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How Can a Teenager Make $1000 a Month?

by Jerry JuaMaking Money

Oct 24, 2020

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When I was a teenager, I earned about $1000 a month. I didn’t think about it until I was much older because my older sister encouraged me to work where she worked. But, since I’ve had a lot of experience having a side job as a teenager, I thought I’d put together this article with a list of the ways a teen can make $1000 a month.

So, how can a teenager make $1000 a month? In the USA a teenager can get a job when they turn 14. Getting a job is one of the most accessible options. Other ways you can do it are to become a Youtuber or start a blog where you promote and sell products.

Selling products online will require some upfront money, so it might not be the first thing you’ll try. Below I will explain what kinds of jobs are easy and fun to do and then go into detail about starting a business.

What are the easiest ways for a teenager to make $1000 a month in 2020?

The minimum wage in the USA is $7.25 as of 2020. However, many entry-level jobs pay more than this. A teenager would need to work 35 hours a week on average to earn 1000 a month on minimum wage.

This can be quite a lot if you are going to school. In an average week, this would mean you would need to work 35 divided by 7, which is 5 hours per day. Or, you would need to work long hours on the weekend and either after school.

Breaking it down to make it more simple you would need to earn $250 a week. McDonald’s starting rate is $10 an hour, and they will hire virtually anybody. So, it is effortless to do. In fact, my first job when I was about ten was doing a paper run for three days a week and got paid $11 a week.

I then got a job at McDonald’s, where my older sister worked and got $8.25 an hour. I couldn’t believe it.

But, generally, a minimum wage job is the least best option. Where you will work long hours and do hard work for minimal reward. However, this won’t give you any time to enjoy your hobbies or live a balanced life.

Depending on what your parents do, you may have the option to work where they work, which could be pretty easy. They may need someone to do odd jobs and may pay you quite well because your parents already work there.

In either case, it is helpful to make a timetable for yourself. That way, you can plan out how much time you have. An excellent way to do it is by using a spreadsheet. You can create a day with one block for each hour of the day. And then use different colors for the other parts of your day. Such as when you are asleep at night or when you are at school.

You can also schedule in when you do chores if you have some. Such as blocking out 15 minutes when your room needs cleaning, and you need to give it a quick vacuum.

When you do this, you can see exactly how many spare hours you have in the day to work on getting that $250 a week. This is a practice called time management and is a good thing to get accustomed to for the rest of your life.

In my opinion, very few teenagers and adults have good time management. When you implement it, it will make your ability to make money way easier. You will be much more relaxed because you are following a schedule.

Once you know how much time you have leftover to make $1000 a month, you can narrow down how you will get it.

1. A golf caddy

Depending on how much you like sports, a golf caddy is an enjoyable and relaxing job because you get to work outside in nature. You can start by reading some books that you can find online about being a golf caddy.

You can also take courses offered by the Professional Caddies Association. You can get more information about how to take a course from them by clicking here to go to their website.

They can earn anywhere from $50 to $100 a day at an entry-level role. You can choose to work as many hours as you like and set your hourly rate, for example, $50 for a round of 9 and $100 for 18 holes.

The important thing with all of these jobs is if you don’t know how to do any of them or don’t know anything about them, you can always learn.

There is a bunch of excellent books on all topics, and the internet has a huge amount of information available to help you.

It is sometimes only possible to start by offering your services for free. Golfers might not take you on unless you have prior caddy experience.

It is much like your own small business where you will have many different golfers you caddy for. You can then set your timetable and work hours.

A huge advantage of being a golf caddy is you can grow to a professional level where you can caddy for big-name sports stars. The highest-paid ones, according to Sportekz.com earn over $10,000 a month. They earn a base salary and then also a percentage of the tournament winnings.

2. A developer/programmer

A developer is a programmer who works on websites. They are also called web developers. A programmer is a person who works on software programs such as Google, Windows, and Apple.

Getting started in this job can take a bit of learning. But, you may have courses at your school where you will learn the basics. And the basics are all you need to be a professional. You need to set up a website, with some example websites you have made. Then offer to build a website for some friends or family for free.

And then approach people who look like they need a new website. There are millions upon millions of people who need a web developer.

To become a software programmer, I would thoroughly recommend John Sonmez’s book called The Complete Software Developer’s Career Guide: How to Learn Your Next Programming Language, Ace Your Programming Interview, and Land The Coding Job Of Your Dreams

Often people do full University courses on becoming software developers. But, it is unnecessary to that. And you can start at any age by working on each day. Say, setting aside a few hours early in the morning before you go to school.

The good part about being a software developer or web developer is you can do this job for the rest of your life. Luckily this is one of the highest paying professions there are. They earn, on average, $75,000+ per year.

I have worked as a web developer and know that it would take you about 80 hours of learning and practice. This would be enough to be proficient and begin charging people a reasonable rate.

Most websites take about 40 hours of work and will pay you anywhere from $500 to $2000 for a simple one. This is more than enough to reach your $1000 a month goal.

3. Babysitter/nanny

A babysitter or nanny is a very easy job to do yet most people do it for free all the time. You probably have seen this if you have a big family, with lots of brothers and sisters or lots of cousins. You watch over family friends’ children, put them to bed, give them snacks, entertain them with a kid’s movie, or play games with them. The best part is the parents will tell you what to do with them. Most babies have a routine.

Being a parent is time-consuming and hard work, and parents love to hire babysitters so that they can take a much-needed break.

How much you charge depends on where you live and experience. According to Fatherly.com, babysitters, on average, earn at least $12.00 an hour. Which means you would only need to work $1000 divided by $12, which equals 83 hours a month.

This would equal 20 hours a week at the most. This is much better than 35 hours a week that you would have to work to get the same amount of cash doing a job that only pays minimum wage.

Maybe you could work 3 to 4 hours a night 7 nights a week for different parents. However, the more you charge, the easier it will be to earn 1000 a month.

4. Tutor

This job is only really good for you if you’re a very studious person. I very much couldn’t wait to get out of school and preferred to play sports and console games.

Nevertheless, if you enjoy studying and learning new things and got excellent grades in your previous years, you can tutor it. Maths and science are normally the most in-demand subjects. Yet, another option is to teach a different language. For example, you could teach English to Chinese students.

According to the University of the People the languages that people most want to learn are:

Mandarin (Chinese)
Spanish
German
French
Arabic
Russian
Portuguese
Japanese
Hindi
Italian
English
Korean

I learned Spanish in Middle School but not enough to speak it fluently. So, I wouldn’t be able to teach it to people who want to learn. Although, if your parents spoke it, or you grew up in a country where they speak any of these languages, offering to teach it to others is an excellent way to make $1000 a month and more.

How much you earn does depend on what language it is and how you teach it. On average, you can earn about $14 an hour. That would mean to earn $1000 a month. You would need to teach 70 hours a month, which equates to around 17.5 hours a week.

5. Dog walker

Dogs need to get walked almost daily, and many owners just don’t have the time. When you walk dogs, you can walk many at once, and the good news is no dog owner will look for someone to walk their dog if it has a bad temper or takes off dragging you along with it.

You can also reject people who have large dogs, or you can charge them a bit more due to the extra work it takes to walk them. Dogs instinctively like to walk in groups and love the guidance of a confident leader. So, dog walking is a great way for a teenager to make $1000 a month.

It has the added benefits of being out in the fresh air, and you might be like me and love animals. According to Angielist.com, getting a dog walked costs about $20 to $30 per 30-minute walk. Most dog walkers offer a discount if you walk more than one dog for a single owner. For example: 2 for $50.

You can comfortably walk 4 to 8 dogs at a time. So, you could make about $120 to $240 for half an hour. Which means you would need to work 2 to 5 hours a month to make $1000 a month.

Yet, you will need to spend a bit of extra time liaising with the owners and ensuring all the dogs get delivered on time. You will probably end up spending about 10 hours a month to make $1000. This is by far the highest paying on this list.

5. Buy and sell products (thrifting)

You can do this in a few ways, but thrifting is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to get started. It’s where you buy second-hand products and sell them online at a 50% profit or more. I recently wrote some articles about doing it:

How To Determine the Resale Value of an Item in a Thrift Store

How to Price Used Items

Also, once you find your items, the website you are on now is an online marketplace. They offer a free account that lets you sell up to three items at any given time during the month. They do not charge any selling commissions or hidden fees. Yes, you can sell for free, and registering is a breeze. If you are interested in listing your items with click here.

You can also buy and sell new products. However, in general, I wouldn’t recommend it to a beginner. You’re better off starting with one of two really good items you find in a thrift store or items you don’t use anymore you found at home and sell online. Then once those sold, buy more things to avoid dead stock.

6. Become a Youtuber and/or blogger.

Although this is one of the more challenging ways to make $1000 a month, once you learn your earning potential is endless.

A common way for teenagers to make money on Youtube is via streaming. Where they play video games, and while doing so, make it entertaining for their audience. As a result, they get followers and subscribers who pay them anywhere from $1 a month and up.

For example, on the popular platform twitch, subscribers pay $5 per month, and you as the streamer get $2.50. So when you break down your goal of $1000 a month, you will need 400 subscribers, which can seem like a lot. Yet, it builds over time as you get better at engaging your audience and creating entertaining content.

There are good resources available that teach you how to do it, and if you play video games anyway, you might as well make money from it.

Here’s an article by Twitch themselves who explain their top ten tips to grow your Twitch account:

Ten Tips to Grow Your Creative Community on Twitch

In another article I wrote about how to make $500 a day on Adsense, I explained how a channel that has 100,000 subscribers makes, on average, $10,000 a month. If you make a Youtube channel that gets 10,000 subscribers, you will make approximately $1,000 a month.

That means you could set a goal to create a Youtube channel that has 10,000 subscribers. However, Youtube requires you to put out consistent videos, kind of like a job, to keep getting views. It does start to snowball, and the amount of money and the subscribers you get will begin to grow exponentially.

The money you make is from Youtube’s Adsense program. It’s the same way with making a blog. A blog generally takes a lot longer to get going, at least a year at a minimum. However, the good news is that once you create the website, it is mostly passive. Meaning you don’t have to do very much, and the money keeps coming in over and over again.

There are many excellent courses that can teach you the ins and out of making a successful Youtube channel, and a successful blog.