Can I earn £10,000 in a year without getting a job? – Progress update.
This year I set myself the task of earning £10,000 in year without getting a job (read more here).
In actual cash terms I’m not doing brilliantly. We have had one student so far this year who was with us for 8 weeks at £129 a week. In total we were paid £1032 (this does not take into account our costs – extra money spent on food, water and heating). Plus we have been renting out our garage at a price of £65 a month – a total of £195 so far this year. So I have made £1227 this year. I have £8773 to go with 9 months left. That is £975 a month ish!!
I am doing lots of the ground work though so that we can make more money in the future.
Renting out our spare room
In our spare/ student room we only had one bed, but it is a decent sized room and I have been looking for another bed for a while now. With two beds we can rent to two people and charge more.
I recently found a bed being given away on on local Facebook giving group and the lovely Mr ETL went and picked it up for me and brought it home. Unfortunately the bed isn’t great – it smells of cigarette smoke and the mattress is not in good condition at all. I think with a bit of airing/ scrubbing with bicarbonate of soda or vinegar the base will be ok though and I am continuing to look out for replacement beds and mattresses being given away on free groups online.
In the meantime I am going to use the bed as a prop. I want to advertise the room to rent on Airbnb and the sooner I get the pictures up the sooner I will get some interest. If I get a booking and I can’t find a free mattress/ the base doesn’t smell good enough in time I will go and buy replacements from a charity shop. Before I take the pictures I have a bit of work to do though as I need to rejig the furniture in the room a bit (as you can see in the picture above the beds are a bit too close together at the moment), get some matching bedding and put some more pictures on the walls. I have found some lovely bedding and pictures in charity shops recently, but the bedding doesn’t match, so I will keep looking! I also found a headboard being given away on Freegle recently which goes nicely with the bed.
Aside from renting out the room through Airbnb I have also been signing up to more agencies who place students with host families. I am now signed up with 4 or 5 of them and will keep going until I rent the room out one way or another!
Renting out my car
I have been feeling much more enthusiastic about renting out my car recently as I think they got the price wrong on the website originally. I thought I was only going to make about £10 a day, but now it looks like I can make around £20 a day and that has motivated me to get going with it!
I have been following the tips on the Easy Car Club site for renting out my car. I put stickers in my car windows showing that the car is for rent, I have requested promotional flyers through the website, which people renting out their car can personalise and have printed and sent to them for free. I have also been telling everyone that I know and meet about it. With both my Easycarclub listing and whole house Airbnb listing I have shared the links to Facebook and asked friends to share my links. Loads of people have been helping me by sharing them with their friends and I’m hopeful that someone will rent out my car :).
At one point I thought I was going to rent it out and I spent an afternoon cleaning the car out. Unfortunately it didn’t come off in the end and since then I have been trying to maintain an level of cleanliness in the car. If someone was to rent it out now, it wouldn’t take long for me to clean. The initial wash I did of my car was pointless though (read more here) – my recommendation is that if you are going to rent out your car, don’t wash it until you have a rental booked!
A student has been filming me recently for a documentary for her Masters degree and she said she has been looking to rent out a car and my car was much more reasonably priced than the ones she has been looking at (you never know I might have a customer there). I don’t know the market, but if you are looking to rent a car you might find Easy Car Club a cheaper option. If you are going to sign up to the website then use this code zo520m and you will get £10 off your first rental!
On car advertising
I phoned a few companies about this and chased them up and although they were enthusiastic I haven’t actually had any success. I can’t bring myself to push this at the moment as I am so busy doing other things. When I meet or speak to people I think might be interested though I mention it so you never know I might have some luck at some point 🙂
Renting out extra storage space
I have been promoting the fact I have storage space to rent on Facebook and to my friends. I have a friend who is currently paying around £40 a month for storage and she has managed to negotiate with me to pay me £25 a month to store her stuff instead, which she will be moving in soon. I’m happy, she’s happy and it’s all good. I just need to clear some space for her stuff! Better get to it!
Renting out our whole house in the holidays
I’ve been advertising it like mad on Facebook as I mentioned earlier. I have also been smartening the place up a bit – mainly with curtains as mentioned here and here and new pictures. I have been finding amazing paintings and pictures in charity shops – in particular at the YMCA shop at my local council recycling centre. I paid £2 the other day for an original painting in a frame! I also found some wallpaper lining paper there – I paid £1 for two massive rolls. It was perfect because I had previously found 5 rolls of matching wallpaper in a different charity shop (which I paid around £6 for). I plan to wallpaper one of the walls in my OS’s room. I am not going to get a chance to put it up before the Easter holidays though and unless the kids want to help do it, I think I will wait till afterwards :). I could do with some lessons as well as I have never done wallpapering before.
Once the house is looking great, I’m going to request free professional photography from Airbnb. My friend told me about it and she has been run off with her feet with bookings after having it. Find out more about that here.
I have had some interest from people about renting out the house during school holidays but no definites. We are very lucky as we have relatives we can go and stay with for short periods if we do manage to get a booking, which is great as we can be flexible over exact dates. We also have a tent which I got for free from Freecycle which we could put to work if the need arose. I need to test it out first though – it is an old massive, bulky 1970’s one and it doesn’t have a waterproof cover. I have been told that as long as there is an inner sheet and an outer sheet and they aren’t touching it should be ok though…
Can I make the rest of the £10,000 this year?
I hope so :). If I could rent out my spare room to two people for £800 a month, my house for a couple of weeks at around £1000 a week and continued with the garage rental of £65 for the rest of the year plus an extra £25 a month for some more storage we will be looking after soon I would make £9610. If you add that to the £1227 I have already made, that would be a total of £10837 (before any expenses).
If I don’t meet my target for the year for whatever reason I will be disappointed but I won’t be too upset. There is a fair amount of effort and a learning curve involved in getting these things up and running – signing up to websites, advertising the fact that I am renting out my car and home etc in the right places, getting my car and home etc in good order (fit for renting out) and getting regular customers established. I have been putting the effort in and even if it doesn’t pay off fully by the end of the year, it definitely will in the long run as I plan to keep going with these side hustles on an ongoing basis. So I am pretty happy with my progress so far and am looking forward to seeing how much money I actually manage to make by the end of the year!
