January was a slooooow month. We were recovering from some Christmas indulgence, the weather was dreadful, the days were short, and were were still stuck in lockdown.
That’s the backdrop for what turned out to be a disappointing month.
Summary of result for the month
Let’s get straight to it. We made a loss:
Surveys (+£106.56)
I usually say that Matched Betting is our go-to earner, but recently it seems that surveys have stolen the crown.
With surveys, we take what we can get. Prolific keeps a stream of cash coming in each month, and is the unanimous favorite across the 3 of us. But we also chip away at YouGov, and do survey panels from time to time.
This isn’t sexy stuff, but it keeps things ticking over.
Cryptocurrency (-101.34)
Cryptocurrency had gained so much in 2020 that surely it couldn’t go higher, could it?
It turns out that there was a pull-back over the course of January before climbing higher into February. It’s such a volatile investment that I’m never sure which way it is going.
There has been a real buzz about crypto recently, and we’ve seen more hits coming in to our articles on Pi and Bee (the latter being new on the site this month). These are cryptocurrencies that are early-stage and may not amount to anything. But they’re free to mine on your phone and, if they do become worth something, we don’t want to miss out!
Here’s how our crypto investment has performed since we first took the plunge:
Shares (-£95.25)
It was difficult to work out how shares should have performed this month. On the one hand we had positive noises around the rollout of a vaccine, and Britain left the EU without the world coming to an end (as some wanted us to believe). On the other hand, we remained in lockdown and the economy doesn’t look to be in a great place.
We now have £2,146 of investments in shares – split across two tracker funds. We’re up on our investment overall, but took a loss in January.
Our fund used to be held mostly in cash, but Cryptocurrency and Shares now make up a combined 45% of the fund. Clearly that means we’re going to be exposed to more volatility than if we’d continued to put it in the bank.
Over the coming months, we’re going to continue to drip more cash into our share investments. Over the long-term we hope that will bring better returns.
Total value of the fund
So, let’s see where all that brings us to at the end of January:
The progress-over-time chart looks like this. It’s the first month we’ve suffered a dip since October 2019. It’s disappointing, but not one that I’ll be dwelling on too much.
And here’s where all of our money is held / invested right now:
The striking thing about the above chart is how much it has changed over the last year. We ended April 2020 with the following mix:
Two things have taken hold since then. Firstly, we’ve simplified massively. We’ve now got rid of the business that never got off the ground, we’ve sold nearly all of our stamps, and we got out of FootballIndex.
The second factor is that we’ve shifted more money into crypto and shares, whilst we’ve also witnessed big gains in both of those areas. You can see that from Crypto alone – we haven’t put any more money into it over the period the two pie charts compare, but Crypto has grown significantly in value.
Aims for February
You may recall we set 2 goals for 2021 – they’re as relevant for January as they are for February:
- Try to generate an average of £300 per month
- Pursue new investment ideas so we can put our cash to some use.
So far, we’re making progress on the second but failing badly on the first. 2021 is going to be a marathon and not a sprint so there’s no need for gloom yet – but we do need to get out of our blocks!