Ask HN: How would you make $100k fast?

Join a FAANG, investment banking / finance or a company with a high TC. [0]

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With zero financial investment, I assume that also means no capital assets of any kind. That excludes land, commodities, resources, labor contracts, securities, etc.

I will assume subsistence is available.

With that said, you only have labor and ingenuity. The ingenuity is required to identify something valuable (scarce, in high demand, etc.) from an economic standpoint.

The labor is initially focused on earning enough capital to acquire the necessary tools. Then, that will enable the labor required to make something of value that can be sold for more capital.

The question of time is unanswerable, because it depends on too many factors.

Interesting. Would you use the same approach for $1M instead of $100k?

Be lucky.

I don't mean to be flippant, but given the constraints, your speed will be almost entirely proportional to luck/risk.

To start, all you have is labor to bootstrap with. So let's say for round numbers $10 / hour, at 40 hours per week is $400. or $1600 for one month. That puts you six "doublings" away from $100K after one month.

Go to Vegas, bet it all on black (or red, your choice) and win 6 times in a row, and done. 1 month of labor + a few minutes of very lucky gambling. Or, a single bet that pays off 62.5 to 1. While the odds are the same it probably seems more "practical" to win "just" two 8:1 bets back to back.

Investments, options tradings, sports betting, etc will all be some variation of this. Get really lucky, and it can be done in a short time, but with a high risk that you have to start over, and it ends up taking a longer time overall.

More realistically, if OP can put all that labor money into investment/savings (assume subsistence is supported otherwise) The standard advice to buy and hold low/no- fee index funds could do it in about 5 years (on average).

https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calcula...

400 initial, $1600 / month, 5 years, assume 7% yearly growth +/- 2% variance.

Finally, OP says "zero financial investment" - but what other resources do they have? Perhaps the sunk cost of education or training or other skills. Then, their labor might be worth $100 / hour, instead of $10. Get a high-paying job.

Then you could make it in 6 months of straight labor income without risk of investment or gambling losses.

All the above is wildly speculative, and not investment advice, and somewhat US-centric, and contains completely implausible numbers and assumptions, but is an honest attempt to quantify an answer to the question.

Looking up the stats, there were 1,788 bank robberies in 2020. There's probably an SOP to robbing banks by now, and a SOP to dealing with them.

Tellers are trained to be very polite to bank robbers, which throws them off. Most bank robberies don't even involve a gun right away. They're written notes asking for smaller amounts of money. The clearance rate is 60% which means about 40% don't get caught.

However, before anyone sets down this path, you should probably consider that it might be easier to make $100k just working at a bank.