13 Ways To Turn $100 into $1000 (It Took Us Less Than A Day)

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Want to know the fastest way to turn $100 into $1000?

Buy gas and drive to your job.

At least that’s what my dad told me. I thought it was crappy advice then and I think it’s worse advice now.

Making money by going to my warehouse job wasn’t the problem. Anyone knows that they can go to work and get paid.

What I needed to know what twofold: how to get money more money when my job wasn’t sufficient, and how to multiply my money once I got some.

Figuring out the safest and most reliable (not to mention legal) ways to turn $100 into $1000 or took a while. Now I won’t claim to be able to do it every single day but can typically make several thousand “extra” dollars every month.

In general, the quickest ways to turn $100 into $1,000 are to sell a high-margin physical product or to provide a service.

How Quickly Can You Turn $100 Into $1,000

Over the past couple of years, I’ve done a huge amount of research to see what other people have tried to turn their own $100 into $1,000. The ideas usually aren’t great.

For example, I saw the suggestion of “rely on the magic of compound interest in a high yield savings account” more than once. Here’s the issue, savings accounts are severely outpaced by inflation (by almost 10x currently). In other words, it would take you just over 419 years to turn $100 into $1000 and, by the time it happened, inflation would mean that you could probably afford only a loaf of bread with your $1,000.

There has to be a better way and, in fact, there are many.

Many of the methods on this list will allow you to 10x your money in less than a month. This might be faster or slower depending on your luck, talent, and work. We’ve turned $100 into $1,000 within hours several times and I’ll share that story at the end.

So let’s get to it!

13 Ways To Turn $100 Into $1,000 (Or More)

1. Flip Thrift Store Stuff

In all honesty flipping items is probably the oldest profession in the world. I’m sure some caveman was trading shiny rocks for coconuts long before any other “jobs” came along.

Things aren’t any different in modern times. If you find shiny rocks, the buyers will come.

We first got into flipping by selling some unneeded items around our house and then using that money to buy items from thrift stores and garage sales to sell. With no cash investment, we ended up with nearly $40,000 in sales our first year!

thrift store sign turn 100 into 1000 example

Most resellers who find items at thrift stores to sell on eBay can make 5-10x their money on every flip. In fact, we’ve had flips that we have made nearly 100x our money on!

Now, knowing what to flip and then putting in the work to find it is what separates successful from unsuccessful flippers. Once you understand how the game works you can apply the same principles to flip thrift store items, truckloads of wholesale goods, iPhones, cars, or even houses.

If you only have $100 to invest, try the Goodwill Outlets where you can easily make 10-20x your money day in and day out.

Here are the things you should look for:

2. Launch A Service-Based Business

I don’t have the tools to do every job that I need to get done. What’s more, I don’t actually want to do every job that needs to be done around my house.

I live just off Center Street in a small city and have a sidewalk that borders my front lawn. I’ve put off buying an edger to cut back my grass for so long that my neighbor has started edging it for me. He won’t accept payment but I would gladly pay him $20 per time to edge my lawn until the end of days tan spend $100 on an edger.

If you’re looking to make money, invest in a tool that many people need but don’t use often enough to warrant buying one. Then you can rent it out or, even better, provide a service for people.

In addition to the edger, you could get a nice ax and learn to split wood, an aerator and aerate people’s lawns, etc. Or, if you’re not the lawn-care type, how about a really nice gel nail kit and you can learn to do nails? Or detail cars?

The list of services you can perform is literally endless and, since the investment is your time, you can start many of them for less than $100!

Let me give you another example:

The average manicure costs $22. However, anyone can buy the materials needed to do their own nails the same way for about $22. However, a gel manicure costs $35. And then there’s the manicure my wife gets. She goes to a salon that uses a proprietary prep method, base coat, gel polish, and curing topcoat. The whole thing costs about $50.

Could my wife do the job herself? Probably, and it would be cheaper in the long run. However, she pays the person who spent $90 upfront on paint and tools to do it for her. She won’t be happy that I’ve added it up but she has paid her nail-girl almost $700 so far this year! Not a bad investment for a girl who is still in cosmetology school.

3. Start A Blog

Starting a blog is not fast money. However, it can be an awesome investment. Since most people aren’t familiar with the mechanics of running a medium-sized blog/site, let me shed some light on how it works on one of my sites.

Another one of my sites has 89 articles on it and averages $6500/month in revenue
The average article is 2800 words long and cost an average of $130
The current market value of the site (based on revenue) is around $225,000

The site is just over two years and during that time, has made just shy of $80,000. In addition to the articles, I have about $2,000 in other costs for the site bringing my total out-of-pocket to $13,570.

When I sell the site I will have turned my $13,570 into around $300,000 (which is 22x my money, a bit better than turning $100 to $1000).

How To Get Started: Making a blog or website profitable takes time and know-how. However, if you’re interested in giving it a go nearly all the information you need can be found for free online.

Check out the following resources:

4. Couponing

When I first visited my in-law’s house I noticed that their neighbors were having a yard sale. I wandered over to see what they had and was surprised to see that every single thing was new.

It turns out that their neighbors were always having a yard sale. They were extreme couponers who bought things on clearance, stacked coupons, and used rebates to get stuff for 95% off or more. They could then sell it for 50% of retail value at their perpetual yard sale and make 10x their money!

While I’ve never gone beyond downloading the iBotta app, I have always been intrigued by the ability of couponing to both decrease your expenditures and increase your income!

So if that sounds like it’s up your alley (or maybe you’re already into couponing) go read up on the tricks of the trade and then start selling your items locally or listing them online!

5. Buy Amazon Returns For Resale

Here’s a mind-blowing statistic for you: Amazon gets around 250,000 returns per day.

What’s even crazier is that most of the items are not put back on the shelves to be sold again, even if they weren’t opened. Because Amazon sells at such high volume (nearing 2 million orders per day) it can afford to simply eat the cost and move on.

But what happens to the returns? A good portion of them is destroyed or thrown away. The rest are sold by the truckload to enterprising people.

Because a small business has the time to sort through and test pallets of returns it can be extremely lucrative to flip these returns locally, on eBay, or even on Amazon.

Now, you probably can’t buy a truckload of Amazon returns. They’re extremely hard to come by and typically go to very large-scale sellers who spend millions of dollars a week on inventory.

However, even those sellers have more inventory they can handle and often sell off items by the pallet or box to other resellers. We have bought dozens of pallets and packages from liquidation sites to resell on eBay and typically make 2-4x our money. On the rare package, however, we have made up to 15x our money.

You might have to flip your money a couple of times to turn $100 into $1,000 but Amazon returns are a great way to do it if you’re up for work and adventure! Plus it’s just plain fun to get a mystery box in the mail and possibly pull out a $1,000 item.

Where to Start:

How To Resell Amazon Returns & Liquidation Pallets
Check Out Our Liquidation.com Review
Look Into Buying Government & School Surplus

6. Affiliate Marketing

Solving people’s problems is one of the most consistent methods of making money and affiliate marketing aims to do just that.

Affiliate marketers get paid by acting as commission-based salesmen for a company. For example, we are affiliates for Amazon on this site. When we recommend a product on Amazon and a reader of this site buys it, Amazon gives us a small portion of the sale.

However, you don’t have to have a website to take advantage of affiliate opportunities.

You can post affiliate links for products you already use and love on your social media and get bonuses for everyone that signs up.

To take it a step further, you can cruise forums and Q&A sites to find people with specific problems and recommend a product or service that will solve it for them. If they click through your link and buy the product, you get paid!

With this is a good deal of work, it is especially useful if you don’t have much money to invest upfront.

7. Give Tours/Activities (AirBNB)

My wife is from Seattle and the last time we visited, we wanted to take a tour of the historic downtown area. We found an older local guy who had lived in the area his entire life and now spent his retired afternoons giving walking tours.

His local knowledge meant that we learned way more than we ever would on a tour bus and we absolutely loved the experience.

Our course, as soon as we were down we started talking about how he had just made over $100 for the two-hour tour. It was entirely possible that he was making over $60,000/year while retired just by walking around his neighborhood and chatting with people.

If you live somewhere that is frequented by tourists, you can give tours, go on hikes, or take people on activities.

There are people on AirBNB who make money by taking people kayaking, letting people tour their farm, etc.

And if you have a $100 to invest you can make things even more profitable. What if you have merch that you sold? Just print off some business cards and send people to your website to buy shirts, stickers, etc.

Or what if you had affiliate deals with some small businesses around and took your tours to their shops? The possibilities are endless if you’re imaginative and you could soon turn $100 into $1,000 per day or more!

8. Day Trading

If you’re into numbers and analysis, day trading or swing trading might be a great option for you to grow your nest egg.

Day trading and swing trading are active forms of trading in which you are looking to profit by trading (usually in the stock market) in the short term.

Day Trading: Day trading typically involves making several trades on a stock in a single day. Day Traders use technical analysis of the stock market to try and predict price moves and make small amounts of profits on every trade.

Swing Trading: Swing traders follow companies and buy-in when they predict a swing in the stock price. While technical analysis is important, knowledge of sectors and actual businesses is more important as trades can be held anywhere from a few days to a few months.

While there are people who have made huge amounts of money in the stock market and have changed their lives by trading, it is far more common for people to make some money, get overconfident, and then lose it all.

So, if you want to get into trading, only invest what you’re able to lose!

Related Reading:

9. Dropshipping

In the past, people have made millions of dollars per year by dropshipping on eBay. While the boom has passed somewhat, there are still ways to make great money with minimal investment by dropshipping on Shopify or on a website you build.

Dropshipping is when you sell a product that you don’t actually have in stock. Don’t worry, it’s actually a legal and very common practice.

You’ll simply advertise your product and, when it sells, you’ll buy it elsewhere and have it shipped to the buyer. For example, let’s say you notice that Walmart always has a great deal on calculators. They’re $60 but people buy them elsewhere for $100. So you start advertising them at $90 and, when people buy from you, you buy it from Walmart and have Walmart ship it straight to your customer.

10. Sell To Platos, Pawn Shops, etc.

If you like the idea of selling on eBay but don’t want to deal with learning how to ship from home, paying eBay fees, managing their new payment system, etc. don’t worry, there’s an alternative.

If you want money the same day, you can flip your find locally. Provided you can get them cheap enough.

To make this method work, people go to the Goodwill Outlets where everything is priced by the pound, spend a few hours finding great things, and then selling their stuff before they even get home.

You can take your finds to a pawn shop, boutiques, or even a store like Plato’s Closet that pays cash for clothes.

You probably won’t turn $100 into $1,000 but, if you’re smart and lucky, doubling your money is a possibility!

Where to Start:

11. Sell A Digital Product

You know those annoying ads you see on Instagram and YouTube that are trying to sell you a course or eBook? Well, what if I told you that many of those people in the ads make hundreds of thousands of dollars per year selling courses and you can do the same thing.

The catch is, can you produce something of value that people actually want?

There is a ton of money in digital products but the space is also quite crowded. If you have technical skills or a great personality there is still room to distance yourself from the competition and make good money.

Spend your time producing the best product you can and then use your investment budget to experiment with ads and drive traffic to your product.

The coolest part is that, after your course or eBook is done you can just keep selling it forever without the work of creating more and more!

12. Learn a Niche Skill

If you’re handy you can learn to do just about anything. Provided you have enough time, patience, and money. Since probably don’t have all those things (and neither does anyone else) we all end up hiring people to do things that we could do but don’t.

The best kind of skill to learn is something that many people would like to do but need only so rarely that they don’t want to spend the time to learn how to do it.

For example, Strié is an interior painting style that gives a wall the look of soft fabric. Very cool and highly desirable, but finicky to get right. So most people hire an expert to come in and paint an accent wall or small room with Strié.

However, a friend of a friend of mine bought some paint, sat down in front of one of his own walls, and spent almost a whole day perfecting his technique. He then painted his wall, took a picture of it, and posted a post on Craigslist advertising his Strié painting services.

In a single day and with less than $50 invested in paint and materials he taught himself a skill that he can now charge $50 an hour for! Over time it won’t be hard for him to turn his investment of less than $100 into $10,000 or more!

To get the wheels in your head turning, consider a few of these other skills:

lawn aeration
rain gutter installation
eyebrow threading
car window tinting
hedge shaping/trimming
metal detecting for lost items

13. Buy Materials To Make Something

Now, if we’re on the right track with these handy/crafty types of moneymakers then let’s take it a step further. What do you have the skill to create out of cheap easily available materials? Or what could you learn to make?

After all…

“A bar of iron costs $5, made into horseshoes it is worth $12, made into needles it is worth $300, made into springs for watches it is worth $300,000.

Can you make a table out of scrap wood? Patio furniture out of pallets? Carve something? Make a beautiful painting? Jewelry? A sculpture? Vinyl stickers? The list is endless.

Here’s an option that my uncle got into years ago and made several thousand dollars doing:

That is simply a small piece of wood that has been stabilized with epoxy resin. Wood is free if you live in the right place and resin can be dirt cheap.

My uncle built his own mini vacuum chamber and was soon cranking out these little stabilized burl blanks which people buy to turn into knife handles, pens, bowls, etc.

If you have some patience and curiosity, turning a little bit of money into a steady income is just a matter of time!

Turning $100 into $10,000 (or more)

It is entirely possible to turn $100 into $10,000 or more but it is unlikely to happen in a single round. Typically it will take a year or more of reinvesting profits and adding work to make 100x your money.

There are many stories of people such as Roberto Cavalli who started massive brands and grew them to a valuation of hundreds of millions with just a few hundred bucks in their pocket.

To grow money consistently, however, you need a business plan and a long-term plan of action.

You might be able to turn $100 into $1,000 as a one-off experiment and that’s pretty cool but hardly life-changing.

If you want to invest $100 to make $1,000 a day, be prepared for a long hard slog as you will have to make up for your lack of capital with hard work and ingenuity.

If you’re interested in bootstrapping a business that will give you financial freedom, head over to Amazon and check out Chris Guillebeau’s book The $100 Startup.

How We Made $1000 In 24 Hours

In our reselling business, we have turned less than $100 into hundreds of thousands of dollars. We started by selling things around the house and, within two years, had built our side hustle into a six-figure business.

However, there have also been several times when we have turned $100 into $1,000 or more in a day or even a matter of hours. We typically shoot for a 4x return on each item we flip but, when the stars align, 100x is not out of the question.

Here’s one of our latest flips that made us over $1,000 fast:

We attend lots of government surplus auctions and school sales to find things to flip. In a recent school auction, we found a small box of microphones that no one else seemed interested in.

We ended up winning the auction for $36.85 and took home 22 of these:

We always aim to sell our items quickly so we listed them on eBay for $100 apiece. Within a few minutes, we received an offer of $1,500 (plus shipping) for all of them.

We accepted it. Could we have held out and gotten more? Probably.

But after all fees and expenses, we ended up spending $36.85 (plus some gas money) to net over $1,200 in profit. All in under 4 hours.

While eBay flips like that one are rare, there are tons of things that sell well on eBay that you can find and profit from.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, I hope that you try one or more of these and turn them into something more. After all, turning $100 into $1,000 in a day is super cool. But learning to do it consistently and scaling up to turn $100 into $10,000 or more is life-changing.

Good luck!