Can anyone explain to me quick ways to make lots of cash by doing side stuff? And yes i know about the stock market
This has actually been my biggest gripe with the game: making money. Missions are actually a HORRIBLE way to make money in the game. Most of your contacts don't pay you crap, if anything. Most mission payouts are 3k-7k, or nothing at all. Aside from this chump change theres the initial heist, which gets you a little starting coin (And may go fast if you decide to stock up on guns), a very late heist that gets you a little more decent coin (Too late in the game imo if you're doing side missions as they pop up), and the final big heist which of course trumps all others. Aside from those 3 heist missions, the only missions I've considered really profitable are the Assassination missions that have already been mentioned because of their obvious stock implications.
In a nutshell, I'm disappointed with the lack of missions that generate intermediate income halfway through the game. Theres not much you can do to generate 50-100k in a mission mid game to pickup necessary cash for properties. Unless you decide to tediously play the stock market (If you're saving Assassination missions for the end, and you should) after the initial heist, you're not going to have enough coin to purchase more than a property or two before the end of the game. Until you do those last two heists at the very end of the game, your main source of income involves $5k security trucks, or $5k races with Franklin, or sticking up convenience stores for a piddly $500. It takes a lot of races to pickup $150k of cash to buy a poor towing company for a guy like Franklin....thats what I'm getting at here. The other damning fact is it can take quite a few in game weeks to pay off these properties before you're starting to make money off them (The Hen House is considered one of the better buys at $80k, but it still takes 70 in game weeks before you start turning a profit!).
What I would have liked to see is maybe some kind of repeatable Heist action where you could pick a number of generic locations to knock off, pick your team/strategy, and then knock the place over for a small profit. It doesn't have to be on the level of the big heist, it could be something like taking out a chain store, or a small credit union, or maybe something interesting like stealing some valuable item from someone for resell/ransom. Maybe stealing information that you use to blackmail someone for cash? I don't know, something more small time and simple that would be fun and would net you 20-50k a job for 20-25 minutes of work. It would be better than searching for security trucks all day or doing 30 races in a row. Plus it would give you a reason to use those crummy heist hires and build them up(Made the mistake of hiring a cheap one for the first job...lost 33% of my profits that way)