Let's Explore Side Hustles

Welcome! Just over a week ago I launched my journey to Sort My Debt Out. In an upcoming post I am going to share my income vs my bills and spoiler alert, things are very tight! You may have seen in my ‘Let’s Get Honest: How much debt am I in and what are my monthly payments?’ post that I already pay around £1800 to debt in the form of loan repayments and Credit Card minimum payments. While this is slowly ticking away at my debt, it’s going to take multiple years to clear it all and part of issue is I regularly have to rely on Credit Cards to make ends meet. So, in essence every time I pay something to my Credit Cards, I end up spending that and usually some more on top of that. That is part of the perpetual cycle of debt that has got me to this point. I’m sure many of you reading this will be very familiar with this problem.

So, what I really need to do is pay additional money on top of my regular payments to start tackling the problem faster, save money on interest and at some stage reduce my monthly payments so I am not so stretched come payday! I am exploring multiple options to reduce my monthly payments to stop my reliance on credit. One of these options is side hustles. I have spent the last two weeks trying out multiple different side hustles. Below I wanted to share all the details with you, hopefully I’ll save you some time on poor side hustles and make you some money on good side-hustles!**

The £27.32 per day concept

One of the most helpful things about sharing this journey so far is the endless helpful content on Instagram and the comments on my Instagram posts. One of the posts I saw was this idea that if you earn £27.32 a day in 2024 you’ll have £10,000 by the end of the year. This really stuck out to me! £27.32 feels so achievable per day and made me feel motivated to explore how I can make small amounts every day on top of my existing full-time job. It turns out it is much more difficult than I expected to do it consistently but some days I’ve done it and some days I haven’t! Here is a little table of my first two weeks of side-hustles.

As you can see my goal of making £382.48 in these two weeks (£191.24 per week, £27.32 per day) was not achieved by some margin. However, I think it was optimistic to think I could achieve it straight away. I was honing in on what would work best for me and I think I’m largely going to stick to Matched Betting as I can do this as and when I have 5-10 mins spare. I can only really fit in one Amazon Flex shift a week with my work and family commitments.

Side Hustle Exploration

Matched Betting

I dabbled with Matched Betting using a site called Outplayed (formerly Profit Accumulator - you can probably remember the Instagram ads!) a few years ago. It worked and I made £30 odd but I just sort of stopped as I wasn’t really as much in need of the money but mostly I just wasn’t that committed to clearing my debt. I was much happier spending all my free time chilling or probably spending credit on takeaways!

I decided to re-explore it the last couple of weeks as I still get the emails asking me to re-subscribe and do you know what? The updated platform is great! The tutorials are super easy and they literally layout exactly what to do to make money and have a cool Oddsmatcher piece of software that connects to all the betting sites and betting exchanges. I’ve personally found it amazing and have been able to just place the bets when I get a spare few minutes. One word of warning I would say is, if you have a low risk appetite it may not be for you. Your liability on the betting exchanges can sometimes run into the hundreds. So, you have to sit and wait for the bets to complete while big chunks of money are sat out of your reach. It’s pretty much risk free but if you make a mistake, like accidentally placing the wrong bet you could potentially lose a lot of money.

For those of you not sure what Matched Betting is, it’s essentially a process whereby you sign-up to a betting site and receive free bets for making a qualified bet using an initial deposit, say for instance betting on Manchester United to win against Manchester City. At the same time you bet against Manchester United to win on a different betting site called a betting exchange. So, whether Manchester United win or lose you win because you’ve bet on both outcomes. With your qualifying bet you essentially break even or lose a very small amount, I’ve not lost more than £0.42 so far. You then repeat the process with your free bets and this is where you make money. The winnings range anywhere from £4-£15 in my experience so far. And you aren’t using your own money this time, it’s free bets. You still have to make the bet the other way on the exchange using your own money but again either way you are going to win so it’s risk free if you place the bets correctly. There is a complicated art to it and you can just research and do it all yourself but the Oddsmatcher software Outplayed provides does it all for you. You also get 0% commission offers on several of the exchanges via Outplayed. I personally prefer this approach as I’d be too anxious if there isn’t something in front of me telling me what to do and reassuring me it will be ok.

They have an affiliate programme which I have signed up for you. If you are interested in doing this it would be greatly appreciated if you could sign-up via my link - Outplayed Match Betting Link

Amazon Flex

I’ve done Amazon Flex on and off for a couple of years now. Pre-newborn baby I would do 2-3 shifts a week at certain points. You can be really clever and get crazy shifts which are upwards of £70-£90 for 2-3 hours work, especially at Christmas time. I used to just check a few times a day and if an increased pay shift came up I’d snap it up and go. My family commitments at the moment mean I can’t really take advantage of this anymore so the last couple of weeks I’ve just done a couple of Morrisons Amazon Flex shifts delivering shopping. One shift I had 27 bags to deliver and it took me an hour and the next shift I only had to deliver 12 bags but it was longer distance so took me an hour. The shifts were advertised as 90 minute shifts but I completed them both in around an hour each. These were £26.50 per shift which is probably the bottom price you can get paid for these in my area but the Morrisons one’s are super, super popular so you very rarely get increased pay shifts. I have done in the past and once I did one for £55 for 90 minutes. I’m guessing someone didn’t turn up or just no one had signed up for that shift. I accepted it 10 minutes before it was meant to start which is also probably why the price was so high.

The most popular shifts available are at Amazon depots where you drive in and collect Amazon parcels. These can range anywhere from sort of 6 parcels (the lowest I’ve ever done) to 40 parcels (the highest I’ve ever done) in my experience. They are usually 2.5 hours to 4.5 hour blocks. Again, it’s usually distance based on how many parcels you do but what you get is a lottery. One shift I did a couple of years ago was only 6 parcels but I had to drive 90 minutes away, this was a dream, I essentially got paid about £60 to listen to a couple of podcasts. I did a 40 parcel shift in a city centre and that was quite honestly horrific and I nearly never delivered for them again! City Centre shifts are the lemon shifts and you’ll see people moaning about them on Reddit.

There is no affiliate programme for this but here is the link in case you are interested. Bare in mind you will need Hire & Reward (H&R) car insurance. Amazon have a special deal with a company called Inshur which provides top-up H&R to your existing car insurance. It’s generally £0.90 per hour and they automatically take the money from your account when Amazon tells them you are working. You sign-up for this via the Amazon Flex app. The insurance used to be free for a year for new sign-ups but I don’t know if they are still running that deal.

Negatives to bare in mind, it’s all done via the Amazon Flex app which is glitchy at best. If for any reason you can’t deliver a parcel you have to return it to the depot so depending on where you live bare this in mind. You could drive 90 mins from the depot, have to drive back to return a parcel and then have to drive home from there. Your eligibility to deliver is all based on a score. You are scored based on things like parcels not delivered (whether your fault or not), whether you checked age restricted items, customer complaints, i.e. my package wasn’t delivered, etc.

Swagbucks

I’m not sure where to start with Swagbucks. Mostly all I can remember is endless surveys that take around 20 minutes and then getting rejected from them for not being the right type of candidate and receiving a measly £0.01 for attempting them. The majority of the money I made was playing Monopoly. You can sign-up for games via the Swagbucks platform and it tracks your progress and you get money for reaching certain levels in the game. It has been kind of fun but I’m talking close to 10 hours of my time so far for £5. Overall, I would honestly say Swagbucks probably isn’t worth the effort. However, in saying this I am going to continue with it and just do things every now and then to get a little bit of money. I just won’t be relying on it as a serious side hustle.

There is no affilate programme but if you are interested here is the link.

We Are 8

I really love the idea of We Are 8. It’s social platform for sharing positive content and to try and have a positive impact on the world. They have partnered with some brands and by watching the brands videos you get some money and the brand donates money to charity also. I signed up to this and thought I might make a tiny amount of money whilst also contributing in a micro way to the world. However, I’ve been served one brand video in 2 weeks which was a 30 second clip that got me £0.03. I’ve checked every day and there are still no more videos for me to watch.

I could of course be doing something wrong. I don’t know if you need to post content or engage with more content to get more ads. However, so far for me it’s been a bit of a flop.

No affiliate programme for this one but here is the link in case you are interested.

UberEats, Deliveroo and JustEat

I am looking into signing up for these delivery services also. From what I understand, you literally can just log on whenever you want and do as little or as much as you want. I’m thinking if I have the odd hour in the evening every now and then I might give it ago.

Sign-ups are arduous on this though so I have put them on the back burner for now. I will update if and when I end up doing any of these!

That’s it for my little exploration of my 2 weeks of side hustles. I hope you find this useful!

Join the Conversation

Alongside my experiences, I can hopefully share some of your stories, whether you are at the start of this journey, part way through or have liberated yourself from the spiral, I want to hear about it!

This blog doesn’t just have to be about my journey. I invite you to join the conversation, share your stories, and connect with like-minded individuals on the same path. Together, we can build a supportive community that encourages one another to stay committed to the pursuit of a debt-free life.

Thank you for joining me on this adventure. I’m excited to see where our collective pursuit of financial freedom takes us!