   How did you make your first money?
  How did you make your first money?I'm sure most of us got some sort of allowance, and we may have even gotten a bit extra by doing chores for mom and dad, but how did you, as an independent being, first make your money by coming up with an idea and putting it to work in the marketplace?My money-making scheme was one very similar to the one used in Office Space (the movie). I used to spend my summer vacations on a farm owned and operated by my relatives (in Holland). They'd send me to get two loafs of bread every other day. Though stores still used cents in their pricing, the Dutch cent was no longer in use. What happens is that stores rounded the final price up or down to the nearest 5-cent mark. I don't remember the exact price of each loaf of bread, but it was 2 cents past such a 5-cent mark. Let's say it cost a guilder and two cents. The first day, I bought two loafs, which cost two guilders and four cents, which was rounded up to two guilders and five cents. When I came back two days later, with two guilders and five cents in my pocket, I bought only one loaf of bread, which cost me only one guilder, as the final price of a guilder and two cents was rounded down to a guilder. I left the store, waited a couple of minutes, and went back in to buy the second loaf. I left the store with two loafs of bread... and five cents still in my pocket. This allowed me to buy a piece of candy for myself every other day. So, how did you first make some money?   
  Washing cars, then paper round as soon as I was old enough.   ;  I picked blue berries. lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of them.   ;  Lawn mowing.  I got 20 dollars a lawn.  Not bad for an hours work at 12 years old.   ;  Picking apples, catching bugs and fish, collecting shells on the beach.  Later I'd do chores for the townfolk and collect furniture to sell at the local market.  I found that if you shake trees sometimes bags of money would fall out.  Then I discovered the turnip market...Oh, you mean real life?  Allowance, then gas attendant in high school.   ;  Web design/development.   ;  Waiting for old people by the ATM Tourist guide.   ;  I don't know why I'm telling you guys this, but ...I was a telemarketer!   ;Quote:Original post by smrI don't know why I'm telling you guys this, but ...I was a telemarketer!You should tell us some of the stories... I'm sure there has to be a few calls that were funny...   ;  Aside from the usual chores (I'll pay you a dollar to mow the lawn, etc.) the first money I ever made was from submitting a "tech tip" to a programming magazine. I still have a copy of my "first published writing" someplace in my Stash of Sentimentality. I think it was something like $25 or a renewed subscription to the magazine for a year; being young and naive, I took the subscription coupon. I ended up maintaining my subscription to that magazine for four or five years doing that, until I figured out that the cash option was a much better deal for me... but by then I'd quit finding stuff to submit, so that died out.The first serious cash I earned was doing virus cleanup after a particularly nasty outbreak; the in-vogue antivirus suite that everyone was using was totally crippled by the virus, so nobody could get rid of it. I wrote a DOS-mode QuickBASIC virus that cannibalized the first one every time an instance was detected in an EXE file, and let it loose on people's systems for a nominal fee. I'd then stare at the output listings as it ran (sometimes for hours at a time on the good ol' Pentium 90 hardware that was common at that point), make some technical sounding mumbles under my breath, and walk away loaded with cash. I think I made something like $300 doing that, which, for a high school kid, was pretty cool.   