• From wearing t-shirts to selling the virtual real estate in an online game, we count nine of the laziest ways people have gotten rich!
9 – Wearing T-Shirts,
• These days’ companies will stop at nothing to get their shiny new product into your sweaty palms. The good news is consumers can actually profit from this… if they don’t mind whoring themselves out a bit! • In 2009, a guy named Jason Sadler set up a website that let companies pay him to wear shirts with their brand names on it. He charged a variable rate based on what day of the year it was. So, on January 1st he charged one dollar and on the 31st of December he charged three hundred and sixty-five dollars.
• In his first year, the human billboard made $83,000. The following year he doubled this. His operation grew so quickly that he had to hire a whole team of t-shirt wearers. Jason was soon earning six figures a year – and literally, all he had to do was put on a shirt in the morning. Genius.
8 – Metal Detectors,
• You know when you go to the beach and see a sad old guy walking around the dunes with a metal detector? You think ‘Man, I’m glad that old fossil is getting exercise but I wouldn’t be caught dead searching for pennies like some hobo in the trash!’
• Well, you might want to rethink your stance because you can actually make some serious coin doing this! Plus strolling along the beach sure beats slaving away at a conventional job!• Mary Hannaby is a great example. Every Sunday the British housewife went on long romantic walks with her metal detector. One fateful day she heard a beep and started digging. She ended up uncovering a fifteenth-century gold treasure worth over 250,000 pounds! The piece is one of only three in the whole world and depicts the Holy Trinity.
7 – Digital Real Estate,
• Everyone knows real estate is a great way to make money, but these days the real money’s in digital real estate – also known as the imaginary real estate. Take Ailin Graef, a gamer who’s made millions of dollars selling virtual real estate in the online game Second Life.• Ailin cracked this seven-figure mark way back in the early 2000s and her operation has since grown into a full-fledged multimedia enterprise. She has more than eighty employees managing thousands of digital rental properties, and her studio, Anshe Chung Studios, is the biggest third party developer of virtual property ever.
• Obviously, a lot of work goes into running an operation like that, so it might be a bit of a stretch calling her ‘lazy’. But let’s keep some perspective: at the end of the day she’s still sitting in her pajamas selling imaginary space in a computer game.
6 – Filling Out Paid Surveys,
• Do you like giving your opinion at every opportunity? Think Apple products are overpriced and that Facebook should stop changing its damn layout so often!? Well, you’re in luck because there are lots of companies out there that will pay you for your juicy opinions.• Simply sign up to a reputable paid survey site and enjoy a stress-free life of… err… mindlessly filling out forms! It’ll take awhile, but you can easily rack up some decent money if you stick with it. • It seems companies can’t wait to scoop all those delicious thoughts and feelings out of you and turn them into cold hard cash.
5 – Be an Heir,
• One of the laziest ways to become dirty stinking rich is to be an heir to a fortune. I mean, you literally don’t have to do anything – just be born!
• Obviously, the circumstances of a person’s birth are beyond their control, but you never know – you could be the only living heir to some billionaire great uncle you didn’t know about. It happens!
• Still, if you want to be more proactive about inheriting other people’s hard-earned money, you could try marrying into wealth. Just find the nearest bazillionaire and start aggressively flirting! All you have to do is laugh at their jokes and put out occasionally. Seems like a fair trade.
4 – Couch Painting,
• In 2007, a slacker college student struck gold when a valuable oil painting turned up in their second-hand couch. • The young German student picked up the crappy old pullout couch from a Berlin flea market and she discovered the bonus artwork was tucked inside while kicking back at home. • No one knows how the painting got there, but it was said to have been painted in the seventeenth century by an unknown friend of the Venetian painter Carlo Saraceni. The student sold it for an incredible $27,630 at an auction in Hamburg. You could buy like the greatest La-Z-Boy with that…
3 – Buying Web Domains,
• If you’ve ever started your own website, chances are your first, second and third choices for a domain name were already taken. Domain names are big business and many people make fortunes from grabbing the most sought-after ones.• Take Chris Clark, a guy who registered the domain name Pizza.com back in 1994. He didn’t own a restaurant or anything; he was just a guy who liked pizza. Chris wasn’t so sure this whole internet craze would pan out so he ended up holding onto his domain name for fourteen years. When he realized the internet wasn’t going anywhere, he decided to see if he could pick up a couple of bucks for his domain.
• He ended up starting the biggest pizza-related bidding war in history! Pizza companies from all over the world threw offers at him and Chris eventually bagged himself $2.6 million – all because of a few lazy mouse clicks.
2 – Have the Right Name,
• What’s in a name? According to Kevin Lewis, a lot! In 2013, the Cincinnati man mistakenly won a million dollars worth of contest prizes because he shared his name with the real winner.• Kevin just so happened to be at Cincinnati’s Horseshoe Casino on August 10th – the exact date the casino was drawing its huge raffle. Kevin hadn’t put his name in for this competition, but was coincidentally in the audience while they were drawing the winners’ names.• When they announced the name Kevin Lewis, he went on stage and bashfully accepted their large novelty check. Casino officials soon realised the actual winner was a different Kevin Lewis from Cincinnati, but they decided to let impostor Kevin keep his prizes because they felt they were the ones who’d made the mistake.
1 – Catch a Baseball,
• Most rich people get to where they are through hard work and dedication, but a few lucky people got there for doing next to nothing. Take Phil Ozersky, a baseball fan who made three million dollars because a record-breaking stray ball landed in his lap. • The incredible stroke of luck happened at Missouri’s Busch Stadium. Cardinals star Mark McGwire had just hit his seventieth home run and the ball came sailing straight into Phil’s hands. Phil didn’t even realize the ball’s value at first. He just wanted a nice souvenir for his kids. But he was soon led into a room and asked to hand the ball over to Cardinals officials.• Phil would’ve happily complied if the officials had let him have a meeting with his hero Mark McGwire. But they refused and became rude and impatient, so Phil thought “Nope, screw you guys” and kept his ball. Good thing he did, too, as he later got a cool three million for it at an auction.
Kinda makes you want to quit your job and go to every ball game, doesn’t it? So guys, what’s the dumbest ‘get-rich-quick-scheme’ you’ve ever thought of doing? Let us know in the Reddit page linked below and you might be featured in a future countdown.
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