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

I explored a number of new side hustles which I haven’t spent much time looking at previously, so be sure to read below and share this post with anyone you think may benefit!

The Bank Engine: £184.82

After a number of months where The Bank Engine has made very small profits and even losses, I am exceptionally pleased to share that the business is now back into the profitability territory which I always aim to be in.

In July 2023 there were a number of new offers that came to market that we were able to share with you quite quickly enabling both us and you to boost our income during the month! Along with the non-essential costs that I cut in June, the turn in events is beginning to show and will now hopefully remain consistent over the coming months with further growth.

Despite these new offers in July they came and went very quickly so I have not sent out an email for July as I did not want to send one for the sake of it. However, we will be sharing one in August with all our favourite offers and all the latest from the world of personal finance; plus a chance to win on the giveaways again! (join the list to be in with a chance to win this month)

I am also really pleased to share that we have signed a partnership contract with a leading finance app that I look forward to sharing further details of with you over the coming weeks and months, and have started to grow our network to ensure further strong partnerships go hand-in-hand with our fantastic community.

Receipt Scanning: £8.62

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.

I earned more this month as there was an additional £5 of points as a bonus last month, which is likely available for you too - 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.

YouGov Finance: £10.00

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

Matched Betting: £66.25

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: £201.66

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 (despite some recent frustrations with Shepper) and some examples of the work I did in July is the building of burger bun units in Tesco, M&S mystery shops and various store audits across a number of locations.

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 ~£28 per hour which is phenomenal!

Dividends: £22.40

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: £52.30

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: £13.82

Two very good sign-up offers appeared in July 2023, being the following:

• WeBull: £3.82 free share in Tesla ($5) with another pending for August potentially worth up to $2,000

• Algbra: £10.00 cash - unfortunately, this one has now been closed but if it comes back we will let you know!

Coinbase Earn: £3.77

Anyone who has been following my journey for a while will know that Coinbase Earn is where I was first introduced to cryptocurrency and how much of my portfolio was initially built!

Essentially, you can earn free crypto for doing quick quizzes (which you can Google the answers for). I don’t currently advertise crypto offers but if you’re interested in opening a Coinbase account, message me on Instagram and I will let you know the best way to do so!

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.