Hello everyone, it’s dreary November. And we’ve chosen an equally dreary photo for our header to this post! Lovely.
If you’re based in the UK then you’ll have felt that the weather has turned colder and windier, but we’re still out there making money trying to grow the fund. Let’s find out how we got on.
What is the purpose of this report?
Most of you now know the drill here, so you can skip this section, but if you’re new then read on whilst we explain what’s going on here.
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 the 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?
Obviously last month was a bit of a turning point, getting out of the red and starting to see this project bringing home some bacon, rather than bailiffs. This month the key was not only to keep that momentum going, but to accelerate the growth of the fund. We’ve now got a few different ‘irons in the fire’ as it were so with more revenue streams, more potential profits.
The key targets were as follows:
- My big task was to get my stamp hustle back up and running after the inconvenience of having to move house and postpone it while they reassigned things to my new address.
- Chris was going to complete the sale of his items in the eBay challenge in his bid to wrestle the eBay challenge crown from Ben who most pundits agree had at least one hand on it.
- Our big new project was to investigate the world of matched betting – I must admit this all sounded a bit shady and back alley dealing to me at first, but we wanted to explore our options and see if this is a road worth going down.
Income
| Project | Income | Expenses | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Be My Eye | £34.40 | -£34.10 | £0.30 |
| User Testing | £30.08 | £30.08 | |
| Surveys | £5.00 | £5.00 | |
| eBay | £54.49 | -£91.74 | -£37.25 |
| Bank Compensation | £50.00 | £50.00 | |
| Kantar / TNS (stamps) | £30.87 | £30.87 | |
| Matched Betting | -£17.99 | -17.99 | |
| £204.84 | -£143.83 | £61.01 |
BeMyEye
After the absolute mega-windfall last month on BeMyEye, this month was never going to be able to continue that storming progress.
But several jobs were picked up. This month Chris did three missions where he had to go and purchase a new-to-market refrigerated drink in several stores. All together he’s ended up buying 22 of these drinks, and he’s still not quite sure if he likes the taste of them. Those 22 drinks, by the way, will be fully reimbursed.
Due to the purchase of 22 drinks, the expenses column for BeMyEye is a lot higher this month than it’s ever been. And unfortunately because we’re cash accounting here (that means we only log income when we actually receive it in our bank account, not just when it gets allocated to us in the app) it looks like it was all for nothing.
Actually, Chris has another £13 or so of earnings which he couldn’t get out of the app in time before the end of the month (sadly they make you wait 10 days between each withdrawal). But the good news is that we’ll see this as pure income next month.
Now, if only he could find a use for the 18 or so drinks that he’s got left.
UserTesting
Chris continues to plug away at this one and it paid handsomely during November, where he picked up four jobs.
The big frustration with this one is passing the screener survey that you have to take before being told if you can do each test. More often than not it’s a rejection, in his experience.
However, when you actually pass one of the screeners and get allocated a job then this is a great way of earning money. Each test is between 10 and 40 minutes long and each pays $10 each. Definitely one that he’ll keep going over the next few months.
Ebay
As you know, Chris and Ben have been going head-to-head in an eBay challenge in November and it’s now over. Next week they’ll do a wrap-up article on that and let you know who won.
However, Chris has continued to play around on eBay to see if there’s any long term money to be made in the niche that he explored for the challenge – selling used football boots. In doing so he’s managed to incur much more expenses than he’s made in income.
We’re looking at a total loss of £37.25, which isn’t great to be honest. But there’s some good news and bad news that accompanies this.
- Good news: Chris still has 10 pairs of unsold football boots, which are included in this months expense. Next month he’ll be looking to complete the sale of all of them, generating some more income.
- Bad news: Chris is probably in a bit too deep here, and he’s starting to have major doubts about whether there is any money to be made at all in re-selling football boots. He’ll be moaning about the difficulties of doing so in next weeks article, no doubt citing the uncertainties of Brexit as having destroyed his fledgling multi-million pound business venture.
Bank Compensation
This month we got a cracking one-off windfall by getting some compensation from our bank. If you haven’t read it already, here’s the full story.
Kantar / TNS – stamps
The rather bizarre little stamp hustle I am onto went above and beyond this month. I had contacted them to inform them I am moving and so want to pause the barrage of envelopes I need to post coming through until we’re settled in and ready to go again. They said “that’s fine, it’ll take a month for us to get your new address up and running anyway, so let’s do that now”, as an aside, in this day and age a month to update an address – are they relying on a room of monkeys with typewriters to happen upon the right combination of characters to form my new address in their system?
Anyway, all sounded good to me and I swallowed the fact I wouldn’t be getting my stamp income for a month. The twist in the tale came when my father (who loves nothing more than to unload a box of belongings from his house/loft/garage to one of his offspring) turned up with a box full of packages of envelopes – apparently they had been going to his address this whole time.
This means that in a spectacular turn of events, I got my usual monthly stamps plus some bonus Christmas stamps – not only that but a rather fetching “Harry Potter Presentation Pack” of stamps. It’s a haul worthy of sending any stamp collector worth their salt into a hot flush.
All in, at cost price it comes to another £30.87 worth of stamps – though I hope to be able to offload the Harry Potter set for more than the face value stamp cost at some point and have even put it on eBay to see if there are any bites. I have pondered holding onto these stamps in the hope of making some extra margin when stamp prices inevitably rise, but I’m about to send out a whole load of wedding thank you cards so I may end up buying these stamps from the fund myself and turning them into some ready cash we can use for upcoming projects.
Matched Betting
This was our big goal for the month and something we saw as having the potential to push the project on to the next level. After looking into it in rather hushed tones over a Big-Mac in a shady meeting in a McDonald’s halfway between us all – this is where all good money making ventures start I presume – we’ve decided it’s definitely worth a flutter and gave ourselves all the task of becoming well-versed in it and getting some action going. It definitely needs a more thorough write up than I can do here, so we’ll have a matched betting article out to you shortly.
The astute among you will have noticed it is a big fat £17.99 in our expenses column which doesn’t exactly look good. This isn’t due to some ill advised betting on Santa’s Little Helper to win the 14:30 at Haydock (I know next to nothing about horse racing but I’m pretty sure those are all things). It’s actually the subscription fee to a site called OddsMonkey – they basically do all the legwork to facilitate matched betting and it has quickly become clear the work involved in doing it without their tools is basically madness. In fact, we all started to see some earnings from matched betting towards the end of the month, but as usual it only counts when it’s in the account or our hands in the form of cold hard cash (or stamps if we’re being picky).
Overall total
Amount at the start of the month: £32.74
Income: £204.84
Expenses: -£143.83
Total value of the Fund at end of July: £93.75
What next?
We are agonisingly close to having broken the £100 barrier this month and it will be nice to achieve that next month. Here’s our plan for this month:
- All three of us will be hitting the matched betting hard. It was a bit of a learning curve but we each have our heads round it now and are focusing on maximising our gains through it this month.
- Chris will be attempting to turn his cluster of used football boots into cash by flogging them on eBay.
- Dave – will be trying his hand at user-testing after Chris has paved the way successfully.
With all the projects we have on the go and the matched betting coming in this month, we may even be able to hit the £200 if we can turn profits of over £100 in December, though there’s always the chance we will have some larger expenses to prevent that – you have to speculate to accumulate and all that.
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.