ASk HN: How would you make $25,000 if you had $25,000?

Buy tickets for popular sport/music events, sell for double the money when the venue is sold out. Repeat.

Not that I agree with this kind of business from an ethics point of view, but it's easy money.

The same way I would turn $25000 into $25001, use $25000 to create something with a higher value. The easiest route would be carefully purchasing $1000 - $2000 cars, get them running/AC/etc, then slap a $200 paint job and sell for $2500 - $5000. You'd have to be careful and selective so that your time and the parts line up for the margins you're looking for, and then the resale process. This doesn't scale since if you continually buy up low priced cars, you'll drive thw prices per car up in the region, but it's nice for extra cash to do 1-3 cars at a time.

depends entirely on your skillset. As other posters suggest, the idea is to take your twenty five grand and create something with more value.

Me, uh, I'd probably just buy servers for my current business, then require pre-payment. I don't know that I could sell that many pre-paid VPSs, but it'd probably be my best chance. speaking of, why am I screwing off here? I should be putting up more servers.

Other options, considering my skill set, would be buying server parts, assembling, and selling them... though clearing that much inventory would be something of a challenge with my sales skills, and margins on servers (unless you are dell or hp) aren't that high, so I'd need to go through several buy parts -> assemble and sell servers -> buy parts -> assemble and sell servers cycles in that month, in a business where net-30 is the norm, so that'd be pretty difficult.

but yeah... I think the key is "what are you good at?" then "how can I do using what I'm good at, plus twenty five grand, to make something worth twice that much?"

Go to Vegas, you've got almost a 50% chance.

Find some other currency that's also called "dollars", that's worth half as much as the one you have.

An easy way to do it: Buy undervalued and poorly monetized but well-established sites on flippa, optimize advertising and grow traffic, resell on Flippa in a few months.

If you've got $XXXXX to play with you can pick up some incredible bargains for a quick flip.

EDIT: I didn't see that you only had one month. This is still feasible, but would require some paid traffic/PPC skill to pull off.

  over a year old
  high PageRank
  lots of inlinks
  steady profit
  lots of unique content  

Borrow it. $25K is unsecured personal loan money, so depending what I urgently need 50k for, I could probably get it then pay it back over a few years.

Why the 1 month time limit?

pay some teenage kids minimum wage to run sausage sizzles all over town.

I need 18 months. I would go to courthouse foreclosure auctions, partner with other investors, and buy the property for 70% of market, fix it up, and sell for market price.

30%/70% = 42%. Take away agent fees, closing costs, and repairs, I could have 25% if I'm careful. Turnaround is 6 months each time.

1.25 ^ 3 = 1.95.

1 month time horizon is silly. I assume you're looking for serious, practical, reproducible ideas. You won't get any that reliably returns 409600% annually.

If I were really held to 1 month, I'd go to Vegas and put it on red.

Put the existing 25K in the bank. Bid on a fixed-bid web project for 25K and get it done in a month.

For a safer gambling idea, split it into a number of bets on different sports matches that are all really shit odds (like 1-3 odds), you've got a decent change that they'll all win, and if they don't you'll almost certainly still have some left (if not more than you started) because you split it. Repeat until you hit the magic number.

As suggested by all the posters suggesting straight up gambling, I think that doing this reliably; doubling your money in one month, is going to be pretty difficult.

As I was saying before, if you have some special skill to add to the mix, that helps a lot (remember, a top end SysAdmin around here can earn $14K/month contracting, before taxes and stuff, so you wouldn't be doubling the money in a month in that case, you'd be adding 50% value, still damn good, and paying yourself a good wage.)

The thing is, doubling your money in a month is a what, 1200% annual return? no, it's more, if it compounds monthly, quite a lot more. You can bet that any investment with even a small chance of that kind of return gets all kinds of money thrown at it, to the point where those niches where this sort of thing is possible are filled right quick.

But yeah. Maybe you can pull that off for one month (hell, if you really hustled, and billed out at top end rates without a recruiter, you can make twenty five grand consulting as a SysAdmin. I mean, I couldn't... I've gotten that kind of hourly rate for short gigs, but I lack the sales skills to do that for a whole month.) but doubling that fifty grand the next month? doing it again? yeah, your odds start looking more and more like a day at the races.

Poker would be one option. I'm pretty good at poker!

1. I just got 25k$ free and clear. Time to stop worrying for arbitrary goals for at least a month and enjoy life!

2. I'll find an another brain teaser that gives me 25k$ free and clear!

3. I'd do it exactly the same way I'd make $25,000 without being given 25k$ free and clear.

4. If I really would have to do it using the money, I'd donate the money to a random charity and use the fame and good will to organize nationwide boyscout door to door fundraiser in order to match my donation. Nobody said I'd have to make that 25k$ for myself.

5. Ok so I should make it for myself? I'd just add that 25k$ to my millions and millions of dollars, stash them all to a short period savings account and collect 25k$ in monthly interest. Nobody said you couldn't use your existing assets to "help a bit".. Why should skills be any different from capital in this respect?

6. Ok so I have to make the money for myself, I have to use the 25k$ doing it and I can't use any other assets? Oh boy.. I'm really not smart enough to pull that off :(

Doubling in one month means 1200% annual return. That requires some insanely risky deals to achieve. Looks at the high risk, high return ventures.

- Gambling.

- Lotto

- Stock options

- Forex

- Future trading

- Illicit activities tend to have high return but highly risky. And also highly questionable.

IMHO gambling is probably the WORST way to go, and well given the 1 month time limit - you will probably have 29 days left to try and make 50,000$ after losing all of it the first day.

The time limit pretty much limits what you can possibly invest in for such a big return in such a short time.

This does remind me of a different HN article i read a while back - If you had 5 dollars and 2 hours how would you make as much money as possible : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=912105 .

I Personally would do some research on current stock options and try to build a strategy to double the money in the time frame i have left.

Buy 4 lottery tickets.

If one of them wins a sum >=$25004, then I've succeeded. If none of them wins, declare that I've failed, and pocket the $24996 leftovers.

Roulette Table, Black.

Buy 25,000 bags of flour @ $1 and sell them for $2.

(Didn't we do this in economics 101? Where you learn about overhead and loss, etc.)

I'd buy some weapons, kill a few pimps, steal their hoes, and pimp em out. Price tag is probably like 2000 for the weapons/grenades, the money is for a while!

On the other hand if you want non-insane, I would buy an appartment building, flip it, and try to make long term money on that. With partners of course.

Honestly for 25 grand I'd live off the money for a few months and find a job.

It frightens me how many of these responses are people describing the scams they'd pull off if they had the cajones to do so.

With only a month, I'd bet it on black. It'd probably be the highest probability of doubling up in that short a time period with no personal effort.

With some personal effort, there a few ways of making 25k in a month. App building projects are very hot right now, you could outsource app building projects and manage their completion. Could you make 25k more in a month, maybe not in the first month. But after you had solid relationships and skilled developers as well as a smooth input project buffer you could conceivably generate 25k profit a month.

I would stick with Stock options. You need to find compelling investment scenarios (Biotech FDA approvals, Quarterly Earnings, etc.)

This is very risky, obviously. There are not too many ways to double your money with a lower risk profile without actually working..

To me, this is much less risky than straight gambling. My last time I answered this with a Stock recommendation (ARNA) it has already been up 3x. So it can be done (see my previous comments)