How to Make Money as a Kid

My son made $14 selling lemonade last summer. By Monday it was gone. Gummy bears, a bouncy ball, something from a vending machine. He couldn't even remember what he bought.

That's the problem with every “how to make money as a kid” guide on the internet. They stop at the earning part. Here's how to mow lawns. Here's how to walk dogs. Cool. But earning is just step one. The real question is: what do you do with the $14 once you have it?

Two kinds of earning

Naval Ravikant draws a line between two types of work.¹ The first is renting out your time. Mowing a lawn, babysitting, scooping ice cream. You trade an hour, you get paid. Stop working, stop earning.

The second is building something that earns while you sleep. A YouTube channel. A set of digital templates on Etsy. An app. A blog. Naval calls code and media “permissionless leverage” because you don't need anyone's approval to create them.¹

Both are fine. Both are real work. But they compound differently. A kid who mows 10 lawns earns 10 payments. A kid who films herself building a birdhouse earns views (and potentially revenue) for years.

You don't need to push your 8-year-old into content creation. Just plant the idea that there's a difference between trading time and building assets. That one concept puts them ahead of most adults.

Money-making ideas by age

Federal law sets 14 as the minimum age for formal employment, with strict hour limits (3 hours on school days, 18 hours per week).² Under 14, kids are limited to informal work: babysitting, yard work, newspaper delivery, and similar gigs. Here's what actually works at each stage.

Ages 6-9: first taste of earning

• Lemonade stand. The classic. Kids learn pricing, making change, and customer interaction. Average take: $10-50 per day depending on foot traffic.
• Pet sitting for neighbors. Feeding, watering, and playing with pets while families are away. $5-15 per visit.
• Crafts and art sales. Handmade cards, friendship bracelets, painted rocks. Sell at family events or to neighbors. $2-10 per item.
• Household tasks for pay. Taking out trash, sorting laundry, helping with groceries. A 2017 Junior Achievement survey found 82% of kids ages 7-10 earned allowance from chores.³

At this age, the money isn't the point. The connection between effort and reward is. They did a thing, they got paid. That's the foundation everything else gets built on.

Ages 10-12: real services, real clients

• Lawn care and yard work. Mowing, raking, weeding. $10-25 per job. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends age 12+ for push mowers.⁴
• Dog walking. $5-10 per walk. Build a regular route and you've got recurring revenue (that's a business concept most adults never learn).
• Tutoring younger kids. If your 11-year-old is strong in math or reading, they can tutor a 7-year-old. $10-15 per hour.
• Tech help for older adults. Setting up phones, explaining email, fixing printer issues. $10-15 per hour. Seniors love patient young tutors.
• Selling on Etsy (with a parent's account). Handmade jewelry, stickers, digital art. This is where the “earn while you sleep” idea starts to click.

Ages 13+: the options open up

• Babysitting. $10-25 per hour depending on the area and number of kids. Red Cross certification costs about $35 and makes parents way more comfortable hiring your teen.⁵
• Content creation. YouTube, TikTok, a blog. Ryan Kaji started reviewing toys on YouTube at age 4 and earned $27 million in 2021.⁶ That's an extreme example, but even small channels teach editing, marketing, and audience-building.
• Freelancing. Graphic design, video editing, basic coding. Platforms exist for this, but most teen freelancers start through word of mouth.
• Part-time jobs (14+). Retail, food service, grocery stores. Federal law allows it with hour restrictions: no more than 3 hours on a school day, 8 on a non-school day.²

A GoHenry report found that 25% of young people now want to start their own business rather than work for someone else, and 78% say it's important to earn their own money.⁷ The entrepreneurial instinct is already there. Your job is to not squash it.

The real question: what happens to your money?

This is where most guides end and where this one actually starts.

Your kid made $20. Three things can happen to it:

1. Spend it. It's gone. Maybe they got something good, maybe they can't remember what they bought by Thursday.
2. Save it in cash. Sounds responsible. But at 7% monetary inflation (Saylor's estimate based on money supply expansion, not the CPI number), that $20 has the purchasing power of about $14 in 5 years.⁸ You kept it. It shrank.
3. Convert it to something scarce. Something with a fixed supply that can't be diluted. Bitcoin, for example, is capped at 21 million. Nobody can print more.

We cover the saving vs. spending mechanics in our saving vs. spending lesson, and the inflation problem in our inflation explainer. The point here is simple: earning money is half the equation. Keeping its value is the other half.

What “21 ways to wealth” means for a kid

Michael Saylor laid out a framework called the “21 Ways to Wealth” for how ordinary people (not billionaires) can build generational prosperity.⁸ Most of it is aimed at adults. But a few pieces translate directly to kids.

• Earn hard. Be competitive at whatever you do. If you're mowing lawns, be the most reliable kid on the block. If you're tutoring, actually prepare. The cash flow comes from being good at your work.
• Save in something scarce. Don't let your earnings sit in a currency that loses 7% of its buying power every year. Convert excess cash into property that can't be inflated away.
• Build a skill nobody else has. Naval calls this “specific knowledge”: the stuff you can't be trained for, that feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else.¹ For a kid, that might be coding, video editing, 3D printing, or understanding how money works (which already puts them ahead of most adults).
• Cooperate with family. Saylor's point: you're more powerful with your family aligned around the same financial strategy.⁸ Grandparents have capital. Parents have credit. Kids have time. That combination is potent if everyone's rowing the same direction.
• Start something. Even a tiny business. The kid who sells stickers at school is learning pricing, supply, demand, and customer service. Those lessons compound for decades.

Permissionless leverage

This is Naval's most important idea for kids, even if they won't hear the term until they're older.

Old forms of leverage require permission. Labor leverage means convincing people to work for you. Capital leverage means convincing someone to give you money. A 10-year-old has access to neither.

But code and media are permissionless.¹ A kid with a YouTube channel has more leverage than a kid mowing lawns. The lawn kid trades one hour for one payment. The YouTube kid creates one video that can be watched 10,000 times. No boss. No gatekeeper. No permission needed.

Naval puts it bluntly: “An army of robots is freely available; it's just packed in data centers. Use it.”¹ A kid who learns to code or create media at 12 has a 6-year head start on their peers who start in college.

Does that mean every kid should start a YouTube channel? No. But it means you should at least show them the option exists. Some kids will light up. Let them run.

The first dollar you don't spend

Here's the moment that matters: your kid earns $20 and doesn't spend it. Not because you told them not to. Because they chose not to. They decided the $20 is worth more as future purchasing power than as a thing they'll forget about by next week.

That's delayed gratification in action. And it's the single most predictive financial habit a kid can develop.

The next question becomes: where does that $20 go? A jar on the dresser? A savings account earning 0.5% while inflation runs at 3-7%? Or into something designed to hold value over time? We walk through the options in our Bitcoin savings plan guide. And our Bitcoin for kids explainer covers the basics of what they'd actually be buying.

Try this at home: the “two paths” experiment

Ages 10+. Time: 10 minutes to set up, 30 days to run.

Give your kid $20. Tell them to split it:

• $10 goes into the “spend” pile. They can buy whatever they want, whenever they want.
• $10 goes into the “save” pile. It sits untouched for 30 days.

After 30 days, sit down together. Ask three questions:

1. What did you buy with the $10 you spent? Can you even remember?
2. How does it feel to still have $10 in the save pile?
3. If you could go back, would you split it differently?

Most kids will barely remember what they spent. The save pile will feel weirdly satisfying. That contrast is the whole lesson.

Bonus round (for kids 12+): look up what $10 would have been worth in Bitcoin 5 years ago. That tends to start a very different conversation.

Sources

1. Ravikant, Naval. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (2020), on permissionless leverage, specific knowledge, and “wealth is assets that earn while you sleep”
2. U.S. Department of Labor, Fact Sheet #43: Child Labor Provisions of the FLSA (minimum age 14 for formal employment, hour restrictions for 14-15 year olds)
3. Junior Achievement & Jackson, Youth & Financial Literacy Survey (2017), 82% of kids ages 7-10 earned allowance from chores
4. American Academy of Pediatrics, Safety Guidelines for Youth Lawn Care (recommends age 12+ for push mowers, 16+ for riding mowers)
5. American Red Cross, Babysitting & Child Care Training
6. Forbes, Highest-Paid YouTube Stars 2021 (Ryan Kaji, $27 million at age 10)
7. GoHenry, 2022 Youth Economy Report (25% of kids aspire to start their own business; 78% say it's important to earn their own money)
8. Saylor, Michael. “21 Ways to Wealth” (2025), on DCA, cooperation, capability, and saving in scarce assets