March 2020 Income Report

Who could have predicted what March would be like? It’s incredible how quickly we went from coronavirus seeming like a distant threat to a crisis that our politicians are comparing to a war!

The human tragedy is unfolding right before our eyes and, at the time of writing, 108,478 people have now died from this bugger of a virus.

For most of us, our routines have changed. Over 100 countries and billions of people were in full or partial lockdown by the end of March 2020, according to the BBC. Basic liberties have disappeared (understandably so); and some of us might not see our older relatives for many months at this rate. This could take a large toll on our society.

It’s enough to make us all sit back and search for some perspective. Perhaps all of this chaos is a timely reminder that there are much more important things in life than money.

Unfortunately though, the financial and economic effects could end up being massive too. When Bloomberg reports the following in relation to the US economy, I find myself shifting nervously in my seat:

Gross domestic product will plummet an annualized 25% from April through June after a smaller setback in the first quarter and the jobless rate will hit 12.6%, the highest since the 1940s, according to the median forecasts in Bloomberg’s monthly survey of 69 economists.

Bloomberg, 10 April 2020

Perhaps things will blow over soon. Or perhaps we’re heading into an economic mess that is going to take years – even decades – to sort out. Nobody really knows. But one things is certain: this is not the time to be taking your eye off the ball on your finances.

So, trying to carry on as normally as we can, here’s how our fund performed throughout all of the craziness of March.

We do these reports every month, and if you’re new here or just curious why we’re sharing all these details with you, check out Why do we do Income Reports?

Summary of result for the month

Matched Betting (+127.44)

Matched betting has always seemed like an endless stream of profits for us. So to watch it dry up so abruptly has been very strange to watch.

We’d just come off the back of a decent but slightly underwhelming Cheltenham festival (which explains our profits) and were looking forward to:

• The Grand National
• The conclusion of the Premier league and Champions league
• A summer of sport: the Olympics, Euros and Wimbledon.

Then, overnight, they were gone and all we’ve got left is things we’ve never even heard of. Like the Belorussian Premier League. Thanks, but no thanks. Betting on those things feels like it’s just going to get your account flagged to the bookmakers. I haven’t placed a bet since mid-March.

For a fleeting moment I worried about the bookies during this period. With no sport to bet on, you’d imagine their profits will take a big hit. I wouldn’t trust any of them with money right now – and we decided to withdraw every last penny out of them in case there is any risk they’re going to struggle to pay out.

Between the three of us we withdrew nearly £1,600, which we’re going to put to better use over this period. We’ve probably contributed to their liquidity problems, but any sympathy I had for these firms disappeared when I saw how much they started to push casinos and slots over the last few weeks. These companies have no shame.

Waiting alone for the matched betting activity to start again…..

Surveys (+£143.00)

This very decent total was achieved through only 3 surveys.

Dave got lucky and landed one, whilst Ben got two. They’re the usual market research tests that we’ve been doing for the past year or so. Each of them take less than an hour and you get rewarded very well for it.

As other earning opportunities dry up, getting more of this is going to be a focus for us.

Stamps (+£12.08)

No matter how bad it gets, you can rely on Dave to bring in £12.08 in stamps every month. Even in the event of a nuclear war when only the cockroaches are supposed to survive, there would still be Dave posting letters to get his free stamps each month.

At times like this we’re very grateful for it too.

Shares (+£0.27)

You may have read in Ben’s recent post, we’ve decided that the money we had in our betting accounts is better used by investing in the stock market.

Each of us will get £550 to invest in any fund or market index, in whatever time-frame we want.

Ben is, so far, the only one to have got off the mark. He hasn’t fallen victim of the indecision that has hit Chris and Dave. Instead, he got straight in, spending all £550 on buying 265.829 units of Blackrock Consensus 85 Class 1 Accumulation fund on 29th March.

He bought it approximately where this red arrow is:

The price had moved up only 27p in the day-or-so before the end of the month. But as you can see, things have picked up a little further since then – hopefully this will give us a nice little payoff for the months, even years to come.

Chris and Dave are still waiting on the sidelines, so expect some action in April.

eBay (-£6.48)

We actually made quite a few sales in the month, which was great news.

Unfortunately, the loss comes from Chris buying further stock just before we all got put into lockdown. We don’t bother accounting for purchases as stock assets, as it’s too confusing.

Those purchases have turned out to be poor timing, as he’s now sitting on about 12 products which are ones that people are pretty unlikely to buy in the current circumstances. He’s just going to have to wait this one out.

Cryptocurrency (-£109.32)

We suffered a big loss on Bitcoin this month, and that’s not a surprise given the way the market has gone.

Charting our holding of Bitcoin since we first invested looks like we’re heading down some sort of alpine range! Since we bought Bitcoin we’ve only had 2 out of 9 months where it has gone up in value. The other 7 months, we’ve been forced into banging on in these posts about losses.

There’s not much else to say right now. Bitcoin was always just supposed to be a bit of a gamble. We’ve ridden it this far down, so we might as well see if it climbs back up again too.

Putting our business on ice

I’ll not go into this further in this post as Ben covered it in his article, but we’ve temporarily (and maybe permanently) turned off our shopify account. We weren’t selling much in normal times, and we reckon the chances of selling right now is further reduced.

Turning off our shopify subscription has allowed us to save money whilst the prospects of making any sales are slim.

Website spring cleaning

One thing that we have invested in recently is tidying up this website. After nearly 2 years of plugging away with this site, often to an audience of zero people, we’re now seeing a steady stream of traffic come our way.

As an example, here’s how many keywords we ranked for in the UK this time last year (48) compared to this year (340):

A lot of those keywords aren’t particularly high-ranking or driving much traffic, but as you can see, we do now have a decent spread of top-10 keywords, which tends to be where you really start to see visitors to your site trickling in. Here’s the distribution of our 340 keywords:

We’ll keep chipping away at this in the hope of growing the site and connecting with more people!

Total value of the fund

So, let’s see where all that brings us to at the end of March:

Breaking the £5k mark is something we’ve been looking forward to for a while. Sometimes, looking at the following chart, I find it hard to believe how far we’ve come:

As we keep making new investments and diversifying the assets we’ve got, I thought it might also be useful to provide a visual summary of where our fund is held right now:

Aims for April

Things probably aren’t going to be normal for a while. It feels like March and April are going to be about adjusting to the new way of doing things. In our case we’ll focus on:

• Finding new ways of making income to make up for the loss of matched betting
• Further investments in shares.
• Making more updates to the website that will help us get more search engine visibility.
• Surviving lockdown!

We hope that all of our readers are doing OK under the circumstances. We’d love to hear what you’re prioritising at this time. Let us know in the comments below.