Monthly Update – July & Aug 19 – Summer Recess

It’s time for our monthly update where we review what we’ve been up to, what, if anything we’ve made, and what our plans are right now. This update covers July and August.

Yes, it’s a double-month roundup in this article. We were too lazy (or busy on our summer holidays) to do a July roundup …which I think sums up the mood at The Money Mountain.

Enthusiasm was a little low and productivity waaaaaay down (not helped by the absence of a football season) and therefore Matched Betting (cynical link to our affiliate linked article!) opportunities.

We’ve all positioned ourselves with a heavy focus on football and as such if we start taking up horse racing betting in the summer it may constitute a red flag for the bookies and result in gubbings – something we’re all keen to avoid.

But first, what’s the point of this article?

We say it every month: if you’re new around here, don’t read the rest of this section. It’s just for first timers (if that includes you, then welcome to our humble site).

If you haven’t read our ‘About Us’ page then you probably should. It explains this whole crazy idea, but in essence, we’re just three fairly regular guys from England trying to make money on the side of our regular day jobs.

Income goes into our collective fund where it is earned over and above our usual monthly incomes. So that’s nothing from salaries or our existing personal investments. We’re looking for stuff over and above that. The sort of side-hustles that anyone can pull off if they’ve got the time and energy (and in some cases desperation).

The purpose of publishing these reports is so that you can see how well (or badly) the fund is doing. And we think that’s important for two big reasons:

• The whole purpose of this blog is for us to try money-making methods so that you can see what works and what doesn’t. The best way to prove what’s working and what isn’t is obviously to share our earnings (or lack of them) from these various sources.
• Secondly, we’ve done something that we think is a blogging first. We’re giving all of our readers a 10% stake in the fund – more details on that in this post. And naturally, we think you’ll want to receive regular reports on how that’s going for you.

Simple enough? Let’s crack on and talk about how this month went.

Goals for the months?

I think it’s fair to say that it was just about getting through them. Holiday’s, no football (and I appreciate I am opening myself up for criticism here: I know there was the Women’s World Cup), Brexit (why not blame our poor performance on it, everyone else does) all meant that there wasn’t much in the ways of direct money making action.

We did however close the purchase of a business! Now, we don’t want you thinking we’re some sort of Warren Buffett style Big Daddy Businessmen. This business cost us in the region of $400.

It is a roll of the dice to see if we can create something out of nothing. The business has a reasonable infrastructure and a couple of nice features (it’s got a great website name which we believe is worth the $400 alone), so we’re taking the (albeit very small) risk.

Quick note for you: you won’t see the $400 cost of the business reflected in the below results yet. That’s one for a future period.

The purchase was funded through the funds we’ve raised so far and we’ve also registered with Companies House here in the UK. Now we are going through the motions of setting up business banking so we can start trading. There’ll be more on this in the next couple of months, once we’ve got something more substantial to tell you.

As we’ve discussed in the past however, we will not be promoting or advertising the business here.

Results

Project	Income	Expenses	Total
Stamps / Kantar	£24.16		£24.16
User Testing	£24.16		£24.16
Matched Betting	£447.66		£447.66
Be My Eye	£11.00		£11.00
Cryptocurrency		-£101.82	-£101.82
Website Costs		-£10.00	-£10.00
Reader Share		-£25.00	-£25.00
	£506.98	-£136.82	£370.16

Matched Betting (+£447.66)

August saw the return of the football season (which provides relief on a number of fronts). Surprisingly there was a lack of offers on the table from the companies outside of their usual weekly’s, but in for a penny, in for a pound, we got straight back on it to start raising some cash.

Ben got gubbed by William Hill only a couple of weeks into the season. This was annoying as they had been a good source of funds over the last 9 months. Unfortunately you have to accept that as part of the matched better’s lot.

Apart from that, he was going for it big time this month and came out with a tidy profit of £87.86 in July made respectable by a golden goal bet through William Hill. August was a bumper month: £174.99. This was simply through knuckling down and placing a total of 215 back and lay bets. It would be interesting to see what this equates to as an hourly rate, but as easy, legit, tax free money, it’s fair to say we are totally in love with Matched Betting as a means of making money. It certainly beats watching Love Island.

In August we also got our first Oddsmonkey referal commission! Whoever you are that signed up via our link, thank you! We are grateful! Sadly we can’t withdraw the commission until we have at least £50 in the kitty, so it may take us a few months. Let us not forget that Rome wasn’t built in a day…

eBay (£0)

Zero profits from this in the month.

This one hasn’t taken off in the way we’d hoped; it is a massive amount of effort and knowledge is key to buying. Get that wrong and you’re doomed. Ben went to have a trawl around the local car boot sales in August and, while there was no doubt it was a buyers market, what was up for sale was mostly rubbish. Having purchased a dress from one seller (thanks to advice from my better half) it has still not sold 3 weeks later. He may have to drop the price just to get it sold and moved on – it isn’t doing anyone any good sitting in a drawer waiting to be posted to an as yet unknown buyer.

It may be worth putting this one on the back burner for now and perhaps revisiting after Christmas. Hopefully the rush to list unwanted gifts will lead to a spelling mistake or two and a bargain for us.

Kantar (£24.16)

Stamps, stamps, more stamps.

Every month Dave diligently does his postal survey and he’s rewarded with a book of stamps. It’s not very exciting, but it’s steady. The only real item of interest here is to wonder what we should eventually do with an increasingly growing pile of stamps.

One day we might have enough stamps to post one of us on holiday somewhere in the UK.

Surveys (£0)

Ben’s poor form continued with the survey’s as he was also gubbed by LifePointsPanel…which was annoying as it was a nice way to make a few quid a month for very little effort other than a few mouse clicks.

Focus Force continues and Ben has got a panel in September which will bring in a few quid.

That said, at the end of August, Ben was a mere 30 Yougov points away from being able to cash in his £50 in what would be just reward for a torturous 14-15months of completing their surveys. Hopefully he will get over the line in September and we’ll have another £50 in the coffers for investing elsewhere.

User Testing (£24.16)

Quick hat tip to trusty online earner User Testing which made us a tidy $30, converted to £24.16.

This is one of Chris’ favourites. It’s not lucrative work, but it’s really interesting stuff – especially when you compare it with the coma-educing tedium of doing online surveys.

The notable thing here is that as GBP continues to tank, this work – which pays $10 per test – gets more lucrative for us. As a result, you might see more of this over the next few months from Chris, providing that he manages to find sufficient available jobs on there.

Cryptocurrency (-£101.82)

Put it down to too many summer BBQs, heatstroke, or merely the lack of summer football, we found ourselves feeling a little crazy over the last few months.

And so, naturally, we decided to have a big punt on cryptocurrency. We took nearly a quarter of the fund at that point (£702) and punted it into Bitcoin. There’s more about that in this article.

Turns out we’ve got about as much skill for investing in cryptocurrency as Boris Johnson’s barber has at cutting hair.

Since we invested, bitcoin has inevitably slid (of course it bloody has), leaving us sitting on a loss at the moment of about £100.

At the moment we’re not massively concerned as it’s all a bit of a laugh this cryptocurrency stuff, innit.

It might go down further, in which case it’s still not the end of the world. None of us are going to lose any sleep over it. (Doesn’t that just show how far we’ve come with the fund – we’d have been crying our little eyes out at a £100 loss in the early months of this project).

Equally, it might rocket upwards if it picks up a bit of momentum again. Or perhaps even if things go badly wrong in the economy it might be seen as a safe haven (in which case the world will be in a very strange place). We’ll keep you posted on this one. It’s going to be a roller coaster.

Website Costs (-£10)

Our domain name registration got renewed for another year costing us £10. So far, google domains has been good to us. No complaints.

Reader Share (-£25)

I’ll keep this bit short too, since we wrote about it in full in last week’s blog post.

We sincerely tried to give away money representing the reader share (that’s 10% of the value of our fund, if you didn’t know). But we failed – only managing to find one reader who actually seemed to want any cash (£25) – so we’re keeping the surplus back and reinvesting it in the fund.

Worry not, we’ll be building another reader share in 2019/2020, so make sure you don’t miss out on that. Side note: we’ve doubled our email subscribers since we started trying to give out money – word must be getting round.

Overall total

Amount at the start of July: £3,435.26

Income: £506.98

Expenses: -£136.82

Total value of the Fund at end of August: £3,805.42

Bosh, have a load of that. The chart just keeps on climbing, even if the incline isn’t quite as steep as it was earlier in the year.

What’s on the agenda for September?

September is a tricky month for The Money Mountain with Chris and Ben having to ramp it up for work after the summer holidays, while Dave is non-stop all year round.

We need to get our business banking finalised – we’re going through the motions with HSBC for that. It seems to be fairly easy, but they do want to know all manner of details which have to be collected from the three of us so that slows things a little; again, there will be an article on that before long to tell you all about it.

Ben has got a fair bit of business travel coming up in September which has the potential to slow the Matched Betting. This is always frustrating, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

We’re all a little disappointed with the outcome of the Readers Fund offer and lack of uptake, but equally got a warm buzz from knowing that we’ve helped move one of our subscribers a little closer to their goal. Perhaps we’ll have a little bit of a session to see how we can get the word out for next summer.

As always, get in touch in the comments below with your thoughts, ideas and abuse. See you later!