Get Rich Quick Schemes

In the world of money, we are all searching for a get rich quick scheme to make money now. No longer do we keep putting our money in the bank, hoping to live off the interest when we are old and gray. No longer do we buy shares in a company, and wait for the price to inch up, so that we can earn a handsome profit in 10 years time.

No siree! We are not waiting anymore. We are not going to wait until we are old, and we are not going to wait 10 years, in fact, we are not even going to wait 5 years. We want our money now, or even yesterday, if that is possible.

So I have prepared a list of ways we can all get rich quick. Some of them might seem dubious, but I can guarantee you that somebody somewhere got rich real quick using every single one of the methods below:

Get A Rich Husband Or Wife
Why reinvent the wheel right? If somebody has already made a lot of money, just make like you really like the person and get married. Don't worry too much if there is no love at the beginning. Since you love his money, you will probably learn to love him. And anyway, if it turns out that you really can't stand him, there's always divorce - and you get half of what he owns!

Start A Ponzi Scheme
Operating a Ponzi scheme is also a short cut to becoming rich. You would start with an great idea to make money. It's not important whether the idea will really make money but it must sound like it's going to make tons of money. You then get investors to invest in you and your idea. You pay them a very good monthly return, usually somewhere in the order of 5% - 10% at least.

The amount paid out to the investor comes from the money invested by the investor himself. Key to the success of such a scheme is the introduction of new suckers....err investors...into the scheme. This will pull in fresh money and allow the scheme to run for a longer period.

A recent operator of a Ponzi scheme is Bernard Madoff. He ran a giant Ponzi scheme. It is probably the biggest on record and might have pulled in billions of dollars from thousands of investors, and probably ran for nearly 20 years.

Madoff did everything right but he made one mistake - he got caught. On the 29 June 2009, he was sentenced to serve 150 years in jail, the maximum sentence allowed.

Buy A Lottery Ticket
The lottery is another great way to get rich real quick, literally overnight. Payouts vary from below a million to hundreds of millions. One of the highest, if not the highest amount ever paid out is $365 million on Feb 18 2006 in the Powerball jackpot.

But don't get your hopes up too high though. Your chances of winning are not too good. Assuming that there are 50 numbers in the lottery, and you have to pick 5 numbers correctly to win, you have a 1 in 2,118,760 chance of winning. Your chances of being struck by lightning are probably higher!

Become A Beggar
We all know how rich beggars are right? We have all heard stories of people who are beggars by day, but by night, they will party the night away at the land's poshest nightclub, with a girl on each arm.

It actually sounds like a dream come true. You pick a street corner and put up a sign that says you desperately need money. It helps if you have a sob story to tell about how you got into your present state - feel free to embellish. Then you put a hat in front of you, and you are in business. People walking by the corner will simply drop money into the hat.

The downside is that you need to dress in dirty, smelly clothes and look sad the whole day - even if you are the happiest guy in the world because you are sitting around doing nothing and people are paying you! And imagine trying to look sad when you are thinking of your hot date with Candy and Lulu later that night. Not so easy right?

Conclusion
Logically, get rich quick schemes or opportunities should not work. If a get rich quick scheme surfaces and it really works, hordes will jump onto the bandwagon and effectively make it into a get rich slow scheme.

For example, let's say online advertising is a very lucrative market. You spend 1 day to set up a website, sign up with a banner advertising company that will pay you $20 for 1000 impressions, and spend $10 a month on a promotional site that will bring you 10000 visitors a month.

In the previous example, you had spent one day and $10 per month. You get 10000 visitors a month which translates to $200 per month. And, you do not need to spend any more time on the website from the second month onwards. Effectively, you work for one day in the first month, and earn ($200 - $10) or $190 per month thereafter.

The figures above may actually have been in the ballpark in the early days when the Internet started getting commercialized. But as time passed and more and more people got to know of this get rich quick scheme and got on board, things started to change. The get rich quick scheme morphed into a run of the mill get rich slow scheme.

I wrote this hub for fun but I would also like to say that get rich quick schemes, if they do exist, do not last. It is in their very nature. Much better to concentrate on a get rich slow scheme and make consistent profits over the long term.