
ASk HN: How would you make $25,000 if you had $25,000? - pmichaud
Here's a brain teaser for all you smart people. You are given $25,000 free and clear, and your goal is to make $25,000 more, for a total of $50,000. You have 1 month to accomplish your goal. How do you do it?
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istari
I need 18 months. I would go to courthouse foreclosure auctions, partner with
other investors, and buy the property for 70% of market, fix it up, and sell
for market price.

30%/70% = 42%. Take away agent fees, closing costs, and repairs, I could have
25% if I'm careful. Turnaround is 6 months each time.

1.25 ^ 3 = 1.95.

1 month time horizon is silly. I assume you're looking for serious, practical,
reproducible ideas. You won't get any that reliably returns 409600% annually.

If I were really held to 1 month, I'd go to Vegas and put it on red.

~~~
lsc
I can see buying at 70% off market, in this market... but you are going to
have a difficult time turning around and selling for 30% more than what you
paid, considering that 'market,' if trends continue, will be less 6 months
from now than it is now.

If I had lots of credit and I was willing to risk it all, I would consider
such a gambit, though my plan would be to buy, fix up, and hold (perhaps
renting to cover costs) until the market started recovering.

For bonus points, if I knew anything about wrangling bureaucracy, I'd work on
turning business real-estate into dual-use lofts. I'd really, really like to
have a dual-use space here in silicon valley, but the nearest place they are
plentiful is oakland, and I don't need dual-use space /that/ badly.

But then, I don't have lots of credit, and I personally suspect there might
still be even more downside in the market than people seem to be predicting.
Still, if I was going to do it, I'd do it here in silicon valley or elsewhere
in the SF bay area. the fundamentals of this place are strong, and while I
think it will get worse before it gets better, I'm certain it will get better.

------
lsc
depends entirely on your skillset. As other posters suggest, the idea is to
take your twenty five grand and create something with more value.

Me, uh, I'd probably just buy servers for my current business, then require
pre-payment. I don't know that I could sell that many pre-paid VPSs, but it'd
probably be my best chance. speaking of, why am I screwing off here? I should
be putting up more servers.

Other options, considering my skill set, would be buying server parts,
assembling, and selling them... though clearing that much inventory would be
something of a challenge with my sales skills, and margins on servers (unless
you are dell or hp) aren't that high, so I'd need to go through several buy
parts -> assemble and sell servers -> buy parts -> assemble and sell servers
cycles in that month, in a business where net-30 is the norm, so that'd be
pretty difficult.

but yeah... I think the key is "what are you good at?" then "how can I do
using what I'm good at, plus twenty five grand, to make something worth twice
that much?"

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Janteh
Buy tickets for popular sport/music events, sell for double the money when the
venue is sold out. Repeat.

Not that I agree with this kind of business from an ethics point of view, but
it's easy money.

~~~
rjett
If one could make $25000 in a month doing this, then I think there would be
quite a few people considering career changes.

~~~
goatforce5
A roommate of a good friend makes a very good living doing this. I'd guess he
must be holding many tens of thousands of dollars of tickets at any one time,
and significant effort goes in to acquiring the tickets in the first place.

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techiferous
Put the existing 25K in the bank. Bid on a fixed-bid web project for 25K and
get it done in a month.

~~~
BrianHV
Where do you find fixed-bid web projects you can bid on for 25K? Do you have a
go-to website, or connections with people who will solicit your bids?

~~~
techiferous
I actually don't prefer fixed-bid projects and I wouldn't attempt to do such a
large one in such a short amount of time. But I live in Boston which has a
nice startup scene and people approach me to build web applications for their
startups.

I've been meaning to build a go-to website for about half a year now, but I've
been too busy with client work--they find me without the website, often
through the Boston Ruby Group.

~~~
dnsworks
If a solid month of work for $25k seems like "a big project" then maybe you're
not billing enough.

~~~
wan23
If you're making $25k * 12 = $300k just by working you probably have some kind
of specialized skill. If everyone could do it, the price wouldn't be so high.

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tbrownaw
Go to Vegas, you've got almost a 50% chance.

Find some other currency that's also called "dollars", that's worth half as
much as the one you have.

~~~
corin_
Was going to be my comment too. Never put that much on roulette, but have done
four figure bets in GBP before. Adds a bit of excitement to life :)

~~~
electromagnetic
Last time I went into a casino I put 5 dollars into a machine and walked out
with 500. I would be scared if the same happened if I put in 25,000!

~~~
corin_
Last time I was in a casion just over a week ago I'd been on roulette for
about two hours, was up an ok amount, and had been putting a fiver on 29 every
now and then... The friend I was with picked up two £50 chips of mine and
pretended to put it on 29, we laughed then put them back in my stack... ball
landed on 29 :(

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vahakota
1\. I just got 25k$ free and clear. Time to stop worrying for arbitrary goals
for at least a month and enjoy life!

2\. I'll find an another brain teaser that gives me 25k$ free and clear!

3\. I'd do it exactly the same way I'd make $25,000 without being given 25k$
free and clear.

4\. If I really would have to do it using the money, I'd donate the money to a
random charity and use the fame and good will to organize nationwide boyscout
door to door fundraiser in order to match my donation. Nobody said I'd have to
make that 25k$ for myself.

5\. Ok so I should make it for myself? I'd just add that 25k$ to my millions
and millions of dollars, stash them all to a short period savings account and
collect 25k$ in monthly interest. Nobody said you couldn't use your existing
assets to "help a bit".. Why should skills be any different from capital in
this respect?

6\. Ok so I have to make the money for myself, I have to use the 25k$ doing it
and I can't use any other assets? Oh boy.. I'm really not smart enough to pull
that off :(

~~~
bloomingrose
loved your comment - tried to up it but no arrow beside your name. :(

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ismarc
The same way I would turn $25000 into $25001, use $25000 to create something
with a higher value. The easiest route would be carefully purchasing $1000 -
$2000 cars, get them running/AC/etc, then slap a $200 paint job and sell for
$2500 - $5000. You'd have to be careful and selective so that your time and
the parts line up for the margins you're looking for, and then the resale
process. This doesn't scale since if you continually buy up low priced cars,
you'll drive thw prices per car up in the region, but it's nice for extra cash
to do 1-3 cars at a time.

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lsc
As suggested by all the posters suggesting straight up gambling, I think that
doing this reliably; doubling your money in one month, is going to be pretty
difficult.

As I was saying before, if you have some special skill to add to the mix, that
helps a lot (remember, a top end SysAdmin around here can earn $14K/month
contracting, before taxes and stuff, so you wouldn't be doubling the money in
a month in that case, you'd be adding 50% value, still damn good, and paying
yourself a good wage.)

The thing is, doubling your money in a month is a what, 1200% annual return?
no, it's more, if it compounds monthly, quite a lot more. You can bet that any
investment with even a small chance of that kind of return gets all kinds of
money thrown at it, to the point where those niches where this sort of thing
is possible are filled right quick.

But yeah. Maybe you can pull that off for one month (hell, if you really
hustled, and billed out at top end rates without a recruiter, you can make
twenty five grand consulting as a SysAdmin. I mean, I couldn't... I've gotten
that kind of hourly rate for short gigs, but I lack the sales skills to do
that for a whole month.) but doubling that fifty grand the next month? doing
it again? yeah, your odds start looking more and more like a day at the races.

------
il
An easy way to do it: Buy undervalued and poorly monetized but well-
established sites on flippa, optimize advertising and grow traffic, resell on
Flippa in a few months.

If you've got $XXXXX to play with you can pick up some incredible bargains for
a quick flip.

EDIT: I didn't see that you only had one month. This is still feasible, but
would require some paid traffic/PPC skill to pull off.

~~~
rwhitman
I've always been curious as to how this is actually accomplished. I have never
had success in selling small websites.

Love to learn more about this. If you can elaborate on the process, please
do..

~~~
dangrossman
I sold a website on Flippa for $90k. The site sold a single WordPress plugin I
wrote and was selling for $97 per license.

~~~
rwhitman
Very cool, how long were you running the site before you sold it?

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omrisiri
IMHO gambling is probably the WORST way to go, and well given the 1 month time
limit - you will probably have 29 days left to try and make 50,000$ after
losing all of it the first day.

The time limit pretty much limits what you can possibly invest in for such a
big return in such a short time.

This does remind me of a different HN article i read a while back - If you had
5 dollars and 2 hours how would you make as much money as possible :
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=912105> .

I Personally would do some research on current stock options and try to build
a strategy to double the money in the time frame i have left.

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messel
With only a month, I'd bet it on black. It'd probably be the highest
probability of doubling up in that short a time period with no personal
effort.

With some personal effort, there a few ways of making 25k in a month. App
building projects are very hot right now, you could outsource app building
projects and manage their completion. Could you make 25k more in a month,
maybe not in the first month. But after you had solid relationships and
skilled developers as well as a smooth input project buffer you could
conceivably generate 25k profit a month.

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ww520
Doubling in one month means 1200% annual return. That requires some insanely
risky deals to achieve. Looks at the high risk, high return ventures.

\- Gambling.

\- Lotto

\- Stock options

\- Forex

\- Future trading

\- Illicit activities tend to have high return but highly risky. And also
highly questionable.

~~~
cjlars
409600% if compounded!

------
jodrellblank
Borrow it. $25K is unsecured personal loan money, so depending what I urgently
need 50k for, I could probably get it then pay it back over a few years.

Why the 1 month time limit?

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jeffepp
I would stick with Stock options. You need to find compelling investment
scenarios (Biotech FDA approvals, Quarterly Earnings, etc.)

This is very risky, obviously. There are not too many ways to double your
money with a lower risk profile without actually working..

To me, this is much less risky than straight gambling. My last time I answered
this with a Stock recommendation (ARNA) it has already been up 3x. So it can
be done (see my previous comments)

------
frobozz
Buy 4 lottery tickets.

If one of them wins a sum >=$25004, then I've succeeded. If none of them wins,
declare that I've failed, and pocket the $24996 leftovers.

------
andrewljohnson
Poker would be one option. I'm pretty good at poker!

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corin_
For a safer gambling idea, split it into a number of bets on different sports
matches that are all really shit odds (like 1-3 odds), you've got a decent
change that they'll all win, and if they don't you'll almost certainly still
have some left (if not more than you started) because you split it. Repeat
until you hit the magic number.

~~~
Retric
There is zero advantage to making several bets at the same time. So really
what your suggesting is to make a series of bet's until you reach your desired
goal. Unfortunately with most bet's the expected value is less than 1 so the
more bets you make the higher your expected losses.

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ck2
Buy 25,000 bags of flour @ $1 and sell them for $2.

(Didn't we do this in economics 101? Where you learn about overhead and loss,
etc.)

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tjpick
pay some teenage kids minimum wage to run sausage sizzles all over town.

~~~
lsc
you could start up a delivery food biz with that kind of capital? (Honest
question, I don't know) - I think there's a market for good delivery or take
out food that's open late here in silicon valley... The place is crawling with
overpaid Engineers who can't cook and aren't expected to stumble in to work
until noon, and yet nearly everything closes at 9pm.

Now, I haven't jumped on the idea just 'cause I know jack shit about cooking
or restaurant management, but if you could seriously start up for twenty five
grand, I'd be looking around for such a business to invest in.

~~~
tjpick
Not sure. I think there's a good payoff from sausage sizzles, it's the kind of
thing kids soccer teams and charities do to raise funds. That's just toy
stuff, but I'd consider coordinating a dozen of those a day before I put 25k
on red @ vegas.

Everyone who I know of in the cooking or catering business works pretty hard,
and aren't millionaires, so I wouldn't think you would get into it unless you
were in it for the long haul.

~~~
lsc
yeah, I think there's a market here... and if, say, you really could set up a
business of that type for twenty five grand, I bet I could get four or five
guys together to put in 5K each, not as a 'get rich quick' ploy, but more as a
'see to it that I can get someone to make me something to eat at 3am, without
losing too much money' thing. I mean, I'd want to have a positive expected
return, but I wouldn't be expecting facebook valuations.

Of course, then, we'd still need to find someone able and willing to actually
do the work, which is another matter entirely. by even thinking about this I'm
ignoring my own rules "invest in what you are good at" - though I guess I
'know' something of the market, just 'cause I'm a customer of that sort of
thing.

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foxtrot
Roulette Table, Black.

------
dnsworks
It frightens me how many of these responses are people describing the scams
they'd pull off if they had the cajones to do so.

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GrandMasterBirt
I'd buy some weapons, kill a few pimps, steal their hoes, and pimp em out.
Price tag is probably like 2000 for the weapons/grenades, the money is for a
while!

On the other hand if you want non-insane, I would buy an appartment building,
flip it, and try to make long term money on that. With partners of course.

Honestly for 25 grand I'd live off the money for a few months and find a job.

