The Summit Meeting

As you will have no doubt seen from our updates, we’ve managed to scrape together a few quid. The problem is, what to do with this money?

We can bank roll more matched betting, but all of us have decided that doing so goes against the ethos of The Money Mountain. It would be far too easy to take the path of least resistance and keep adding to the fund at the rate of a few hundred pounds per month.

That is not to sound flippant about it all; if you have read this blog and have been inspired by our efforts so far and have decided that matched betting is the way forward for you and you can achieve your goals using this means, then congratulations! You’re doing better than most.

We’re definitely going to carry on with the matched betting for a while longer yet. It is one of the easiest profit-to-effort activities at our disposal.

But what next?

Forget Davos (I’ve always thought that sounded like the name of a Greek waiter that your auntie Shirley fell in love with on a holiday romance). Forget the G8. We decided it was time for a summit of our own.

So, we met at McDonalds and occupied a table for a couple of hours talking through ideas. Sure, global economic leaders might think they’re discussing more important issues, but can they do it over a bacon double cheeseburger? Can they, heck.

We have all decided that we want to build a sustainable, passive income stream. There are various ways of doing this, some more passive than others.

Let’s look at the options, starting with the obvious:

1. Investing in the stock market

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that over the long term investing in the stock market generates returns far greater than leaving cash in the bank; it is fraught with risk and it can all go terribly wrong too, but as far as ventures of interest to The Money Mountain goes, it’s fairly low risk.

What would we be doing? We’d be investing in some sort of dull as dishwater fund, that would have a yield of around 5% a year. Add to that a (very modest) 1% a year growth and if we took the £1500 we’ve got so far, added £100 a month each (£300 total), in 10 years time we’d have……the grand total of around £45,000. Assuming we maintain the 5% yield, we’ve be looking at around £2,250 a year in income, which in turn would give us £750 a year each. Not to be sniffed at, but not something which is going to lead to early retirement (especially as this would most likely be taxed too)!

This is the ultimate in passive income. You really don’t have to do anything. You buy a FTSE 100 fund, it chucks out around 3.9% right now and you just let it go, adding to it every month and the income keeps coming.

2. Drop shipping

As a slightly less passive option, we considered drop shipping, but it all seems a bit cowboyish and I don’t fancy getting chased down the road by Lynn Fowles-Wood (one for the kids there!) because the tea towels we sell spontaneously combust.

Chris has also recently been through a bit of a saga ordering a duster (yes, ladies and gents, this is the rock-and-roll-lifestyle of a man in his 30s) from a dropshipper on Amazon. The duster turned out to not be what was advertised and the whole shonky episode has left him with some serious reservations about this as a sensible business idea. Not to mention he has a house that is now getting dustier by the day thanks to this one particular drop-shipping buffoon.

3. Buy a business

Dave looked at buying a business, but from looking at this, it seems to be massively risky. There is a site we looked at exchange marketplace for businesses for sale, all I can say is that it would take a brave man/woman to take any of them on in our price bracket!

How do you work out who is selling a genuine business opportunity and who is selling a complete lemon? It’s a minefield. Anyway, who would really want to sell a great business idea to us for a couple of hundred pounds?

4. A property empire?

A brief discussion was around buying a property to renovate, but the sums of money we’d need are far beyond what we have available to us at the moment, perhaps a few ventures down the line, we can look at this again.

Many people have made good fortunes off property empires. But sadly, we’re looking less at casinos and skyscrapers, and more at smelly bedsits as we look to get a foothold on the property ladder.

I think we all like the idea of taking something knackered and turning it into something useable for someone. For that to be a realistic option we’d need roughly 10-15 times what we have available to us at the moment and even that could be waaaaaaaay off if the place is all but condemned!

Spank it all on some scheme.  Of course….

Again, reading this as I write it, it sounds dreadful. We are talking about huge sums of money for most people, but…we decided to gamble a little with our fund (other than the portion which is going to charity) and do something a little more risky than the stock market:

We’re going to start buying and selling. That’s right, an online business. It might sound like a hair-brained scheme, and maybe it will turn out to be just that, but it felt like a really exciting option. Not just the one we think has the most potential, but also probably the one that the 3 of us have the most common interest in. And that is half the battle.

Now, what exactly we’re doing, we’ll tell you more later, but we have a product in mind, we have a supplier in mind, all we need to do is get it all set up and start selling our wares. We’re not sure if we’ll be advertising the venture on The Money Mountain; we’ll certainly be telling you what we’re doing and how we’re doing it, but as to whether we link to the business through this site remains to be seen…

Dave has some online retail experience so that will be absolutely invaluable as we start this business. We’re going to be holding the stock, taking the orders and shipping them out ourselves, as well as our normal Monday – Friday work-lives; I guess that’s why it’s called a side hustle!

We’re doing as much market research as we can right now; there are market reports on what we want to do from a few agencies, but there costs are massively prohibitive for such a small operation; they want around £2500-£3000 for a market report. A drop in the ocean if you’re a huge company looking to enter a new market or trying to see how you are faring against your competitors, but to 3 chaps with £1500 in the bank, it’s not a serious option.

A bit of research here IS necessary. We’re about to spend all of our fund on a venture to try and make something sustainable. We all remember Chris’ football boots venture on eBay. 15 pairs of boots at 99p a piece isn’t too bad; a few matched bets and it’s been repaid. £1000 worth of stock we can’t shift is a problem, not least of all the explaining I’ll have to do as to why the spare room is full of a load of b…..I nearly gave the game away there!

We’ll be feeding back again soon and please keep your fingers crossed for us. The more £ we make, the more £ we give away.