How I Made $1000/Week Working 5 Minutes A Day: Part One

Two decades ago, I moved to New York City with a couple hundred dollars, no job, no place to live, and knowing no one in the area. I had one bag of clothing, a Discman and an 80 CD wallet. I had no computer, and obviously no smart phone. This was a challenging situation, but my attitude towards those types of situations has always been: “Eh… I’m sure I’ll figure something out.” The beauty of approaching life this way early on is that you realize you will just figure something out regardless of the situation. And that knowledge is hugely beneficial going forward in life.

I got off a Greyhound bus to the city in late November. Since it’s really really hard to get online with a Discman, I found an internet cafe, and looked for the cheapest housing I could find. That’s where I discovered the now defunct Hotel Riverview. Right on the edge of Manhattan in the West Village area, up against the Hudson River.

At a time when the average price for a hotel room in NYC was about $275, the Hotel Riverview was a cool $24 a night. Bingo.

There was quite a bit of history to the hotel. It had once been used to house surviving crewmen from the Titanic. Built in 1908, it was originally the American Seamen's Friend Society Institute; intended to be a “temporary home for seamen in distress.”

Distressed and covered in semen was still an accurate description of the Hotel Riverview at the time I stayed there. A $24/night hotel in Manhattan is not a place where cost-conscious travelers stay. It’s a place where desperate people stay. Junkies, prostitutes, the criminally insane, and me.

My room was—and I’m not exaggerating here—4 feet by 6 feet. It held a bed and a little sliver of space next to the bed. There was a single, naked lightbulb dangling from the ceiling. For a few more dollars a week you could get a small TV on a rolling stand in your room. There was no cable. Just an antenna which would bring in nearly three whole channels.

Each floor had a communal bathroom. This wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Sure it was disgusting, but when you’re not eating much (as I wasn’t) you don’t have to go to the bathroom too often. And I usually had the facilities to myself. It turns out the other occupants of the building weren’t big on taking showers.

Although I stayed there through the winter, I never shut my window the whole time. The room was heated by a 4-inch diameter metal pipe at the foot of my bed, through which boiling water would run constantly. It wasn’t down near the floor. It was literally where my bare feet were at the end of the bed. So it was a fun game to try and not be scalded by it when laying in a bed in a room that isn’t as long as I am tall.

The blazing pipe created a balmy atmosphere in the room. So keeping the window open was a must. When it’s a moist 95 degrees in the room, and a crisp 10 degrees outside, and your window is open, you get a nice meteorological phenomenon where the two meet. Your own little personal weather-system. A tiny storm of charged air that is both hot and cold and—from what I can tell—really fucks up the reception on your antenna TV.

So things were not ideal. And it was made worse by the fact that there was a rule in place that you had to check out for one night every two weeks. So every thirteen days, in the dead of winter, I’d have to pack up my stuff and just wander the streets for a night until I could check back in the next day.

I figured to get an apartment it was going to run me somewhere between $2000 and $3000, in order to pay for first and last month’s rent and any sort of deposit or fees that might be involved.

I was doing some work through a temp agency. If I was lucky, I’d make about $55 a day, or $275/week. My room and food was around $35/day, or $245/week. So, if I was really tight with my money, I could just about save $30 a week. Which meant in a scant year and a half I’d be set up to get a place somewhere. Obviously that wasn’t a viable plan.

I probably could have asked my parents for a loan or harassed one of the people I’d met in the city to let me stay with them for a while, but that’s not really my nature.

One time my high school guidance counselor told me that my problem was that I liked getting backed into a corner. That I would allow myself to get into difficult situations so that I could try and get out of them. And there is probably some truth to that. But I don’t really see that as a problem. I honestly see that as one of the keys to a happy life. When you tell yourself, “I like challenges, struggle, and adversity,” those things are all off the table as a source of pain in your life. Not only that, but you will handle those situations much better than the person who laments, “Why me!?” all the time.

So there I was. No money, no job, no prospects, and no real marketable skills. Looking down the barrel of another couple years living a life of austerity in a room that was just bigger than a coffin, but no less depressing.

Faced with that reality, I knew I needed to come up with a money-making plan to get me out of this situation sooner. Just over a month later, I had $4000 in my pocket and was on my way to my own place in the city. The story of that plan will come next Sunday.

I realize this sounds like I’m setting up a story that begins with, “So I got me a chisel and went to work on constructing a glory hole.” But the plan I came up with was one that was completely legal, safe, and didn’t involve me doing anything sketchy at all. There was no sex or drugs involved. I didn’t get into any dangerous situations. No one got scammed. It required no special skills on my part. And there was no luck involved. And while the time element may be slightly exaggerated for the sake of the post title (there was some time spent planning and prepping throughout the day) the time I spent “working,” on the days I worked, was literally right around 5 minutes.

I will spill the details in a week.