7 Ways To Make An Extra $1,000 A Month

Many of you are very tight on money, and an extra $1,000 a month would literally change your world. An extra grand of income per month doesn’t sound like a lot, but for a one-income family or a family with a lot of expenses, an extra $1,000 can make a big difference when it comes to reaching your financial goals or just preventing you from getting into more debt. If one of you is a stay-at-home parent, earning a $1,000 is an attainable goal, but many of us don’t know where to start. We automatically think that we’ll need to go get a part-time job with non-flexible hours doing work that we hate, but it’s simply not true. You just need to be a little creative, know the area you live in and its needs, and fulfill those needs. Here are 10 ideas for how to make an extra $1,000 a month:

1. Pet Walking/Sitting

If you live in a big city or a residential neighborhood with a lot of pets, there will always be a need for people to have their dog or cat looked after, or even walked during the day to get some exercise if the owners leave really early and get back late from work. Pet sitting jobs would be more sporadic, but if you get 6 clients for $10 a day at 5 days a week, you’ll make $1,200 a month! You could easily walk 6 dogs a day in just a couple hours of work.

2. Nanny

This is the ultimate way to make money if you’re good with kids and you have some good references that can speak to your experience dealing with young children. I had a friend who was a stay-at-home mom who was a nanny for one of her friend’s toddlers, and her son and the other toddler had playtime while she made some extra money! Parents expect to easily pay $200 to $250 a week for childcare, so offer to do it for $500 or $600 a month and take on two children at once. That’s over a $1,000 a month in income.

3. Web/Graphic Design

If you’re artistic and good with computers, this is such a good way to make extra money. If you’re a web designer or graphic designer by day, then you could easily pick up one extra client per month and do $1,000 worth of work for them. Even if you get two small business owners, you could charge them $500 for a simple web design, and that’s considered CHEAP in the web design industry. So many small business owners also need logo and branding redesigns which is what a graphic designer specializes in.

4. Freelance Writing

Instead of starting your own blog and hoping that you get a ton of traffic in the first month (which is highly unlikely), start writing for other blogs. There are tons of big-time blogs and even smaller blogs that are looking for staff writers, because they know that the more quality content they push out, the more traffic it will bring to the site. Once you start researching it, you’ll find a lot of people trying to low-ball you and ask you to write an article for $5 or $10. If all they want is a 250 word news article, that’s cool, but don’t write a how-to article for $5. Keep searching, and you’ll find a blogger who wants someone that will write quality content and is willing to pay a premium for it. Many bloggers will pay $15 to $25 for good articles, so search around and look for someone willing to pay good money. 50 articles per month at $20 per article would land you at your target. Get started by going to the Problogger’s Job Board.

5. Professional Organizer

I know there are some of you who are freaks about getting organized and staying organized. Then, there are the rest of us who want to be organized, but we don’t want to put the effort into doing it. The two major areas of one’s life that always need to be organized are home offices and garages. If you like transforming a mess into a well-organized area, people will pay a lot of money to have you organize their office or garage. And I’m not talking just being their maid. I’m talking about organizing their files and designing storage areas in garages. Get 4 clients per month at $250, and you’ll be making $1,000 a month by working one day a week!

6. Teach Swim Lessons

If you live in a warm climate such as the Southeast or out West, it’s never too cold to swim. If you’re a good swimmer, get certified as a swim instructor and teach swimming lessons part time to the little ones. Parents will pay a lot of money, and you could bring your kids to the pool along with you and make an extra $1,000 a month just by swimming in a pool a couple times a week!

7. Computer Repair

If I charged my family members, extended family members, friends, and friends of friends every time I diagnosed their computer issue and fixed it, I’d have made enough to retire. I never charged, because they were always people that i was close to, and I just wanted to help out, but finding a good computer repair person is like finding a good mechanic. If you’re good at it and you only charge $20 to $30 an hour, you’ll get so much referral business that you’ll easily be making $1,000 a month soon, and you’ll probably have to start turning down business unless you want it to become a full-time gig.

These are all really practical ideas for earning an extra $1,000 a month, and I’ve shown you concrete examples of how attainable the workload is to earn that amount doing all seven of these things. There are thousands of ideas like this, and maybe we’ll make it an on-going article series as we come up with more ideas. None of these ideas required any money for start-up and you could do all of them out of your home. I love offering services, because there’s no inventory to buy, nothing to store in your closet or garage, and people will generally pay more for a service they don’t want to do or don’t know how to do themselves.

Would an extra $1,000 per month change your financial outlook? Any other good ideas for gaining an extra $1,000 a month?

(photo credit: galawebdesign)