When you were growing up, the options for raising money were: (1) ask mom for a couple bucks, or (2) try opening a miserable excuse for a lemonade stand with three lemons from the tree out back and that leftover school desk in the garage.

How times have changed. Today’s kids have business opportunities coming out their ears, including:

1. Babysitting. Not for the faint of heart, babysitting can be a challenging job, there’s no doubt about it. But if you’re well prepared, and most of all if you have a flexible, relaxed approach to being around younger kids, babysitting can be very rewarding. Today’s parents are willing to pay a premium to ensure that Junior and his kid sister are well taken care of. Put together a baby-sitting kit that includes crayons, some toys that kids of all ages will find interesting, books, and anything else you think might help in a pinch. Make sure you build a good reputation with the people you know, and before you know it the dollars will be rolling in.

2. Outdoor maintenance (including snow removal and landscaping). Okay, so your neighbor next door owns a landscaping company, and he just bought a Ferrari. That might be a bit ambitious for your first business venture, but still, there’s no reason to think you won’t be able to make decent money offering to take care of people’s yards. In the summertime, mow a few lawns, trim the bushes and maybe even some trees. By Halloween, you’re raking leaves up out of people’s yards; and at Christmas, you’re back again shoveling snow (assuming you live in an area that has snowfall). It’s a year round business if you brand it properly.

3. Hi-tech assistant. Is there anyone left that doesn’t know that everyone under 21 knows everything there is to know about technology, and everyone over the age of 65 is hopelessly out of touch? Thought not. Establish yourself as a computer expert, able to do anything with the silicon-based world, and offer to debug or set up people’s computers (for a small fee, of course).

4. Pet Walker. Poor Rex. He’s stuck inside all day, while his owners go off to their workaday jobs, waiting aimlessly for that moment when they walk back in that door and his life is happy again. Why not help his owners see the value in a happy dog by offering to take him for a walk around the block three times a week? He’ll love it; they’ll pay for it; you’ll do it.

5. Car Wash. Perhaps the gateway to business ownership for more current adult small business owners than anyone could guess, a car wash is a great way to earn good money. Get your bucket, suds, and sponges, and you’re good to go. You can either set up a car wash stand along a busy road, or advertise in your neighborhood and wash cars right at the neighbors’ home.

You’ve probably heard the claims: “Each day, millions of dollars in free government grants goes to waste because no one applied for it.” Usually the next part of the claim is that all you need to do is pay such-and-such website to receive a complete guide to government grants.

But is it true?

Parts of it are true, and parts are not so true. The true part is that yes, there are plenty of government grants out there that go unanswered for lack of qualified recipients. But that doesn’t mean they’ll give the money to just anyone who walks up to the window. Like most things in life, it will require hard work and time invested in order for you to receive any of these grants.

If that hasn’t put you off by now, keep reading.

The truest of these claims is regarding education. Various government and private institutions do give out money each year to help individuals with their education. Most of the opportunities available to students are well-publicized through the financial aid office of the institution they are applying for. After all, it’s in the best interest of every school to make it as easy as possible for a person to enroll and earn them more tuition money.

However, there are four basic types of federal grants for students: Pell Grants, Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants (FSEOG), Academic Competitive Grants (ACG), and National Science & Mathematics Access to Retain Talent Grants. All of these are need-based grants, meaning that in order to be eligible, you must show that you are unable to attend the institution without grant money. If you don’t qualify for any of these, you will want to look into two other areas: scholarships and student loans.

The amount of number of scholarships available to students is staggering. There are scholarships for everything under the sun available from every company from Tylenol to the United Negro College Fund. Filling out applications, writing essays, and meeting the odd requirement can be a full-time job for any college student. Student loans include Perkins Loans and Stafford Loans, which have traditionally helped college students to pay for their education at very low interest rates.

Other federal grants that are available include grants for the arts, business, housing, and community development, to name just a few. The complete listing of categories and information is available for anyone who wants to spend the time at the website for federal government grants,  You’ll find a complete list of grant opportunities, indexed by keyword, category, agencies, or Recovery Act Opportunities. Unfortunately, most federal grants in the category of business are targeted toward developing highly specialized technologies and businesses.

The federal government does offer small business loans through its Small Business Administration (SBA) arm, but keep in mind that these are loans, not grants-and they will require repayment. You can get more information about these loans at your local banking institution, because the loans are actually facilitated through commercial banks and regulated by SBA federal loan guarantees. In other words, you can get a small business loan at a lower rate of interest than you otherwise would through a bank like Wells Fargo or Chase because it is guaranteed by the SBA.

If you can write a decent paragraph and have access to a computer with internet, there are lots of things you can do these days to earn a few bucks. If you can type and have good grammar skills the possibilities are endless. Here are five of the easiest:

1. Freelance. Alright, so freelancing is probably not what most people would consider “easy.” But, it is easier than a lot of other jobs, like removing fangs from poisonous snakes, or cleaning up after rock concerts. There are lots of sites that do the work for you by aggregating potential employers and projects in one place, like oDesk or Elance. Beware of any site that asks you for money up front, however; it is probably a scam. A genuine site will usually make their money as a small percentage of the amount paid for a finished product.

2. Name internet domains. The easiest way to do this is to use the website PickyDomains.com, which serves as a sort of facilitator between people looking for a cool domain name and people who think up cool domain names for a living. Registration is free, and you can start work right away sending suggestions for domain names on the site. If the client selects your particular idea, you get paid a portion of the purchase price (prices vary, and amount you receive will also vary based on your “rank,” which is basically how long you’ve been working with the site for).

3. Write Reviews. Ever read an internet review that just seemed a little too… positive? Well, that’s probably because it was someone who was paid to write about the company in glowing terms, and never even tried their widget, or hotel, or whatever it is. And you can be one of those people! Like the idea above, there’s a site-when isn’t there a site?-that you can write reviews for and submit them, and make anywhere from between $1 to $50 per review. Their disclaimer-and it seems like a fair one-is that you’ve gotta be pretty good at writing to get paid for your review.

4. Blog. Yes, it is still possible to get paid for blogging. Most people don’t, and you probably won’t, but that’s not the point. The point is that you can do it, and here’s one way. PayPerPost.com is a site that serves as a meeting post between advertisers and bloggers. So, say Joe in Tucson wants five people to blog favorably about his new hotel. He hires them on this site to write on their blog about what a great vacation they had at his place and so on, and they get paid as long as the blog post is approved. Not bad, huh?

5. AdSense. It’s a little bit difficult to understand, but basically this is a Google program whereby you are paid if someone clicks on an ad on your site. As an AdSense publisher, you can create the text that is meant to draw visitors to another site.