Canadian Finance Blog

3 Easy Money Making Hobbies to Boost Your Personal Finances

Posted: 07 Oct 2010 02:00 AM PDT

More often than not, hobbies deplete resources rather than helping to bolster them. Having a hobby can be expensive, but if you're looking for ways to increase your income without changing careers or taking on a true side job, finding money making hobbies is a great way to get ahead financially. Provided you enjoy the hobby, it will give you another way to enjoy your time as well – an added bonus.

Write Online

There is a huge industry for content writers online. If you can write simple articles or if you're a specialist in a particular area, you can easily establish a hobby income writing for a niche website or a content mill. While you'll never get rich, you might earn enough to ease the budget a bit and give yourself a bit of extra spending money for the holidays or the weekends.

To write online for a content mill, it's important to not buy into the myth that you'll be earning a full-time income online. It's possible to earn quite a bit writing, but to do that you'll need to move beyond the easy jobs and into the skilled professional or published fields. To make a few hundred extra every month though, it's easy to find writing work you can enjoy.

Play Penny Stocks

Penny stocks might normally be associated with a great deal of risk and best left to the experts, but if you're careful to set yourself limits and to research your moves with penny stocks you can double or triple your money set aside for investing. Like many hobbies you'll need to invest in the fun, but if you've invested wisely your money will grow.

To work in penny stocks, invest only a small amount that you might spend on entertainment otherwise. Every week or month, invest that small amount of money in a variety of stocks using online traders with low commissions. Manage your investments by watching primarily and researching your next small investment. Be careful to not buy and sell your stocks without good reason. When you sell, you'll be required to pay commissions and that can definitely eat away at any profit if you don't sell when your investment has gained value.

Buy and Sell

Time is valuable, and most people don't take the time to search for bargains. They don't have the patience to sort through junk looking for gold. If you do have the time, though, you can make a nice amount reselling items you've found in garage sales and resale shops. One easy way to earn is to buy a box of discarded books or tools from a garage sale. Clean them up, photograph them alone or in bundles and post them for sale online. Even priced at a dollar each through online resellers, you'll start to see an almost immediate profit.

You might also buy furniture or appliances if you're handy and fix them up. Paint or stain the furniture or make mechanical adjustments to the appliances and resell these to earn additional profits. The trick to making money with this particular hobby is to know when something can be treasure, and when it truly is trash.

Author Bio: Rebecca Garland is a veteran freelance business writer working hard to populate the internet with relevant, interesting content that might be mildly entertaining or even useful. She writes regularly for many companies and websites on topics ranging from penny stocks to parenting including everything in between.

3 Easy Money Making Hobbies to Boost Your Personal Finances originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on October 7, 2010.