flipping scam that goes on on social media. We’re talking about legitimate and legal ways that you can turn $100 into $1,000 or even more.

Whatever boat you’re in, learning to turn a few dollars into more can allow you to avoid disaster, have a better birthday or Christmas, or even save for retirement.

So, if you want to multiply your cash, here’s how we would (and do) go about it:

In general, the easiest method to flip money is to sell products. Many people make 2-4x their investment every month by buying items from clearance racks or from thrift stores and reselling them. It carries minimal risk and allows you to make money when you’re not actually working.

But don’t worry, we have other methods too, 11 of them to be precise!

What does it mean to ‘flip money?”

The term “flipping money” has gotten a negative pall to it because of the scams surrounding it on social media. Typically a person messages someone and asks for a small amount of money, promising to pay them back a larger amount (up to 10x in some cases) a few days later. Don’t fall for this garbage.

There are several ways that you can make your money work for you that can grow into something real and ethical.

In our terms, learning how to flip money is all about learning to make your money work for you. Every dollar that you earn becomes a little worker for you to go out and recruit more of its buddies.

The more money you get and invest, the more you make.

Making your money work for you allows you to earn money when you’re working, eating, sleeping, or just sitting on the toilet. This is especially key because, as Warren Buffet says, “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep you’ll work until you die.”

So let’s talk about the methods you can put to work in your own life!

13 Legitimate & Legal Ways To “Flip Money”

1. Resell Thrift Store Items

inside of thrift store

If you’re new here, just know that flipping thrift store items is our bread and butter. We’ve slowed down a bit now but for the past couple of years we’ve made up to $15,000 in a single month by reselling items on eBay.

Reselling items that you find at a thrift store, yard sale, or on clearance at Walmart subscribes to the oldest adage of investing: “Buy Low, Sell High”

Our Take

Earning Potential: High
Investment Requirement: Low
Effort Required: High

How To Get Started

If you want to get started reselling items there are tons of guides on the internet to get you going. You just need to master three things:

2. Rent Out A Room Or Spare Space

If you have more space than you need, renting it out can be a great way to make your money work for you. My brother-in-law lives in Seattle and, since he’s a broke college student, pays as little for rent as possible. This means he pays $600/month to live in someone’s spare bedroom and another $150/month for a storage locker for his stuff. Now imagine being on the other side of that equation.

Our Take

Earning Potential: Medium
Capital Required: Low-High (Low if you already own property)
Effort Required: Medium

How To Get Started

Thanks to tons of innovators and new start-ups, just about any sort of spare space you have can be rented out. You can rent out a spare bedroom, your shop, garage, backyard, field, or just about any other bit of space that you have.

If you’re looking to make money but avoid managing tenants, Store At My House is a good place to start.

3. Go Minimalist

Now, I’m not saying that you should make your coffee at home and stop eating avocado toast (even though it’s gross). But here’s a fun exercise, look around one of your rooms at home. Every single thing you see was once money, and that money was once time. You have traded your money and life for the things that are collecting dust.

What if you could change them back? One of the best ways to flip money is to declutter your home and sell items that you have. This is advantageous for lots of reasons. For example, you get money from selling things, your house will be easier to clean, and you could potentially downsize or stop renting a storage unit (which 10.6% of the US population does).

Our Take

Earning Potential: Medium
Capital Required: None
Effort Required: High

How To Get Started

Making extra money by selling your stuff can be as easy as putting out a garage sale sign. If you have more valuable items you could consider selling them on consignment or listing them on eBay, Mercari, etc.

4. Start An Online Business

There are literally hundreds of opportunities to start an income-generating business without even leaving your house. People are making very small investments into Shopify stores, blogs, dropshipping, Amazon FBA, and more to walk away with thousands of dollars per month!

Our Take

Earning Potential: High
Capital Required: Low-High
Effort Required: High

How To Get Started

If you want to start making money with an online business the best thing to do is to start hanging out with like-minded people. After you’ve identified an opportunity, find Facebook groups or forums filled with people that have the same goal.

5. Get A Booth At An Event

Cashing in on people’s fun or FOMO is a great way to flip your money. I have a friend who drives almost two hours out into rural Utah buys out all the honey at a little farm shop and sells it for 2x as much at the weekly farmer’s market in my city.

flip money by selling honey jars example

If honey isn’t your thing you can sell merch, food, bottled water, or even handmade items.

If you want to make this even more passive, consider buying a vending machine, arcade game, etc, and placing it in a laundromat or store.

Our Take

Earning Potential: Medium
Capital Required: Medium
Effort Required: High

How To Get Started

Once you’ve identified a product you can make money on, look for local festivals, concerts, markets, etc. The type of product (and how much money you can make) will be heavily influenced by the type of places that you choose to sell your wares.

6. Dividend Investing

If you have a job, there is a very good chance you have a 401k for retirement. Did you know that some companies will let you choose the stocks that your money is invested in?

What’s more, you can open a retirement or brokerage account at any time on your own! But what to do when you finally open one? Invest in dividend stocks of course!

Dividends are little “bonuses” paid by a company to their shareholders out of their profits or reserves. So if you own shares of Coca Cola you can receive an extra $.42 per share every year (based on last year). While it seems small, it can add up quickly. Warren Buffet’s investment firm will receive approximately 672 million dollars this year from their Coke shares alone!

Our Take

Earning Potential: Low
Capital Required: High
Effort Required: Low

How To Get Started

If you don’t have an existing investment account you can open with a traditional broker such as Fidelity or Charles Schwabb. Then, check out this beginner’s investment guide for dividend stocks!

7. Flip Houses, Cars, or Phones

One of the best ways to flip money is to buy a product and flip the product to increase your original investment. High-ticket items like houses or cars are common flips that people use to make obscene amounts of money. However, both of them require large amounts of capital. If you don’t have the reserves to flip things on such a high level, consider flipping something like iPhones off of Craigslist. Many people make $1-200/day flipping phones and other electronics locally.

Our Take

Earning Potential: Medium
Capital Required: Low-High
Effort Required: High

How To Get Started

If you’re interested in flipping phones, you’ll need to educate yourself first so you don’t lose money on bad buys or get scammed. Check out a guide from someone who actually does it (like this one) to make sure you’re starting off on the right foot.

8. Purchase The Rights To Media Or Art

Did you know that every time an artist’s song is played in a TV show, on a movie, or even on the radio they get a royalty payment? What’s more, artists will often sell the rights to a song or even whole albums. If you want to purchase all or part of their work the royalties are transferred to you and you can rake in cash for the rest of your life!

You don’t have to have a ton of money either as artists of every type and level are typically interested in selling the rights to their work.

If you don’t love music, you can also invest in the rights to art, books, etc.

Our Take

Earning Potential: Low-Medium
Capital Required: Medium-High
Effort Required: Low

How To Get Started

Buying royalties isn’t difficult but it can be hard to find profitable opportunities. Look for unusual opportunities through a site like RoyaltyExchange where you can buy entire rights or partial rights to all sorts of media.

9. Sell Information

If you have some time but not a lot of money, selling information is a great way to get some extra cash.

You can create a course, start a blog, make a YouTube channel, or find another way to disseminate information to an audience. While this isn’t necessarily an easy way to make money, there are people who make millions of dollars per year doing nothing but selling their own ideas and information!

What’s more, if you really want to flip money and don’t have time to invest, you can hire a writer to create a book, course, etc. on your behalf.

Our Take

Earning Potential: High
Capital Required: Medium
Effort Required: High

How To Get Started

If you want to sell information, the first thing you need to figure out is what unique value you can add. If you can come up with a unique product that people are looking for you’ll have a much easier time selling it without spending a ton of money on marketing.

More Resources:

10. Double Dip

The best job I ever had was straight out of college when I managed the night shift at a boy’s home. All the students were asleep so I simply sat at my desk and checked on them every 15 minutes. In the meantime, I was free to do whatever I wanted…so I started this blog, did homework, researched passive income, read books, etc.

I only worked that job for a year but the whole time I felt like I was double-dipping. I had full benefits and that $17/hour I was making became much higher as I was able to also make money blogging during that time.

Our Take

Earning Potential: Medium
Capital Required: Low
Effort Required: High

How To Get Started

If you want to find a job that allows you to “double-dip” look for security-type jobs. The security guard at my public library simply sits at his desk in front of a computer monitor and does homework for his whole shift. Working a job for $10/hour that allows you the mental energy to pursue other income streams may be much more valuable in the long run than a job that pays twice as much.

11. Get A New Certification (or something for work that correlates with a raise)

At one of my last jobs, I learned that there was a list of accomplishments and certifications that were related to quarterly raises. For example, getting CPR certified was worth a $.25/hour raise, as was getting certified to administer medications, learning to write the nightly shift report, etc. I spent a couple of hundred dollars getting all of the certificates I needed during my first 2 months on the job. This ended up netting me a $2.25/hour raise which means I made my money back in a single paycheck (and it was all profit from there).

Our Take

Earning Potential: Low-Medium
Capital Required: Low
Effort Required: Low-High

How To Get Started

Even if your workplace doesn’t have a list, there are likely things you can do that will increase your value. The more education you have the greater your negotiating power.

I have a friend who learned Spanish while living in Mexico for two years and, when he came back, it occurred to him to get a fluency certificate. Since he could now prove to employees exactly how proficient he was he could demand higher pay.

Start by looking for applicable skills or certificates in your field and determine which ones would give you the most bargaining power when talking to your boss or looking for a new job.

12. Micro Lending/P2P Loans

Garnering interest is probably the oldest method of making your money work for you. Did you know that you can actually flip money legally by utilizing P2P loans?

If you have some extra money, you can lend it out via a loan to someone else on a lending platform such as LendingClub or YieldStreet. Investors often make between 7-11% per year on the money they lend to other people.

Our Take

Earning Potential: Low
Capital Required: Low-High
Effort Required: Low

How To Get Started

P2P loans can be very profitable but they’re not without risks. MoneyUnder30 did a great write-up about how to get started making money if you’re interested in backing loans to people who need them!

13. Outsource Your Day Job

If you can’t find a job that allows you to work, you can try a slightly more ninja method.

With the increase of remote work, the popularity of outsourcing parts of your job has grown in popularity as well. Many people find the easy repetitive parts of their job and hire a VA or employee in another country to do it for them for a fraction of what they get paid per hour.

For example, it’s easy to find someone in the Philippines to do data entry for you for a couple of dollars per hour. You get your paycheck, you pay your worker, and pocket the difference. Everyone gets paid!

Our Take

Earning Potential: Low-High
Capital Required: Low
Effort Required: Medium-High

How To Get Started

Hiring a VA is a good start if you want to start simplifying and outsourcing your life/job. The longer you work with a specific person the more you’ll be able to rely on them and delegate your jobs. You can give it a try on Fiverr or UpWork to see if you enjoy it (some people find it more stressful than just doing the work).

Passive Income: Separating Your Time From Your Money

One of the make goals of learning how to flip money is to divorce your time from your money. Meaning that you can make money that is no longer directly related to your time.

After all, I’m sure you already have a job of some sort and just need some way to multiply the money you’re making without adding a ton of work into your day. Unfortunately the idea of “easy money” or “passive income” is not quite what most people think.

To make your money work for you you typically have to put in some level of work (and sometimes lots of work).

For example, this blog makes us some money. If I stopped working on it (as I have several times) it will continue to make money for several years without any more input from me. However, it required a good deal of work upfront to get it off the ground. Most money-flipping methods work the same way.

–> If, however, you’re not scared of work, there are a ton of ways that you can put in some effort and turn $100 into $1,000 or more. Check out that article here!

Now here’s your ninja tip. If you really want to make money without the effort, outsource your work. I could have hired a ghostwriter to write every article on this blog and just enjoyed the paychecks for years to come. Looking for ways that you can outsource your work can be both freeing and lucrative if you do it right!

Conclusion

At the end of the day, flipping money is just good business. Learning how to recognize and capitalize on opportunities around you is the essence of hustling and making ends meet.

So whether you’re after food money or want to buy a second home, I hope these have gotten the gears in your head turning about how you can make your money work for you!

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