Earning Money

I talk a lot about making money on the web and all of that, but I wanted to talk for a moment on another venture that I am beginning to dabble in. And, the truth is, it is one that you CAN do even as a student. Sure, if you want to become a millionaire by the time you are twenty one with just one hundred dollars to invest in stock, it is not likely. But if you are looking to start small and begin to grow, you can make money, there is no denying it. But, we’ll get to that in a moment.

The stock market is a way to trade stock obviously. But, what some people don’t understand is that stock is actually a part of the company. When a company goes public, it is said to be worth X amount of shares at X amount of dollars per share. So, people buy these shares up, yada yada, and the price begins to fluctuate. Stock prices fluctuate based on the buying and selling of the shares. However, they also fluctuate if the company is doing incredible. So, in a sense, you want to buy stock with a solid company. A company goes public because they get the money from the sale of the stock. And that money can be used to expand. That’s why the biggest companies are public. They have the money to continuously expand.

So, how can you invest in the stock market as a student? Put one hundred dollars aside. That’s it. Just put one hundred dollars aside that you are willing to spend. The rule of the stock market is, though, never to invest in the market unless you can risk losing that money. You can lose money in the market. But, you can also gain it. You’ll want to talk to a broker and just tell him/her that you are starting small and just want to see what you can do. They’ll give you a good stock to try in, get ten shares probably, and call it a day. In a future post, I’ll give you the e-mail of my stock broker. He really knows his shit which is why I will recommend him.

By investing that one hundred dollars, if you start to make money, you can sell the shares and perhaps buy shares in another company. You take the profits that you’ve earned and expand more and more. That is the trick with the stock market. Continue to expand. But, the rule of thumb that I live by is to really figure out what you’re trying to do. Is it for long term investing or short term investing? I own shares of Intel (INTC) and I think it is a company for the long term. But, if I were to buy shares of a company that do best in the fourth quarter, I’d want it to be for short term earning. Figure out what you want before you invest. So, take your one hundred bucks and think about investing.

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I know, I know, you look at a soda can and go, “yeah right, there is no way in hell that I can make money from this. Sure, five cents, but what is five cents going to do for me?” That’s true, what can five cents do for you? Nothing at all. But what if you controlled all the cans on campus? What if you went around campus once a day after all your classes were over, collected a bunch of bags of cans, put them in your car and then drove to the store? You cashed them in and voila, you have made some money. But, how can you make money on getting cans around campus?

Here is an idea that you should play around with. If you get permission from your school and say that this is an effort to ‘clean the school up and give back to the environment,’ you can easily get permission to put boxes or bags around campus for cans. Schools are always looking for things like that. They will see that you are doing a ‘good deed’ and they’ll eat it right up. So, you go around and place one or two boxes in each dorm building or on each floor of each dorm building. Now, the next step is actually letting people know what you are going to do with the cans. A lot of people just throw the cans in their garbage and that’s lost profit.

Here is where you get permission to put fliers up around campus asking for people to, rather than throwing their soda cans, their beer cans, their beer bottles and their soda bottles in the garbage, they take just half a second longer and throw it into your box or bag. By doing this, people may find it intriguing and some may just do it because they want to say they are helping the environment. And in a sense, they are helping the environment. Now, you may still be asking yourself how in the world this can make you any money. A can only gives you five cents and that right there is nothing. And, you will need twenty cans to make a dollar.

Consider if your school is one thousand people strong. That is extremely small for a college, but let’s just say for argument’s sake, your school is one people strong. Thursday night, five hundred people decide to get drunk. So, two thousand cans of beer are bought for those five hundred people (assuming each person only drinks four beers). And they do their drinking. Now, let’s just say five hundred cans find their way to your bags. Voila, you have just made $25.00 on someone else’s money spending. Now, what about schools that are 25,000 people strong? Can you imagine the possibilities?

Now, the only downfall would be the counting of said cans. So, what you could do in a sense is devise a method so that you know EXACTLY how many cans can fit in each box. Perhaps set up each box with slots so that each can fits. By doing this, you are ensuring that when you go to a beer deposit store, you can get what you deserve and it saves a lot of time of counting. But, as you can see, if you have a lot of people on campus and a lot of people drinking beer, you are going to make a lot of money. But, do keep in mind that you are going to have to do some work and you are going to want to try and invent some way to ensure that you are getting the cans counted. Good luck doing this, though.

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