Monthly roundup – July 2018 (“Going Backwards”)

We’re all new to this, us and you. So, let’s explain what’s happening here.

Hopefully you’ve read our newly created ‘About Us’ page and you know that this is a project where we’re trying to grow our fund. The idea is to make extra cash, over and above what we make through our day jobs, so that our financial situations sit a little healthier.

We started themoneymountain.com with zero in the fund, thinking we’d claw our way upwards from there. But at the moment the money mountain is looking like a very big one to climb.

Each month we’re going to bring you a report on how much we’ve made (or lost) in the period. That’s so that you can see which methods actually make money, and which are a waste of time.

So, how has it started off this month?

Bad. Very bad.

We might have only launched our website on the 4th July, but already we’re in deeply negative territory. We were supposed to be making money, not losing it.

It wasn’t exactly meant to go like this.

How bad is it?

Using our mountain climbing analogy, it feels like we’ve spent a month staring at the mountain from our base camp. Worse still, it feels like we’ve been slashing and burning all our camping equipment and provisions at the same time.

Why are we losing money on this?

It all begins with setting up a website. Of course you can start blogs for free, but if you want a decent looking one that has the potential to make revenue for you then you need to have a self-hosted WordPress blog.

So that’s what we built.

Anyone can do it, and we wrote about exactly how in this article here: how to build a professional looking blog as cheap as possible.

Although we tried to keep the cost to an absolute minimum, it ended up costing a total of £122.50. Not a small amount but definitely value for money when you consider that includes:

• 3 years of quality WordPress hosting with market-leading provider, Bluehost*.
• 1 year domain registration with Google Domains
• Purchase of a website theme – which we get to keep forever.
• Potential to make money through blogging!

So, you see, it was a pretty unavoidable expense. But still one that set us back nevertheless.

But our spending didn’t end there. My fellow blogger and project member, Ben, decided that a good way to make money was by giving Fat Lama a try. It’s a site that allows anyone to make extra cash by renting pretty much anything to other people. I’ll let you read about his exploration into it here: Fat Lama: Fortune and glory or just lose a load of stuff?

The strategy was to speculate to accumulate. Spending was needed to get various items, including a strimmer and chainsaw, into rentable condition. We’re now awaiting the ‘accumulate’ phase. And none of us know how long that will take. We didn’t get any bites in July so we don’t know quite how this one is going to go. Will it ever pay off the initial investment? We’ll have to wait and see. Ben will be reporting back in a future post.

Of course, we’ll turn our attention to other ideas in the meantime.

So, all of that brings our total expenses in the month as follows:

Expenses	-£153.81
Website	-£122.50
Fat Lama	-£31.31

Income

We’ll, this should be easy. There wasn’t any.

Nothing. Nada. Zip

Which is a bit of a disaster really, considering this site is about making money. Carry on like this and we’ll have to consider renaming our site to thedisappearingmoneypit or something.

But there is some hope. That’s because we have actually started earning some income in July, it’s just that none of it made it into the bank for the time this report was prepared. It’s one of our rules that if it isn’t in the bank or in our hands (or an investment account) it’s not on our income report.

Amounts awaiting payment but held in apps, or online websites, or shiftily-written IOUs on bits of paper aren’t real enough to be putting in our income section.

But rest assured that we’ve been buzzing about like crazy trying to make some money and fully expect a good chunk of it to hit the account in August.

Overall total

Amount at the start of the month: £0

Expenses: -£153.81

Income: 0

Total value of the Fund at end of July: -£151.81

Man of the month

Usually in these income reports we’ll have a blogger of the month section, where we celebrate which of the three of us made the most money that month,and how.

But it’s no contest this month as we all made zero.

It’s a ‘must try harder’ school report for all of us.

What next?

August needs to be the month of redemption. The target is to reach positive territory by the end of the month.

Chris is working on various apps, customer testing, and eBay to earn money and should have a report on at least one of those methods in the coming month.

Ben is still looking into Fat Lama and hoping somebody takes a shine to his strimmer. That sounds strange as I type it. He’ll be looking to get another source of income coming in.

Dave is also going to be looking at new methods of making money after his post last month about cashback sites – the lazy man’s way to make lots of money.

The challenge will be that in amongst all of that, two of us are off on holiday, and one of us is getting married. Not ideal money making conditions, but we’ll do our best!

Let us know your thoughts

Are we going about this the wrong way? Are we missing easy opportunities? Have you got any money making suggestions you think we should try? Let us know in the comments below.

*Note that this is an affiliate link to Bluehost. If you browse and buy something through this link then it doesn’t cost you anything – you’ll still pay the same competitive price you would otherwise. But it does give us some affiliate income. Which might dig us out of a tight spot here.

–> Next Month: August