How I made an extra £721.81 in September
For those who have been following my personal finance journey for a number of months (or years!) you will know that I am keen to share my full journey which includes a breakdown of my extra earnings.
So with September 2023 coming to a close recently, I wanted to share a more detailed account of my extra earnings for last month.
During September, I tried to really work on efficiency and as such spent very little time working on my side hustles (just over 5 hours for mystery shopping) which enabled me to focus more time into planning the future for The Bank Engine.
The Bank Engine: £363.87
August was an exceptionally great month and I wasn’t expecting to top that this month, but to remain in such profitable waters has made me exceptionally pleased and hopeful for the future of The Bank Engine’s success. At the moment, all these profits are being retained by the business in order for me to re-invest back into growth of new ideas which I floated to you all in surveys recently.
The Bank Engine has been really well positioned in recent months to make the most of great new referral offers which also benefit you greatly, such as the Webull offer.
Of course, this is something that I am hoping we can start to see more of and we will definitely be continuing to keep an eye out for the best and latest offers available; be sure to sign up to our mailing list to get these offers sent directly to your inbox!
Energy Switching: £51.00
Previously, our energy was with Eon.Next who was the supplier when we moved into this property, but I knew that we weren’t getting the very best rates.
As such, I did some research and noted that if we switched to Octopus Energy and opted for the Octopus Tracker plan, we could save (on average) around 30% on our monthly bill as this plan tracks the wholesale prices for energy.
I can confirm, since switching, our energy usage has actually gone up due to colder weather but our costs have gone down quite considerably.
On top of this, if you sign up with a referral link, you can get a £50 credit to your account once your first payment has been taken. As I used someone’s referral link I managed to take advantage of this and you can also spin a wheel once a month when you submit meter readings to win additional credit. I did this, and won a further £1 of credit!
If this is something you are considering, I would be exceptionally grateful if you used my Octopus Energy referral link: https://share.octopus.energy/maize-hare-467
Receipt Scanning: £6.47
Following some confusion over how this side hustle has worked for a number of months, I finally signed up to the NeilsenIQ Consumer Panel in June, which allows you to earn rewards for scanning your receipts from grocery shopping and then scanning the barcodes.
This isn’t going to make you a millionaire by any means, but by my calculations you can make an extra ~£40 per year just from scanning your weekly groceries that you would have bought anyway.
During September, I scanned our shopping every week and managed to get bonuses for using the app for 4 weeks straight, and for 3 months straight - I don’t have a referral link, but this is the website (I know, it looks ancient but it does the job!)
Points can be exchanged for vouchers once you reach thresholds in £25 multiples depending on the type of voucher you would like! I would recommend this as a slow burner side hustle that adds up over the long-term.
Matched Betting: £3.23
This is my original side hustle that I started back in early 2020 as my first dive into the idea of earning extra income outside of my 9-5 role as an accountant. To date, I have made £3,000+ in tax-free cash from this side hustle and helped hundreds of others make money from it too.
If you haven’t heard of it, the idea is that you use betting sites’ promotional offers to make a profit by using online calculators to win regardless of the outcome of a sporting event. At first, this probably does sound quite complicated but that is why I have written a comprehensive free guide that has helped people make £1,000s from this side hustle.
I am happy to answer any questions on this side hustle, but I would highly recommend checking this free guide out here.
Mystery Shopping: £172.55
A more recent side hustle of mine, that I started late in 2022 is mystery shopping whereby you go into stores and answer questions alongside capturing images to feedback to those who are gathering information.
There are dozens of websites and apps that are available but the two I tend to get the most success from are Roamler and Shepper and some examples of the work I did in September are Stella Artois checks where you get paid to buy a pint in a pub, National Lottery audits where you take a few photos in shops and mystery shops in Poundland, M&S and Currys to name a few,
As a result of me fine-tuning the jobs that I did last month, I managed to increase my average hourly rate when completing these jobs to ~£40 per hour which is phenomenal!!
YouGov Finance: £35.00
This one won’t be for everyone, but it’s worth considering if you are of a similar mindset to me. YouGov is a massive company well-known for their surveys which are feature heavily in news articles, etc. across the world.
YouGov Finance is a new function where you give them read-only access to your bank accounts and they essentially compile your data with that of thousands of others and sell the data to companies who want to buy it. They pay £5 per bank connection per 90 days and as someone with many bank accounts, this is a steady earner for me.
You may be thinking; why would you sell your data and my reasoning is because a) there’s nothing dodgy in there, b) the bank likely already do sell some of my data to companies anyway, and c) most of the accounts connected have very few transactions going on
Dividends: £22.95
This one is obviously a bit different, as it is the income earned by my investment portfolio during the month. I am not invested in dividend stocks and am mostly invested in accumulation funds where the purpose is to growth my investment pot over time rather than to provide me an income.
I am, however, paid dividends from a number of investments that I hold in platforms like Nutmeg and Trading212. I re-invest these dividends to ensure that my money is working hard for me.
If you are keen to learn more about investing, you can check out my free investing guide here, and I am always happy to answer questions that you may have.
Bank Interest: £62.74
Similar to the one above, this is “passive income” that I earn without lifting a finger and has been earned on my savings (being my emergency fund and my Cash Lifetime ISA).
Whilst this is a large amount of bank interest to be earning every month, the cash I have sat in these accounts is actually losing value as a result of inflation, which is frustrating but is part of the deal when you are looking to keep cash in the short-term.
Sign-up Offers: £4.00
There were not many new sign-up offers in September, but I received the following:
Overall thoughts
I’m exceptionally pleased that the business continues to perform well and that I’m able to make consistent additional income from my various side hustle income streams that I have been testing out over recent years.
I understand that I am in a very fortunate position to be able to make extra income and I do not take that for granted, so I would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who has made this a reality, and I hope that I can continue to help you increase your income and wealth over the future!