At specific times in the year, for universities where most students live on or near campus: lots of students seem to find it easier just to discard perfectly good things rather than move them around - especially the start of summertime when many students move back home, or start a job elsewhere. It can be worthwhile to collect useful-but-discarded things and sell them on to the next round of arriving students provided you have someplace to store them in the interim.
At all times in the year, again for universities where the student population is resident nearby = relatively diverse array of grocery, convenience stores and relatively high % of restaurants, typically clustered in a relatively dense area and all of which will generate some food waste. The key is not just the availability (and diversity of products that may be found this way) but also the tendency to hire student (or recently-student) employees who may be a bit more likely to turn a blind eye toward dumpster diving, or even facilitate it by spreading the word about "desirable" items about to be trashed.
This. I never went looking for perishable foods but all sorts of perfectly good small appliances or pieces of furniture were to be found in May of each year.
Apartment complexes can also be pretty good for this sort of thing. Where I live now people who move out sometimes leave their stuff by the dumpsters in the understanding that doing so means the stuff is fair game for other residents (especially recent move-ins) and the administration in the rental office will let you know if you ask about any furniture that recent move-outs have left behind inside t...
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