The Short Story of how I've Survived with Online Money for the Past Five Years

Here is my story of how I've survived only with online money, even though I've never had a job. Maybe you can learn from my mistakes.

The Beginning

Ever since I was in highschool, almost a decade ago, I've dreamt of making money online. The internet was a very different place back then. My life was different too. I was living in a poor ghetto and my parents both worked yet struggled to make ends meet. I really wanted to help my folks out, and so I've started looking for ways to make money online. I stumbled upon an article about a guy that was making 12 K a month by having ads running on hundreds of his blogs. I thought I should start a blog as well and since I've always been into cars, I started a car blog.

Two years later, there I was, having written hundreds of articles on my blog and having made from advertising a grand total of $ 8.00. To say that I was disappointed would be an understatement. For months, I've desperately searched for alternative solutions to making money online. I've found a website that offered anyone the ability to engage in stock pair trading. I've signed up using my mother's credit card. Placed $100 in my account and started trading. Made around $8 in profits on my first day. I was ecstatic. I thought I finally found a way to make a quick buck online. Weeks later I've managed to sell my blog for the grand total of $360. I bought some stuff for my highschool graduation with that money and the rest I've invested in stock pair trading. As it turns out, it was a pretty stupid decision. After a summer of trading, having transactioned contracts worth a total of $5000, I'd lost the money I got for my blog, maxed out my mother's credit card and found myself in serious debt.

The Second Beginning

Life had some surprises in store for me and a year later I was living near a mountainside resort. I'd had no internet connection for that year. That sabbatical truly gave me time to think and reflect on my approach to making money. I'd realized that my mistake was to try to make money without much work, either from ads or risky stock contracts, and that I needed to change my approach. Thus, I've started looking for actual online work. In doing so, I've found a website called Student of Fortune. On that website, students from the U.S. would post their homework and so-called "tutors" would do it for a price. That's when I truly started to make money online.

Finally some Luck

In the first two months I've made $600. Keep in mind that I live in Romania and due to differences in exchange rates to the local currency and the cost of living, $600 is worth about four times more than they are in the U.S. After a short while I found a way to game the website and contact students directly, as the website took a %20 fee of all my earnings. My first student was a Saudi young man. I will never forget him. I wasn't great as a tutor and homework doer back then but I've worked hard for this guy and a few months later when he left the U.S., in the fall of 2018, he gave my contact info to other Saudi students and ever since I have worked for tens of them, doing all sorts of their college projects, for good money. I still do it to this day. I have done thousands of assignments and taken tens of online college classes for them since.

Lessons I've learned

The reason why I've managed to survive for so long only on an online income is that I've moved to the countryside where the cost of living is very low. I grow my own food, do my own car repairs, use firewood for heating, create furniture, do construction, I do everything for myself and with the little that I earn online I am able to support my family. So that is my story. The lessons that I've learned along the way is that through actual hard work you can earn some money, enough to support yourself, but not much.

The real money made online is made through sales. Some sell physical items, others sell games or apps. Those are harder to produce though. What is easy to make and sell is intellectual property. In a sense, it is what we are doing here. Books are intellectual property but those are hard and time-consuming to produce as well. T-shirt designs and other similar items are also intellectual property. They're easy and quick to make and you can make substantial amounts of money off them, if you have the money needed in the first place to advertise them. This isn't easy either.

However, the most money is made through financial transactions. You don't have to produce anything. Just to have some money to invest into trading. Stocks trades, binary options, etc. That is all the past though. The real fortunes are made now through cryptocurrencies. They're the new gold-rush, and I plan to benefit from it. The most important lesson I've learned is that when you start something, you have to stick with it. If I would've kept working on my blog, it could've actually been a decently large car website now. So, if you have a passion or an online project you're working on, stick with it, no matter how long it takes. I wish I would've done the same.