Animal Crossing New Horizons Money Making Guide
Love it or hate it, even life on your deserted island cannot escape the grasps of capitalism (thanks to your local Tom Nook). As such, you'll probably want to start earning bells as soon as possible. Depending on what you have access to and what your money goals are, different strategies will yield the best results for raking in the dough. This Animal Crossing New Horizons money making guide breaks down the best ways to earn money quickly depending on which stage of the game you are in.
Early Game
Assuming you are playing daily, we are defining early game as your first week on the island. These strategies should help you with early game goals like building Nook's Cranny and paying off your first few home loans.
Selling seashells
Seashells wash up on your island daily. There are plenty to collect and all can be sold. None are particularly valuable, but collecting them all adds up to at least several thousand bells. This can be a consistent source of income for your first few days on the island. Once you move past the first couple of weeks, you'll probably find that picking them up is not worthwhile anymore.
Selling native fruit
Your island will have one native fruit type when you arrive. Each piece of fruit sells for 100 bells and each tree grows three pieces of fruit every three days. You may want to use a couple of pieces to plant some more fruit trees, but you're safe to sell most of them. You'll be better off saving the space to plant non-native fruit trees in the near future. If you are able to, you can save this fruit and sell it on another island with different native fruit for 500 bells apiece.
Catch fish
As soon as you get a fishing pole, you can start catching every type of fish in the waters around your island. Check out our fishing guide for more details on which fish are most valuable. Some fish sell for as many as 15,000 bells each, so this is one of the best ways to make money in the early game. You can of course also catch bugs, but they tend to be less valuable on average.
Find your money rock
You'll have six rocks on your island. Five of them will yield resources like stone, iron, or clay when struck with a shovel. However, one of them will yield bells. If struck eight times (dig holes behind yourself to prevent recoil), this rock will spit out 16,400 bells. This will be a random rock every day, and depending on your island you will likely need the ladder and vaulting pole before you can find it every day.
Sell crafted items
As you collect resources like weeds, wood, stone, and iron it may be tempting to sell your excess for extra bells. This is not a good idea. You should instead use these resources to craft furniture on your DIY workbench and sell that instead. In almost every case, crafted furniture will sell for a higher price than the materials used to craft it. Nook's Cranny will also have a hot item that sells for double every day, so if you have the DIY recipe for it take advantage by crafting as many of that item as you can.
Mid Game
Mid-game isn't very strongly defined and your total and daily playtime determine how long you'll stay in it before you reach late game. But, it can roughly be considered around a month of daily playtime, or the period until you've finished most of your house upgrades, have an upgraded Nook's Cranny, and have ten villagers. You'll now have access to most bell-making tools but may not have much of a savings account to start investing in the stalk market. Regardless, now is a perfect time to enact the Bell Boom Ordinance, newly added in the 2.0 update.
Plant and sell foreign fruit
There are five different native fruits you can get on your island. Check out our fruit tree guide for full details. Fruit that is not native to your island will sell for 500 bells apiece. You'll want to prioritize getting foreign fruit as soon as possible and plant several trees on your island. Once you've built an orchard of non-native fruit trees, you can easily rake in 100,000+ bells every three days.
Plant money trees
Every day, there will be a patch on your island that will have a golden glow. You can dig up 1,000 bells at this spot. Before covering it back up, you can also plant your own bag of bells into the hole and it will grow into a tree that grows three bags of bells at that level one time. You can plant up to 10,000 bells, and four days later you'll have a money tree that yields up to 30,000 bells. This can be done daily for a consistent 30,000 daily income.
Sell extra fossils
Once you've made significant progress towards filling out the fossil section of your museum, it's a good idea to start selling your duplicate fossils. You can find four each day buried around your island and make around 15,000 bells daily by selling them all.
Visit mystery islands
You can buy tickets to visit mystery islands for 2,000 nook miles. In addition to finding new villagers, these trips can be an effective way to earn bells. Just make sure to visit with empty pockets (besides tools) to maximize your profits. Normal islands will yield coconuts, fruit, and higher spawn rates for bugs and fish. But, there are also rarer islands like Tarantula/Scorpion island, big fish island, sister fruit islands, and money islands that can be very profitable. Money islands are home to several money rocks and net nearly 100,000 bells alone.
Save your bugs and fish for CJ and Flick
CJ and Flick are two special characters who will randomly visit your island every couple of weeks on different days. CJ will purchase fish for 150% of their prices and Flick will do the same for bugs. You can either ramp up your fishing or bug-catching while they are on your island or save all your fish and bugs in storage and wait for them to visit before selling.
Late Game
After you've been playing daily for about a month and have done things like fully upgrading your home, you can start really building a savings account. At this point, there is a way of making money very quickly and growing it exponentially every week. You can, of course, still use the mid-game strategies for earning bells, but you'll find you may not be compelled to do so seeing as how effective this late-game strategy is.
Playing the stalk market
The stalk market is an incredibly effective way of earning money fast. While you can technically start playing with it at any time, it's most effective when you've already saved up a few hundred thousand bells to invest. Here's how it works:
Every Sunday morning until noon, Daisy Mae will visit your island selling turnips. The price will be 90-110 bells each. You can buy as many turnips as you'd like in stacks of 10. Every day except Sunday, you can sell these turnips at Nook's Cranny for a fluctuating price between 20-800 bells. Nook's Cranny will change their price twice a day, once when they open at 8 a.m. and again at noon. If you fail to sell your turnips before the following Sunday, they will spoil and cannot be sold.
If you are simply checking your prices every once in a while and only selling on your own island, you are taking a risk buying turnips, since your prices may never be higher than what you purchased for. However, the prices are not completely random and actually follow only a few different patterns, with a small price range in those patterns. You can use tools like Turnip Prophet to track and predict your weekly prices. Further, if you are able to visit other islands, you can use marketplaces like Turnip Exchange to guarantee huge profits every week.
Using these crowd-sourced external tools, you can easily 5x your investment every week. Starting with a few hundred thousand bells, you can pull in 50 million bells in just a few weeks. From there, the sky is the limit. Past a certain point (perhaps 50 million is a safe bet), you'll likely find you have more money than you know what to do with. At this point, it might be time to retire from rapid bell earning and simply enjoy life on your island!
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