17 Ways To Make $20 Fast, Instantly (Get 20 Dollars Right Now)

We all know the feeling. Maybe it’s that new book you’ve been eyeing, a surprise date night, or just the need to top up your weekly budget – sometimes, you just need to make 20 dollars, and you need it fast.

Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered. Below are some tried-and-true methods to help you pocket that $20 instantly. Whether it’s tapping into online opportunities, leveraging your hobbies, or exploring quick gigs, there’s something for everyone.

Think about your free hours, what you love doing, and how you can mix and match these ways to get that quick cash. Before you know it, you’ll have that $20 in hand!

How to Make 20 Dollars Fast, Almost Instantly

  1. Online Surveys
  2. Sell Gift Cards
  3. Sell Electronics
  4. Signup Bonuses
  5. Delivering Food Via a Food Delivery App
  6. Save Money In Your Budget
  7. Babysitting and Pet Sitting
  8. Get a New Credit Card
  9. Driving For Uber
  10. Take On A Freelance Job
  11. TaskRabbit
  12. Sell Old Textbooks
  13. Plasma Sales
  14. Testing a Website
  15. Sell Stock Images
  16. Offer a Service on Fiverr
  17. Reddit SlaveLabour

So, you’ve been asking yourself: “How can I get $20?”, “How to make 20 dollars today?”, “How can I make 20 dollars right now?”, “How can I make 20 dollars fast?”, “How to make 20 dollars right now?”, “How to 20 dollars a day, consistently?”, “I need $20 now”, “How to make 20 dollars per day?”, “How to get $20 instantly?”…

Don’t worry. I’ve got you covered.

Our Favorite Side Hustles

Download these apps and make extra cash in your spare time. Get paid to complete surveys or take photos around your city.

  • Survey Junkie
  • 20M+ members
  • Average survey payout is $.50 – $3.00
  • Make money in your spare time
  • Trustpilot rating of 4.5/5 from more than 30k+ reviews
  • Branded Surveys
  • Earn up to $5 per Survey
  • Share your opinion on products or services
  • Over 50,000 five-star ratings
  • Get PayPal cash or direct deposit

Online Surveys

Your opinion actually matters! A lot of companies have a desire to hear from you on the various products and even marketing strategies that they are considering.

They don’t do this just to flatter you. Rather, they are actually curious about what your thoughts are because this may help them make better decisions about which products or ideas they want to bring to the market.

Online surveys do not pay much for each survey that is taken, but they are a great way to earn some quick cash to get you through a crisis. There are also some websites that will allow you to do some work outside of just simple survey taking as well.

They may include small tasks such as watching a video or searching for a website for some piece of information. These are easy tasks that virtually anyone can do, but they pay a few dollars for your participation anyway. Some of these websites include the following:

how to make $20 immidiately

Sell Gift Cards

Gift cards are a common gift of choice from those who may not know what else to get a person. It seems a little thoughtless in a way to sell these off, but the gift-giver generally will have no idea that you have done so anyway.

The point is that you should have access to funds that will be useful to you. If someone gets you a gift card for a shop that you do not consume at, then what is the point? The gift is practically worthless to you.

That being said, this gift still has value to someone in the public. There are buyers out there who will pay cash for a gift card to a particular location.

They are not looking to pay even money on it of course, but they can still give you a good deal for what amounts to a gift that has no value to you.

On a $30 gift card, they may give you $20. That is how you can get 20 dollars in 5 minutes. It may already exist in your wallet even if you don’t realize it.

Check out: 6 Places to Sell Gift Cards for PayPal Cash Instantly

Sell Electronics

Another great way to make some extra money is to sell off extra electronics that you have lying around the house. You can make $20 fast by looking at some of the oldest electronics that you have that you are not getting any value out of at the time being.

Think about all of those products that you purchased at some point with a sense of excitement about them. You probably had a good reason for buying those things at the time, but now they seem a bit out of date. They may still have a lot of value to someone out there though.

Thus, you should look at what you have in the electronics realm and see what you could possibly do away with.

make 20 dollars instantly

A lot of people sell off old gaming consoles or even DVDs and CDs. These items have lost their value to the seller, but a buyer can help them make 20 fast and get other priorities taken care of now.

Try selling on eBay, Facebook Marketplace, or on your other favorite website or app. If you need to make 20 dollars fast the same day, you can also visit a pawn shop to see what they’ll pay you for it.

Signup Bonuses

One of the easiest ways to earn $20 right now is by signing up for websites that offer welcome bonuses. Just by registering on certain websites, you can earn instant cash. For instance:

  • Branded Surveys: Sign up and instantly get 100 points, equivalent to $1. Reach their $5 threshold and cash out straight to PayPal.
  • Acorns: This top-rated investing app gifts you a $10 bonus simply for linking your bank account.
  • Swagbucks: Shop and spend $25 to bag a cool $10 bonus.
  • Rakuten: Join, shop, and enjoy a generous $30 bonus after your first purchase.

It’s that simple. Sign up, earn, and enjoy your bonuses!

Delivering Food Via a Food Delivery App

You might not have considered yourself to be someone in the business of delivering food, but a lot of people are making money doing exactly that.

Food delivery apps such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Instacart have exploded in popularity, and this means increased opportunities for people to get involved with a little side-gig work delivering food.

Some people even make this their full-time occupation, but it is definitely a great way to make 20 instantly.

use food delivery apps to earn money quickly

Just a few orders on a food delivery app like DoorDash is really all you need to generate around twenty dollars. You can do that on a lazy afternoon if you have a little spare time on your hands.

The even better news is that the food delivery apps are working on ways to get the money out to their drivers in faster ways than ever before.

Save Money In Your Budget

There is probably some extra money lying around in your budget if you take a chainsaw to it. You have to get serious about your savings if you want to see extra funds generated.

Consider using some smartphone apps to make your moves now. A few of the most popular apps that help people save money include Trim, Digit, and Mint.

Each of these is perfectly suited to help the user find extra room in their budget to trim it down.

Getting twenty dollars squeezed out of your budget is a matter of figuring out where you are spending the extra funds today and also looking at getting your behavior under control. Both of those elements are usually enough to figure out how to get 20 dollars in 5 minutes.

Babysitting and Pet Sitting

This activity remains a popular way to generate income quickly. Babysitting (or pet sitting) is a great way to free up time for the person paying for the service.

They need the extra time away from some of their responsibilities, and they are willing to pay some money to make that happen. Those who do the watching of those children or pets get some quick cash in their pocket right away.

make $20 immidiately with pet sitting

There are a lot of apps one can use to find a sitting job if they so choose. It is always a good idea to try to do the sitting for someone that you know directly, but this is not a requirement.

Instead, a lot of people like to use an app such as Rover for dog walking or Care.com to find jobs watching people’s children.

Both apps continue to see high demand for sitters, and both present the sitter with the amount of funds that they will receive from the work that they do. It is all laid out there right from the top so that there are no questions asked.

Get a New Credit Card

This sounds like an odd recommendation to be sure. Why would someone open a new line of credit if their intent was to get money quickly?

The answer is simply that they can choose to draw cash off of that credit card rather easily. Most of the cards have a limit on how much cash may be drawn off of the line of credit, but that limit is often generous, and this is a fantastic way you can solve the question of how to get 20 dollars in 5 minutes.

Check with the credit card provider to see if you qualify and what all of the terms and interest rates will look like on that card. Those are important things to think about as you never know what could be hidden in the small print if you don’t take the time to go over it all. Check that out before making this leap.

Driving For Uber

Do you own your own vehicle? You could use it to make the funds that you need right now.

It is probably not the first time that you have heard of the concept of driving for Uber, but how much weight have you really given to it? That is what you need to think about. There are opportunities to drive for Uber, and they are growing.

People who need some quick money are often more than happy to pick up a few passengers and take them where they need to go in order to get the quick cash that they have earned. Uber drivers report that they can earn as much as an average of $18 per hour when they work during peak hours.

That is great because it will get you to your goal of earning $20 very quickly. Uber also often provides rewards and benefits for completing a certain number of rides within a given time period after you get started.

Additionally, don’t forget that many customers tip for the services that they receive. It can make this job well worth your time.

Take On A Freelance Job

The Internet offers more opportunities than ever to find freelance work for a skill that you possess. Perhaps you are a good writer, artist, or photographer. Those are all skills that other people are willing to pay money to you to complete for them.

Some people have used a website known as Fiverr to offer various services that they provide in order to make $20 immediately.

They can either charge a full $20 for a service that is a bit more in-depth or valuable, or they may choose to charge the bare minimum of $5 per task and simply complete at least four of those tasks in a short period of time to make the $20 that they need today.

TaskRabbit

Among the ways that you can figure out how to make 20 fast online is to go to a website like TaskRabbit. This is a place where you can offer to take care of small tasks for strangers to earn your money.

They might want you to do anything from leaving a review on a product to going out to do some personal shopping for them. The thing about TaskRabbit is that these are very short tasks that only take a few minutes to complete.

The tasks don’t pay all that much individually, but they can add up quickly. You are taking on these little pieces of work that someone else doesn’t want to do or doesn’t have the time to do. It is saving them precious moments, and they will pay for that.

You get the nice benefit of having helped someone out and earning them back some of the time they would have otherwise lost. It is a service to both the person who performs the task and the person for whom the task is performed.

Check out: Thumbtack vs TaskRabbit: Which is Better?

Sell Old Textbooks

There is a huge market for old college textbooks. The demand for this material is practically always going to be there, and the value of these textbooks only continues to rise year after year.

Makers of the textbooks seem to be able to charge just about whatever they want for them, and students have to pay up to get the materials they need.

The old textbooks that you have in your home probably have enough value to get you a quick twenty dollars at the very least.

They may have a lot more value even than that! You could be sitting on a lot of extra cash and not even realize it. Why wouldn’t you take the opportunity to get that money out of the books and into your account?

Plasma Sales

Those who really need cash quickly may decide to sell their plasma. They are permitted to do this, and many are paid around $20 to $50 per donation.

They can do so every few days or whatever the local regulations allow. The donation of plasma is not dangerous to your health, but the feelings of fatigue or dehydration are possible side-effects of this process.

It is important to consider all of your potential health conditions and well as other options before you jump immediately to plasma sales. Still, it is definitely a great way to get the money that you need today.

Extra reading: 10 Highest Paying Plasma Donation Centers

Testing a Website

Finally, there are some websites in need of testers to see how they are working. There is money in testing out a website for users. Basically, you’ll get paid to use the internet.

This work is best done by someone who has at least some background in information technology (IT), but this is not a hard and fast requirement. Anyone who has some spare time to watch a video about a website and then go to test the elements that the video asks for can make some money.

The videos are usually around 20 minutes on UserTesting, and the payout is $10 on PayPal once the testing has been completed.

You can quickly make two or perhaps three $10 payments to your PayPal account in about an hour. That is a very quick way to make the $20 you need online!

Sell Stock Images

Got a talent for photography? You can create a source of passive income by selling your images on stock photo sites. Try to think of content that won’t have a lot of competition, not just generic photos. 

Three of the best sites to sell stock images include:

Offer a Service on Fiverr

Fiverr is a popular freelance website where you can offer to complete tasks for people, from simple ones to complex.

For instance, you can write articles for people, design a logo for a website, or edit videos or podcasts for someone, and the list goes on and on.

You can easily make $20 fast from relatively simple tasks on Fiverr! Read more about how to start making money on Fiverr without any skills and how I made $200 in the first week.

Reddit SlaveLabour

SlaveLabour is a subreddit where you can get paid for doing various, mostly odd tasks such as downloading photos, adding captions, data collection, making YouTube thumbnails, logo design and similar.

You’ll get paid via Amazon gift cards, PayPal or CashApp.

More From Dollar Sanity:

5 Ways to Get Paid Watching Movies On Netflix

8 Places to Sell Amazon Gift Cards Online Instantly

10 to Make $30 a Day In Your Spare Time

Leave a Comment