2019 – what a year we had! In this post we’re going to look back on our first full year of the project, including the highs and lows that it contained.
We’ll cover how we made our money (all £3,214 of it), what worked, and what didn’t.
2019 was a momentous year for our little project!
As you know, we only started this project in July 2018 in the hope of making a bit of extra cash that would give us yet more opportunities to invest and, ultimately, give ourselves a bit more financial freedom.
With that in mind, 2019 – our first full year of doing this – hasn’t been bad at all. We managed to grow our fund from £1,034 to over £4,249.08 in the space of 12 months. There have been some highs, some lows, but overall we can look back on the year feeling fairly content that we’ve pushed on in the right direction.
Here’s our total result:
Matched betting – 2019’s gift to us!
Let’s be completely honest, the biggest driver of earnings in the year – by quite some distance – has been matched betting. This was something we discovered in late 2018, and we’ve never looked back.
All of us, when we initially looked at it as a potential way to make money, thought that it seemed either too shady or too complicated. But look at us now, over 1 year on. How wrong we were about it. It’s something that the three of us chip away at weekly to keep the cash rolling in. And it doesn’t let us down!
It’s relatively easy work, you can do it without leaving home, or having to talk to anyone, and it’s fairly flexible hours-wise as well.
There are probably only two downsides to it for us. The first is that it feels like bookmakers are starting to get a little wise to it, and we’ve noticed this in both the deterioration in the ‘free offers’ that they run as well as through the fact that we’ve been banned by a couple of them this year. I personally have reservations as to how viable matched betting is going to be during 2020. I predict we won’t make the same sort of money we have done this year.
When will matched betting have run its course?
The other downside is that it has made us slightly lazy. Matched betting has proved to be such a relatively simple and fruitful activity that we’ve slightly coasted along (well, at least I have) doing this at the expense of most other things. Ebay selling, surveys, mystery shopping – they all just fell a little more by the wayside as the year went on.
That’s a shame, because one of the things we wanted to do with this site was to try different methods of making money and see if they work.
2019 – the year we bought a business!
We shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves, though. There was one major activity that we did complete in the second half of the year, which pushed us into completely new territory. You probably already know what that was: we bought a business.
The purchase of the business was somewhat fortunate. One of us already has an online business as their day job, and the opportunity arose – through existing contacts in that business – to take over a website that the owner didn’t see much of a future in. For the price we paid (less than £300), it certainly felt worth a gamble.
Unsuprisingly, it has ended up costing more than just the initial £300 purchase price. We’ve had to inject another £600 or so of capital into the business to get it going and cover its running costs until we can make it profitable. The other big investment has been in terms of our time.
The length of time it takes to get a business set up should not be underestimated! Redesigning a website, registering a company, setting up banking and accounting arrangements – the list feels endless!
It took a lot of work to get the business ready to re-open
We finally re-launched the business in November, and it wasn’t exactly a case of opening the floodgates to hundreds of orders.
The truth is, we’ve been averaging only about 1 or 2 sales per month since we opened. Not only does that leave us miles away from it being the vehicle that is going to propel us to higher levels of income; it isn’t even managing to break even at the moment!
It feels, as we go into 2020, that we’ve got to hold our nerve with this business (despite our worries). We need to keep backing it, as if it does manage to start generating sales then this could be a really useful part of our overall portfolio.
Fingers are firmly crossed on this one!
A few other reliable side incomes have really helped
Whilst matched betting has been the engine, and the purchase of a business has been this year’s new shiny toy, there have been a few other activities which deserve a shout out. These have been things we’ve earned bits and pieces of income with, and overall they’ve given us a nice result.
Firstly, surveys have been our second biggest source of income. We made £379.10 of extra cash doing these over the course of the year. Personally, I hate doing them. They’re deathly dull and pay a very low return.
How I feel doing surveys
But if you want money bad enough, they’re a viable option. The selling point of doing them is that they’re very convenient and can be done in any dead time that you’ve got – including while you’re on the loo. It would be fascinating to know how much we’ve earned sitting on the throne.
Check out our guide to surveys here.
Our next highest earner has been eBay, where we’ve made a respectable £193.25, after all costs (of which there are many) are taken into account.
Selling your unwanted stuff on eBay feels like a timeless pursuit. There seems to be no end of willing buyers for all sorts of items that you want to get rid of.
We’ve made money during the year flogging teddy bears, football boots, and also wallets. It’s the latter that gave us our real gains, as we came across some unwanted wallets that were unsalable in shops due to minor imperfections. We managed to shift a good batch of these to satisfied customers who grabbed themselves a bargain compared to the ‘as new’ price. If we can lay our hands on more of that in 2020, we’ll definitely be repeating this trick.
Next up is our stamps hustle, which sees Dave post items each month – as instructed by a market research organisation – in exchange for payment in stamps. £138.60 worth of stamps this year.
It’s a nice little earner but, as I bemoan every month, we don’t know what to do with all the stamps we’re accumulating. Converting them, somehow, into cash is proving to be tricky. In 2020, we’d love to find some way of doing this. Perhaps just selling them on eBay is the way forward.
2 activities that helped make up the numbers, but that we’re going off …
These are the two projects that I’ve been ploughing a lone furrow with. First, there’s mystery-shopping app BeMyEye, which I’ve typically had some action on most months. It has returned modest amounts of cash (£116.46 in the year).
Over the months, though, I’ve started started to cool on this as a money-making method.
The tasks in the app are getting more and more difficult to do, and the app’s latest update has introduced a way of having to photograph things which is nigh on impossible and have meant that I’ve had missions rejected. A rejected mission means no payment, and that’s really not a good use of my time. So 2020 may well see earnings slow down through this.
The other one, which again seems to have taken a back-seat as the year rolled on, is User Testing. Among all of the methods of making money, this is still one of my favourites, simply because it’s quite interesting work. In principle, I’d love to do more of this work, but it tends to involve a lot of sifting through jobs which you aren’t allowed to do as you don’t fit the profile.
Bitcoin: our low (and then even lower) of 2019
No review of the year would be complete without talking about our low point: buying bitcoin.
We launched into this idea at the height of 2019’s bitcoin bubble, full of excitement that Bitcoin might soar yet higher still. As it turned out, turkeys don’t soar high in the sky, and our particular bitcoin bird was back down to earth with a serious bump.
On an investment of around £700, we managed to lose £292.80 by the end of the year, which seems like a crazy loss. That’s almost 42% of our original investment.
The loss seems even worse when you think that for roughly the same amount of money, we’ve managed to buy an online business!
Perhaps things will turn around in 2020, or perhaps we’ll take even further losses. At the moment it feels like there’s little sense in selling and we might as well hold on to our investment a little longer in case of an upturn. Early January has already given us some (probably false) encouragement, as the price has been on the rise again.
Turning towards 2020
And so our attention turns to the new year and what we want to achieve.
In 2019 we made a total of £3,200 profit (slighty more if you strip out the £300 we paid to buy a business, which we’ve taken as a cost). More money is going to be pumped into the business in 2020 (another £600 which will again be taken as a cost) but, all other things being equal, it feels like we should be trying to make at least as much profit again.
Here’s how we’ve grown over the last 18 months:
So, let’s set a minimum target of £3,000 of profit in the year. That means we’re going to need to be making an average of £250 per month in order to hit that target.
Matched betting, between the 3 of us, should be able to mean we can get most of the way to that target alone, but we need to keep finding additional streams of income to really get us over the mark.
Of course, our new business is going to be a continued focus. It would be lovely to get to the level where we’re making 5-10 sales each month by the end of the year. How realistic that is, we don’t know, as it’s all completely uncharted territory.
The other thing that I would personally like to investigate a bit more is ‘flipping’. I’ve been hearing more about this recently: it’s basically buying things cheap and then selling them on at a profit online (usually eBay or Amazon). It’s essentially what we were trying to do early last year with our eBay sales, but I think it’s worth another go this year.
Aside from that, there’s the success of this website, engagement with readers, and of course our commitment to give away 10% of the increase in the value of our fund to our readers.
We’ve been steadily growing the traffic to this site over the past 18 months, to the point where we get a reasonable level of traffic on some of our most popular articles. But we’d love to get more regular engagement on new posts. The question is: how do we do that?
Success on the internet seems to rely, in large part, on persistence. By consistently delivering content, hopefully people will continue to find and follow us.
If you’re one of our regular readers, we thank you kindly for supporting what we’re doing.
We’d love to hear if you’ve got any suggestions for us in 2020! We hope it’s a good one for you and for us.