The year is flying, and we’re getting close to Christmas. Santa and his elves are working away getting presents ready for the children, but we’re making them look like utter dossers compared to what we’ve managed to achieve in October.
We’ve achieved a lot in the month, but it hasn’t been matched with financial success. Infact, we’ve made a loss. That’s ok, though. October has been about putting in the effort so that future returns will be higher.
Step this way, let’s review the month.
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?
The goals for October were simple:
- 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.
We didn’t hit either of those goals, and that’s ok. The point of setting the goals is to give ourselves something to aim for, not to beat ourselves up about them.
Progress has been made on both of the above goals, and in the context of the whole month, that’s been good enough.
Firstly, on the business: we’re now launched! We have an online, shopify-based business which has even made 2 sales since we started it. Those 2 sales feel fairly miraculous given that we weren’t fully up and running at the time we made them.
But let’s be clear, 2 sales a month isn’t going to get us anywhere fast. We’ve got outgoings to pay, and we’re going to need to significantly improve our sales if this venture is going to be worth it. However, like all things – including this blog – internet presence takes time to build.
Back in the day, we hardly had any visitors each month to The Money Mountain. But now, thanks to a growing readership, we get a good spread of visits. Persistence pays off. Hopefully the same will be the case for our business.
On our other goal of continuing to make money: technically we completely failed this as we recorded an overall loss for the month. Don’t worry though, there’s a sensible reason for this apparent blip.
As we’d mentioned last month, we bought a business and the expense of doing so hadn’t yet been recorded. This month it hit – more on that below.
Let’s look at how it all went down…
Results
| Project | Income | Expenses | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stamps / Kantar | £12.08 | £12.08 | |
| Matched Betting | £165.12 | £165.12 | |
| Cryptocurrency | £29.69 | £29.69 | |
| Buying a business | -£300.00 | -£300.00 | |
| £206.89 | -£300.00 | -£93.11 |
Matched Betting (+165.12)
Another pretty decent month matched betting.
We didn’t have any huge wins, but Chris and Ben kept the momentum going with the standard bookies’ offers.
October was a decent month, and there were some reasonable offers that the bookies presented us with. The rugby world cup, and the premier league being in full swing helped us bank some profits.
Honestly though, there’s not much else to say about this right now. If you’re not matched betting yet, it’s easy money. We discuss it more in this article: Matched betting: is it legit, and is it worth it?
Kantar (£12.08)
Another book of stamps was accumulated in reward for helping with the TNS postal survey. We’ve now got over £150 of stamps and are no closer to working out how we’re going to turn them into cash.
Cryptocurrency (£29.69)
Rejoice! Bitcoin went up for the first month since we made our ill-fated investment.
Not going to lie, our investment in Bitcoin has been a bit of a money pit. We invested around £700 and saw it drop to around £500.
We were hoping that at some point the decline would have to stop, and thankfully in October that happened. A gain of £29.69 in the month seems nice, but it will have to rise a lot further until we recover all of our losses.
Still, we’re not thinking of cashing out yet. We’re going to ride this train a little longer.
Buying a business (-£300.00)
We purchased our business for around £300. Truth be told, Dave stuck it on the credit card, but now that expense has come through and hit our results.
Those of you with any accounting knowledge will know that what we’ve actually done here is purchase something with £300 of value (at least we hope) and therefore we’ve acquired an asset, not suffered an expense.
To those people, I say ‘you’re exactly right’, but I’m still going to list it as an expense. I don’t claim that this is the perfect way to do it, but in an effort to keep things simple, it’s what we’re going with.
Much as I love this blog, I haven’t got the time to be doing a perfect set of accounts for it (and there’s no need). So we’re going to use a bit of cash accounting here.
It makes sense to write off the £300 for the purposes of this blog. If the new business doesn’t make any money, then it will all be lost – and maybe it’s safest to work on that basis for now, as we don’t know if it’s going to be a success. However, if it does make money then we’ll hopefully receive some dividends in the future, and those will be profits for our fund.
Doing it this way is going to be a lot simpler than me listing a value of the investment and then constantly considering it for impairment purposes.
At this point, we should also point out that the business is probably going to need more money injecting into it in the future to cover initial expenses whilst we try to get it up to a level of sales where it can be self sustaining. Any further money we have to pump in will also be shown as an expense for the fund.
Overall total
Amount at the start of Oct: £4,010.78
Income: £206.89
Expenses: -£300.00
Total value of the Fund at end of Oct: £3,917.67
After going on about hitting the £4k mark last month, we now suffer the indignity of having fallen back below that level.
This is the first loss we’ve made since the very start.
What’s on the agenda for November?
We’re going to keep it simple:
- Make 4 item sales in the business. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but if we can sell 1 item per week, then we’ll be roughly at break even point.
- Get the fund back above the £4k mark.
We were targeting having the fund at £5k by Christmas. That goal has now completely gone out of the window. The new business is taking time and money, which is naturally going to mean that getting to £5k isn’t possible.
That’s not a problem. We’re in this for the long term, and much of what’s been invested in this month is hopefully laying the foundations for a more prosperous future. Whether that pans out, only time will tell.
As always, get in touch in the comments below with your thoughts and ideas. What do you want to see us getting up to?