Unusual Ways to Make Money

The month of February I'll be offering a money-making tip every weekday. Today we're focusing on unusual ways to make money. Here's the one for today:

Make money finding things.

Huh?

Yep, that's right, make money finding things. A few ideas:

• Find diamonds in parking lots -- The temperature changes your jewelry experiences getting in and out of cars and buildings cause diamonds to come loose from their settings.

• Treasure hunting in the desert-- Arrowheads and metates are hundreds of years old and can be sold for good money.

• Hunting for natural treasures -- Sea shells, giant pine cones and rocks can be collected and sold.

• Treasure hunting in the garbage

• Special opportunities -- A man in California offered to take the shag carpet when a large old theater was being remodeled, saving the new owners the cost of disposal. When the old carpet was cut up and carefully shook out, it was found to contain over $2,000 worth of precious stones, rings, and coins. Wondering what may be caught by vacuum cleaners, the man then arranged to take the full cleaner bags from several cleaning companies each week. It saves them disposal costs, and he regularly finds coins and small jewelry when he digs through the dirt.

• Hunting treasure with a metal detector

• Panning For Gold -- For less than $10 you can buy a gold pan, and become a prospector.

I told you these were "unusual". ;-)

Out of all of them, the metal detector and garbage ideas are the most familiar to me as I see people at the beach all the time with detectors and we have a guy who drives our neighborhood regularly on trash day. But the others are certainly "new news" to me.

How about you? Do you have any unusual ways to make extra money?

Comments

[Grant Baldwin]

Those are certainly unusual ideas! Like any job or type of work, I guess they would only be worthwhile if the amount of money earned made sense for the amount of work you put into it.

If you spend 5 hours combing the beach with your metal detector and all you have to show for it is an old coin worth $3.42, it may be time to cash in the metal detector!

[cnlogger]

really unusual

These were some of the most absurd "ideas" I've ever read. Since when is panning for gold a "money making scheme"? Or dumpster diving?