I arrived at an odd conclusion this morning. Laziness is the only reason I don't have a lot of money. I figured this out by typing "how to get free money" into a search engine, which in this case happens to be Bing. I expected a few results. There were 120 million of them.
The first one said, "Get free money! Make 25 to 150 dollars in the next one hour!" This sounded like something I might enjoy, so I clicked on the link. It took me to a website called "Survey Money Machines", where I read that there are hundreds of marketing research companies who want to pay me for my opinion. I bookmarked it and moved on.
The next result stated, "Get free government money! Receive up to 50-thousand dollars in grants!" I didn't click on the link. At some point in the past, I possessed one of those books Matthew Lesko used to advertise on TV which listed hundreds of reasons the government (which is deeply in debt) will give you free money. As I perused the book, I remember figuring out that I didn't qualify for any of them.
The next result read, "How to get money for free – eHow.com." I became interested when I read this: "There are lots of ways to get money for free. Remember that free means without cost. Working or time of any kind is a cost. Contrary to the way most free money articles are written, this article will stick to things that really are free." Jackpot, I thought. It wasn't. The article had only four suggestions: Look through your couch cushions, check the return slot of pay phones, clean out your car, and my favorite, ask someone for money. In other words, you can either scrounge or beg. And finding pay phones in 2013 also sounded like a lot of work.
I decided to check just one more link before wrapping up the search. But then I got sidetracked by a headline that said, "How to get free cable." It was a set of instructions about how to hook up your computer to your TV and get perfectly legal free cable. I lost interest, because my computer at home is an HP laptop, and it overheats and shuts off after five minutes of normal operation. Then I remembered I haven't done my taxes yet. I do them electronically, and I need to start now, because it takes awhile to finish them when you do the whole thing in five-minute spurts.
Anyway, I don't think I'm going to get free money, and the main reason is that I'm far too lazy to check all 120 million search results, even though I'm positive there's a gem of a website out there somewhere that won't turn out to be pure bologna. But I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be in the first 100 million.
