If you are looking how to get fast cash and you have exhausted your old DVD and CD collections and raided the attic looking for things to sell on eBay, you don’t want to borrow money from anyone, be it friends and family or even a payday lender.  You have looked at other ideas but come up blank.  You have even tried cosmic ordering. Probably the best type option for making money fast however is one that has not been mentioned yet and that is by completing surveys for companies on the web.  Surprising as it may seem, companies genuinely are prepared to pay you to take their surveys.  There are quite a large number of paid surveys companies on the web so you should be able to find them relatively easily.  They are easy to do, they do not take much time to complete and the money is quickly paid over.  Remarkable.

Essentially it works like this.  A company has developed a new product and it wants to know whether it will be a success, so in order to try to find out in advance whether they are on to a winner they commission some market research.  This market research basically involves asking consumers for their opinions on certain things, in effect asking them to answer a number of questions.  They used to use call centers to call people up in order to speak directly to consumers but this was a very expensive option.  Nowadays, in the days of the internet, it is much easier to set up an online questionnaire to be answered, and because they are no longer paying for expensive call centers they can even offer the people money to answer the questions.

You can take advantage of these surveys.  You simply register you name, select which survey you want to take and spend 5-10 minutes answering the questions.  You can earn upto $20 for each survery you complete which means that in a couple of hours you can make probably well over $100.  You wanted to know how to get fast cash, well $100 in just a couple of hours is fast.  Why not give paid surveys a try.   You may find the reward well worth the effort.

If you really want to know how to get fast cash then one great answer may really surprise you.  People talk all the time about how the internet can make you money, and to a large degree this is true, but only if you actually know what you are doing and only if you work very hard at making money online do you get access to this source of cash.  However, one genuinely quick way to make cash as a by product of the internet is to offer your services writing articles.

You may think that this is a ridiculous suggestion, but the truth is that at the heart of making money online is the process of setting up websites with original content.  Blogging, webpages, whatever, they all need original content in order for Google to pay any attention to them and as a result put them in their index.  There is therefore a need for huge quantities of original content by website owners, so much so that in the main an individual person is usually unable to generate sufficient quantities of it.  It is for this reason that website owners look to outsource their content or article writing to others.

There are a number of ways to offer your services to website owners.  You can set yourself up as a provider on sites such as oDesk, or Elance or even Craigslist and bid for work opportunities when they arise.  However, given this is a website devoted to teaching you how to get fast cash, this route can be a bit hit and miss.  You can easily be underbid for work and lose out, or find that the purchaser is really fussy and ends up not paying you.

The best route is therefore to enrol as an author on a writing service website, such as Textbroker.com.  This site allows you to write articles for anyone submitting a keyword and requesting an article.  The price you charge is anywhere between 1 cent per word and 2 cents per word.  When you enrol Textbroker will evaluate your writing skill and you will then be allowed to take work at different standards.

Once you get into the groove writing articles you can usually end up writing a 500 word article in something like 20 minutes.  If you averaged five 500 word articles every two hours in a 6 hour stretch you could earn anything between $75 and $150.  Not bad for a short days work.  Do this for a couple of days, perhaps at the weekend and you could clear upto $300.  Worth it.

So if you really want to know how to get fast cash then why not consider writing articles for website owners.

How To Get Fast Cash

Jan 18, 2010

So you are in the positon where you need some cash and you need it fast.  You want to know how to get fast cash.  It may be to pay off an unexpected bill or it may be to take advantage of a sale price, or it may just be something to allow you to treat yourself.  Whatever the reason there are a number of ways that you can get hold cash quickly but the truth of the matter is that although you may be able to get cash fast you will almost certainly not be able to get cash easily (methods that may appear to be easy often have a hidden bite to them, as we shall see).

The first and perhaps most conventional way is to borrow the money you need.  Probably the best place to get cash fast is to approach a member of your family or a friend for the cash.  This route has the benefit of being quick, they may not charge you any interest for borrowing the money and they may not be too demanding when it comes to prompt repayment either.  However this route does have its drawbacks.  You may not want to ask friends and family for cash.  You may be too proud, or not want them to know because it is your intention to spend the money on them.  Whatever the reason for not wanting to go down this route, it’s OK not to, you do have other options available to you.

If borrowing from a friend or family is not something you wish to do then, and the intention is not to teach you to suck eggs here, but you could always consider drawing cash directly from your credit card.  You will usually suffer a cash withdrawal fee of around 2% but as long as you intend to pay back the money quite quickly this should not be too much of an impediment.

Not all borrowing is especially beneficial.  If you do pursue payday lenders or alternative lending arrangements then you need to be careful as the rates of interest that you can end up paying can make even small loans extremely expensive.  This concept is explored in a subsequent post however.  In your quest to find the answer to the question how to get fast cash some of these other lenders may appear attractive, but you need to know what you would be letting yourself in for if you follow this course of action.

So if you have decided not to borrow money from your friends or family you still have the option of approaching a specialized lender.  A conventional loan is unlikely to be the most appropriate solution as the application typically takes a couple of weeks and you have to get approved and it involves checking your credit score and so on.  These are all steps that you either may not wish to occur or cannot afford to occur.  Fortunately there are lenders out there, called payday lenders and even pawnbrokers who will be prepared to lend you the money and fast.  So if you are struggling to work out how to get fast cash the next port of call would be a payday lender.

Payday lenders specialize in providing short term and very short term loans.  They do this by offering you quick cash but requiring that you pledge something against the possibility that you do not make repayment when the time comes, usually the end of the month (being the time when you receive your next paycheck).  It is a similar situation with pawnbrokers except that instead of pledging repayment from your next paycheck you bring along an item of value, lodge that item with the pawnbroker and receive cash as a percentage of the value of that item.

The drawback to these types of arrangements is that payday lenders and their kind have set up their businesses for one purpose and one purpose only; to capitalize on the sometimes urgent need that some people have; that of the need for fast cash.  Because they know that people who borrow from them are often desparate they are able to charge very high rates of interest on the money that they lend.  You may not necessarily believe this, because the rate that they often advertise is a simple interest rate and not an annualized rate, but the interest that you pay on a loan from a payday lender, over a full year can work out to well over 100%.  That is if you borrow $100 you may well end up repaying over $200 for the loan.

So, in your search for how to get fast cash you can approach a payday lender or a pawnbroker but there are significant drawbacks.  The ease and speed of available cash is more than balanced out by the cost that you will end up paying for the privilege of getting that cash.

If you want to know how to get fast cash then you would do worse than consider selling a number of your unwanted items on ebay.  The benefit of ebay is that you can set a short timescale for the auctions that you hold and the vast majority of people who buy things through ebay pay through a paypal account which means you can get hold of the money very quickly.  This then would meet your criteria of having to get hold of cash fast.

We all have items lying all over our homes that we either do not like or have not used for a long time, they may even be broken but we keep them anyway.  Well selling such items on ebay can be a great way of raising some quick cash and clearing out some of the clutter from your home at the same time.  Most of us need to de-clutter our homes so this may well be a perfect opportunity for you to take advantage of your need and kill two birds with one stone.

If you do not already have an account with ebay then the process could not be easier.  You simply register your details, select a username and hey presto, you can buy and sell on ebay.  Setting up a paypal account is a little bit more complicated but the on-screen instructions are more than adequate to guide most people through the process.

Next you need to decide what you are going to sell.  It can literally be anything from an old set of pans to a pedal cycle.  All you have to do is create a sales page, entering all the relevant details of the item you are selling on the page; ebay provide a wysiwyg editor for those who are not expert in these matters.  Take a photograph, or perhaps even a couple of photographs so that prospective buyers can see what they are bidding on, upload these photographs, select a time for the auction to end and set it off.

During the auction you will be able to see information about who is watching the item, and of course who is bidding.  We are looking at how to get cash fast so in order to speed up the process you can set an auction to run as quickly as three days.  That way you will get resolution on the sale of the item quite quickly.  The best thing to do is to set up auctions for a number of items at once; that way you are not pinning all your hopes on the outcome of one auction.