Money Making Schemes

A week ago, I decided to go to the magical world of Disneyland, but realized that magic is pretty expensive these days, and as a self proclaimed expert ticket purchaser (not including scalping, but I will perfect this art as time goes on, believe me), I decided to make a purchase through craigslist. My skill was rewarded with park hoppers for me and two other friends, each at $55/ticket. All I had to do was take the three 8-day park hopper tickets, use it for that day, and return it to him so he could resell it.

Now, regular park hoppers go for something like $93, so I'm sitting there thinking wow, golly gee willikers, I definitely got the better end of this deal! I thought about it some more, and realized that the guy I purchased it from was trying to run this as professionally as he could, so I tried to crunch some numbers, and see how much he could make, because you wouldn't try as hard as he did for no reason.

Each 8-day park hopper is $204, meaning that for every 8 sales he makes per disneyland ticket, he collects $440, with a profit of $236.

Now he's not going to sell only one ticket at a time, as demonstrated by me purchasing 3 tickets. Assume he sells 600 days worth a year, total, which when you think about it, is a very modest number. Come winter time, I'm willing to bet he goes through at least 300, 200 for the summer, and at least 100 for the other months (which include spring break, halloween, long weekends, etc.)

This modest number yields: $17,700. That's $17,700 untaxed, untraceable, straight cash. He was working with another guy, so split that in half, $8850 a year, and all you have to do is in the morning before work, distribute tickets right next to disneyland, and after work, collect them. It's risk free for him, because he holds an ID until you return them.

Earning $50,000 a year? Make that $58,850. That's a 17.7% raise. If it was me, I would do the job alone, and get a 35% raise. Try asking your boss for that, see what he says. I did. You know what he said? Sell disneyland tickets.

Now if you put in a little more work (let's say you're single, and just trying to make some money to pay off loans or who knows what), and you sell 1,000 tickets, which I truly believe is possible, you'll make $29,500. That's a lot of money for a side job.

Tell me that isn't a deal. I have to say, I am quite impressed.