I made a good living and then got squished in a single day. I'm a computer geek. I work with unix servers, mainly AIX from IBM. In the late 90's companies were offering computer geeks big bonuses and stock to come work for them. It was also close to the dot com bust. When all these surplus unix server parts became available, I started buying pallets of them. I rented a storage unit and built complete unix servers. I then sold these on Ebay as "educational systems". I made a website to show how people they could use these systems to study, and get unix certified. Then they could get the big bonus jobs. I was knocking out two to three a week, at about $500 profit each. It was so easy. UPS would drop off the parts. I would set up the auction. Then UPS would pick up the completed server and deliver. And it was a good $1500 a week. I did this for over a year. Then one day my auction didn't get any bidders. I put it up again, and again it didn't get any bidders. I did a search and found IBM crated a group called "IBM Certified Used". They had over 100 auctions for the same server I was selling, for less than I could buy the parts. I had a storage unit full of parts, that I couldn't use. I took them to a computer recycle center. And I was done... But it was a good run