Happy birthday to us! This site is 1 year old, which is cause for celebration.
But how did June go for us? Did we punch out the lights in style, or celebrate poor and penniless with a reduced price birthday cake that’s nearly past its sell by date?
What is the purpose of this report?
We say it every month: if you’re new around here, don’t read 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.
What were our goals for the month?
Let’s remind ourselves what we aimed to do in June, and see if we achieved it:
- Drag ourselves over the 12 month line with as big a total as we possibly can!
- Work out what to do with the reader share.
- Possibly buy a business.
We achieved 2 out of the 3. But the last one was just like one of those re-lighting candles on a birthday cake, that we just couldn’t blow out.
Success 1, was dragging ourselves over the line for the 12-month anniversary! More on that below.
We also managed to work out what to do with the reader share – three of our readers have been contacted to receive some free, absolutely-no-strings-attached cash. We sit and wait nervously, whilst we discover if the email addresses we got for them are real, or if they’re just Russian bots.
As to buying a business, sadly this hasn’t happened yet. Fail
You’d think with the delays we faced trying to buy a business that we had to clear some major hurdle. Do the competitions and mergers commission need to check we’re not creating a monopoly? Have the target’s shareholders revolted at our potential takeover? It’s none of those. We’ve just been slow.
Obviously we can’t talk too much more about what we’re cooking up with buying a business until it’s actually done, but hopefully we’ll know if it’s definitely on or off by the end of next month. If it comes through, it will be the subject of a more detailed post!
Right, let’s look at how we did this month:
Results
| Project | Income | Expenses | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stamps / Kantar | £12.08 | £12.08 | |
| eBay | £11.69 | -£3.00 | £8.69 |
| Matched Betting | £69.06 | £69.06 | |
| Surveys | £65.00 | £65.00 | |
| Cryptocurrency | -£1.00 | -£1.00 | |
| Other | £2.00 | £2.00 | |
| £159.83 | -£4.00 | £155.83 |
Kantar / TNS – stamps
The only thing more guaranteed than losing a single sock in the wash is us receiving some stamps from Dave’s Kantar / TNS survey efforts. It might not be a huge amount, but the stamp mountain continues to grow.
eBay
April was the massive eBay month for us. And we’re still working our way through the last of the things that didn’t sell first time round. £11.69 in sales (less £3 in costs) is small fry, but we’ll take it.
Matched Betting
As you know, we started matched betting in November last year and all 3 of us each made close to £200 per month, for the next 4 months or so. Times were good.
And then the end of the football season arrived and things have completely changed for us – this month we only made £69.06 between us. Matched betting is still definitely worthwhile, but we’ve found it really difficult to make profits over the summer while the football season isn’t on.
There was the Women’s World Cup, there has also been Wimbledon and Royal Ascot, but none of them have really set the pulse racing, and many of the bookmakers don’t seem to have come out to play for Summer.
It looks like this trend could continue until October, when we’re hoping that the bookies and their offers will be back with a bang on football. If Aston Villa will pay £20m for Tyrone Mings, we have to believe that anything is possible.
Surveys
The biggest windfall we’ve ever had from surveys arrived this month. Finally, after months of waiting, Chris completed 11 months of torture doing YouGov surveys and they finally paid out £50.
There’s absolutely no chance he’s going to be doing surveys to try to earn another £50. He’d rather lance his own piles than spend another 11 months earning an absolute pittance with these guys.
Ben, however, heroically carried on with his surveys and brought in a further £15.
BeMyEye
There’s no income this month from Chris’ old favorite. That’s with good reason.
Frankly, this app has been taking the mickey a bit for the last month. As you may know, it offers mystery shopping jobs that you do through the app. Perhaps there are a lot of new users (jobs are being taken quite fast at the moment), but the app recently decided to offer a load of jobs out at what he felt was a completely unrealistic rate.
There’s no way anyone is going to go into a cafe in London, try to talk the owner into doing a survey, conduct a 15 minute survey and record all the responses in the app, just for £4 per mission.
If there’s a bit more realism in the pricing for jobs, Chris is likely to be back on the trail next month.
Overall total
Amount at the start of the month: £3,279.43
Income: £159.83
Expenses: -£4.00
Total value of the Fund at end of the month: £3,435.26
So, month 12 wasn’t a cracker, but it was at least better than May. Things are bound to be a little quieter over the summer, but we’ll see if we can keep some momentum going.
In terms of where our money actually is, at the moment we’ve got most of it tied up in online bookmakers, as matched betting profits. But we’ve also got a fair chunk of cash in the bank. This month we decided that we’d start thinking about buying cryptocurrency and, though we hadn’t done it during the month, we’ve moved our cash balance into Coinbase, ready for a purchase in July. More on that to come!
Here’s the trusty graph. It’s a thing of beauty!
What next?
July means 3 things, much the same as last month:
- Don’t let our progress stop over the summer – keep making the money through our regular avenues.
- Finish giving away the reader share.
- Work out if we’re actually buying a business or not!
Let us know your thoughts
As always, if you’ve got any comments, questions or ideas on how we can make money on this site then get in touch.
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.