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 August 2023 coming to a close recently, I wanted to share a more detailed account of my extra earnings for last month.

I expanded my time input into a number of existing side hustles, and focused on the growth of The Bank Engine, so be sure to read below and share this post with anyone you think may benefit!

The Bank Engine: £540.94

Following the first real profitable month for some time last month, I was exceptionally pleased and grateful to see that this increased further throughout August rising to a substantial level of >£500 in profits for the month.

This trend is a result of the new offers that were released in July, which have benefitted The Bank Engine considerably which notably include the new Webull free shares offer!

Whilst the campaign did not go live in August, I was also really pleased that we were able to launch our partnership with Chip* at the beginning of September which positions The Bank Engine well by being able to bring tailored offers to our audience!

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!

Receipt Scanning: £3.02

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.

In August, I received the bare minimum points which is roughly 75 per week that you scan the shopping - 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: £16.73

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: £234.11

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 August are M&S mystery shopping trips, scanning melons in supermarkets and getting paid (and reimbursed) to get some free beers at various pubs!

As a result of me fine-tuning the jobs that I did last month, I managed to maintain my average hourly rate when completing these jobs to ~£28 per hour which is phenomenal!

Dividends: £14.80

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: £60.42

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: £3.95

There were no new sign-up offers in August, but I received the following:

• WeBull: £3.95 free share in Tesla ($5) being the second free share received from Webull (you could now get FOUR free shares!)

Market Research:

I was invited to a quick “website usability” test with Bunnyfield during August which took me around 5 minutes to complete and paid a whopping £15 - I was exceptionally pleased with this!

Overall thoughts

I’m really happy with the jump up from the previous month and am hoping to see further growth for the rest of the year now that I’m back on track. I really appreciate your full support with everything that I do and hope that I can continue to give back to the community as often as possible. Thank you for your support!

The eagle-eyed of you may note that I didn’t make a Lifetime ISA contribution again this month and the honest answer behind this is that I could not afford to as I have been replenishing my emergency fund as a result of having cash tied up in a house move, deposit timing differences, and unexpected and unplanned necessary large purchases. I anticipate that I won’t be contributing to this until later in the year, but still plan to maximise the contributions for the year.

For further info on ISAs and Lifetime ISAs, check out this page.

You may also notice, if you looked at the Profit & Loss reports on Instagram, that I did not get reimbursed for all of the incurred costs of mystery shopping. This is because Morrisons’ website refused to let me leave a review on a number of products that I therefore cannot get reimbursed - just a note for any other mystery shoppers to be careful!