Welcome back for another shakedown of what happened last month in the life of The Money Mountain. This time, we’ll be picking through the highs and lows (oh yes, there really have been a couple of lows!) of September.
Let’s get stuck in.
If you’ve been here before, skip this section
We say it every month: this section is 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 month?
After making the most of holiday season in August, September was very much a back-to-school month for us.
Sadly, ‘school’ was in the form of full-time employment and, whilst it wasn’t exactly new to us, work really started to ramp up again after the summer break.
Chris is currently dealing with the joys of his boss being made redundant. “Great news” said his company, “this will be a chance to get more visibility and take on more responsibility”. Thankfully Chris wasn’t born yesterday and saw through this thinly-veiled attempt at polishing a turd. Make no mistake, Chris has been given the absolute shaft by his employers and it’s yet more fuel for the engine that powers our financial independence voyage.
Sadly, it also meant he had to work quite hard, as he did not only the job he’s paid for, but the one someone else was previously paid for as well. All for no extra money. You’ve got to love corporate culture.
Ben didn’t have it much easier either. September was similarly taxing for him. To rub salt into the wounds, he’s got a fair bit of business travel coming up in October too.
So we knew it could be a tough month. But, nevertheless, the goal was to push through it and increase the value of the fund. Breaking the £4k mark was the holy grail. Did we do it? I’ll leave that cliffhanger for a little later…
But first, something exciting which doesn’t yet appear in our results for the month
Last month, we casually slipped into conversation that we’d bought a business. For $400 we manged to get ourselves a pretty sweet deal. We spent September picking through it and trying to get to grips with exactly what we’ve taken on.
We made major progress with the following:
- Setting up a company. To own a business between the three of us, and make sure that it’s completely legit, we had to set up a private limited company. Once you’ve got past the jargon, this is surprisingly cheap and easy. Within 1 hour, virtually anyone can be an official company director, and start printing a business card saying as much – in order to impress the ladies (if that’s your thing).
- Setting up a bank account. What is it with banks – why do they make everything so very difficult!? At the very start of this project we opened an bank account with HSBC so you’d think that upgrading ourselves to business banking would be easy. Nope. HSBC have once again made it fiendishly difficult for us to give them our money so it looks like we’re going to be getting into bed with, Spanish bank Santander this time. Hola amigos!
- Working out how the business actually operates – the business already sells a particular type of product and has made a few sales over the past year. But who are the customers, where is the stock coming from, how much is this all costing? It’s all a bit of a minefield, and has needed some collective effort to get it sorted.
The upshot of all of this is that we haven’t got the business up and running properly yet. The website needs a slight redesign, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We need to come up with a marketing plan, work out where our stock is coming from and do all manner of other things ASAP so we can try to cover our monthly costs of running it. The clock is ticking.
How we’re feeling, with everything we need to do to this new business…
Despite the massive amount of stuff we’ll need to do to the business to give it a fighting chance of making money, it’s pretty exciting stuff and we’ve all been getting a buzz of sinking our teeth into this as a project.
We’ve set ourselves a goal to soft-launch the new business by 1 November, and start really pushing it in time for Singles Day on 11 November. We’re targeting this date as apparently it’s an Asian shopping fest, and – just like toilets that spray a jet of water on your backside – our business is apparently (relatively) big in Asia.
Stay tuned for more updates nearer the time. For now though, let’s get stuck into this month’s results.
Results
| Project | Income | Expenses | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stamps / Kantar | £12.08 | £12.08 | |
| Surveys / YouGov | £100.60 | £100.60 | |
| Matched Betting | £191.42 | £191.42 | |
| Be My Eye | £18.00 | £18.00 | |
| Cryptocurrency | -£94.65 | -£94.65 | |
| Lottery | £2.90 | -£25.00 | -£22.10 |
| £325.00 | -£119.65 | £205.35 |
Matched Betting (+£191.42)
Not the greatest month we’ve ever had on this, but still decent. It really helps having the football season back on.
Results have been very unpredictable in the premier league (which is what we place most of our bets on), but we’ve carried on placing bets safe in the knowledge that the outcome of the result makes no difference to us at all.
That’s the beauty of matched betting. It’s guaranteed earnings, and has been the number one earner for us over the last year. We can’t recommend it enough.
This is how I still feel when I think of how simple it is to make money matched betting. They’re giving money away.
Unfortunately, our enthusiasm to get stuck back into it at the start of the football season has seen us come a cropper with a couple of bookmakers, who’ve started to wise-up. Our accounts have been gubbed (meaning it’s virtually impossible to make any matched betting returns from them) which is obviously a blow.
However, for the time being, we’ve still got enough accounts out there that we should still be able to milk this particular cash cow for some time to come.
Be My Eye (£18)
Chris keeps plugging away with this app. This month he managed to pick up a couple of jobs checking out advertising displays on the London Underground.
Fortunately, he managed to get the many, many pictures required in London Underground stations without looking too much like a terrorist and taken in for questioning. 3 Missions of this paid £5 each. The remaining £3 was from referrals, which seem to keep trickling in from the link we provided in the review we wrote of this app.
Kantar (£12.08)
Yet again we got another book of stamps in reward for helping with the TNS postal survey. Another month goes by where we contemplate how we can possibly use the ever-growing pile of stamps we have. Any ideas would be gratefully received.
Surveys / YouGov (£100.60)
As Chris covered in splendid detail a few months ago: the path to getting paid out for YouGov surveys is slow and filled with frustration. It’s not well paid work when you measure it on an hourly rate.
But, after months and months of filling in surveys, Ben finally got a £50 payout from YouGov! It’s a sweet moment when it eventually comes, it has to be said.
Ben also had even more success this month as he turned up for a Focus Force panel, and was immediately screened out. Fortunately, they still pay you the full fee for this. So it really is money for just making a fairly straightforward trip into London and then heading home again! More of those would be lovely.
Cryptocurrency (-£94.65)
Since we invested in Bitcoin, things have gone from bad to worse.
Remember, we bought about £700 of it (here’s the article on how we did it). At the time, we knew it was a stab in the dark. Little did we know, we’d pretty much end up stabbing ourselves.
Our Bitcoin journey, depicted in a GIF.
Last month we lost just over £100 as Bitcoin decreased in value. This month we lost nearly the same amount again. The total value of Bitcoin we now hold is just a shade over £500.
It doesn’t feel like time to cut our losses yet. Bitcoin is so very volatile that we live in hope that it will rise again, as fast as it fell. If not, this might just serve to teach us an expensive lesson.
For the time being, it’s certainly proving to be a drain on our monthly performance.
Lottery (-£22.10)
As if our investment in Bitcoin wasn’t gambling enough, in September we decided – like men with pitiful gambling addictions – to have a flutter on the Euromillions lottery.
Given that the jackpot stood at €143m, you can perhaps forgive us for getting a little giddy. Yes, we knew it was folly, and so it proved when we returned only £2.90 on a £25 stake, but it briefly allowed us to dream of how we’d spend the mountain of cash we’d have won.
Unfortunately, it was back down to earth with a bump. It seems that none of us will be bathing in tubs of £50 notes any time soon. Lesson learned. Check out our article: Playing the lottery: it won’t be you.
Overall total
Amount at the start of Sep: £3,805.42
Income: £325.00
Expenses: -£119.65
Total value of the Fund at end of Sep: £4,010.78
Yes, we did crack the £4k mark! What a feeling, to have pushed through another milestone.
But rather than spend too much time in our newly-established base camp at the £4k mark, we’ll be trying to push on to £5k as soon as we possibly can.
Here’s the chart of how we got here:
What’s on the agenda for October?
Much of this has been mentioned already, so I’ll keep this brief.
It’s a case of:
- Get our newly-acquired business launched in time for 1 November.
- Carry on making money. Ideally, we want to be at £5k by the time 2020 rolls by. It’s ambitious, but do-able.
As always, get in touch in the comments below with your thoughts and ideas. What do you want to see us getting up to?