Part of the fun of all of this is trying out different things, seeing if they make us any money, pursuing those that do (like matched betting) and ditching those that don’t (here’s looking at you, Stashbee).
What I’d like to talk about today however is how do you start from zero and grow your wealth? Of course I have to drop in the usual caveats about this not being advice, but just a theory about how one could start with zero and make £2500 (almost) risk free in their first year.
Virtually everyone wants to make more money, these days. Perhaps you’re one of the following:
- A student without two pennies to rub together and the idea of working Saturday nights in a bar doesn’t fill you with any joy.
- Someone on a lower income and looking subsidise your earnings without risking your own money.
- Someone who has got themselves into a little bit of credit card debt and needs to get it paid off asap.
- Someone looking for the thrill of the chase!
Whatever category you’re in, it really is possible to make more money and in this article, we’re going to explore how you can do this most effectively.
The assumptions
Whatever your profile, this whole demonstration assumes you are starting with a bank roll of £0. It also assumes that the only money going into this bank roll is from the side hustles we’re going to talk about below; there are no supplementary payments from a salary, interest or anything else for that matter…
Step 1 – Build your bank
This first step is going to need patience. We’re starting with nothing; we need to build up to about £100 as quickly as possible. From our experiences so far, the best way to do this with minimal input (and therefore the most efficient) are to sacrifice some of your time doing surveys and mystery shopping tasks.
Online Surveys – easy money!
Ben has been doing online surveys using Opinion Outpost, Global Test Market and MySurvey. Global Test Market and MySurvey recently merged to form Life Points Panel…who seem to send out a million different surveys a day, so there are plenty of earnings opportunities from this site.
The beauty of online surveys is that you don’t have to leave the house and can generally do a few surveys a day while on the throne. Or while waiting for the kettle to boil or while on a break at work.
Ben made £40 in his best ever month doing online surveys, and that was without really trying too hard.
There are so many different survey providers, I am sure that you could earn even more if you had the dedication/patience to this cause! Either way, let’s assume that in your first month you will make around £20 on online surveys. You need to make sure that you sign up to panels which will allow you to be paid out in cash rather than vouchers (assuming cash income is your goal here, of course).
Mystery Shopping Apps
When Chris downloaded it, back in the summer of 2018, he didn’t know what he was going to be in for with mystery shopping app, BeMyEye.
But this turned out to be seriously viable way of making money. The app allows you to choose a number of tasks in your local area to complete. You pick one and visit the location, following the instructions (which usually involve checking for a product, and taking some photos) to make a couple of pounds each time.
In Chris’ case, this was just something that got him out of the office on his lunch break and had him discovering new places (as well as having to order more Coca Cola than he could shake a stick at on at least one occasion after work), which turned out to be a fun way to earn money.
As Chris wrote in his article, over the summer he was making about £12 a week doing the odd task here and there (although he was selecting the more lucrative offers). Let’s assume that can get out and do a couple of tasks a week, you will hit the lofty heights of £10 every seven days, suddenly we’re at £40 a month once we’re up and running!
One of the nice bonuses of the BeMyEye app is that Chris got little extras along the way:
- A hundred weight of Cactus Water
- A free £1 bet (which we put on Derby County to beat Manchester Utd in the Carabao Cup last September and were quids in (12/1 if I remember rightly) until seconds from the end). Any winnings would have been ours to keep
- Several L of Coca Cola in swanky bars across old London town
All nice little bonuses, but it’s really about getting the cash flowing in to the coffers, and BeMyEye has delivered that for Chris over several months now.
Focus Force – Big time!
Dave’s first success came thanks to Focus Force. It is another survey platform, but rather than doing online surveys for anything from £0.50 to £3 a time, I have yet to see these guys offer a survey for anything less than £50 for an hour or so of your time. Dave’s first was for £150, paid in cash at the interview.
Now, the only downside with Focus Force is that you have to send out quite a lot of applications before you will get a call back to participate in a survey.
They send out a lot of mails for different surveys: some are one-to-one either face-to-face or via Skype, some are group workshops, I’ve even seen one where they will pay you £150 as well as dinner and drinks with other participants.
The emails will detail the qualifying criteria such as age, job title, experience and other specifics such as if you are Sky or an HSBC customer. If you fit the broad criteria, you complete the questionnaire and return it by email…and then play the ol’ waiting game.
Let us assume here that you will be invited to one survey paying £50 every two months averaging out at £25 a month.
The totals
Month 1
Month 2
Step 2 – Putting this money to use
So there you have it! You invested some of your time and not much else. Maybe a little shoe leather, some of your electricity bill and possibly a train ticket to get to a Focus Force interview.
We’ve accumulated £190. If we want to take some expenses out of this (the train ticket for example), let’s round it down to £170.
What do we do with it? The temptation may be to spend it; to pay down some of the debt, but if we can have the discipline, we can grow it to something pretty decent.
Bankrolling Matched Betting
With a £170 bankroll, we can start matched betting. We have enough money to back and lay bets and to take advantage of the offers the bookmakers have on their sites.
In our case, matched betting was the activity that took our project from just a couple of hundred pounds, into the thousands within just a couple of months. It works, and we’ve explained in this article how.
As an example, if we took that £170 and opened an account with one of the major bookies that offer us £30 in free bets if we place £10, then all we have used so far is about £50 of our £170 to back and lay a bet. We then have £30 in free bets which we should be able to turn into around £25 profit for us. Take out some of the expenses one incurs when matched betting and we’ve turned our £170 into somewhere between £190 and £195 in a week.
There is more information on matched betting to be found here and here, but we feel that you can easily make £100 a month from matched betting, the only barrier to making more is the size of your bank roll, time and sophistication.
There are some relatively simple offers you can take advantage of to reach your £100 target. If you go a little bit off-piste and look at the more complex offers, there is more money to be made. Oddsmonkey can certainly help you here and guide you through the murky waters; and in the interests of transparency, the link back there is an affiliate link, so if you sign up using that we get a few pennies in our bank account…for which we thank you!
Step 3 – Grow exponentially
We’ve spent two months doing the hard yards on the online surveys, pounding the streets for BeMyEye and Focus Force and we’ve got together enough for a matched betting bankroll.
As above, the bigger our bankroll, the more matched betting we can fund and we can go from £100 a month to £200 a month just in matched betting profits (there is a section of the Oddsmonkey site which lists the standard offers which, if you took advantage of all of them, would make you roughly £225 a month)!
This however needs funding and so with this in mind, we shouldn’t turn our back on the online surveys, BeMyEye or Focus Force. Apart from anything else, who knows how long matched betting is going to be a thing?! It is at the whims and mercy of the bookmakers, so we need to make our money quickly as we can!
So while we’re matched betting, we can still be doing all the other things we’ve been doing to get us to this point. Remember that none of them take up too much time and can easily be slotted in around your other commitments. Here’s a little example of what I think is possible if you are structured and organised:
We’re happy to talk more about this with you if you want; drop us a line via the forum or on Twitter @moneymountain_
We don’t think the above is an overly ambitious target and shows how we can go from having zero to play with, to a decent sum of money in the bank to fund a better life/a debt free life/a future for our kids…whatever we choose.