February 2020 Income Report

Well, that’s February done, and I’m glad to see the back of it. In my book, February is a dreary month with equally dreary weather. It seems like its only function is to serve as a placeholder whilst we wait for spring.

Of course, this February has been given an extra dose of depression with the spread of the Coronavirus, which has got the markets well and truly spooked. But despite all the gloom, February was a pretty good month for our project! Let’s see how it went.

Why do we do income reports?

In previous income reports, we had a whole section on this, which we’ve been repeating each month. I’ve now moved that to its own separate page, and will link to it each time instead.

The reasons for doing that are twofold:

1. it takes up space, and the majority of people don’t need to read it anyway, and
2. we’re struggling to get advertising enabled on this site because the advertising networks seem to be punishing us for repetitive content. Hopefully the removal of this will help.

Summary of result for the month

Matched Betting (+£186.02)

In terms of the income we made, this is one of our best month since we started. That’s then offset by £150 of costs, as we decided to renew our Oddsmonkey subscription for another year.

We choose to pay our Oddsmonkey subscription annually, as it works out a lot cheaper. We did have a discussion over whether we really needed it or not, and we decided that it’s still providing enough value to warrant a renewal. If you’re weighing up subscribing or not, our views on whether it’s worth it are in this article here.

How did we have such a bumper month, with over £300 of matched betting profits? Firstly, Ben opened up a couple of new accounts at previously untapped bookies. He also hit the matched betting with all the steely focus of a problem gambler. One way or another, he’s determined to hit his income goals this year!

Graphical depiction of Ben, hunting down his income targets this year

The second thing that also helped the profits is me having a voyage into a new type of betting activity. It’s not one that I want to go into in great detail here, but it’s essentially a no-lay strategy.

It’s still early days to see if this is something I’m going to sick to in the long term, but I’m certainly not done with the experiment yet. I intend to continue with it in March. However, the experience has been mixed and a few thoughts on this sort of thing are worth highlighting:

• As you’re not laying your bets, this is a lot closer to actual gambling. The biggest worry here is that you end up getting sucked into it, and it’s not a road that any of us want to go down.
• Although, in general, this has put us in profitable territory, earnings are very volatile. I’ve had a day where I’ve won £150, making me feel cock-of-the-walk. Then I’ve followed that up by losing £120 over the next two days leaving me feeling much more like a feather duster. This method is much more mentally and emotionally draining than regular matched betting.
• It’s a lot easier to lay a single bet in this method than it is to do a matched bet (where you’re having to lay everything off), but the flip side is that you end up doing a lot more bets in total. So really you’re not saving any more time.

This change in activity has had me flagged by a couple of the bookmakers and there’s now one, in particular, where I’m not allowed to place any bets at all unless I actually go into one of their shops – and I can tell you, I did this once before and it felt like I was on a daytrip to Strangeways prison – I won’t be repeating that ordeal any time soon.

To illustrate the point about the volatility involved in this system, here’s Chris’ betting log for the month, in graphical format. On the horizontal axis are the number of bets, and the vertical axis is his profit. As you can see, it’s all over the place.

In March, Chris is going to continue his experiement with this new system, before concluding if it’s worth persisting further. March also brings the Cheltenham festival, the first big horse racing event of the year, and we’re going to ride the free offers harder than Lanfranco Dettori himself!

Stamps (+12.08)

As usual, Dave continued his TNS Royal Mail Survey, and the regular allocation of stamps trickled in. It’s the same trick we’ve been repeating for the last 18 months.

What’s more exciting is that there’s been an announcement that stamps are going up in price! It’s excellent news for us as we’re sitting on a current face value of nearly £230 of the stuff.

Two disappearing icons: red phone boxes and Royal Mail – surely at the increased prices you’d do everything you can not to post letters any more.

Challenges still remain on how we will ever actually liquidate the position, but we still count it as part of our overall stash.

eBay (-£26.64)

I’ve focused quite a bit of attention on eBay this month. I had very high hopes for a sale of an item which I thought should bring in quite a bit of cash.

In the end, the auction never seemed to gather any momentum and the final price was not only below what I’d hoped for, but it was also below the price that other similar items had sold for. It was a bitter pill to swallow.

And that’s when it hit me that there might be an opportunity here. It seems that in the particular niche I’ve been looking to sell in, that ‘buy it now’ listings are achieving a higher price than auctions. There could be a real opportunity for sniping up certain auctions and flipping them as better ‘buy it now listings’.

So I’ve taken a gamble on nearly £40 of products to try this trick with in March. I’ve gone for the more expensive products, in the hope that there could be more profit. Sadly, it also means there’s more risk involved as well.

I’ll let you know how it goes in next month’s report.

By the way, in working out my profit on ‘buy it now’ listings, I couldn’t find a decent online calculator that worked out what I’d make after all fees are deducted. So I made one and posted it as an article – check out our eBay profit and fees calculator.

Surveys (+£170.70)

Ben was in phenomenal form in February, completing not one, but two lucrative paid surveys.

This isn’t just poorly-paid YouGov grinding. This is getting involved in much better paid market-research panels through a reputable source. The main downside with this activity is that you have to apply for many surveys and get a lot of rejections before you’re picked. But if you’ve persistent, it seems that you’ll eventually land a decent payday.

Inspired by his efforts, Chris and Dave are trying to get in on the action too.

Cryptocurrency (-£32.13)

For once, it was a reasonably flat month for Bitcoin. The price continues to jump up and down on a daily basis, but is holding out at reasonable levels, which is surprising when you consider that stock markets have taken a battering in Feb.

Perhaps some people have been switching out of stocks and into Bitcoin? To me that seems like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, but perhaps they’re seeing something we’re not.

How everyone seems to be feeling right now about the markets….

Our business that we bought in 2019

We’ve now invested £900 of equity in our business, and made a further loan to it of £2,100. Most of our money is therefore tied up in this venture.

I’ve been thinking about how to report this in these income reports and have decided that I will only report income or expense for the business to the extent that we think the total value of our investment has materially changed.

So, to date we’ve written off £300 (which we took as an expense in a previous income report), which relates to sunk costs, but for the time being we think the remaining £2,700 is supported by the value of the business.

However, it must be stated that we’re making very few sales. Not enough, each month, to cover our fees (primarily Shopify platform fees and banking costs). So we’ll continue to monitor the situation and if we need to write down our investment in the future, we’ll do so. Fingers crossed we don’t.

Total value of the fund

Amount at the start of Feb: £4,647.66

Income: £531.79

Expenses: -£206.77

Total value of the Fund at end of Feb: £4,972.68

A pretty impressive result! Here’s how far we’ve come in just over 18 months: 

Aims for March

This has turned into a long post, so Ill keep it brief.

Again, we want to try to hit our minimum earnings threshold of £300. That means:

• Making the most of matched betting and the Cheltenham festival.
• Chris continuing his no-lay betting experiment
• Chris continuing his eBay experiment.
• Trying to pick up a few lucrative survey opportunities.

Wish us luck!