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You can inherit money. Many people I know have inherited money. Some of the wealthiest people in this country and indeed the world, have inherited their wealth. This type of riches is called old money as opposed to those that had poor parents and relatives and became rich. I use the term rich as a relative term because it is very hard to determine what is rich anymore, except in cases of extreme wealth. A few years ago anyone that was worth half a million dollars was considered well off. Can you still consider this to be true in all cases? Lets take the case of the person that moved to an area where he bought his home for about $35,000 dollars around 30 years ago. If the home was in an area where prices have risen drastically like a suburb of New York City, the home could easily be worth $400,000 - $500,000 dollars today. The person owning the home may be living the same life style he did years ago and may not even have any or much money in the bank or investments. Is this person rich, I don't think so? Now lets take a person that rents an apartment and inherits $500,000, is he rich? I think well off might be a better term. Of course if you live in a depressed area of the world and had $500,000 dollars U.S. you, most likely, would be rich. The thing with being rich is that, many times, it is a matter of perspective.

Another way to get free money is to win the lottery, any lottery. Try not to win the New York lottery however, because they make it sound much more valuable than it really is. For example, if you were to win a million dollar New York Lottery and took the money right away and didn't string the payments out over twenty years you would only get about 1/4 of a million dollars. The reason for this is, in New York State, you only get half the prize if you elect to take the money immediately. Your half prize is now subject to taxes and you have to figure about half of what you won you will lose to the tax man. So try and win a different lottery. I hear the Canadian lottery is pretty good but I don't know much about it. The problem with lotteries is that your chances of winning are pretty slim. To win the top prize in the New York State lottery the odds are about 45,047,474 to 1. They are a little better for a bonus prize, only 7,509,579 to 1. I guess we would have to forget this method as a money maker.

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You can find money. As a matter of fact almost everyone here has found money at one time or another. I remember I found two dollars once on the sidewalk and I am not even counting the numerous times I found coins on the street, on the beach, in the car and in the couch. The problem with this technique is that in the many years I have been finding money, I have only made about $4.00. This is hardly worth even looking for. But I could increase my chances of finding money and even jewelry by getting a metal detector. By the way I have tried this also. When I first got my shinny new detector I went into the park confident that I would come out of the woods with something. My day went like this:

10:00 A.M. - I got my first beep and began to dig excitedly. I couldn't find anything so I made the hole wider and deeper, still nothing. I didn't realize it but there was a pull tab from a can in the pile of dirt I had extracted from the hole. This was to be the first of hundreds of pull tabs that seemed to sprout from the dirt everywhere.

11:30 A.M. - I was learning to go more slowly with the detector as I swung it over the ground. Contact, I began to dig again. Wow a bottle cap. This was harder work than working because I was in a park and had to fill all the holes back in.

1:00 P.M. - As I swung the detector over the ground it really went crazy, I must have hit the mother load I thought. I began to dig and to my amazement I found a stop sign with the pole still attached. I wondered what the heck that was doing buried in the park.

I was tired of digging and filling and lamented the fact that I didn't buy one of those metal detectors with a screen that shows what is under the earth before you dig. That was the end of the metal detection method of making free money. Besides not being too fruitful, it was too much like work and getting paid for work is not free money. The same can be said for gathering cans and bottles. It is so time consuming that you have to consider it work and decide how much per hour you are making, it is usually much less than you would make as a delivery boy.While we are at it, lets throw flea markets into this category along with church bazaars and the like. An exception for some people might be EBay but when I did it, it was also a lot of work. The way this might work out however, is by selling only one expensive item at a time, this avoids most of the paper work.

There is also the grant method of getting free money. I don't know much about this, but I have seen Matthew Lesko running all over the television wearing a suit jacket with question marks all over it that looks more like something the Riddler from Batman would wear yelling all about free money. According to him the money is there and just waiting for you to get it. Here are some examples he cites, $100,000 small business grants, $75,000 grants to remodel your house, $140,000 grants to open a book store and so on. Gee Wiz, what are we waiting for, lets open a small business, make it a bookstore and put it into our home which we can remodel and get the whole $315,000. Ah if we only could. But this is not free since you have to buy the book to find out how to supposedly do this.

So what is left? I guess you could try the, 'get paid to take surveys' routine, but again this is like work and the pay is pretty bad. I am sorry but in conclusion I have to say that maybe there is no free money as a practical thing for most of us, but you already knew this didn't you? Oh well, I guess we can keep hoping.