7 Ways to Make Money With Friends

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Tired of your boring job? Wish you could find a way to earn a living while spending your days with people you actually like? You can. All you have to do is look to your friends. Check out these seven ways to make cash with your buddies. (See also: Should You Talk to Friends About Money?)

1. Set Up a Group Yard Sale

While a massive yard sale with your friends won’t make you rich or even make you a decent living, it will put fast cash in your pocket while helping you unload years worth of accumulated clutter. There are several benefits to partnering for yard sale with friends. First, you’ll benefit from a larger network of people who will help promote and market the event to friends and family and around the neighborhood, so you can increase the number of visitors to the sale. Second, when the sale is over, you’ll have extra hands to help load up all the leftovers so you can cart them off to a donation drop.

2. Start a Business Together

I could have made this article a big list of all the different kinds of businesses you can start with a friend — restaurant, day care center, moving company — but that list is virtually endless. The most important message I need to send in this regard is that if you want to start a business with friends, you should have a meeting, discuss your strengths and passions, and start tossing around ideas for potential companies you can launch that will make you all happy. A good amount of capital in the bank doesn’t hurt either.

3. Make Each Other Your Go-To Resources 

Your and your friends don’t actually have to work with each other to work for each other. If you have friends who are great at what they do — let’s say one of them is an investment banker — use that friend as your sole referral when your contacts ask if you know someone. I’m queried a lot by my contacts on who I’d recommend. Of course, I always recommend a friend that I know can get a job done. Do that once or twice and a good friend will start returning the favor — which means more money in the bank for both of you. 

4. Join Rent a Friend 

Have you heard of this social networking site wherein random strangers pay for your company? It exists. Join Rent a Friend, and you could set your own fee for how much you’ll make per hour or establish a flat rate for an outing with a potential new friend. Sure, it’ll become a tricky situation if you actually become friends with the person who bought your time, but there’s no harm in padding your pockets in the meantime.

5. Become Secret Shoppers

You have to be super savvy to make secret shopping work for you — you generally don’t get “paid” but rather are provided a fee for your outing in the form of a reimbursement — but if you can master the art of secret shopping, it’s a great way to add a little cash to your pocket while enjoying quality time over meals and activities with your pal. The key is to spend less than the fee allotted for the scheduled event so you can score the free meal, etc., while pocketing whatever is left from the fee. If both of you get in on the act, you may never have to pay for lunch again. 

6. Pool Your Money and Invest

This is along the same lines of starting a business with your friends — you’ll need to put your money together to launch a company — but there are other ways to invest without having to go to an office every day. There’s investing in the stock market, of course, but also think about hands-on projects into which you can each invest your money and talents and from which you can each reap the financial benefits of the final projects, like flipping a house, for example.

7. Buy a Bunch of Lottery Tickets

Granted, this is a long shot — but it happens. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that those 100 tickets you bought by pooling your cash increases your odds more than the 50 tickets you’d buy on your own. Certainly not the most frugal or even the smartest way to spend your money to make money, I admit. But, hey, we all have to take a gamble sometime. Every lottery winner in history has — and it paid it off.

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