Sounds like a good life to be honest. I'm probably just romanticizing the days I was a little too young to remember, but I wish I were one of those self-taught programmers, hackers, tinkerers. Everything's opaque and user-friendly and/or optimized to the point of illegibility now.
You're never too old to start learning that stuff.
For networking, there's a ton of resources on selfhosting and homelabbing, and big communities here on lemmy and elsewhere. It can be as expensive a hobby as you want, you can stretch an old laptop pretty far, get really cheap stuff from the cloud, or build a data closet in your house/apartment.
If you wanted to learn more about software, Rust has a ton of high quality official documentation available and would be really valuable knowledge for a career.
For the raw hardware tinkering getting the $30 essentials set from ifixit will get you into 90% of consumer devices, and even as a professional I'm usually watching a 5 minute youtube video before dissassembling anything, and that's really all you need.
Currently cooking for friends and family. I let them know what I'm cooking that week; they can opt into any of the meals. I just make extra of those, and they give me $10 per portion.
I flipped cars for a few years. Im a pretty good diy mechanic.
The amount of people who cant be bothered scraping off stickers, and giving a car a good detail astounds me. Take the car home, wash it thoroughly, detail the engine bay and interior, and if you have the skills change the oil, air filter and coolant. Those were usually good for a few hundred per flip but the bar to entry is low, anyone can do that.
Also buying cars with 4 steel wheels with bald tyres and finding a set of cheap alloy wheels with good tyres that someone was flogging off were also a good flip if you could find the wheels and tyres cheap and negotiate the car down. "Mate a set of tyres is $600" when you can find a legal set on nicer wheels for $200.
The best ones were nice cars with 1 big problem, "needs a new clutch" or "blown head gasket" made a few grand off those usually because I could spend as long as I needed to to do the job on the cheap by myself.
In Australia the limit is 4 per year before you have to apply for a motor vehicle traders licence, but thats per person. The official paperwork on a few of mine may or may not have have had my flatmates details.
Im curious as to how they figure out the difference between title flipping and just some guy selling a car.
All I had was an old car and a lawn mower, didn't even have a phone or pager (1994 or so). Whipped up some flyers and pasted them all over the trailer park communal mailboxes (several parks). Used mom's phone number and checked in by pay phone.
First day, lady called mom wanting to know if I could edge.
"Tell her I can."
"You don't have an edger!"
"I will after I get paid on this next job."
Hauled ass to Home Depot, got an edger, rest is history.
A major leg up was mom (grandma) being old and having old friends that wanted the work done. Once I displayed competency, the referrals rolled in.
My very first job when I was little was a professional grammar nazi for a publisher. Something that was akin to a favor with benefits. It lasted less than a year. I was able to buy my first game with it.
Some years back, we made a trip to make/selling some simple food at a weekend street-fair (travelling to a bigger town about 100 miles away). One item only but with several ingredients ... non-cheap, fresh , high-quality. Two people, cleared (in today's dollars) about $1000 in two afternoons.
It was different from what other vendors were selling, simple, $2 a shot, great-tasting.
Once, no money for food. So posted to craigslist something about a broke dykes dinner. Bunch of fellow gay women showed up, each contributed one item. Memorable night. There was some whipping with green onions in the kitchen. One of the women told me (we were all out of jobs, struggling) that a straight guy would pay her $50 to throw tomatoes at him while he jerked himself off.
Short term can be defined many ways. For some, a year can be considered short term. And depending on how much you deposit, you can get good returns as early as 6 months.
It can range from between 4% and 5%+. Per nerdwallet, the highest they have listed is 5.07%. I'm not good at math and how bank rates work, but you can probably try computing based on those percentages.
I once asked what would be a real life equivalent of those small chores you find in video games that earn you a little gold.
Someone answered that driving people around.