Smarthinking pays about $12/hr for online tutoring work, done from home. For English, this implies reading essays of high school and college students and sending feedback according to highly standardized procedures that they train you in. ("Your essay should open with a thesis statement", etc.) They also do math, science and computer tutoring, but I know less about how they work. You choose how many hours a week you want to work and which hours (e.g., Monday 10-4) but they have to be the same each week (you are allowed skip some occasionally and just not get paid from them).
With 20 hrs/week it would only give about half of your targeted income, which might be too far. But if you think you'd find tutoring easy/fun and have problems finding customers out on your own (which would obviously pay more), you might give it or another company like it a try. (ETA: I think the company keeps for itself half of what the students pay, and certainly hiring a personal tutor must be more expensive than paying for anonymous, standardized online feedback. So getting a few students to hire you for personal lessons might give you enough to get close to your target. You would have to save for the summer though.)
I'm signed up with a tutoring outfit called InstaEDU that pays $20/hr for purely online tutoring. The hours are very irregular -- tutors make first-come first-served responses to student requests. And I find that, at least in CS, the students are often rather confused, at least to start. But their money's as green as anybody else's.
TL;DR: this is a repository for discussing income generation strategies optimized for free time
I hope I'm not cluttering up LW but maybe enough people are also interested in this? I graduated high school about a year ago.
I have a lot in common with Will Newsome's self description in this post
http://lesswrong.com/lw/2qp/virtual_employment_open_thread/
But it's a dead thread, and there's been some interest in early retirement extreme, (http://earlyretirementextreme.com/) and having repositories for stuff.
The upshot of it is that I want to optimize for free time and mobility. Need about $2,000 to live (1600 expenses 400 savings/buffer) 2nd EDIT: no I don't, I must have screwed something up when I was adding this it's more like $1600. ($1300 to spend $300 buffer). A 20 hour workweek or even shorter is what I'm going for here. Right now I'm barely functional. Even that much is a bit of a stretch for me as I am now. Plenty of advice abounds on optimizing my health and squashing akrasia though, and I'm sure that if I implemented it I could get to the point of handling part time work. But I think I would always find being a 9 to 5er unappealing.
I'd value spending that time reading texbooks or walking around town or lazing around on the beach more than I'd value extra money. I'm also interested to hear about some more conventional part time jobs if they pay enough. I'm ok with doing somewhat boring work if the hours are light and I have time to think.
I've generated some candidate strategies if anyone here has experience at these. I don't have much knowledge of what they would entail or how to break into them. Or they might give someone some ideas I dunno but anyway:
4hww style dropship business (but success at that seems hard to set up and sustain)
freelance work at a site like odesk or elance
Own a popular app or forum
Push carts at wal mart part time (but I don't think that pays enough)
Self employment doing massage therapy (I can set my own hours but I'd need to invest time and money to get trained)
Tutoring (I might like this one. Do I need a college degree? Can I make enough with part time hours? Is it hard to find leads for clients? How would I do that?)
Online poker (but it seems kinda hard)
Does anyone here live in a yurt? And has anyone tried living in other countries to cut down expenses?
edited to add: Did I make a mistake including numbers? They're what would be ideal for me, not strict requirements. I can work a little more or spend less. Err on the side of posting ideas, I'm sure some other people are interested in low stress work but don't value free time *quite* as much I seem to