The $40 Challenge - Money Making Idea:
Buy & Lease 2nd Hand Fridges

(For background on this money making idea challenge, please visit: The $40 Challenge)

The Idea

Buy a couple of second hand fridges, clean them up, and rent them out to temporary residents like summer school students.

Poster: AlaskJohn
Initial cost: $250 (started with $40 but rented out his accommodation to make up the difference).
Initial time: Talking to people and finding second hand fridges - 4/5 hours; Cleaning fridges 3/4 hours.

Results:
Income: $500+ over the first summer period
Costs: $240 for acquiring fridges. $10 for cleaning supplies and $5 for printing flyers announcing the service (guesstimate).

Modifications:
Gave variable renting time periods like 3 weeks/6 weeks/all summer to the students. After summer he upped his fees to ensure renters took better care of the fridges, but still keeping it below what the stores charged. With the money made from the initial rentals, he bought more fridges and expanded his empire.

Total amount made: $500+ first summer. Plus recurring income in subsequent summers/falls for 3 years.
Residual potential:
You could potentially get someone to manage the empire for you and pay them a small amount. Or you could create a system that makes it very easy to run. Potentially you could get people to rent for longer periods, say up to a year, and let them pay monthly.

This was a cash cow and this person rode it like a maestro: invest in an income producing asset, use proceeds to acquire more assets to make more income. And after the time period he sold some of it and gave others away. It was residual while he was running it as once the initial work of finding the fridges and renters was done, he didn't have work to do till the period was over. This is a very entrepreneurial application of the $40 challenge and it is definitely worthy of applause!

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