Make money

Be a nude model

Be a nude model.
“There are no particular physical attributes we’re looking for,” says Allene La Spina, model registrar at the School of Visual Arts (212-592-2000, schoolofvisualarts.edu). “We want someone who’s comfortable being nude and who’s inspiring in their poses.” SVA holds auditions quarterly for the $18-an-hour job (call to put yourself on the list). The single-named Sharine, 26, poses at SVA and at the National Academy (212-996-1908, nationalacademy.org), which pays $11 per hour. “They demand challenging poses that look beautiful but make your feet numb,” she says, explaining that each stance lasts 20 to 40 long minutes. Sharine also poses for artists ($40 an hour) and photographers ($100 an hour), whom she finds through Craigslist or recs from art teachers. To make sure they’re not sketchy, she meets them in public and brings someone with her to the session. “I only want to work with real artists and photographers who have studios,” she says. “Not just someone who wants to see a girl naked.”
Prerequisites: Stillness, boldness

GET PAID TO WATCH THE TUBE.
Television-ad research company Nielsen IAG (345 Park Ave South, 12th floor; 212-871-5200, iagr.net) will pay you to sit in front of a screen and keep track of product placement and other details. Brooklynite Tony Johnston, who worked at IAG for four months and got paid about $15 an hour, describes the scene as “an enormous room full of wayward souls—underemployed hipsters, struggling artists, the incurably nocturnal—getting paid to watch television and write quiz questions. It’s easy money to make while keeping your days free to save the world or sleep, depending on one’s predisposition.”
Prerequisites: Couch-potato tendencies

FAKE AILMENTS TO HELP TRAIN MED STUDENTS.
Remember when Kramer acted out a case of gonorrhea on Seinfeld? Faking an illness pays well—between $18 and $27 an hour—but you’ve got to have skills: Landing a faux-patient role at Mount Sinai’s Morchand Center for Clinical Competence(1 Gustave Levy Pl at Fifth Ave; 212-241-0612, mssm.edu/medschool/morchand/overview.shtml) requires performing two monologues during the audition process. Check Back Stage for info, or send a résumé to program coordinator Katharine Yamulla at katharine.yamulla@mssm.edu.
Prerequisites: Acting chops

BABYSIT. SERIOUSLY.
Parents used to trust nearly any teenager to look after their kids (we know, they hired us). But these days many prefer college-educated tot-watchers and will pay as much as $35 an hour. To get in on it, upload a profile to babysitters4hire.com. If local parents like what they read, they’ll contact you with jobs. Just leave your boyfriend at home this time.
Prerequisites: Patience, clean background check

CONVINCE STORE OWNERS TO PAY YOU $25 FOR ADVERTISING SPACE ON YOUR DOG’S SWEATER.
Prerequisites: Dog, lack of soul

CATER WAITER.
Waiting tables at a restaurant means scrounging for tips. Cater-waitering for dinner parties, corporate events and weddings is essentially the same job—but with an hourly rate of $17 to $20. Send your résumé and photograph to Premier Party Servers (145 W 28th St; 212-499-0886, premierparty@hotmail.com), which employs 300 part-time cater waiters in New York.
Prerequisites: White shirt, winning smile

DOG-, CAT- OR HOUSE-SIT.
Members of Sitter City (sittercity.com) pay for access to a database of baby, pet and house sitters. Create a profile billing yourself as the outlandishly responsible angel that you are, and those in need will come to you. House-sitting tends not to pay, but you’ll get a free place to stay, so see “Rent your apartment.” You’ll make $10 to $20 a day cat-watching; doggy-care wages can reach $25 to $50.
Prerequisites: Accountability, love for animals

BE A PHONE-SEX OPERATOR.
Dirty talkers typically earn 50 cents per minute of talk time, or a flat fee of $16 to $20 per hour. Requirements include a landline (no cell phones), a computer with Internet access and the ability to not giggle uncontrollably at unusual requests. Start your new career by looking into options at phonesexprofessionals.com or sexyjobline.com. Foreign accents are in demand, so let a company know if you have—or do—a good one.
Prerequisites: Sexy voice, no qualms

SELL BAND T-SHIRTS.
All it takes to make a good-looking shirt is a desktop design program, a pack of iron-on transfer paper, a color printer and an iron. Make your own band shirts and unload them at shows for $8 a pop. Also works marvelously with sports teams.
Prerequisites: An eye for design, irony

HAWK OTHER PEOPLE’S STUFF ON EBAY.
Listing an item on eBay takes just a few minutes, but some people can’t be bothered. Offer to sell their stuff for 10 percent of the profit. One publicist we know makes $100 a month selling her coworkers’ designer clothes, bags and electronics. Her best tip—if something doesn’t sell, repost it in a week. Even if it got no bids the first time around, it may get ten the second time.
Prerequisites: Time

ASSEMBLE IKEA FURNITURE.
Ikea Brooklyn offers furniture assembly for $60 an hour. Underbid the big box by charging $40. Pass out flyers on the ferry or on the shuttles from Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights.
Prerequisites: Ability to read directions; Allen wrench

USE AMAZON’S MECHANICAL TURK.
Named after an 18th-century chess-playing device, this service (mturk.com) lets companies pay people to do simple tasks—like judging if two items in a search engine are the same, or coding a subject category for websites. Each listing has a reward amount from a penny to $5. Have your earnings transferred to an account, or redeem them on Amazon.com.
Prerequisites: Time, immunity to boredom

PROVIDE CUSTOMER SERVICE.
Outsourcing company Working Solutions (972-964-4800, workingsol.com) sets you up with a temp gig on the horn, for which you’ll earn between $7.20 and $30 per hour, depending on the project—some “agents” do tech support, others take reservations. The good news is you work flexible hours and you get to wear a Madonna headset. The bad news: You’ll likely be cursed at by strangers.
Prerequisites: Extreme patience

PUT YOUR HOBBIES TO USE.
Your mom may get ’em free, but some New Yorkers would pay good money to buy your homemade soap and Popsicle-stick puppets. Offer them up at the American Crafts Festival at Lincoln Center (craftsatlincoln.org; $500–$700 for a weekend booth); the more casual crafter can try the Brooklyn Indie Market (brooklynindiemarket.com; $65–$90 per day). Submit examples of your work and register as a vendor online. For more venues, visit artfaircalendar.com.
Prerequisites: Healthy lungs (you know, to verbally browbeat people into buying your creations)

SCALP TICKETS.
No need to lurk outside concerts and games: Sell tickets through StubHub (stubhub.com), a site that lets you charge whatever price you want (legally) for in-demand tickets. The site e-mails you when a buyer bites. You’ll get 85 percent of the total sale.
Prerequisites: A good nose for what’s gonna sell out

HELP PEOPLE MOVE.
Rent a van from U-Haul—pick it up yourself to save the customer the trouble. Charge $40 an hour for your time and advertise on Citimove (citimove.com).
Prerequisites: A valid driver’s license, a good back

BARTEND FOR PARTIES.
If you make a mean mojito, invest in a shaker and start mixing for private cocktail and dinner parties—it’s the only time someone will ever pay you to get them drunk. Certification isn’t required in New York, but it will make you more legit if you’re advertising on Craigslist. For help with that, hit the New York Bartending School (212-768-8460, newyorkbartendingschool.com), which offers a 40-hour, $695 course that ends with state certification and job-placement assistance.
Prerequisites: A good ear, the ability to stay sober while surrounded by magnums

PASS OUT FLYERS.
Once again, Craigslist (newyork.craigslist.org) is the place to go—search for the terms flyers, street team and promotion. Live Nation is compiling a street team to work concerts at Hammerstein Ballroom and Irving Plaza three to five nights a week; they’ll make $200 a month. Meanwhile, distributors for Naturally Intense Personal Trainer Service make $12 per hour and get a $50 bonus if anyone they hand a flyer to signs up for training services.
Prerequisites: Stamina, long arms, insistence

Close bars, collect left-behind items, sell them.
Prerequisites: And you thought the dog sweater was low

Tutor for standardized tests.
You have to be committed for this one because the application and training take quite a while. To teach for Kaplan Test Prep (212-492-5800, kaptest.com), you need to have scored in the 90th percentile on the test you want to teach. After you attend the required 20 hours of training, you’ll start at $20 bucks an hour. That’s the same fee you’ll earn with the Princeton Review (212-945-6447, princetonreview.com), where you have to take a 30-minute test and give a five-minute lesson audition. If you pass, you begin a 30-to-60-hour training program. Finally, if you scored in the 99th percentile when you took the GMAT and aren’t one of the five people still making millions in the business world, you can pull in $100 an hour teaching for Manhattan GMAT (212-721-7400, manhattangmat.com). Yes, there are some catches: You’ll have to endure two rounds of interviews, audition and two months of unpaid training. You’ll also have to explain to a classroom of naive corporate hopefuls why their career choice is doomed. Doomed!
Prerequisites: good test-taking skills, teaching skills, humility

Sell your unwanted books.
At Book Off (14 E 41st St between Madison and Fifth Aves; 212-685-1410), you’ll get between 10¢ and $1.50 for your fiction and nonfiction titles. The Strand (828 Broadway at 12th St; 212-473-1452, strandbooks.com), meanwhile, offers up to one-fourth of the cover price, depending on how well preserved the tome is and how likely it is to sell. “I’d love to have a first-edition copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses,” says Strand co-owner Fred Bass. “If it was in good condition, you could get somewhere in the thousands of dollars.” A newish copy of The Secret, meanwhile, will fetch $3.
Prerequisites: someone other than Danielle Steel in your library

Clean apartments.
Start with flyers in your building—everyone likes the idea of someone else doing their cleaning—and work your way up from there.
Prerequisites: comfort with muck and cleaning fluids

Have a stoop sale.
Stay on private property—your steps, porch or an enclosed garbage area—so you don’t have to go through the rigmarole of getting a vendor permit. One Brooklyn couple held a sale last month and made $800 by the end of the weekend.
Prerequisites: some stuff others would pay to own

Sell your clothes.
Consignment stores like Tokio7 pay you only when someone buys your stuff. Beacon’s Closet (beaconscloset.com), on the other hand, gives you instant cash—35 percent of what the item will sell for. A pair of like-new Converses will get you $6, and a cashmere Marc Jacobs sweater $14. “We buy seasonally,” says Tiffany Collings, manager of the Park Slope branch. “So if you have a wow piece that’s not right for the temperature outside, wait to sell it.”
Prerequisites: willingness to part with old clothes

Organize people’s closets.
If you’re one of those people whose closet looks like a finely edited Soho boutique, help others tame theirs for $20 an hour. One tip to keep in mind: Don’t toss anything without your client’s approval! Advertise on Craigslist (newyork.craigslist.org).
Prerequisites: anal-retentive tendencies

Rent out your apartment while you’re at work
(and tell us how that worked out for you at letters@timeoutny.com)
Prerequisites: neatness; trust in your fellow man, an apartment someone would actually want to work in

Write other people’s online dating profiles.
Believe it or not, there’s an actual business, Profile Helper (profilehelper.com), that interviews clueless daters and charges them $69.95 to revamp their dating profiles. Your four-year-old could do that! Okay, so maybe she couldn’t, but you certainly could. Clever up your Facebook page to advertise your profile prowess; post info about your service on OKCupid (okcupid.com), MySpace and Craigslist. Charge $30 a pop and tell your successful clients to pass the word along. Bonus: For more money, offer to snap flattering photos.
Prerequisites: good grammar, thoughts beyond “walks on the beach”

Sing or play the bongos in the subway.
The MTA’s Music Under New York program (341 Madison Ave at 45th St; 212-878-4678, mta.info/mta/aft/muny/) schedules musicians to play each month in city subway stations. The next audition will be held on May 2; submit an application by March 15 to qualify. Too underground (har) for auditions? You can still legally perform your acoustic rendition of “Circus” in the subway. As long as you’re not using an amplification device, selling CDs or positioned near a booth, in a car, or blocking the flow of traffic, you’re totally within your rights. Check in with the Street Performers Advocacy Project (212-529-1955) to learn the rules
Prerequisites: musicality

Play online poker.
At any given time, there are a gazillion players looking for a game of Texas Hold ’Em on sites like Poker Stars (pokerstars.com) and Poker Room (pokerroom.com). One Brooklynite who asked to remain anonymous tells us he made more than $65,000 playing in his spare time over the course of the past three years. “The key to making money is playing multiple games at once. Sometimes I play eight games at a time,” he says. “I like to play in the evening—more people are on their computers, so you have a better chance of matching up with less experienced players.”
Prerequisites: poker skills; luck

Set up a chair and offer five-minute massages on a subway platform.
Prerequisites: shoulder-rubbing savvy; an unsketchy appearance

Hit up a casino.
Take Greyhound’s Lucky Streak bus to Mohegan Sun (Uncasville, CT; 888-226-7711, mohegansun.com) for $25 each way, and you’ll get two $10 bets for free. Just make sure to play games with the best odds—namely poker, blackjack and craps—and place your bets on the 6 and the 8, since they’re rolled more frequently than any number other than 7.
Prerequisites: a good hand; a poker face

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