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College Students: How To Manage A Cash Crisis

Sad College Student

Going to college is a full-time job. If you’re not going to classes, then you’re studying. This leaves little time to earn the money you need for your expenses. While your student loan disbursement will cover your tuition, books, and room and board, it may not leave any money for anything else.

Even if your parents are sending you a little money, it may not be enough to pay for all your expenses. Fortunately, through the Internet, you can earn the money you need without having to sacrifice your precious study time commuting to a retail, restaurant, or construction job.

Emergency Funding

emergency funding

 

If you need money right away, you can get some money immediately through lenders who offer an alternative option to payday loans. Some like MaxLend.com can give you up to $1250 as a personal cash loan. Moreover, the eligibility requirement is minimal, funding is fast and repayment is flexible. All you need is a social security number, an active checking account, and a verifiable source of income.

Online Side Hustles

While getting a personal loan will help tide you over a rough spot, it’s still a good idea to create a side-hustle that will help you manage your expenses.

While there are many ways of making online, they mainly fall into two basic types of business models: offering a service or selling a product.

Let’s take a look at some examples of how to apply these business models:

  1. Offer a service.

You can offer a service through Fiverr.com or Etsy

Offer Service on Fiverr

Fiverr is a good place to sell digital services. Essentially, you will need to have a unique skill set and to be able to execute it quickly for this website to be profitable. For instance, if you have graphic skills and can make a banner in ten minutes, then earning $5 per banner will work. Since the Fiverr service is in high demand and you have a quick-turnaround, you’ll be able to pile up the money fast. You will also be able to make more than $5 per gig if you offer some extra services, like faster delivery rate, providing source files, offering a bundle, etc. However, Fiverr will not be profitable for you if you the service you’re offering is not in high demand or if you take a long time per order.

If your skills lean more towards arts and crafts then through digital work, then you might be interested in selling crafts on Etsy.

  1. Buy and sell merchandise.

If you don’t have a specialized skill then you could simply buy products at a low price and sell them at a higher price. Two good marketplaces for this are eBay and Amazon.

Visit eBay and understand how it works. Learn what types of products sell well and the price points that have the best sales. Next, go over everything you don’t need from your personal inventory, books, CDs, gadgets, guitars, etc. Experiment with selling these. Usually, collectibles sell well. You will eventually run out of things to sell. At this point, you will need to find more products to sell. There are a number of ways to get more products. You can visit thrift shops, garage sales, or estate sales. You can also try liquidation sales or selling other people’s products for a commission. Try out different sources to see what works best. For the business to work, you will need to get quality products at a low cost so you can resell at a higher price.

Amazon is an alternative marketplace to eBay. Again, use the same principles you learned from your eBay business. Usually, if your eBay business is working well, you may not need to sell on Amazon. Alternatively, you might find that the fierce competition for what you are selling on eBay is not doing too well, but you can get a decent price on Amazon.

Buyer Beware

While there are many legit ways to earn money by offering a service or selling a product besides these four platforms, many booby traps await you, too. While you may be aware of get-rich-quick schemes on the Internet, you may not actually be able to recognize them when you run across them.

A good conman is good because you don’t recognize that he is out to swindle you. He sends out all the right signals to win your confidence. Similarly, many legit business opportunities like MLM, Internet Marketing, Blogging, Email marketing, Amazon, EBay, and others are used by cons to pitch you into buying marketing courses or software that promise to 10x your success rate. Well-written sales letters by hired copywriters will convince you that the only thing separating you from tapping into these goldmines is lack of know-how.

After you buy the course or software, you may find that the product doesn’t live up to the promise and you end up with only a vague idea of how to do things. Sometimes the information is outdated and the marketing techniques no longer work with the current Google algorithm, and sometimes the success you were promised requires far more knowledge and skills than the product can provide.

While there are genuine marketing courses and software that will help you make money online, it’s difficult to distinguish those that deliver real value from those that just give you stuff that is hard to apply.

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