It depends how much hustle you have. On the streets, you survive by hustling, by making quick, often shady or sketchy deals. This is the only way to quickly parlay small sums of money into much larger amounts. Hustling doesn’t scale well, since you start running into legal problems if you try it on any scale larger than a few thousand dollars.
I used to make a small living by hustling. The thing about hustling is that it requires a lot of work, a lot of energy, and a lot of imagination, since you have to work fast and you’re never doing the same thing twice. I can give you a few examples of things I’ve hustled over the years.
I was in a department store in Vancouver and saw some leather belts on sale for 50 cents each. It was clearly a loss leader to get rid of some old stock. I had $20 in my pocket, and I scooped up as many as I could afford. I had my itinerant’s license (it was $90 for a whole year) which made it legal for me to sell door to door, for just these sorts of opportunities. I spent an afternoon going door to door selling the belts for $5 apiece and turned my $20 into $200. Then I took my $200 and made a bulk purchase of some incense for 25 cents a pack and went door to door selling it for $1 a pack, for 3 for $2. I now had enough money to pay my rent, plus a little bit left over to start the whole thing over again.
Over the years I’ve hustled everything from cleaning supplies (I had an ‘in’ with a professional chemist who sold me small quantities of industrial-grade janitorial chemicals at wholesale) to erotica. You’ll never get rich this way, but you can quickly double or triple a small sum of money in a short period of time by hustling. If you try to hustle larger amounts, you’ll start cutting the grass of the shitbag capitalists who run our society, at which point they’ll use their pet politicians and police to crush you under taxation and city bylaws. You have to make sure you nibble small enough amounts that you’re beneath their notice.