20 FORGOTTEN BUSINESSES Almost NOBODY Knows That PAY MORE Than a College Degree 💰

57 thoughts on “20 FORGOTTEN BUSINESSES Almost NOBODY Knows That PAY MORE Than a College Degree 💰”

1. 20. Window Screen Repair
   19. Worm Farming
   18. Knife & Scissor Sharpening
   17. Beekeeping
   16. Firewood Delivery & Wood Splitting
   15. Chair Caning Restoration
   14. Hand Painted Sign Lettering
   13. Mobile Luxury Car Detailing
   12. Garage Sale/Estate Sale Re-Selling
   11. Watch Making & Watch Repair
   10. Sewing & Clothing Alterations
   9. Wooden Fence Repair
   8. Piano Tuning
   7. Taxidermy
   6. Restoration & Resale of Vintage Furniture
   5. Well Placed Vending Machines
   4. Professional Picture/Photo Framing
   3. Shoe Repair
   2. Local Locksmith
   1. Book Binding & Book Restoration

   1. Bless you Friend!

   2. ​@justme-br9sjAmen!

   3. Please add the pay out price

   4. Thank you!

   5. No 6 is best

2. I got a $300 coat for $25 at estate sale, plus many other items included. I hit it off with the cashier, and she gave me deal. Be nice to workers at these sales, they have power!

   1. Goodwill is selling at almost retail but have an online store. Also they do have sales/auctions.

3. I’m only 40 and my elementary school librarians made a killing restoring and rebinding books.

4. I knew an independent locksmith who was the sole breadwinner in his family. He and his wife raised eight happy healthy children!

   1. Lock smiths make less than $60 000 cad a year, like $35 000

   2. He must have had a really fine lock on the Parental bedroom! 🤭

   3. My brother made a decent living doing. He’s since expanded the business.

   4. ​@KYurkAt $125.00 just to knock on your door? I think that you’re a bit mistaken.

   5. I’m not familiar with this trade. What does this profession do?

5. I’d add bicycle repair. In my country (New Zealand) this is really expensive and takes forever. However, as another person mentioned, many of these skills only pay well in developed countries. They are hard to find in cities nowadays but in China, where I live, there used to be cobblers and bike repairers on street corners and they charged too little for such great work. Now we live in a disposable society….

   1. “Bicycle Repair Man, you’re my hero!!!”

6. I’ve actually done some of these, and just the firewood gig funded the 3 YouTube Channels that I had at the time for an entire year. I also cut up and hauled away scrap metal with one of my younger brothers, his wife, and a family friend. People would call us to remove abandoned vehicles, clean cans that had been dumped by random people, and remove dead fall after storms. We made money hand over fist, and eventually saved enough to move into what we thought was a larger, better home, but ultimately turned out to be a money pit, which was eventually seized by the County under Eminent Domain Laws. The Elderly Man pretty much tricked us into buying it for the price of the back taxes he owed, then after we had paid those Taxes off, we found out that there were more problems with the property than just making a few modest repairs and upkeep would solve. Ultimately we just had to chalk it up to a learning experience and move on. My advice to anyone watching this video, is that Not all that Glitters is Gold.

   1. Well if you remove the dead every fall then I could see why you would make a lot of money

   2. ​@ellej3112 yeah, it was a really good arrangement we had. We didn’t have to cut down any living trees to supply our customers with firewood, and it kept the area cleared up after bad weather, and I like to think it helped prevent Forrest Fires, by removing potential accelerants. One thing you’ll notice about heavily forrested areas such as where we lived at the time, is that all that dead fall is just going to fuel Forrest Fires if one were to break out. By removing as much as we could without damaging the rest of the living, healthy trees, we were actually helping the environment in much the same that proper Forrest Thinning does.

   3. AngelaChris-y8l bot

   4. Jacksonhillvy bot

   5. VictoriaGomez-n3q bot

7. I live in the US and in a well populated area. Lots of fence menders around, I sharpen knifes and scissors, I advertised it, talked about and let everyone at the church know I sharpen the church’s knives. In 5 years 2 customers, too many I can sharpen at home good enough. Restaurants? They are on a knife change out, I would need to buy thousands in knifes, then go and rotate out once a week sharpen ones for dull ones, then I get paid $3.00 per knife. My wife does alterations, booked out 3 months, specializes in formal wear, good luck on just buying a commercial machine and using YouTube to learn how to Taylor a dress in a month. Better have really good insurance, it is a craft that takes years, a decade to be somewhat capable. Most of the stuff on the list there just are not customers, or the pay is way off. Piano tuner, if the piano isn’t used who hire a piano tuner? Bees, sounds great, but the money is in the pollenating, not the honey. Pollenating means you have to have the means to move your hives around all over the place, and good luck on keeping a hive alive there is much to learn about bees. I looked up Caned furniture, Facebook marketplace, fully restored caned rockers, several of them, $50 -110.00. There are lots and lots of canned chairs all sell for less then $100.00. Not worth the learning and cost. Before getting started, better check your local market, where I live most of these don’t pay much of anything, or I have the talent for.

   1. True

   2. Agree. The video made every single business introduced sound well too easy to make money of. People better do their own research before following these advises.

   3. My grandfather came to New York City in the 1920s he built a push cart, Rung a bell and walk the streets of Brooklyn sharpening knives scissors and tools. The stories I heard were during the depression when everybody was broke he had coffee cans full of coins, my mother Born in 1929 was embarrassed to go to school because while people had no money she had brand new shoes and a fur coat. They were Italian. Didn’t even speak English.

   4. ​@Cerealpoet so your grandfather was a street walker who kept your mom in furs? 🤔

   5. The Amish have a massive head start too. If people want those services they usually hunt down their local Amish communities.

8. My grandfather taught a furniture refinishing course for years. When his son-in-law was laid off from his office job, he used the skills he had learned in his father-in-law’s course to set up his own business. He ended up making more money as a furniture refinisher than he ever earned in his office job.

   1. My sister used to say she was a stripper for the shock value. She worked for a used furniture store refinishing the stock.

   2. I own an antique shop. The belt sander is tool #1 an older woman who helped gave me an antique book on such. The antique book showed the primitive ways I needed . Like reamalgamation and primitive finishes and repairs. If u tried to learn from a modern book they’d just teach u new wild product use. So for anyone interested in learning trades start at the beginning. Learn the old primitive ways then work forward. Eventually I got to analyne dyes . That’s when I became a professional! I use to refinish and paint furniture 14hra a day my first 3 yrs half the time in my underwear. I own an antique shop. 11 yrs now. It’s not easy . Some ppl need a boss. It takes a strong work ethic. If u don’t feel that worry some hole when u slack and waste those few hrs I’m not sure u can. I have buddies without that boss pushing em they can’t make production. Whatever it is u have to produce. Black box is a theory that u make produce learn for the future . It goes in the black box and u don’t know when it’ll pay out Maby unexpectedly but u must constantly be filling that box if you’re not making liquid currency at that time.

9. Vehicle detailing ain’t for the faint of heart. You work in the heat, the cold, and you are at the mercy of whether there is rain in the forecast. You will be called in to clean up everything from what a baby left in the car after an “oops”, to the inevitable result of a trip to the beach, to the consequences of the client parking the car under a tree dripping sap or (seriously worse) a flock of birds. Youi work on their schedule, not yours. Some clients will offer a good tip for the extra work, but not often enough to cover the extra time/effort in general. If you don’t grin and bear it, there is always some one ready to take their business at the drop of a hat.
   The start up costs are not high, neither the materials over time. What is high are the taxes, the vehicle maintenance, and gas.

10. The master plan:
    1.Get a Van
    2. magnetic side sticker signs (or “e”-sign)
    3. Drive to restaurant, take knives to sharpen. Take slop for your worm buckets back home.
    4. Switch sign to “worms”, deliver worms/worm poop to businesses
    5. In between routes, work on building bee hives, altering dresses, old furniture, and restoring books from garage.
    6. Do it all at your own pace while enjoying delicious honey.

    Crafty people got this.

    1. 😂😂😂yes!

    2. Somewhere at the beginning of your list, I would add “Learn how to correctly sharpen knives, other cutlery, and mower blades”. Sharpening is not just grinding a new edge. It is knife-dependent, and also, you frequently have the rebuild before ore sharpening. TANSTAAFL (There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.-R. Heinlein)

    3. 😂❤

    4. Accurate

    5. The way you put that order is badsss!

11. That’s the thing about capitalism. If there is money to be made in a certain niche, someone will fill it. Now identifying a niche is more difficult than watching a video.

12. For locksmiths the narrator forgot two of the most important things you need: knowledge of applicable laws and really good insurance, because if you open the wrong lock or the right lock for the wrong person… lawsuits and/or jail time.😢

    1. You also need a spotless criminal record, impeccable references, ability pass the test to acquire a license, significant start up capital, and good marketing skills.
       Also a market with enough people to provide a steady stream of work and little established competition. No one wants to hire a brand new locksmith when there is one with a track record available, with the exception of getting your car door unlocked and that service comes cheap from AAA and other car clubs that have been around forever.

13. I worked as a piano technician for may entire adult life. Yes, tools are not cheap, and it takes a few years to build a clientele. I retired when I was 55. My first $100k year was in the 90’s. Today, a busy tech can easily earn $200K!

    1. Most people don’t play acoustic pianos anymore. And the interest to play piano is dying. The people who play piano play electric digital ones or synthesizers. It might have been a good job in the 1900s, but electric pianos will replace acoustic completely, like most things.

14. I’m 73. I sewed for a living. I made draperies, quilts, actually just about anything made out of fabric. I made fancy sheet sets & throw pillows. Sometimes I’d take home $1500, sometimes more. I worked for 1 person with no other employees. All I needed was a sewing machine. Where I worked was called a workroom. Check out these opportunities, there are too many college degrees hanging around with unhappy people.

    1. What sewing machine would you recommend?

    2. Singer or pfaaff

15. I remember shop classes, wood working classes, welding classes! All electives in high school.

    1. So was Home Economics, which taught cooking, sewing, home budgeting.
       I know now why Mothers were also creative in their homesteading. Genius really.

    2. Even in Junior High

    3. and they taught childcare. Think of the mother on the news right now sitting in jail for child neglect. Our tax dollars are paying for her, her husband and the grandparents to sit in jail where that money could have went towards education. Instead we make our young people sit in classrooms miserable in class they don’t like or need in their chosen life path. Think foreign languages, advanced math, advanced English. The teachers suffer because the students don’t want to be there. The students who love the classes suffer because the teachers attention is on keeping the unruly container. I had 5 years of home economics. A year of bookkeeping and a semester of typing. I have a Masters Degree, own a business, ( for last 50 years). I use the bookkeeping daily, the typing and the home economics. I have Airbnbs. I KNOW HOW YO MAKE A BED. How to clean. What dishes to put in the units. I learned in high school. Not in my years of University education. And I came out of high school with no student loans just the capability of earning a living. Everyone needs to ask themselves, “was this planned stupidity?”

16. its crazy how easy it is to make money with just working out of your garage…. now all I need is a garage!!

    1. I feel so seen, like I’m totally exposed. Garageless.

17. My cousin and four of his friends found themselves all but one laid off, the other working part time in a minimum wage job. My cousin, who had a terrific voice, entered an Elvis impersonator contest and won, even though Elvis wasn’t his favorite music. Encouraged, he entered a Frank Sinatra contest and won second place. The five of them ended up forming their own business singing as The Rat Pack for parties, weddings, graduations, birthdays, you name it. They had a customized van, traveled all over the US and some in Canada. All five are mostly retired, but well off. My cousin and three of them still entertain for the fun of it. Not everyone could do this, but it got them all a nice living, able to buy houses, support their families, and now, enjoy their grandkids.

18. I am currently taking a sewing machine repair course, I have a vintage machine. Watching this, and knowing that I need it, I am going to learn how to repair scissors. Scissors to a sewist are like knives to a chef.

19. My high school taught me solid state electronics, drafting, woodworking and welding – enough so that I could read blueprints for construction, I made custom wooden screen doors that sold for up to $400 each in my own shop, I built a trailer to haul my dune buggy with the welding experience and I was making my own designed expandable ladder racks and selling them. I also repaired oscilloscopes for the school system. All of them made me money and I could have chosen any one of them for a business. I did the window screen repairing in conjunction with my window cleaning and gutter cleaning business and was making six figures at that before I retired.

20. In 1983 I charged $10 per hour as a new handyman. After a few raises and more experience, I was charging $35 per hour and had a three month waiting list for my services. My secret? – punctuality and utter honesty. (it didn’t hurt that I am a natural-born problem solver.)

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