Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I'm always looking for an EZ retirement job. Minimal skill. Minimal investment. Work as many days as I want. Something where I can work outside (I live in San Diego) and make about $1000 a day. Well I think I found such a job today.
I had my home windows rescreened this morning. Our sun beats the hell out of window screens and after a few years they need to be replaced.
So I hired a very reputable window re-screener. Joe (not his real name) is 72 years old and works out of his truck. Totally self-contained. No helpers or assistants. Everything he needed was in that truck.
He rescreened my entire house (about 10 windows), 2 large patio door screens and 3 small bathroom screens. It took him 3 hours which included 1/2 hour for lunch. My bill? $450 (pre-negotiated in advance).
So I asked Joe "How many jobs do you do in a day?" Usually about 3 jobs. My wife sets my schedule and I usually make it home in time for dinner.
$450 per home X 3 homes = $1,350. Being a little more bold, I asked Joe how much screening material he used on my house. He got out his smartphone, pressed a few buttons, and said "about $100". I must have looked stunned because Joe said "a good window re-screener can gross about $1.25M a year."
When Joe left, I did a little research on "window rescreening in retirement." There are a few articles floating around the Internet but this is a pretty good one: https://www.fixingscreens.com/best-s...-to-start.html
I'm going to talk with the young guy who cleans our windows. I need to know his opinion.
Anybody know of any other EZ $1M a year retirement jobs?
Sounds like a come on. The link is a sales job. The math does not add up. Even at the figures quoted if they guy worked 365 days a year the gross is a half a million. If this was such a great gig everybody would be doing it. Say you went out and did one job in a day and made $500. After labor, materials, and losing a retirement day you could have been fishing you may make $400. You would have to be in a major city to have enough work to be busy more than a couple of days a week. Now you are down to the 40k a year range. Plus it does not sound easy to me. Outdoors in weather, dealing with bugs, hauling ladders, being alone working on ladders, dealing with obnoxious home owners, and on top of that the business end of billing, getting stiffed with bad checks, having to sue deadbeats, taxes, you name it. There are better things to do in retirement. I plan on fishing, not working.
You said you hired a reputable re-screener - how did you find him and how did he become reputable?
If you started doing this today and spent the next few days getting you gear in order to start in a week and a half so you could spend next week lining up customers, how would you do that? If you were successful at lining up 2 jobs a day the following week, how would you keep getting work for the following week while working? Obviously it can be done, but getting it started is not simple.
Speaking of not simple, I worked in a window screen factory one summer. I mostly stuck frames - getting the different length pieces that had been cut and putting the corner pieces in to assemble the frames for whatever sizes the warehouse sent orders for. That was nasty work; I would have oil and aluminum "dust" up to my elbows after a while. Other times I boxed. I tried rolling screens; they let almost every one try in case they were good at it. I wasn't. It's harder than you might think to make sure you have the screen right so that the grid is square with the frame, keep the screen tight enough that there is no sagging but not so tight that it pulls the screen out of square. If you get a belly in it, it has to be redone. You have to do this while rolling in the spline, which also requires feeding out the spline as you roll it in. So you have to make 2 hands do the work of 3. Most people can only roll with their dominant hand, so it is the non dominant hand that needs to do 2 things at once. You have to be reasonably quick and not have a high rate of waste.
So I disagree with your assumption that it is not a job requiring skill/dexterity.
Many jobs look easier than they really are until you try doing them yourself. His job is one of skilled labor. It's not something you just go out and do. He probably has many years of experience giving his clients a clean and well done screen replacement.
As someone else also mentioned, any job dealing with the general public can be quite difficult. You will have the occasional customer that will complain about your work no matter how good you are at it and make demands that you give a discount and threaten you with really bad yelp reviews or post something on facebook telling the world who you are and never to hire you.
Good luck with it.
There are many jobs out there that require personal service, skill, and knowledge about how to efficiently solve a problem for a home owner.
One advantage to those types of jobs is that they cannot be easily out sourced. These might be ideal for a young person developing a business that can grow by word of mouth advertising.
However, they are not retirement jobs. Either you are retired or you are not.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
44,576 posts, read 81,186,228 times
Reputation: 57813
At 66 now I wouldn't want to spend my day on a ladder, and can't imagine doing it at 70. I have made and replaced screens before, it is an easy DIY project if the house is single story. It's hard to imagine that he would get that many jobs, but it depends a lot on the area. Here the homes are mostly hitting the 30 year age, and people are replacing the entire windows, not the screens. We just did ours in May for triple pane, about $15,000. They, including the screens, are guaranteed 30 years.
The best jobs for retirees are those where you set your own schedule, work when you want and can go off on vacations whenever without being tied down, or at least having seasonal work. That would include Christmas tree lot attendant, tax preparer, selling at a farmer's market, or making and selling crafts online.
EZ? Are you kidding? How many older Americans of retirement age can easily work a physical job as if they were still in their 20s? Climbing and hauling stuff up & down ladders, dealing with bugs, sun, rain, wind, etc. doesn't sound easy to me.
If I do any work after retiring from my full time job, it will probably be some that follows me home. I do a number of different things and one of them is small MS Office development projects. I wouldn't be surprised if they keep farming out small stuff my way partly because I have done a good job and partly to keep me around for questions about the stuff I spend most of my time on.
I'm always looking for an EZ retirement job. Minimal skill. Minimal investment. Work as many days as I want. Something where I can work outside (I live in San Diego) and make about $1000 a day. Well I think I found such a job today.
I had my home windows rescreened this morning. Our sun beats the hell out of window screens and after a few years they need to be replaced.
So I hired a very reputable window re-screener. Joe (not his real name) is 72 years old and works out of his truck. Totally self-contained. No helpers or assistants. Everything he needed was in that truck.
He rescreened my entire house (about 10 windows), 2 large patio door screens and 3 small bathroom screens. It took him 3 hours which included 1/2 hour for lunch. My bill? $450 (pre-negotiated in advance).
So I asked Joe "How many jobs do you do in a day?" Usually about 3 jobs. My wife sets my schedule and I usually make it home in time for dinner.
$450 per home X 3 homes = $1,350. Being a little more bold, I asked Joe how much screening material he used on my house. He got out his smartphone, pressed a few buttons, and said "about $100". I must have looked stunned because Joe said "a good window re-screener can gross about $1.25M a year."
When Joe left, I did a little research on "window rescreening in retirement." There are a few articles floating around the Internet but this is a pretty good one: https://www.fixingscreens.com/best-s...-to-start.html
I'm going to talk with the young guy who cleans our windows. I need to know his opinion.
Anybody know of any other EZ $1M a year retirement jobs?
I just re-screened three of my own windows this summer in about an hour and it cost me less than $15 for a roll of screen material, and $5 for spline. You got ripped off. I've been redoing my own screens in their existing frames forever. Not hard at all. Getting the screens up and down might be tricky on a second floor for some retirees. Some jobs we'll pay for, but this is one that you could certainly attempt yourself if you have access.
Last edited by TheShadow; 10-31-2018 at 07:49 AM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
