If you are in the United States, you may want to consider applying for disability. This is ethically questionable if you can support yourself working. It may or may not be a rational economic decision: see below.
Pros:
Cons:
I suspect that disability is set up, without anyone being at fault, such that the vast majority of the economic incentives prevent you from improving yourself further. A more sustainable program to replace disability on the national scale, one that would not actively discourage going to work or training, would resemble a basic income-type system. Unfortunately, such a program does not currently exist in the United States. (More realistically given the general political climate here, percentage disability ratings like the VA uses would be a sustainability improvement, if they could be implemented fairly.)
I believe that it is at least somewhat ethically justifiable to take advantage of disability if you qualify for it and your disability is significantly impacting your ability to work (even if it does not prevent you from working entirely), because there is no better system in place. However, just because I may be able to justify it to myself (I do not currently collect disability, and am currently agonizing about whether I should) does not mean that you will be able to. Please make your own decisions.
You are not allowed to accumulate assets that the US government can see (past $2,000, if I recall correctly), rendering it extremely difficult to plan for the future. (The shoebox under the bed is a plausible strategy for saving, but if it is discovered, you may get accused of drug dealing and/or tax evasion.)
It wouldn't only look like tax evasion but effectively be tax evasion.
You might do some online work that pays you in bitcoins.
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