Ways to Make Money While Living in Your Car

There are people who live out of their car by choice and those who are forced to endure the suffering that comes along with living in such a cramped and unreliable housing situation. Sometimes, you never know where you’ll end up parking your car and sleeping that night. We like to rotate spots and not stay at the same spot for extended periods of time to not attract much outside attention.

For the people who live in their car and already have jobs, some of you have remote jobs and some of you have jobs with a physical location. Those who have to show their pretty mug every day and clock into work are most likely not going to be nomadic car campers. You wouldn’t be able to roam the continent if you’re tied down by a job that requires you to be there in person. Luckily, some of us have remote jobs that allow us to travel around in our home (car). This article is more for those types of jobs, and for people who do not currently have a job at all. And let’s be honest, many of us would much rather not be tied down by your typical bootlicking job.

Living out of your car can be much cheaper than living like a ‘normal’ person who lives in an apartment or a house. That being said, it is very wise to still have some form of income while living this lifestyle. If not, you’ll be on the street pretty quickly. Some of us need more money than other to sustain ourselves. Personally, I don’t need much at all and can comfortably live on $10 a day maximum. This is not including the occasional car repair and emergency expense, which will inevitably happen. That’s why it is smart to go into this while already having a little nest egg of at least a couple thousand.

I’ve been making money from non traditional income sources, mostly online, for the last thirteen years or so. This is the way that I prefer to work, and enjoy making my money online and from multiple different income sources. I’ll be giving you a list a of options for you to create yourself an income while living in your car. Some of them might be unrealistic or unsuitable for your situation, circumstances, or skillset, but hopefully this can help you make some money in some form.

Create an Online Store

This is a viable option for you to make money while you’re living in your car and it has very high growth and scaling potential. There are multiple different ways that you can go about this. I would not recommend going all-in and focusing only on this, and dumping all of your money into it at the beginning. Start this up while you already have some source of money coming in and only focus on it fully once it starts to bear fruit.

The first thing you might want to figure out is what you’re going to be selling. It helps to choose something that you can get excited about, something you enjoy, something you would use yourself, and something that already works. It sounds nice and all to invent something brand new, but this is much more risky and you will probably fail many times before you can come up with something that will actually pop off. Once you’ve decided on your product, you could test it a bit to find out if there’s any demand for it. After that, you will want to ask questions like “are you going to hold the inventory yourself?”, “where will you store the products?”, “should you purchase a storage unit, or maybe use an Amazon warehouse with Amazon FBA?”.

You’ll want to figure out which platform/s you want to use to sell your products. It’s better to try multiple different selling platforms at the same time. You could make your own website and brand name to go along with this business venture. You can sell your items on Amazon, E-bay, Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist, a personal website, TikTok shop, etc. If you want my E-book with more in depth instructions on how to get started with creating a private label product and making your first sale, join my mailing and you’ll automatically receive an email with a free copy of it.

Different Survey Sites and Research Sites

You might read the headline of this section and roll your eyes and have the urge to keep scrolling, but hear me out. You might be surprised at how much you can make with paid survey and research websites. Sure, you will not be making a doctor’s salary or even a middle class wage, but you can definitely clear over $10,000 a year with this if you put in a little effort. You can use survey sites to make over $1,000 a month without an insane amount of effort, believe it or not. That’s because there are a few research sites that currently pay pretty dang well for your opinion.

I’ll list the best ones out there for you:

Prolific. Prolific is hands down the best website to make money online for simply giving your opinion. I have made $800 a month on Prolific alone while working only about 20 hours a week. That’s just a few hours a day and wasn’t even doing surveys the whole time, I was switching between my League of Legends (a video game) and other tasks.

Mturk. This is a close second to Prolific in earnings potential in my experience. If I’m making $500 a month on Prolific then I’m usually making around $300 with Mturk.

Inbox Dollars and Survey Junkie Mobile Apps. I put these together because they’re both on mobile and they’re the only mobile survey apps that I think are worth it. They are quite good, actually, not on Prolific level but you should use them to add more money to your overall earnings. You could sit back and make $20 a day on them with just an hour or two of work if you want.

Online Freelancing

This is quite a broad thing to say but basically you would learn a useful skill or trade and put that to use online. Or, you can do something that you’re already skilled at. The options for this are endless; there is article writing, product reviewing, web development, graphic design, stock trading mentor, and so many more.

Once you are able to provide something of value to other people, you will go out there and market yourself. You can look to gain clients for your freelancing work on places like Upwork and Fiverr (the two best places to start in my opinion). The earning’s potential is very high for this type of work, but it all depends on you and what you’re able to provide and how well you sell yourself.

Gig Work Such as Instacart and Grubhub

I do a lot of Instacart along with all of these other things. It’s a reliable income source that isn’t going anywhere any time soon for me. If I need an extra $50, I’ll simply open the Instacart app. and complete two or three batches. If I Instacart for a solid eight hours, I’ll make about $120. If I go absolutely hard from sunrise to store closing times, I can reach $220 days.

Gig work could be a perfect fit for you if you have a reliable car, if your car sucks then it might be better to not risk it. Your car is your home in this situation, and if it’s nearing the end of its life then you might not want to strain it with this type of work. Not to mention how much it’s going to cost you when random parts inevitably start going bad. If your situation calls for it though, you can make enough money doing this to stack those Benjamins. I can bring in $4,000 monthly without too much stress using Instacart.

Social Media Influencer

It’s a bit more difficult to make this one work than the others, but it’s definitely a viable option if you have the patience and the dedication to remain consistent. You might think that you have to gain an insane amount of followers and become famous to make any sort of decent money with social media, but you really just have to grind consistently and pull in relatively humble amount of views in your niche.

For example, if you are able to acquire a couple hundred thousand views per month on Youtube then you will have something like $200. You just have to get monetized first, which to do that you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the past year. Youtube is the social media platform that I recommend you start on, make an account right now. The sooner you get started the better. You can make a bunch of shorts per day if you want to gain subscribers more quickly.

Other than Youtube, you can create a following on TikTok or Instagram. TikTok pays out per views, and pretty handsomely at that. You just have to have an idea. There should be something you can do that people want to watch, you just have to figure it out. Good luck!

Conclusion

These are just the most efficient income streams that I can think of for you to give a chance while you’re living out of your car. All of this is under the assumption that you don’t already have a job and you’re in need of income. Don’t forget to check out the E-book I mentioned at up there! Always shoot me an email if you have any questions about anything. Stay warm (or cold) out there fellow car dwelling brothers and sisters.