Christmas doesn’t need to break the bank, there are loads of ways to make it affordable, but there are times when you might want to spend a bit extra. The minute you put the word organic in your shopping list, the price goes through the roof. Sustainable gifts can be pricey and if you are visiting family and friends that aren’t local, costs can spiral. Last year the Mirror said that the cost of Christmas had ‘pushed up to 87% of adults into debt and nearly half of those will still be in the red at the end of 2016’.  Getting into debt over Christmas is not a good idea especially if you are still recovering from last year! It is so much better to save up the money first and if you are running out of time and options for that, another alternative is to try and make a bit of extra cash in the run up to Christmas!

Easy Car Club: Rent out your car when you are not using it! EasyCar club lets you list your car for free on their website for potential punters to rent out. I thought about doing this and to be honest didn’t get very far, but I don’t live in the right area. I think this would probably work best in city centres where lots of people can rely on public transport most of the time and only want occasional access to a car. If you are away over Christmas and won’t need your car, it might be the perfect time to rent your car to someone who wants to rent one to go and visit their friends and relatives! 

 

Uber:  Become a taxi driver in your spare time. Uber allows people to book your services virtually and handles the rates and takes payment as well. We took our first Uber ride a few weeks ago. We were pretty impressed with the service and it was cheaper than getting a traditional taxi.

Just Park: Rent out your parking space! If you have a parking space or garage near a station, a popular beach, or in a city centre that you aren’t using, you could make some money renting it out. Garages aren’t just for parking in – we actually rent out part of our garage for long term storage, which is such little work for a bit of regular money coming in.

Airbnb: Rent out your spare room! We rent our spare room to students on and off throughout the year and I prefer having someone in it to not because when we don’t have student it just ends up being filled with junk and tidying it is another thing to add to the to do list. Make sure you are comfortable with whoever you are renting to before you do (ask for more info, check passports if needed) and also make sure you comply with any relevant legislation like having a gas safety certification and reporting any earnings which are taxable.

So what are you waiting for? Make your assets like an underused car, parking space, garage or a spare room start working for you, pay their keep and help you avoid getting into debt this Christmas!

 

The UK government has shown it’s support for the ‘sharing’ economy in the 2016 budget with a potential £2000 worth of tax breaks for people who want to start up micro – businesses. This is really encouraging and good news for us. We rent out part of our garage for storage and we earn £65 a month. Our garage rental is really easy because we have someone storing long term low value, low risk stuff, in only part of our garage and it fits in easily with our lives. Currently we have to pay tax on my husbands half of it (I don’t earn enough to pay tax), but 

From April 2017, there will be two new tax-free £1,000 allowances – one for selling goods or providing services, and one income from property you own. People who make up to £1,000 from occasional jobs – such as sharing power tools, providing a lift share or selling goods they have made – will no longer need to pay tax on that income. In the same way, the first £1,000 of income from property – such as renting a driveway or loft storage – will be tax free (taken from here)

I eventually quit my challenge to make £10,000 in a year (read more here), but I’m not totally down on the ‘sharing’ economy a.k.a. the peer to peer rental economy. I just don’t think it is established enough yet for some types of activities. The more people that do it, the easier it gets, because insurance companies will start offering cheaper off the shelf insurance, websites will become more populated, drawing more traffic to them and advertising on them will be enough. They will have more data about what kinds of things people want to rent in your area and what it isn’t worth bothering trying to rent. There will be reviews of reliability for both customers and the people renting, like there already are on Airbnb and sites like Ebay (although there is potential for fraud and manipulation with these reviews and shouldn’t be entirely relied upon). The websites will also have encountered many more incidences of things going wrong and will have more safeguards in place for people on both sides i.e. the people renting and the customers.

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As these sites develop things will most likely get easier and as things go wrong more safeguards will be put in place, but for now it just isn’t for me.  I do still need to work out a way to make a bit of money, so my latest plan is to try and write a book about being eco-friendly and thrifty (something I have been planning and not doing for far too long) and see where I go from there. So I have three questions for you my readers:

1. What would you want to see covered in the book?
2. Would you buy it?
3. If you would buy it, what would you pay for it? 

Thanks for all and any feedback (you don’t have to stick to answering these questions), it would be incredibly helpful!

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I’ve been too busy thinking about all the potential pitfalls to even try to rent anything out. The thing is that although on the surface it seems really simple to lend someone my stuff in exchange for a bit of cash I’m not so sure it is.

It sounds like a whole load of hassle to me:

On top of all this renting my stuff out seems a bit silly to me because if I wanted to make money by renting stuff out wouldn’t I be better looking into the rental market and working out what people actually want to rent, rather than just randomly seeing if anyone wants to rent any of my old cr*p under used stuff? Also although it seems more eco-friendly to rent out things I don’t use very often actually the eco-friendly less hassle option is to get rid of the stuff I don’t use very often and rent things from other people or organisations if/ when I need them.

From a money making perspective it could be argued that I would be better off financially if I kept the stuff and rented it out rather than got rid of it and paid to borrow if I needed it, but if I sell it:

• I make a sum of money now
• I free up space in my home (assuming I have to store the stuff between rentals)
• I free up a load of time I would have spent renting it out.

The final nail in the coffin for me with this idea is that I just don’t have any interest in it. I don’t feel particularly excited about convincing people to rent stuff in my home that I had pretty much forgotten about until this point.

I completely recognise though that this may be a great idea for someone who has got stuff that it would make sense to rent out or who wants to start up a new niche rental business. This idea is definitely gaining in popularity as can be seen by the growing number of sites that facilitate it e.g. Rentything, Rent Not Buy, Zilok and Rent My Items.  It just isn’t for me unfortunately.

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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!

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On my schedule of things to do I am supposed to be focusing on renting out more of our garage this month.  I still haven’t managed to rent out my car or sell on car advertising and I would like to rent out my house for a week over the Easter holidays.

Luckily for me I don’t actually have to work very hard to rent out some more storage space because a friend asked me if I would store some of her stuff in a few weeks time- result!  I would like to rent out more space, but if I want to rent out my house over Easter I have work to do and I am going to focus on that for the next while. 

I have taken the first step and listed my house on Airbnb and advertised it to my Facebook friends. I’m not entirely convinced we will manage to rent it out over Easter as there isn’t long to go and I haven’t had any interest so far. However if I hadn’t set myself the goal of trying to rent it out over Easter, I would have most likely waited until much nearer the summer to get the house ready and advertise it on Airbnb for the couple of weeks we want to rent it out in the summer holidays and actually that probably would have been too late.  So my theory is that whether or not we rent it out over Easter it is still worth getting the house and listing ready now for the next time I want to rent it out.  Plus you never know we may be lucky and get a booking for Easter.

The one upsetting thing is that we were supposed to have a student arrive the day our current student leaves, but they were meant to be with us for 4 weeks and the 4th week is in the Easter holidays.  I said we could only have the student for 3 weeks and so they cancelled the whole booking :(.  We now have no students lined up after our current one goes, so I am going to try other agencies and listing the room on Airbnb.

Anyway I said I have work to do and this is mainly doing a bit of redecoration and repair work.  We basically redecorated the house from top to bottom around 5 years ago and it mostly looks pretty good.  The kids bedrooms however have (had) a bit of a mishmash of random pictures and posters on the walls and one of them could do with a repaint. There are also places around the house that could do with touching up/ cleaning the paintwork. After redecorating we never quite got around to co-ordinating the curtains, bedding, pictures and light fittings in our bedroom and it would be nice to co-ordinate it a bit better. Our lounge could also do with a very simple makeover (the paintwork is fine, it is just the pictures, cushions and tv cabinet that need a bit of work).

I have already sorted out YS’s  (Younger Son’s) room. The decor in his room was quite bland and minimal and hadn’t been updated since his baby days.  I decided it needed a bit more character. I found some gorgeous animal jungle print curtains in a charity shop for £5 (as pictured at the top of this post) and decided to go with an animal theme in the room. This involved sweet talking OS (Older Son) into giving his brother some of the pictures and things from his room.  This included a framed jungle scene print, an owl clock and a giraffe hanging height measurer.  I found a framed picture of elephants that had been in the loft for years and I bought a lovely animal print notice board in a charity shop for £3.  The curtains were the perfect size, but they didn’t have black out curtains behind them. The old curtains had black out lining sewn into them and to save on hassle and money I basically hooked the two sets of curtains together so that one set hangs behind the other. My mum came and helped and we both tacked the curtains together with slip stitch so that you can’t tell there are two sets of curtains hanging together.  I love it and YS seems pretty happy with it too.

I also found some really lovely curtains for our bedroom in a charity shop at a cost of £18 – they are really good quality, large curtains, so I think that they were great value.  The only problem is that they stink of one of those room freshener things and I am trying to air them as much as possible to get rid of the smell.  Plus they also need lining with black out lining.

Next on my list is OS’s room though, before he starts getting upset that we haven’t done anything to his room after giving half his stuff to his brother.  We are going with a pirate/ nautical/ fish and sea creature theme in his room.  I don’t have anything that fits that theme, so I am going to get making (plus I will keep scouring the charity shops)! Next week though is a really busy week. I am meeting up with a couple of girls from Sussex University who want to make a documentary about my money making adventures for their masters degree and another day next week I am hopefully meeting up with Benita Matofska who apparently saved herself £20,000 through sharing!  If I get any free time though I will see what I can do for OS’s room…

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I was also kindly asked to write various guest posts including one for Thrift Week – a whole week of thrift which sounds great! You can read my post here.

The end of the month is getting closer though and I wanted to provide an update before I start on next month’s challenge! Just to recap in case you don’t know I have set myself a challenge to make £10,000 in a year without getting a job (read more here).  This month my plan was to start renting out my car on the weekends as we have two cars and we don’t need to use both of them on the weekends.  My other plan was to sell on car advertising to a local company. 

It took me forever but eventually I signed my car up to Easy Car Club. I have a thing about forms (I don’t like them) but actually it really didn’t take me long at once I actually sat down and did it.  It is free to sign up and list your car and you can either choose how much to rent the car out for, or they allocate what they think is an appropriate rate.  They have a refer a friend scheme, so if you are thinking of renting someone else’s car through them and want to sign up then use this code: zo520m and you will get £10 off your first rental! 

I haven’t had any interest so far, but they have a section on their site advising how to promote your car and that is on my list of things to do next!

As far as on car advertising goes I phoned a few companies to ask if they wanted to advertise on my car, but I haven’t had any luck so far, but I have someone who I think might be interested.  I will continue to plug away at this!

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At first thought it sounds a bit scary.  What about insurance or roadside assistance? What if the driver wrecks my car? How do I know I can trust them? What about petrol costs?

I’ve been looking into easyCar Club (see their site here). It is free to list your car on the site (they take commission on every rental). They give you free RAC cover for a year which covers the person renting out the car and the car owner.  Fully comprehensive insurance for the driver and the owner is arranged by EasyCar when the car is rented out, which is totally independent of the owners usual insurance.  It covers providing a courtesy car if needed. Also owners can review drivers on the site, which may help to provide reassurance about how trustworthy they are. Drivers have to replace the petrol they have used before they return the car.

This is all great, but is it worth it?

Over the last few days I have been washing and waxing my car. I was supposed to do that last week – read more here – but everything takes longer than I think it will! This is a pretty momentous event as my car has not been washed since I got it a few years ago and I have never waxed a car in my life! Usually I just think there are better things to do in life than wash cars and it is a waste of water and isn’t that what rain is for :).  I was going to wash it with a sponge and water in a bucket (low on water usage), but it has been so cold recently I decided to use the jet wash at my local petrol station (not so great for water usage and I felt a bit guilty about this).  It took me a little while to work out what to do with it. It is a bit complicated at first glance as it has various different setting and different brushes and it doesn’t tell you which brush to use on which setting and you have a set amount of time to do everything in.  I also wasn’t too excited about using the bottle of car wax stuff we have at home which says toxic on it!  I’ve done it now though!

After all that effort, my car still doesn’t look that great. We went through a phase when our kids would run to get into my husbands car and fling open the car door and bash it straight into my car which is usually parked next to it.  So I have a series of small dents and bashes which are showing up really nicely now  I tried using a chipstick thing but it doesn’t seem to be doing anything, so I’m not sure if I need to take it somewhere to be sorted out professionally… Plus I haven’t even got started on the inside yet. There is a muddy boot print on the back of one of the car seats and there seems to be popcorn in every nook and cranny (I often give them homemade, slightly salted popcorn as a snack after school in the car on the way home)!

So my question is – would I have to go to this level of effort every time I rent the car out? Would I have to wash and hoover the car each time? Ideally my car would just generally be cleaner and I would only feed my kids snacks that aren’t messy and I would make sure no muddy shoes went in the car every again, but in real life will that really happen??

If I was earning huge bucks then it might be worth it.  I looked at some similar cars to mine being rented out on easyCar Club though and I think my car could be rented out for around £12 a day- that seems like a very small amount of money to me, to watch someone drive off with my car!  It cost me £3 to wash my car and if I did that every time I’m only getting £9 a day!!!  If I did rent out my car at £12 a day, 2 days a week for a year (and didn’t have any costs) I could make £1248 a year.  At £9 a day taking into account the £3 – I would be making £936 a year.  This money is taxable too (although this wouldn’t affect me because I’m not earning enough, it may make it less attractive for someone who is).  This is before I take into account the mileage that could be added to my car.  I can’t see anything on the easyCar Club site about mileage, but people may well want to visit relatives far away on weekends and add quite a lot of mileage to my car.  The more miles my car has on it, the more it loses value and the quicker it will need servicing and repair… I don’t know quite how to quantify this cost, but it will definitely eat into the money made…

£1248 over the course of the year is still quite a lot of money though and in slightly warmer weather I can stick to washing my car with a bucket of water and a sponge.  Plus if I found some local people who regularly want to borrow my car and I build up a relationship with them then it might seem more worth it (plus I could find out where they want to drive the car to and make sure I only lend it to people who want to drive locally).

The other thing on my side is that my car is quite old and isn’t worth that much.  I am just within the limit for easyCar Club’s rules – it has to be 10 years old or younger and have no more than 120,000 miles on the clock.

On balance I’m not entirely convinced it will be worth it, but I won’t know for sure until I try so I am going to give it a chance (once I’ve finished cleaning my car) and see what happens! What do you think – would you be comfortable doing this?  Do you think it would be worth it?

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I love my life.  I enjoy being able to be around for my kids whenever they need me.  I also like being able to spend the time when they are at school doing the things I need to do to run the house and the things I want to do like writing this blog or writing an e-book. Living such a thrifty lifestyle has enabled me to do this for the last two years and it’s been great. There is one small problem though – we recently realised that we are regularly a bit short each month. This is not a big problem in the short term, but could be a much bigger problem in the long term.

So in contrast to last year, where I entertained dreams of living a moneyless life (Moneyless Manifesto inspired), I have come back to earth with a bit of a bump and it is time for me to make some money. I don’t plan to go out and get a job though (as you might have already guessed) and I don’t plan to change my lifestyle at all.  Instead I have a plan which was inspired by the following:

My plan is to set myself the challenge of earning £10,000 from my home, my car and things I already have this year! The ‘Sharing Economy’ (i.e. where people ‘share’ for a fee, things that they own) is big business these days. According to PWC the sharing economy was worth $15 billion in 2013 (read more here). 

Sharing is a really eco-friendly thing to do.  The theory is that if you rent out your room, your car, your garage or your stuff while you aren’t using it then you make the best use of what already exists. You reduce the need for new stuff, new cars, new hotels and new storage units to be created, built and maintained to rent out to people.

My initial thoughts on how to make my £10,000 include the following ideas:

I’m going to be testing out the ideas to see how much we can earn, how well they fit into our life and how much work they involve. I will of course be reporting back on how it all goes throughout the year, so watch this space and wish me luck!

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