One of the most commonly asked questions by players new to Torn is 'how do I make money?' People see other players rocking powerful weapons and millions of dollars at just a few days of age, yet they only have a couple hundred bucks from selling bootlegged DVDs, so how do they do it?

It may not be as obvious as you think. Doing small crimes, selling shoplifted good back to the city, and mugging people (at least at low stats) aren't actually very good ways of amassing money. This guide only touching on many possible ways. If you want detail, the guides linked below are where you should be headed!

Keep in mind that any prices listed in this guide were accurate at the time of writing, and may no longer be accurate. Remember to do your research!

If you're new, I also very strongly recommend reading my other guide, Kayla's New Player Starter Guide/FAQ! It will help you get started off right, and help you avoid a lot of common mistakes.

Ahab's fantastic Guide List has a whole section on many guides that can help you with money, just scroll down to the '$$$' section.

But before I tell you how to make money, you'll want to know how to keep it once you have it. So I'm going to make a quick mention of...


Protecting your money

In Torn, you're going to be mugged. Prepare for this, and always try to keep as little cash on hand as possible to that the muggers get next to nothing. There are a lot of ways you can stash your cash on Torn, and they're not all obvious, so make sure you know how!

Here's a post from Baldr's Guide on how to Store your money and Destroys guide to money protection.

If you can successfully minimise your losses from mugging, all you really need to be bothered about is your hospital stay, which can be fixed with medical items from the item market. Always keep a healthy stock of these in your items, you'll never known when you're going to need them.

Now, on with the actual guide!






Selling losses

Also known as 'slutting' this is when a player pays another to attack them and deliberately lose, so that they can increase their 'defends won' stat. For a player starting from nothing, this is the easiest way to quickly build your cash and get yourself some weapons, armor and drugs to start off with. However, it's not recommended long term, as every loss sold is energy not spent in the gym, which harms your long term gains. Early on though, this is viable as a quick short-term injection of cash, each sold loss can net you at least $250,000. This is enough to get you the essentials you'll need to start (weapons, property rental money, first aid kits) but don't rely on this a your way to earn cash.

To sell a loss, advertise what you're doing in the Trade chat, look for ads for people buying them, and check out the Attacking forum.

Before starting, it's a good idea to get yourself a few medical items like first aid kits so that you can get yourself out of hospital after losing the fight. If you sell a loss and have none, you're going to have to wait out the hospital timer.

How to be a Slut by TheDarkLegacy

Kobie's guide to slutting (Done the right way) by Kobie



Flying

This is the big one. When a player asks how to make a lot of money, flying is the most common thing you'll be recommended. By travelling, you can make $5 million+ a day if you do it enough, but like most money making methods, you'll get out what you put in.

The short version is once you reach level 15, you unlock the ability to use the Travel Agency. From here, you can travel to other counties. It will take some time to reach these destinations, but once you arrive, you should buy flowers or plushies and then return to Torn. (Do this quick, as if you get mugged abroad you cannot med out.) When you're back in Torn, these items can be sold at a large profit either to other players directly, or on the item market.

Keep in mind that your gameplay will be quite limited while travelling, and you'll be unable to access most pages, however the chats, forums, and player profiles all remain unblocked, but you won't be able to attack anyone, use the gym, or do crimes.

This guide will explain how to profit from travelling better. iribuya's Visual Guide To Flying by iribuya



Trading

Trading can make you a lot of money, and is definitely capable of making you very rich, however it is risky, requires a lot of time, and needs you to already have a bit of money. The premise is simple. Buy low, sell high. Purchase items, and sell them for a higher price than you bought them. Consumable items will be the best reliable, as people always need more of them. Stuff like medical items, drugs, alcohol. The profit margins may be small, but when selling in large quantities, you will start to see your available cash increase.

Buying a bazaar from the points building will allow you to skip the item market fee, allowing you to make more money, and sell more items in a shorter time. Keep in mind this method comes with the risk of being mugged. There are other guides that explain trading in great detail, so definitely read those if you wish to try this method of making money. When it comes to trading, as a new player your best place to start will be with items from city stores, explained below!

A Trader's guide to $1,000,000,000 by Jorgy411



City Stores

When buying items from the stores on the city map, you have a daily limit of 100 items, and the stores have a limited supply that is shared between all players in Torn. This means that for some items, the demand greatly exceeds the supply, and those items can be sold for a great deal more than you can buy them. The profit here is small, but it's very easy money and costs you next to nothing.

Try buying 100 beers, bricks or sheep/teddy/kitten plushies from bits n bobs, pepper spray from Big Als, or lollipops from the sweet shop. Then you can sell them on the item market (or preferably directly to another player through trade) for slightly under what the cheapest price is, and you should be able to sell them for a profit.



Jobs/Companies

Jobs and companies are not always a good source of money, however they still get an honorable mention. The starter jobs of Army/Grocer/Casino give you very very little money. While you can stay in these jobs for a while to gain work stats, it's beneficial to find a player-run company to work in as soon as possible. However, you should expect to work for very little to no pay in companies that have useful job specials. You may be able to negotiate yourself a much higher wage. Keep in mind when you are new, you will have extremely low working stats, so the best companies won't want to hire you. But someone likely will. Try asking in the trade chat, or look in the company recruitment forum for companies that are hiring. A sweet shop is a solid choice, if you can get into one, because it will give you cans.



Cans

If you reach the max rank of the starter grocer job or work in a sweet shop company (minimum 7?) you can get cans of energy drinks with you job points. Energy drinks are consumable items that can sell for around 2 million dollars for the cheapest can, making them a great way to get some income if you can get into the company. Try messaging the directors of 7* sweet shop companies to see if they're willing to take you in.



Blood Bags

Once you've completed the Introduction to Biology, and the Intravenous Therapy education courses, you get the ability to fill empty blood bags at the cost of 20% of your life and 3 hours of medical booster cooldown. With a standard 24 hours of medical cooldown, you can fill 8 blood bags a day. When you use an empty blood bag from your items, it will become a filled blood bag of your blood type. There's no way to change your blood type, and you'll only find out your blood type when you fill a bag. Each blood type sells for different amounts of cash, but you can make profit with any of them.



Discord Giveaways

While I don't recommend you try to use this as a method of actually earning money, I'm mentioning this just for the social benefit. Torn has many fan servers on Discord, and many of them often host lottos and giveaways (especially around holidays). It can be worth joining these servers and entering them in case you win anything, but if you never do anything besides hang around for the free stuff, you're probably going to get some angry looks (and your ass kicked). Torn is an MMO, be social! Join them, have fun, make some friends, and make a little money on the side.

Discord forums



Donator packs

It's not necessary to spend real world money on Torn. Some of the richest players in the entire game have spent next to nothing on Torn. However, this is an option for those who wish to do so. Donator Packs can be bought with real money, and those items can be sold either to the Pawn Shop or to other players for around $25 million.



Graphics

If you're good at art, or have some skill in image manipulation, there are a lot of players out there who like to buy profile pictures, profile/forum signatures, company banners, etc. If you know your way around photoshop or a paintbrush, you can sell your talent for torn dollars on the Graphics forum!



Torn City Investment Banking

The bank in Torn doesn't work like the bank in most games. In the Torn bank, you put in an amount of money for a set period of time, and you can't withdraw your money before that point. While you're new and don't have a lot, I recommend just putting your cash in for one or two weeks, as each time you'll be putting more money in that you gained in the mean time. The max this bank can hold is 2 billion, at which point it becomes most profitable to take the 2 month option. Merits in banking make a massive difference here, so if you're using the bank be sure to upgrade it a bit. You might not be making huge money here while you're new, but it's basically free money.



Selling your bounty slots

A single player can only have 10 active bounties placed at any one time. Players who like to place a lot of bounties on other people may want to have more than 10 bounties, and so they will pay other players to place more bounties on someone on their behalf, giving them a small fee for the trouble. Not a bad little extra, if you can find someone who wants to buy your slots, just beware of retaliation!



Odd Jobs

This newspaper article on Odd Jobs in Torn City is an interesting read, and may give you a few ideas!






Crimes

Crimes are important to Torn. They're the single largest source of merits in the game. However, they're not a very good source of income, especially at low levels. Of all the crimes you may be able to do, shoplifting boxes of chocolates from the sweet shop can bag you items worth $2,800~ each. This is the only crime that's slightly profitable when you're new, however the jails resulting from this crime will impact your Crime Experience, and make it hard to move up the crimes ladder. Stick to stealing as many jackets as possible from the clothes store once you have enough crime experience to reliably do so, as even the jackets can be sold for $700 each. However, even reaching the point you need to be at to succeed at these crimes will take some time working on the easier crimes.



Mugging

Mugging can be good money, but you need to know what you're doing. You need to know when people are carrying large amounts of money, or get very lucky. Mugging random players in the New Player's Chat isn't really going to for for you. When you have low stats, finding anyone worth spending the 25 energy needed to mug isn't going to be easy. You might get 100k if you're lucky, but since you can sell a loss for at least 250k, there's not much point unless your mugs are consistently getting you more than that.



The dump

When someone trashes an item, it ends up in the dump. Searching the dump is a waste of your valuable energy as the items you find there are almost always going to low value trash items other plays decided to throw out for good reason.



Casino

It should be obvious, but gambling away all your money in the Casino is not a good way to make money in Torn. A few lucky players will win big and get rich, but statistically, you won't be one of them. Out of those players who do hit big, many of them end up losing it all trying to chase even bigger wins. The casino is rigged, and not in your favor.



Running a company

At level 10, you get the ability to create and run your own company. I don't recommend you do this. Running a company requires a deeper understanding of the game than you may have at this point. To get one off the ground requires a large investment of time and money. Chances are, it will take more money than you have just to see the company making any profit at all.

Buying a company is generally considered a goal for a more experienced player, they can be very expensive and time consuming to run and to run well also require a lot of investment and business education completed - many companies run at a loss just for personal achievement of the director which can make having a competing company for profit extremely hard - I would recommend learning more about the game and companies as a whole first before leaping in to running one and getting dissuaded as a result. https://www.torn.com/wiki/Companies