Starting an ATM business with $5,000......$50,000
Birthday recently just passed. Got gifted $5,000 by a friend. Honest to god, I typically blow my money on dumb shit but for once I was thinking, why not use these funds to start an ATM business, start small and place it in those inner city borough stores/shops in NY that only takes cash? Has anyone else thought about doing this? You know, gathering a bunch of your pals to each chip in $5,000 until you raise a fund of lets say, $50,000 and really do this shit big. How profitable is the ATM business in NYC?
Sounds like an interesting hustle. I’d say fuck it and do it, but don’t have any experience in this myself so perhaps research more.
Definitely a great idea.
I heard that you can make on average $180-$360 a month from just one ATM machine. If you buy 40 used machines and allocate the rest of the capital to invest in actually populating the machines with cash, you can make roughly $7,200/month (being conservative with $180/month profit from each machine), just by utilizing the same funds over and over again. That's a 14.4% return on your original $50k investment, in just one month alone.
The problem would lie in actually finding those shops/stores, and convincing the owners tket you put a machine there. Also tax stuff. You don't want the IRS coming for you. Oh, and don't get robbed in the inner boroughs when you're refilling the machines up with cash. Take a gun with you.
Overall, good hustle.
That’s actually pretty decent, I can’t think of too many investments that net a return like that, only other one I can think of one is rental property in a lower cost market. But yeah, I’d imagine actually getting a good location is tough. Seems like a good side hustle, scale seems tough though.
I recommend you act like you're robbing the machine, that way people won't mess with you.
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I'm going to be stupidly a negative Nancy here, but hopefully also a voice of reason.
I maybe pull $60 or so out once a month from my bank ATM, which is free. I'll maybe spend $20 on Chinese at the good local cash only place, and lend a friend $20 to buy weed with. (I don't smoke, it just tastes nasty to me, although I can build a pretty nasty gravity bong)
You're going to deal with lower income neighborhoods, costs to shopkeepers to park the ATM there, and both insurance fees, and significant costs when people decide to f*** with them. (do you think the bodega owner will care? it's yours not his) Don't ignore these costs. Carting thousands of dollars around isn't free either. Banks deal with this by doing it in bulk with well designed policies. A bodega ATM? not so much.
the ATM machine will cost you around $3,000...that is a sunk cost
then you will need $2-3,000 per week to stock the machine.
Assume you make $200/month based on $10,000 of cash taken from the machine
200/10,000 = 2% per month * 12 = 24% per year.
however, remember the $3,000 you spent to buy the machine...at $200/month revenue you will need 15 months of operation to pay for the initial equipment cost
That is indeed a good business in the ong run if you are stocking the machines yourself...but to scale and make this your fulltime income, ($10,000 per month) you will need 50 machines = 50 * $3,000 = $150,000 just to buy the machines....and then cash to stock the machines ($2,000 * 50 = $100,000 per week)
So, this business has an initial operating requirement of $250,000 (and that assumes you will be stocking the cash in the machines yourself every week)
What would be the business insurance on this operation? i imagine pretty high...you gonna get robbed at some point...
I have a friend who owns around a dozen of these. The key is being friends with management / owners of high-traffic destinations where people need cash. If you aren’t already connected in the nightlife world, it’s going to be pretty hard to break in. Small convenience stores and bodegas are fine, but fee-sensitive people pulling out $5-$50 at a time are a lot less lucrative than drunks pulling out a few hundred and not worrying about the cost.
At any rate, don’t forget that cash is a dying business. It’s not going away tomorrow, but it’s been increasingly less relevant over the past decade and the pandemic has only accelerated this trend - most people I know carry little-to-no cash, and I barely even use physical credit cards these days; it’s all about Apple Pay and Venmo/Zelle for mobile payments
I was looking in to crypto atm's recently. I was looking in to a well known franchise but the poor English on their website put me off somewhat. lets discuss.
I assume you're a Brit given your profile pic. A new law was passed last year that requires people buying from crypto ATMs to provide a lot of identifying information - picture of ID, face, email, name, DoB. Some ATMs even have a fingerprint scanner.
Since the only advantage of crypto ATMs was anonymity, the crypto ATM business in the UK is dead imo.
you recon? what about the coinbase speculators?
calc if in the US
https://coinatmradar.com/roi/bitcoin_atm_business_return_on_investment/
I thought about doing this 10 years ago but I was sure that within a few years we'd be, more or less, a cashless society. Instead, paper money still persists in the U.S. I still think it's a bad long-term business to be in.
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