Ways to Make Extra Money Without a Boss, Shoes, or People
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Sitting in a hotel conference room at 2am stuffing goodie bags.
It’s the middle of the night. I have a conference starting in eight hours and I’m still stuffing. I thought I had already done the hard things. Coordinating the speakers and their schedules, tracking the attendees, working with the hotel staff and the catering people. But here I am at a big table with stacks of papers and products and bags, and it’s just me and a few other workers and the kind of tired silence that only happens when you have nowhere else to be.
I distinctly remember thinking: why am I doing this? I don’t ever want to do this type of work again.
That was the moment. Not a dramatic quitting scene. Just a quiet decision made over a pile of goodie bags at 2am in a Florida hotel conference room.
I had always worked for somebody. Always. Good bosses and bad bosses, men bosses and women bosses. After getting older, and after spending sixteen years taking care of my husband’s grandmother and then both of my parents, if you want that story it’s over in Taking Care of Yourself After 50. I just couldn’t picture going back into the 9-to-5 grind. I did look. For about five minutes. Customer service? Oh hell no. Waitress? Not going to happen. Answering phones? Done that, been there. Making copies and organizing other people’s lives and travel plans? No thanks.
I didn’t want to deal with people. I didn’t want to buy work clothes. And I absolutely was not buying new shoes.
What I wanted was to find ways to make some income that were interesting, fulfilling, and dare I say fun. I had no business plan. I just started poking around and saying yes to things that seemed worth trying.
Here is what I found.
Side Income Ideas for Women Over 50: The Old Magazines Nobody Wanted
This was back when eBay was at peak popularity and everybody was finding crazy fun things there. I was watching auctions, bidding on items, getting that thrill of winning or hitting the buy-it-now button. So I started looking for things I could flip.
An old Life magazine might sell for five dollars. But one solid vintage ad pulled from inside that same magazine, a car ad, a Coca-Cola ad, a weird-looking food spread from 1952, could sell for close to a hundred. The whole magazine was worth five dollars. What was inside it was worth twenty times that.
So I started buying old magazines. Not just Life, but any old magazine in decent shape from the 1930s forward. I pulled the ads out and organized each one into its own archival plastic sleeve with a little scrap of paper noting the year, then stacked them in plastic bins so nothing got bent. Took photos. Uploaded listings. And waited to see what happened.
I was shocked when they started to sell.
I bought a big box of cardboard tubes with end caps and got a postage scale, and every few days I would package up whatever had sold and head to the post office. I did that for about two years before the constant post office trips got old and I let it wind down. But for two solid years I was making real money pulling ads out of magazines nobody else wanted, from my own house, on my own schedule, with no boss in sight.
I still think about that operation whenever someone tells me there is nothing interesting left to try.
A Knitting Show, Some Yarn Sponsors, and Marvin Gaye
I had been teaching knitting at local craft stores for years, so the teaching part I already knew. What I wanted to figure out was how to make money with knitting without having to actually sell knitting. If I sold fifty pairs of socks, I’d have to knit fifty pairs of socks. No thanks. So building a knitting empire was now my goal.
Twitch at the time was almost entirely gamers, but they had just opened a creative category for hobbies. I looked around and saw a handful of crochet streams. Not many knitting streams. So I thought, why not?
I learned how it worked, stumbled along, and started my first stream. Talked to zero people for weeks. Zero viewers. I narrated what I was doing out loud, asked questions and answered them myself, and just kept going. If you want that part of the story, I wrote about it in Is It Too Late to Start Something New After 50. The short answer is no, it is never too late, and also it takes longer than you think.
Eventually people showed up. Then more came. And I started figuring out how to make the show into something people didn’t want to miss.
The yarn affiliate piece came naturally. I set up a chat bot on a timer so that every fifteen minutes or so it would drop a message in chat: “Jenny is using yarn from KnitPicks today and if you’d like to buy some it won’t cost you anything extra and Jenny will make a little that goes back into buying more yarn.” And then my affiliate link. My viewers were knitters. They were going to buy yarn anyway. Might as well use my link and help a girl out.
I also had panels just under the stream with affiliate links and a pretty KnitPicks ad. And then I started working with sponsors.
Knitcrate was a monthly yarn subscription box, and they would send me two boxes a month to open on stream. I made a whole production out of it. I would play Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On while slowly pulling back the tissue paper, teasing out the reveal, until I finally showed the yarn. Then I would do a giveaway and mail the winner their box. My viewers absolutely loved it. I also reached out to the company that makes my favorite yarn, Zauberball, and we worked out an arrangement where my viewers got a discount on their first order and they would send yarn periodically for giveaways.
It gave the show something other knitting streams didn’t have. Real relationships with companies that my viewers could actually benefit from.
Then I applied for Twitch Partnership. Partnership was the only way to unlock a subscriber button, which was the only way to earn real ongoing income. Viewers would pay five dollars a month to subscribe and I would keep half. I applied, got denied, kept going, applied again, got denied again, kept going, applied again. Two or three times over several months, each time making sure there was real growth to show between applications.
The partnership letter arrived the day before my port surgery.
I was heading into breast cancer treatment the next morning and that letter showed up. So excited. But before I could even share the news with my viewers, I was in surgery, and by the time I announced it I was already starting to feel the effects of chemo.
After all the congratulations it took another week or so to get the subscriber button actually turned on. That was a huge day. So many people subbed. I had made a short clip of the AC/DC song Big Balls so that every new sub would trigger it, “I’ve got big balls, she has big balls, and NAME has the biggest balls of them all!” and I would yell out their name right at that part. The clip was about thirty seconds. And hearing it play back to back to back for that entire first stream was just hysterical.
Nearly a hundred subscribers in the first few days. Then it kept growing. Viewers would also throw bits, which is Twitch currency worth about a penny each, so I averaged another fifty dollars a month just from that. The subscriber income ran three to four hundred dollars a month at its peak.
The community that had built up around a silly little knitting show kept showing up through all of it. That meant something that went well beyond whatever the income added up to.
Books That Don’t Require Writing Very Many Words
Somewhere in the middle of all of this I discovered that people were making money on Amazon by publishing what are called low-content books. I had never heard of that term. Journals. Log books. Puzzle books. Coloring books. Books with lines and prompts and space for the reader to fill in, but not a lot of text from the author.
I researched how it worked and started creating them.
One of the books I made is a health journal specifically for someone going through cancer treatment. Tracking symptoms, medications, how you feel today, all the things that get complicated fast when your medical life takes over. That book is still selling. I also made a Short Term Rental Property Management Logbook for people renting out a property who need to track guests and bookings. My sister has several rental properties and needed something like that, so I made it. Turns out a lot of other owners needed it too.
It is not like publishing a novel. It’s a simple two-page spread repeated over and over to make a book. But I have an author’s page on Amazon and 43 titles in my catalog, and none of them require me to do anything once they are published. At its peak that catalog brought in about a hundred dollars a month. That part never gets old.
The Thing That Actually Shocked Me
A few years ago I applied for the Amazon Influencer program and got approved. The idea is simple: film short videos reviewing products, Amazon puts them on the product pages, and when someone watches your video and then buys, you earn a commission. This is my Amazon Storefront.
I started filming things I already owned, in rooms I was already in. The thing most people don’t realize is you don’t have to have bought the product on Amazon. If it’s sold on Amazon, you can film it. Bought it at Walmart? Doesn’t matter. Film it.
So I went back through our Amazon purchase history and made a list. Found five to ten products, filmed myself using them, cooking with something in the kitchen, a cat playing with a toy, whatever it was, spent a day editing and recording voiceovers, then uploaded to Amazon. Within hours they would be live. Whether they actually got placed on a product page was up to Amazon. You just hope they do, and hope somebody watches, and hope that somebody then buys.
These are not traditional review videos. They are called shoppable videos. The person watching has already come to the product page and is thinking about buying. My job is to push them to take the next step. Show them how it works. Answer the questions they are silently asking. Tell them what I like or what I would change. I didn’t put videos up for products I hated.
I got approved mid-September 2023 and started filming. At the end of that first partial month I had 87 videos uploaded.
I made $19.04.
I could not get over it. How easy was that? Second month I uploaded another 85 videos and made $348.30. Third month I added 18 more for 190 total and made $603.02. Fourth month I added one more video and made $918 in December alone.
Nineteen dollars in September. Nine hundred and eighteen dollars in December. First four months combined: $1,888.
There was no stopping me. I filmed everything at my house, at my sister’s house, anywhere I visited. If it was sold on Amazon, I made a video. My sister made her own list, and I scheduled several weekend trips to her house to film. Five to ten products at a time, film the thing, move to the next one. Got home and started editing. In my first full month I had 160 videos live.
That income now runs four to six hundred dollars a month consistently.
So What Is the Point of All This
None of these things replaced a salary. That was never the goal.
If you google “side income ideas for women over 50” I wasn’t look for the usual results of listicles and expert roundups. “Here are 27 side gigs” or “a CFP recommends these 7 passive income ideas.” Generic, interchangeable, written by people who have never actually done any of it. The goal for me and this article is: Let me share with you my experiences in real life, trying new things, and actually finding some success and a whole lot of fun.
At my peak, across the magazine sales and the Twitch income and the affiliate links and the book royalties, I was pulling in somewhere around eight hundred to a thousand dollars a month from things I figured out myself, from home, in my pajamas, with no boss and no shoes required. That number surprised me when I added it up. It might surprise you too.
The magazine thing started because I noticed something on eBay. The Twitch income came from teaching something I already knew. The books came from researching a term I had never heard before. The Amazon videos came from going through my own purchase history and pointing a camera at things already sitting on my shelves.
None of it required a business plan. None of it required a big investment.
I used some of the Amazon income to pay for a digital marketing course and the software to go with it, reinvesting it back into learning new skills. And some of it I spend on fun things for my hubby and I to do. We’ve seen Herb Alpert, William Shatner, Colin Mocherie from Whose Line Is It Anyway, and many other things over the past few years, just using my “fun money.”
An extra few hundred dollars a month is not retirement. But it is tickets to see people who make you laugh. It is a course that teaches you something new. It is money you made yourself, on your own terms, from whatever corner of your life you decided to turn into something.
There are more options out there than most people think. And most of them don’t look like jobs. They look like curiosity.
I’ve learned a lot of lessons and still experiencing life after 50. What to read about No Longer Feeling Invisible After 50: Showing Up Anyway. Or The Letter I Mailed at 63: Finding my Biological Father Later in Life.
