I came in below my $50 dollar a week goal again, but I’ll still be able to make a stock purchase. The reason I missed my target this time was quite different from previous weeks. And while the dopamine rush still hits when I get paid with dividends throughout the month, I can feel the hedonic adaptation setting in.
I have continued researching ways to earn income online in my spare time and though I have become comfortable grinding away on the survey and task sites, I have always suspected there were other opportunities. This confluence of factors has led me to take a longer view in my approach to earning $100 dollars a month in passive income as well as reassess how best to achieve my goals.
With the time I spent this past week thinking, researching, and attempting to implement a few new ideas in place of surveys and small tasks, I have set myself up to earn at least 3 months worth of beer money income according to my goals. I did this with a variation on churning. I will likely get more in depth with churning later, but I felt it was worthwhile to explain why I did not reach my $50 dollar goal this week. I have not received any income from churning yet either and so instead I would like to lay out how I earned the bulk of my income with another new idea this past week: reverse stock split arbitrage.
To take advantage of reverse stock split arbitrage a company’s stock needs to have lost value and be worth less than the minimum requirements for remaining listed on a stock exchange. When this happens the company does a reverse stock split. For instance if a stock is $0.50 cents and the company needs it to be $1 dollar, they would combine 2 shares of the stock into 1 and the new share price would be $1 dollar. Well, say you only owned one share of that stock and so they couldn’t combine two shares into one because you don’t have two? Some companies pay out cash, but occasionally they just round up.
So hypothetically, let’s say a company’s stock is worth $1 dollar, but they want it to be worth $10 to be safe. If you own 10 shares it is combined into 1 and your overall value doesn’t change. But if you own 1 share and they round up, then you’ve made $9 dollars.
These opportunities are few and far between and don’t pay much, so the work is in setting up a system to capture these opportunities and take advantage of them. But once it’s set up I believe it’s possible to make a couple hundred extra a month if the opportunities are there.
I tested this theory out last week and so far have earned about $30 dollars because I just so happened to get lucky on the timing. It’s a volatile time in the market, but because of that I have another tool in my arsenal to earn online income.