Side Hustles: How to Make Extra Money Online

Citation preview

Side Hustles How to Make Extra Money Online Hayden Vernon

Copyright © 2020 Hayden Vernon

All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. Book cover illustration by Owain Anderson.

Contents Title Page Copyright Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven About The Author

Chapter One INTRODUCTION There has never been a better time to take on a side hustle. As I write this, the world is in the grip of a pandemic that has frozen the global economy and put an unprecedented number of people out of work. Across the world people have been laid-off, or put on furlough schemes that pay reduced wages, as lockdowns designed to limit the spread of coronavirus are enforced. The forecast has not looked so bleak for the global economy since the Great Depression took hold in 1929. During that time, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15 per cent from the start of the depression to 1932 – and millions lost their incomes. Things are not that bad for us yet and governments are working hard to limit the damage of the pending recession we are facing, but the fact remains that the gloomy economic outlook means that now is a good time to think about ways of making some extra cash. With so many jobs under threat because of the coronavirus pandemic, many people are turning to the internet to make a second income and take on a side hustle. Luckily for us, the internet has spawned an abundance of ways to make cash legally, for those with the knowhow. Side hustles can take many forms, from selling things on eBay to taking on a second job in the gig economy such as driving for Uber or renting a room on AirBnB. While not without problems, the latter two can be great, flexible ways of earning money, but not everyone has a spare room to rent out or a car to drive. Instead, I will focus on ways of making cash online that do not require much besides a computer with an internet connection, some time to spare and a little bit of knowledge. You should already have the first two – and the third is where this book comes in. It is possible to make a second income from the comfort of your sofa if you know where to look. This book will take you through the various online money-making hacks that I have personally put to the test. As a journalist for Vice.com, I have written a series of articles over the last couple of years about my attempts at making money on the internet and I want to share what I have learnt during that time. Growing up, I was never that bothered about earning lots of money or getting rich – not because we were financially comfortable, but the opposite. My mum had me at the age of 18 and my dad bolted before I was born. We spent the first part of my life living in a bedsit, before moving into private rentals and eventually a council flat. Things were often tight, though not as bad as some had it, and we managed with what we had. You often hear of rags-to-riches stories of entrepreneurs who started with nothing or Del Boy-types pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but I grew up used to not having a lot of money to spare and I assumed things would always be that way. My mindset changed a couple of years ago, when I started to realise that while having money would not necessarily make me happy, it could help stop that nagging anxiety in the pit of my stomach that I had grown so familiar with. You might know it – the one that starts building when an official-looking letter comes through the door, or when the rent is due but your bank account is empty. That feeling is what made me want to hunt down and write about ways of making extra cash online. I was terrible with money before I started writing about it, but since the series began back in 2018 I have made enough to pay off my long-standing student overdraft and save money on top of it. Not enough for a deposit on a mortgage where I live, at least not yet anyway, but enough to keep that anxiety in check. There have been ups as well as downs, but crucially I have more money now than I started with – and even my failed efforts at earning cash have taught me valuable lessons. I don’t want to be yet another internet bullshitter, promising money for nothing or “six steps to becoming a multimillionaire”, there are enough of those out there already. If it was that easy to get rich quickly we would all be loaded by now. Instead, I will delve into both the good and bad aspects of making money on the internet, so that you can learn solid ways of earning a second income online and steer clear of the rest. The internet can feel a bit like the Wild West at times. Wherever there is legitimate money to be made, inevitably there are scammers trying to cash in as well. It is important to be able to spot the difference between what might be a potentially lucrative way of making money and a scam that may end up costing you. During my time researching and writing about money for Vice, I have encountered my fair share of scams and risky ventures. The truth is that it comes with the territory when you are looking for ways to make cash on the internet. I will highlight any of the scams or cons that I encountered for each moneymaking method covered in this book, but you should also practice caution and healthy scepticism whenever someone is promising you money for nothing online. Remember: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I have stood by that over the last couple of years and it has steered me past the many scams that are out there and into profit. Despite my cautious tone – there really is lots of money out there to be made and each chapter in this book will consider the pros and cons of a different method for boosting your bank balance. The first chapter will look at the “matched betting” phenomenon, where with a bit of knowhow it is possible to profit from bookmakers with risk-free sports bets and sign up offers. Matched betting has grown into its own little industry within the gambling industry and I will show you how to profit from it step-by-step. I will also talk you through how it is still possible to make money on it, even at a time when so many sports

are out of action because of the pandemic. Next we will look at profiting from online casino, bingo and poker offers. This is similar to matched betting, but in some ways even easier – and unlike the live sport needed for matched betting, online casinos are completely unaffected by coronavirus. The following chapter will look at the world of forex trading, which is touted as a get-rich-quick-scheme across the internet. The foreign exchange market is the world’s biggest financial market and anyone can trade pairs of currencies on it using a computer or smartphone. It is an accessible way into trading, but it also has a dark underbelly, rife with hustlers and scams. In the next chapter we will look at ‘comping’, the art of entering loads of online competitions with the chance of winning big prizes, and ‘clickworking’, where you can make some good cash from completing small tasks online. The former is not a reliable way of making cash, but it does offer you a chance of winning large cash amounts or expensive prizes. Clickworking is a more reliable – but also more time consuming – way of generating an income. In the last chapter we will look at the ‘financial independence, retire early’ movement, a group of money-savvy savers who have great ideas not only for making cash online, but also how to invest your money and make it work for you. Fire will give you the tools to help you save invest and grow an online income once you have begun earning it. Taken together, these chapters will give you everything you need to start earning cash online, both during the pandemic and in normal times. How many of them you try and how much money you make is in your hands. A final note on this book before we get into it – while there are opportunities to make money online across the world, laws and regulations vary greatly from country-to-country. What is perfectly legal in western Europe might be off-limits elsewhere. Similarly, just because a method works in one place, does not mean it will work everywhere. I am based in the UK and as such this book is written off the back of my experiences of making money online in the UK. Although most of the websites I talk about can be accessed across the world, it is important to know the law for the jurisdiction you are in. There is no point earning lots of cash online, only to have it confiscated because you broke some local law you were not aware of. That also extends to using a virtual private network (VPN) to make it look like you are based somewhere in the world when you are not. If you are a reader from outside of the UK, I hope there are general lessons about making money online that you can take from this book, but please check that what you are doing is legal and viable in your country before committing to anything. Now, let’s make some money.

Chapter Two Matched Betting Here is something you won’t hear people admit often: I’m a terrible gambler. It’s true. Even when the odds look good, I still manage to get it wrong. If I bet red, black comes up. If I bet on the favourite to win, expect an upset. The thing is, I’m not just unlucky, this is the case for almost everybody. There is a reason bookmakers and casinos make so much money: the odds are stacked in favour of the house. Britain’s gambling companies took £14.5 billion from punters in 2018 alone. That is the equivalent of the GDP of many small countries, so they must be doing something right. The house always wins. That old cliche is true, well, sort of. There is actually one way to buck the odds and extract money from these profit-making powerhouses: matched betting. When I first heard about matched betting I was researching ideas for easy ways to make money online as I began my series of articles for Vice. As I looked around the web for ways to make cash, matched betting kept cropping up. I was pretty sceptical at first. It seemed too good to be legitimate, so I assumed it was a scam, but the more I read up on it, the more it made sense. Matched betting is a process that allows people to make a guaranteed profit from bookmakers, taking advantage of ‘free bet’ offers using a system of placing more than one bet to minimise risk and ensure that any losses are covered, regardless of the outcome. If that sounds confusing, don’t worry. It was to me at first as well. I will talk you through the ins and outs of it in this chapter – and once you get your head around it, it can prove to be very lucrative. Matched betting is not a new phenomenon. It has been around since the early 2000s, springing up with the rise of the online bookmakers in the UK. Bookmakers started offering free bets as a way to compete with each other and stand out in a crowded marketplace. Britain has some of the most liberal gambling laws in the world, which is why there are so many online bookmakers vying for your cash. Currently that amounts to around 80 different bookies operating in the UK, with more joining the battle for punters all the time. They all offer essentially the same product – albeit with different logos and website designs – so one way of standing out from the other bookies is to entice customers with free bet offers. While just signing up and trying your luck with these free bet offers could net you some money, profit is not guaranteed as you would still need to bet on the correct outcome, for example on the result of a football match, to take any winnings. But what someone far smarter than me realised a few years ago is that there is a way to turn these free bets to your advantage and make money from them without gambling in the true sense of the word, i.e without risking any money and actually guaranteeing a profit. Since then, matched betting has grown and grown and has found its way into places as diverse as broadsheet newspapers and online forums such as Mumsnet, touted as a money spinning free-for-all. So, how does the matched betting system work? The process is simple, but you need to understand the key concepts underpinning it before putting it into practice. The way you make money is by signing up to bookmakers to take advantage of free bet offers. That’s the bit you guessed already, but as I said before, there is no way of guaranteeing a profit from these by simply staking them and hoping for the best. To get around this we use something called a betting exchange. Betting exchanges, such as Betfair and Smarkets, act as marketplaces between bettors. They are similar to standard bookmakers but they allow members to bet against each other rather than against the bookmaker. This means you can not only bet for a certain result, but also bet against a result happening. This is called a ‘lay’ bet and it is how we turn those free bets into profit. By ‘laying’ the right amount against your free bet, you guarantee a profit regardless of the result. This back and lay betting technique allows you to make a profit on free bets and typically you will end up with around 80 per cent of the free bet amount as profit if you do it correctly. One question that comes up a lot is, ‘why do the bookies allow matched betting if it can guarantee winnings for punters?’. I have asked a number of bookmakers but they have all stayed tight lipped about it, refusing to give an answer on the record. However, one insider I spoke to says he thinks matched betting just does not hit their profits enough for them to worry about it – and besides, there is not a lot they could do about it even if they wanted to, because free bet offers are so vital in attracting new customers. Let’s look at an example. Say a bookmaker is offering a £20 free sports bet when you first sign up – this a fairly standard offer that you will come across regularly. To guarantee some profit from that offer you need to sign up to that bookmaker and then to a betting exchange such as Betfair or Smarkets to ‘match’ your bets. Usually you have to deposit and stake a bit of your own cash at each bookmaker to get the free bet to begin with, but by laying this as well you can limit your initial loss and guarantee an overall profit. After signing up you need to find a game to bet on, I always stuck to football but you can choose other sports. When considering a game to bet on, it is important to take note of the minimum odds in the terms and conditions of the offer, which vary from bookmaker-to-bookmaker. To both make sure you are meeting the odds requirements and to make things easier down the line, you should set the odds to display as ‘decimal’ on the bookmaker. If you cannot find where to do this, you can usually find out by Googling the name of the bookie and ‘decimal odds’. Once you have done that, start looking for a game to bet on. When

you are betting your deposit, you want to find a game that has the closest odds in both the bookmaker and the exchange, as this will limit the amount it eats into your profit. You can use software such as OddsMatcher to help you with this. OddsMatcher, which has both paid and free to access versions, automatically trawls bookmakers and exchanges for optimal odds. This can take some of the pain out of looking for suitable fixtures to bet on. It is important to get this right – you will make a small loss on your initial deposit with the bookmaker and although the free bet amount will more than cover this, it is still worth minimising this as much as possible. Once you have found a suitable game to place your bet on, you need to use an online matched betting calculator (there are loads of free ones out there, use Google to find one) to double check that you have everything right. Simply set the calculator to ‘normal’ mode and check that you are losing just a small percentage of your deposit before betting on your chosen game. After you have placed your bet on a certain result – in the case of football this is usually a home win, away win, or a draw – you need to ‘lay’ (bet against) that result happening in the betting exchange. For example, if you bet for a home win with the bookmaker, this means you are betting for a draw or away win to be the outcome with the betting exchange by ‘laying’ this result. Once you have bet through your initial deposit, you can claim the free bet. This is where the profit starts. A £20 free bet will usually be given as 4 x £5 free bets, so simply place them on the same event as separate bets. We need to find another game to bet on, but this time it is worth picking odds greater than 3.0 to maximise your profit. Just bear in mind that the higher they are, the more you will need to have in your betting exchange account to ‘lay’ against it, because higher odds mean higher liabilities (the amount of money we put up against the bet). Using the same calculator that you used in the previous step, but this time set to ‘free bet’, we can see how much money we retain from the free bet depending on the odds of your chosen game. Again, by using software such as OddMatcher you can look for games with the best odds for retaining free bet amounts and maximise your profit. Once you have placed your bet with the bookmakers, you again need to lay the result with the betting exchange and then that’s it! You are guaranteed a profit and it is time to cash out. Where the money goes for withdrawal will depend on the result of the match – if your bookmaker bet wins then your winnings will need to be taken out from the bookie, but if the lay bet wins, your winnings will be with the exchange. My first matched bet was on a similar £20 offer. It took me around 20 minutes to complete (as well as some time to understand the matched betting basics) and I earned £16 from it. While that does not sound like a great deal of money, remember there are loads of bookmakers out there offering similar free bets to try and draw new customers in. It is your job to hunt these offers down and make them work for you. And if that sounds too much like hard work? Well you might still be in luck. A miniature industry has sprung up to capitalise on the money available through matched betting over the last decade or so, usually in the form of products offering advice and software to help people extract profit from bookmakers. Companies like Profit Accumulator and its main rival OddsMonkey offer subscription services that take the pain out of finding your own matched betting offers and organise everything for you. Keeping track of offers, free bets and withdrawals can be a messy business and these services are useful for helping keep things in check. They also offer matched betting guides and information on all the offers out there. They are useful services and as such they charge monthly fees. These are usually fairly insubstantial – anywhere between £10-20 per month – though they can eat into your profits if you stay subscribed over multiple months. It is worth looking at Profit Accumulator even if you are not interested in signing up, as they will take you through a couple of offers step-by-step for free, which can be great for learning the basics and getting used to matched betting. A bit like the bookmakers, matched betting companies often run offers for new subscribers, such as free trials and cheap introductory rates. Looking out for these can be a great way of accessing their resources at a discount or even for free. After my first week or so of matched betting, I chose to subscribe to a matched betting service for two reasons: laziness and human error. At first, I just created a spreadsheet to keep track of my bets, lays, deposits and winnings and thought this was enough to keep me organised. I was wrong. As my free bets snowballed I lost track of where I put money and the sheer number of offers I was doing at one time resulted in me making an error. Somehow I bet for, instead of laying against, a game at the exchange and I had to ‘cash out’ both of my bets to avoid the chances of a big loss. As I have said, laying games at high odds requires putting up a large ‘liability’. This is fine if you are guaranteed a profit, but can result in losses if you do not do it correctly. Mistakes like this are common for beginners, but it does not make it any less galling when you are on the end of one. While matched betting technically guarantees a profit, it does not account for human error and anything you can do to limit the chances of this happening means you stand to make more money. While signing up to matched betting services does not make your chances of mistake zero, they do offer ways of keeping track of each offer you do that can keep you organised. A Profit Accumulator insider I spoke to estimated that there are around 40,000 people actively matched betting in the UK at the moment. Bettors are split fairly evenly between those that do it off their own back, finding offers and using free services to make a return, and lazier people who pay companies to do some of the legwork. I definitely fell into the latter category and I stumped up the £17 monthly fee to access the ‘premium’ area of Profit Accumulator’s website. While there is a lot of information available online for free to those who are patient enough to look for it, I found paying a relatively small sum (when not over multiple months) was a quick and easy way of getting a good matched betting resource without

eating into my profit too much. But I don’t want to sound like a shill for these matched betting companies: if you have the organisational and research skills to go it alone, you absolutely can. You can even do a bit of both, using the services at first to learn the tricks of the trade, then going it alone when you are more seasoned. So now that you know the basics you are ready to get started as one of the few people smart enough to actually extract profit from the bookmakers. You just need to decide how far you want to take it. Some people treat matched betting almost as a full-time job, sitting for hours finding the best offers and turning out results, but most just put in an hour of two a week and make some decent cash on the side. Regardless of how much time you put into it, it is worth being as organised as possible – set time aside for it and realise that it is not simply money for nothing. It still requires you to use your concentration and organisational skills. The fact is, although matched betting is profitable, it can also be quite boring. The further I got into it, the more it felt like an actual job as I sat for hours on my laptop: filling out details, depositing money, finding bets, laying them and keeping track of it all in my spreadsheet. It is important to remember to just plough through and think of the profits! As you get through the more well known bookmakers’ offers and start signing up to some of the lesser known ones from the 80-or-so out there, hurdles will likely crop up that you did not expect or encounter at first. Each bookie has different verification processes for withdrawal and you will need to have your email address, phone numbers, copies of bills, bank statements, credit and ID cards to hand. Bet Regal, a particularly dodgy bookie that I tried an offer with required “a copy of your identification complete with an official stamp (round & red) and a signature of your legal representative”. This made it impossible to get my winnings back. Although rare, things like this do happen. To help avoid situations like this, become familiar with the forums of matched betting companies for each offer you attempt. Other bettors would have attempted the offer before you and their experiences can be helpful. Another thing you might start to notice is the issue of money management – both withdrawing your profit and keeping enough in the betting exchange to cover your liabilities. At times, your original investment will likely be tied up between accounts, or in lengthy withdrawals from bookies, so be aware that you may need to wait a few days for profits to materialise. The Profit Accumulator insider I spoke to, who is a matched bettor himself, says he likes to think of matched betting as an investment – the more money you start with in the exchange to cover your liabilities, the quicker you will make returns. Most bettors invest between £200-£500 at first, but once profits start mounting these can be reinvested and act as the required liabilities as things start to snowball. It is also possible, though more difficult, to start with less money. There are people who start with as little as £40 and build slowly. If you do not have a timeframe for making money, you can start with a small principal amount, withdrawing and reinvesting it each time until the profit builds up to a lump sum. Just do not expect quick returns this way - it requires discipline and patience to build a small amount into a good sized profit. Once you have completed the sign up offers for each of the 80-odd bookmakers – no mean feat, but worth at least £1000 and probably a lot more than that – you may be thinking that your matched betting career is coming to an end. This is where reload offers come in. Reload offers are the ongoing promotions and bonuses that bookies use to retain existing customers and tempt them into playing. A reload offer is any promotion that is open to current members, excluding new members. There are a whole heap of them available between all the bookies you would have registered with when completing the sign up offers and this is where long-term profit is made. While the sign up offers are great for beginners, and will be enough to keep you occupied and profiting for a long time, reload offers make it possible to keep extracting money from the bookies. For now, it is enough to concentrate on sign up offers, but be aware that matched betting does not stop there. It is possible to keep matched betting perpetually once the sign up offers are finished. *** You might be asking yourself, reasonably, how matched betting works under the current restrictions brought about because of the coronavirus pandemic. At the time of writing, almost all live sport in western Europe and much of the rest of the world is currently on hiatus. This has definitely hit the number of games available to bet on. However, it is important to remember that bookmakers are still desperate for new customers and most of their offers still apply. Despite the lack of sport, there are still plenty of offers out there and random leagues, such as the Belarussian Premier League, are still running. Bookies are focusing on these for now, with an eye on professional sports starting up again soon. There is a lot of financial pressure on the big football leagues to start playing again, even behind closed doors away from fans, and as soon as this happens expect lots of free bet offers and a resumption of business as usual for matched betting. Until then, complete offers on the games that are still taking place. Matched betting is an ongoing battle between bookies and smart bettors and while coronavirus has hit bettors, it has also taken business from the bookies. This is good news for matched betting: when bookies are desperate for customers, they rely on offering more promotions to attract them. Although at the moment there are less of these offers for live sports (but still enough to keep us interested), almost all the online bookmakers also have separate casino, bingo and poker operations and we are seeing increased offers for all of these. In the next chapter I will talk you through how to profit from them.

Chapter Three Online casinos, bingo and poker Like sports betting, online casinos are big business. A recent UK study found that around 17 per cent of the population gamble online. The house almost always wins, remember, and last year this resulted in £5.3 billion revenue for gambling companies in the online market alone. But in a similar way to matched betting, there are ways you can fight back and actually make money from the casinos by using similar strategies to the ones we looked at in the last chapter to take advantage of casino bonuses as well. I learnt about casino, bingo and poker bonuses the deeper I got into matched betting. As I was writing my first money article for Vice, I wanted to find ways of banking cash quickly – my hope was to make a good amount in a short space of time to give the article a bigger sell. Although matched betting on sports games is a great way of making cash, it can take a while for profits to clear and make it back into your bank account. I quickly boosted my profits through various other online gambling offers and made around £1000 in just a couple of months of doing this on the side of a full-time job. Depending on how seriously you take it, you can easily make more than this. Like the bookies, the UK’s liberal gambling laws have spawned an array of competing online casinos and they all use offers to stand out and lure potential customers onto their platforms. These offers are great news for us because we can use them to turn a profit. Unlike matching free bets on sports games, making money from casino offers does not require a onesize-fits-all strategy. Obviously you cannot lay, or bet against your casino game bets at a betting exchange, so we need different tactics. Because these offers take various forms, the ways of profiting from each can vary greatly, from sign up bonuses at casinos to free spins on slot machines and even complimentary bingo tickets. All of these can make you risk-free money if you know how and a lot of people actually prefer online casino and bingo offers to regular matched betting once they start them. These offers are often quicker, simpler and they can be more profitable as well. They are also a lot more exciting, because with many casino offers you have the potential to win a lot more money – and who doesn’t want the chance to play risk-free roulette or cash-in with free spins on a slot machine? Because of the nature of casino offers, profit is not always guaranteed, but most offers are risk-free. This means that while you may not hit it big, you also don’t stand to lose anything, so it is usually worth trying – and the more risk-free offers you try, the higher your chances are of hitting a winner. Take this example. An old offer used to give a quick £5 refund on digital scratchcards. The idea was simple - spend a fiver on a scratchcard and if you did not win, the company would refund your money as withdrawable cash. The company hoped punters would keep spending the refunded money in the event the scratchcard was a loser, but avoiding this meant it was impossible to lose money. If you won, you might get ten or twenty quid, or even hit the jackpot and take thousands. So despite no guaranteed win, it was still good value because it was free. Although that offer does not exist anymore, many more like it do. The basic idea behind making risk-free casino offers work for you is to find and complete as many of these as possible and hope you come up with some winners. The more you try, the better your chances. The same companies that are set up to help sports matched bettors, like Profit Accumulator, OddsMonkey and ProfitNinja also operate in the casino, bingo and poker fields and most have a dedicated part of their website to help their subscribers with these types of offers. As with sports betting, I did pay to access help to get started with these offers when I was first writing about it. If you can afford to take a small hit to your profit too, then it is probably worth it until you have fully learnt the ropes. The companies tend to list the offers for each casino and also offer tailored instructions for each offer. This can be really useful as the process for getting money from each can vary so much. However, as with sports betting, there is some free information available on the internet about how to take advantage of casino offers. Using those resources along with this chapter as a guide can definitely give you enough to get started independently without paying for a subscription to these sites. The further you get into casino and gambling offers, you may also start to see offers that are not riskfree but classed as low-risk. This is a step up from the guaranteed profits of sports matched betting, but once you are comfortable with it, it is a great way to earn money. The way low-risk offers work for us is that instead of being a complete refund on any money you put in, like in the scratchcard example above, they usually rely on discounted prices – such as on bingo tickets or spins on slot games. While this sounds scary at first, especially when compared to risk free offers, we can actually take advantage of the favourable odds that these discounts provide to turn a profit. If a spin on a slot machine usually costs £2 a go and the odds are that the average punter loses 50p per play, then it would be crazy to play at that price, with the average cost being £1.50 a go, even if we win sometimes. But if a discount on the same game provides a ticket for £1 now, with the same odds, then that is excellent news for us. We might not win every time, but the odds are that we will make on average 50p each time we spend £1 to play. That's the principle behind low-risk offers. You risk a small amount of money at first, but it is almost mathematically certain that you will make a profit if you play through enough of these offers.

During my time writing about betting for Vice, some of the most profitable offers I tried came from casino bonuses, which usually fall into the no-risk category. I made £38 from an offer at Grosvenor Casino, playing through a £20 bonus on blackjack using a strategy table (you can find many of these for free online through Google). The offer, like almost all casino offers, specified that I had to rollover my bonus a certain number of times before withdrawing it. This varies from company-to-company but for this offer it was five times. By using a strategy table I made the blackjack odds as favourable as possible. The casino always has an edge in any game, but by playing blackjack as efficiently as possible you can limit this to as little as 0.5 per cent. That means that for every £1 you bet, you will keep around 95p of it – not great if you are playing with your own money, but a good strategy for retaining money from a free bonus. As it turned out, I got lucky in this game of blackjack and nearly doubled my money on top of that before withdrawing it. This is the exciting part of casino offers – it won’t always happen – but there is a chance you will upset the odds and make more than you thought you would. It took a lot of discipline to quit while I was ahead, but it is important that you do so if you find yourself in this position. Remember that every game you play for longer than you need to, or with your own money, increases the chances of giving profit back to the casino. Most casinos try to dissuade punters from using bonuses on games like blackjack and roulette because of the small margins you can make for yourself if you play them well. Companies often add unrealistic rollover requirements onto these games, meaning you would have to play through your bonus tens, or even hundreds, of times before withdrawing it. Instead, taking advantage of these offers usually means playing on their slot machine games and a lot of offers give free spins on these and/or a cash bonus. Because of this, slot machines are likely to be the most common games you will play. Slots come in all shapes and sizes and there are a huge array of different payout structures, bet sizes and bonus rounds. There is no strategy when playing slots, it is just a case of setting your stake and then hitting the play button – the reels will spin and the game will tell you if you have won or lost. It is important to note that every single spin is independent. This means that the slot has no memory, it does not know if you have been on a winning streak or a losing streak, it just generates a payout for you with each click of the spin button. I recommend using the ‘autoplay’ function of any slot machine you choose to play through a bonus on. Instead of manually clicking spin each time, these functions will automatically spin a certain amount of times for you. Slot games are made to be addictive, to draw players in and tempt them in to chase their losses. Do not fall for this. Simply play through your bonus the minimum number of times required to withdraw it once you have gone through this process. Autoplay can be a great way of keeping a distance between yourself and the game. Some offers have large wagering that require many slot spins – autoplay allows you to get through this fairly painlessly and without getting invested. It is possible to calculate the average returns a player is likely to receive from slot games and casino games more generally. This figure is known as return to player (RTP) and it is a theoretical percentage of wagered money that will be paid back out to the player over time. The RTPs for each slot machine (and there are hundreds of different ones) can usually be found online using a Google search. For example, if a slot has an RTP of 95 per cent then this means that in the long run, for every £100 that you put into the game, you will receive £95 back. So, the higher the RTP, the more money is paid back out to us on average. We want to look for high RTP games, as these are the best for keeping money from casino offers. Usually it is possible to find games with RTPs in the mid-to-high 90s range and these offer the best chance of retaining bonus funds when wagering through a large number of spins. However, because the RTP is calculated assuming an infinite amount of spins, you are not always going to get the exact RTP amount back when you play – it could be less, it could be more, but usually over a good number of spins it will be close to the average. Just remember not to let the game play with your emotions, regardless of the results. Let the odds work for you. If you get unlucky on one game and it does not hit the RTP you expected, just stop before you lose anything and find another offer. If you do enough of them, you are sure to profit. As coronavirus has temporarily hit almost all live sports, many bookmakers and gambling companies are now offering bets on virtual sports to tempt potential customers into playing with their own cash. Virtual sports essentially take the form of computer-generated horse racing with blocky, dated looking graphics. Usually we would avoid this sort of thing – particularly because there is no way to guarantee profit on virtual sports, because you cannot match a bet on a fake horse race at a betting exchange. However, with many new offers cropping up on these virtual races, including many free bets for first timers, they now present a good risk-free way to try your luck. I had a go with one bookmaker, BetVictor, which offered a free £10 bet on a virtual horse race for new customers. It is a similar process to betting on a real event – each horse has odds and you pick the one you think will win. Having absolutely no knowledge about the pretend horses’ chances in this fake race, I simply guessed and got lucky. I more than doubled my money and took £24 from them in a couple of minutes. You may not be so lucky the first time you try, but the trick is to try multiple offers (making sure to avoid risking your own money) and eventually you will hit a winner. Moving on from casinos, bingo offers can also be a great way to make some easy profit. Once the preserve of grannies, online bingo is now a huge business and counts players of all ages. Like the casinos, bingo companies use tempting offers to grab new customers and these are what we capitalise on. For many bingo companies (Mecca, Buzz Bingo, Bingo Storm) these offers take the form of free bingo tickets after you deposit a certain amount of money. For example, you may have to deposit £10 but you receive

£30 worth of free tickets on top of that. They also regularly offer free spins on slot machines as well, which are worth trying your luck with. Most of these offers are not risk-free, but because of the odds of winning they will almost always return a profit. The RTP of most bingo games is estimated to be around 50 per cent. This means that under normal circumstances a player can expect to receive half the money they spend back as winnings on average. Not a great deal, but we are not playing under normal circumstances. With a bonus boosting our balance, a 50 per cent RTP would result in an average return of around £20 on a £30 bonus and initial £10 deposit. Generally, the matched betting companies estimate the minimum bingo RTP to be around 50 per cent, but some sites may even be as high as 70 per cent, which can mean even more profit. Playing through free bingo bonuses is straightforward. It usually involves playing through your initial deposit by buying tickets for games, before being credited with free bonus tickets. You do not need to pay too much attention to what games you are playing in, just simply buy into as many as possible to get your bonus quickly. Once you have your bonus, it is the same scenario. Play through it by buying tickets for multiple bingo games and hope you have a few winners. As I said above, offers like these are not entirely free of risk, but the odds are on your side. The average player will stand to make something like 50 per cent of the initial deposit and the bonus combined. You may make more, you may make less. Like the casino offers, the more of these offers you find to play, the higher your chances of making a good profit. Finally in this chapter we will look at online poker, another side of online gambling that is a bit different to the casino and bingo offers. While it is possible to make money from poker by just being a great poker player, it really does require skill and dedication (not to mention luck) to make consistent profit from it this way. In the early 2000s, along with the rise of the online casinos, there was a global online poker boom. This was particularly true of the Texas Hold’em version of the game, which is by far the most popular form of the game and the one I will focus on in this chapter. During the prime boom years between 2003 and 2006, the online poker player pool at least doubled in size every year, meaning there were a huge number of new players out there and the various poker platforms battled for their custom with tempting offers. Unfortunately, those days are long gone. While some offers are still available, they are not what they used to be. An industry insider I spoke to said that because poker has become a lot less profitable for gambling companies due to diminishing interest in the game, they now usually only offer sign up offers and these can be hard to profit from. Technology, the bursting of the poker bubble and an increase in the general standard of play have all squeezed our chances of making quick cash from the poker hustle, but there are still some reasons to give it a go. Unless you are an experienced and wiley card shark, your best hope of making money from online poker is by taking advantage of sign up offers, but these can be tough. Sign up offers take various forms, but usually consist of a mixture of bonus funds and free tickets to enter tournaments that would usually cost money to enter. Let’s take the bonus funds first. Many poker companies will offer to match your first deposit with bonus funds, or a certain bonus amount depending on an initial deposit. While on the face of it, receiving a 100 per cent bonus on a deposit can seem like a great deal, the poker companies are very keen to make it as hard as possible for you to turn this into withdrawable cash. Almost all the companies use a points-based loyalty scheme that ensures you need to play a certain number of hands of poker (usually many) before withdrawing any bonus funds. This means that at the very least you have to break even, but often in reality need to be in profit, using your own cash at the tables to ever stand a chance of releasing your bonus funds. So, these offers are not for novices, but if you are still interested, or fancy your poker skills, make sure to shop around for the best offers. This does not mean just looking at the amount of bonus funds on offer from each company, but paying attention to the terms and conditions that will explain what you need to do to release the funds. While getting your hands on cash bonuses through poker is tough, tournament tickets, another common sign up offer, can be a good risk-free way to make some money. Online Texas Hold’em poker takes two main forms: the cash game, where people play for straight cash that they have on hand, and tournament poker. There are hundreds of poker tournaments going on across the internet at any one time. Entrants usually pay to ‘buy-in’ to games and instead of starting with varying amounts of cash, each player is given the same number of chips. The tournament is played in rounds until eventually one winner emerges: the player who has gained everyone else’s chips. This frenetic version of the game can be bewildering for first-time players, but because there are still some sign up offers out there that offer free tournament tickets, it can be a good risk-free place to start playing the game. The strategy for making money from these offers is similar to that of the free bingo tickets or free slot spins, but as poker is a game of skill as well as luck, it will pay to have an understanding of the game and its strategies before giving it a go. Or, if you’re feeling lucky, dive straight in and try your luck. So, between casino, bingo and even occasional poker offers you can build on your matched betting profits and start raking in a sizable second income from your sofa. The first two chapters of this book have shown you how easy it is to get started making good money from home – all things that I have tried and succeeded with myself. In the next chapter we will look at something that is touted as a get-rich-quick scheme across the internet, from blogs and YouTube videos to social media adverts. I gave it a go for an article for Vice, hoping to add to my early successes, but all was not as it seemed.

Chapter Four Forex The idea to try my luck on the foreign exchange market – forex for short – came about because of the coincidence of a couple of things: the sheer number of adverts I came across selling forex as an opportunity to make easy-money on the internet and the conclusion of Brexit. I wanted to capitalise on my matched betting successes and write about making even more quick cash on top of it in my next article. Brexit was coming to an end at the time, with daily news events causing big swings in the price of the pound. Despite knowing absolutely nothing about the financial markets at the time, I hoped to use the chaos Brexit was inflicting on Britain’s currency to cash in on the forex market. News at the time reported that hedge funds stood to make a killing from “shorting” – betting on a fall in value – of the pound in the event of a no deal Brexit and my plan would follow a similar strategy. I would bet on a drop in the fall of the pound relative to other currencies as Brexit unfolded, in the hope of making some easy money. First, a little background on the forex market. As with online gambling, the internet has made it possible for anyone with a computer or smartphone and some spare cash to start trading wherever they are connected to the internet. The foreign exchange market is responsible for trading the world’s currencies and it is the largest market in the world – dwarfing the major stock markets such as the New York Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange, and Tokyo Stock Exchange combined. It comprises more than $5 trillion per day in transactions and spans currency trading activity in various exchanges, institutions, and banks all over the world. It is open 24/5, with trades taking place across the globe. This means it is possible to take part at any hour of the working week with just a few clicks from your phone. On the face of it, the trading process is quite simple but there are a few terms you need to familiarise yourself with. Currencies, such as the pound, US dollars and Japanese yen, are organised into pairs. When you place a trade you predict whether one currency will rise in value (buy) or fall in value (sell) against another. This is called a contract for difference (CFD). Get it right and you make a profit, get it wrong and you lose money. When you trade forex on a platform you are trading it as an Over the Counter (OTC) transaction. This means that you speculate on the movement of currencies against each other, but do not take physical ownership of the actual asset, in this case, money, as it would be unrealistically expensive for a home trader to buy enough actual currency to join the market. Instead, platforms effectively loan you the currency using something called leverage. Leverage involves borrowing a certain amount of the money needed to invest in something. In the case of forex, this money is usually borrowed from a broker (the trading platform you sign up with). A market analyst I spoke to before I started trading suggested I trade as small as possible at first. This sounded like sensible advice, but leverage means this was not as easy as I had first thought. Because it is not actually possible to trade with sums as low as the ones most consumer traders can afford to invest, retail FX accounts offer high leverage. On the platform I signed up with my leverage is 1:30. This means that every £1 I trade is magnified by 30 – increasing potential profits and, of course, losses. Let’s look at an example and dissect my first real money trade on the forex market. I started by shopping around a variety of forex platforms and practiced with a few demo accounts. Most will give you £10,000 of fake money to play with, so it does not really feel like you are risking anything. This makes practice trading pretty meaningless – it is not until your own money is at risk that you will get a proper feel for real world trading. However, demo accounts can be useful for getting to grips with how the platforms and trades work and this is what I used them for. It is a good idea to get an understanding of the platform before you start putting your own money into it. So, after playing around with demo accounts on a few platforms, I decided to sign up with some real money on the Plus500 platform, which at the time had one of the lowest minimum deposit policies I came across. I put £200 in the account, which is around the minimum you need to invest to start trading forex. With leverage, the minimum I can trade is technically £1000, but this only requires a £33 margin, meaning I am not risking a huge amount of my initial deposit. To begin trading, choose a pair of currencies. When trading you are betting one currency will either rise (buy) or fall (sell) against the other. To avoid the chance of big losses, it is important to set something called a ‘stop loss’ order before executing a trade. A stop-loss order is usually set before a trade is placed, but can also be set or changed afterwards. Stop-loss orders tell your broker to halt your trade once your currency reaches a certain price. A stop-loss is designed to limit an investor's loss on a security position. Setting a stop-loss order for 5 per cent below the price at which you bought the currency pair will limit your loss to 5 per cent, for example. On the flip side of this are things known as ‘take profit’ orders. These orders close your trades once they reach a certain level of profit. When your take profit order is hit on a trade, the trade is closed at the current market value. You may also see take profit orders referred to as limit orders. Together with stop-loss, they are an important part of securing your trades on forex. For my first real money trade I decided sell the pound (GBP) against US dollars (USD), thinking that Boris Johnson’s failure to get a Brexit deal through parliament on that particular day would have a negative impact on the price of the pound. Some traders rely on strategies like this to make money from

the foreign exchange market, but there are many different strategies at play. These vary from studying currency charts for patterns and favourable signs that can be used to predict price movement, to using news events as indicators. I tried the latter as my strategy. Really though, it was a coin flip. The trade started in the red, sinking below its initial value immediately and sunk lower from there. It lasted no more than a couple of minutes and already my funds were down. After my bad start, I carried on trading through the next few days, hoping to generate some profit to write about! I tried out different strategies, setting wider stop loss and take profit orders. I managed to gain a few wins, but they were outnumbered by losses and my initial £200 investment started to slip away. The more I researched trading, the more I realised that this should not have been that surprising. Despite adverts plastered across social media to the contrary, more often than not consumer traders lose money on the forex market. By law, trading platforms have to display warnings like this: CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. Between 74-89% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs. You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money. So, despite the warning signs, why do so many people can make a quick buck from forex? There are a huge number of people on the internet purporting to help inexperienced traders turn their trades into profit and many more who use their own supposed profits in forex to promote themselves. There are a few places to look for help with trading for free, including YouTube tutorials and babypips.com – the latter is a particularly useful free resource on the basics of forex trading and popular strategies – but for every legitimate forex resource out there, there are hundreds of less-reputable ones. Because of its reputation as an easy-money-maker, retail forex trading has a whole scam industry surrounding it. Aspirational social media culture has fed the idea that there is easy money to be made in forex. Scammers prey on this by offering things known as ‘signals’ for a fee to novice traders or signing them up to fake trading platforms and falsifying profits. They promise big returns if you follow their trading tips, but many offer bad advice or simply vanish after taking your money. One popular forex scam is perpetrated through the selling of forex ‘signals’. A forex signal is a suggestion to enter a trade on a currency pair, usually at a specific price and time. Signal sellers are forex firms, or individual traders that offer a system, usually for a fee, that claims to identify these favourable signals to buy or sell a currency pair that will turn a profit. Individual signal traders will tout their long experience and trading abilities and show testimonials from people who vouch for how successful the person is. All the unsuspecting trader has to do is hand over a certain amount of money for the privilege of trade recommendations. The problem is that these signals are not usually a shortcut to profitable trades, more often than not they are unreliable and signal scammers will regularly offer bad advice – the exact opposite of what they promise. Some may recommend a good trade now and then, either through luck or to allow signal money to perpetuate, but they then disappear once things go awry. Although there are some signal sellers who are honest and perform trade functions as intended, it pays to be sceptical. As well as signal scams, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the body in charge of regulating financial services in the UK, has reported that consumers are being increasingly targeted by unauthorised or scam forex trading and brokerage firms offering the chance to trade in forex CFDs. These firms usually promise very high returns and guaranteed profits either through a managed account where the firm makes trades on the investor’s behalf or by trading using the firm’s trading platform. Most consumers report that they receive some returns from the firm at first, which gives the impression that their trading has been a success. They are then encouraged to invest more, but soon the returns dry up and the firm closes up, as with the fake signal scammers. An FCA source told me that even if firms are genuine and not a scam, there are still huge risks in forex trading for retail consumers, particularly if they are promising high returns, because forex is one of the riskiest types of trading you can engage in. During research for my forex article, I found a number of forex accounts on social media offering unrealistically high profits in exchange for signals or commission fees. One account I messaged said he could offer me average returns of £180 per week on a £300 investment. With a consistent 60 per cent return rate like that, your £300 would grow into £1,416,709 after just 18 weeks if you reinvested all your earnings! Compounding, the process of reinvesting an investment’s earnings to generate additional earnings over time, means returns like this would skyrocket quickly and are clearly unsustainable. Another account I ran into offered me a return of £1500-2000 on an investment of £500 and said she could not be a scammer because she is a practicing muslim, before sending over a copy of her ID. But she ruined all the hard work she had done in winning me over by saying her trades are 98 per cent accurate, higher than any legitimate trader could guarantee. Looking out for these signs – overconfidence and overpromising on returns – are good indicators of scammers. So with the scams too much of a minefield to navigate, I pushed on alone, continuing my strategy of trying to invest on the fall of the pound, but my biggest win actually came from the complete opposite. In the build up to the 2019 UK general election a MRP poll that the markets see as a reliable indicator, forecast a Conservative majority and GBP rose quickly against the Euro because markets tend to prefer the Tories to Labour. I managed to get that much right and immediately regretted not looking more closely at the election polls and attempting to trade around the news they generated. I had stopped

trading by the time the general election rolled around and it was probably for the best. I thought Labour might do better than expected, perhaps creating a hung parliament, but in the end they were crushed by the Tories. In the immediate wake of the exit poll the pound surged more than two percent, its biggest one day rise since January 2017. Shortly after my article went out, Brexit anxiety crept back in to dampen the gains, but would I have predicted any of this accurately enough to make money from the turbulence? Probably not. *** The same applies for trying to trade forex in the current climate of turbulent markets caused by the pandemic. So far, the corona-crash has wiped around a third of value from the world’s stock market and many of the world’s currencies are incredibly volatile. The news cycle is churning quickly, with events moving things on day-to-day or even hour-to-hour. While many skilled traders will no doubt be able to make a killing on the markets in this situation – even as they turn downwards as the world heads towards recession – for novice traders it can be very difficult to predict price movements at the best of times, let alone with everything in such a state of flux. I went into forex trading believing that if I threw myself in, absorbed things quickly and spoke to the right people, I would make money. I did not – and I would not recommend taking on forex lightly, if at all. An ex-market analyst I spoke to at the time of writing my Vice article told me that he does believe it is really possible for anyone to go into consumer forex trading and expect to make much money over a period of time. He said that the basic problem is that there is just too much leverage – meaning people are effectively pretending to have a bankroll around a thousand times bigger than they actually do. Even with a good statistical edge, people will lose money if they overbet, which is a common mistake. As far as side hustles go, forex promises a lot, but delivers little. Scammers are everywhere online, boasting of huge profits, but as I said in the introduction to this book, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. This is the case for any firm or individual promising high, easy returns on the forex market.

Chapter Five Clickworking and comping After my foray into forex failed to boost my earnings, I wanted to get back to reliable ways of earning money. During my research I stumbled across ‘clickworking’ and ‘comping’, which are separate but related ways of making cash online. Clickworking is a term coined to describe various processes including filling out forms, data entry, answering surveys and many other digital tasks that companies will pay you to complete. On the face of it that sounds like a pretty boring way to earn cash and well, yes, it probably is. But it is an increasingly popular way people are earning reliable money online and companies are always recruiting new members to answer surveys and test new products. Comping is a similar idea, and although it is not as reliable in paying out, it does provide an opportunity to win big. The basic concept of comping is to enter as many free-to-play online competitions as possible in the hope of hitting a winner. There are thousands of competitions out there because companies often use them as a way to advertise and promote their products. While the odds of winning one may be small, the more you enter, the better your chances become. The benefit of comping is that the prizes can be huge, from big cash payouts to cars and holidays. Taken together comping and clickworking can be a way of generating a second income. Although doing them is a bit dull, you can complete tasks from the comfort of your home at the same time as doing other things – listen to a podcast or watch a film as you go, or just fill out surveys when you are bored and have a few minutes to spare. I like to think of clickworking as the main way of earning money from the two and comping almost as a hobby on top of it – you can enter competitions casually (though in large numbers) and anything you win is a bonus. Before you start, make sure to set up a dedicated email address for any online earning – and use it consistently for both comping and clickworking – otherwise your personal email inbox may become flooded with offers and other junk from the companies you are signing up to. Let’s look at clickworking in more detail to begin with. There are loads of opportunities to make cash through completing tasks online. The process is not all that different from matched betting – it pays to be organised and the key to making money from it is to complete as many tasks as you can manage, as with the betting offers. There are a dizzying number of ways to earn cash: you can get paid to watch videos, write, search Google and much more. The main thing to remember is that while some of these sites only pay small amounts, add them all together and you can earn thousands of pounds over time. You also need discipline: with some sites, it can take a while to earn enough to be able to withdraw your money. If you give up, it means you did the tasks for free. It is important to understand that it is not money for nothing, this is more like a ‘proper’ job than anything else we will look at, but it can be a nice extra income provided that you are consistent and have patience. For a few minutes of form filling, you can make a couple of quid. Do this multiple times and it will snowball. There are loads of sites you can sign up to for free that will give you clickworking tasks to complete to start earning cash. Swagbucks is a good site to start out with. It pays you for completing short online tasks in virtual cash, which you can exchange for real money, PayPal credits or gift cards to spend at various online retailers. With clickworking it is usually best to take cash if it is available, but at times you may have to settle for vouchers. These can still be worth working for, especially if they are for a company that you would spend your money at anyway. It is important to make sure you spend any vouchers before they expire – otherwise you cannot spend them and you would have worked for free! Swagbucks is huge in America, but it is growing fast in the UK. It offers a variety of tasks including but not limited to filling out polls, watching videos and completing internet searches using its page instead of Google. The way Swagbucks works is that advertisers pay it to promote their wares or do market research and the site then passes a cut to you. The more dedicated you are, the more you earn, though every task pays a different amount. If you do sign up, make sure you do it through a site that offers a promotional code. Usually users only get only a few points for registering, but if you register through an affiliated site, such as MyMoneySupermarket, you can get bonus points worth £15 in Amazon and M&S gift cards if you earn £5 worth of points in your first 30 days. It is always worth checking for welcome offers when you are starting on a new clickworking site as they can boost your earnings early on and add value to the time you spend working. It pays not to be loyal in this sense – if you can make more money doing tasks on another site then you should switch. Another clickworking site worth looking at is Qmee. With Qmee it is possible to get paid in cash for searching the web. It just involves downloading an add-on that sits on your internet browser – I suggest using Google Chrome. With the add-on installed, you search online as you normally would on Google, Amazon, eBay and the other giant internet companies. Qmee will show extra results or adverts alongside normal search results – and it makes money as some firms pay to appear in these ads. By searching you can earn a cut of this cash. If the Qmee result interests you, click it and you will earn a few pence. This is usually 7p-15p, but can be up to £1. It is important to know that you do not have to buy anything – as with any of this stuff we want to avoid spending our own cash as it eats into our profits. You can cash out your earnings to a PayPal account whenever you want, though it is probably worth waiting for it to build up. As with any clickworking site, look for a sign up code before starting to boost your earnings early on. As well

as paying for search adverts, Qmee also offers surveys that you can profit from. Profits can be slow to build up – remember there is no such thing as money for nothing and if it was easy to earn big money from simply searching the web everyone would be doing it! But it can be worth doing if you do not get sucked into wasting your time on it. Install the add-on, use the internet as you normally would – and treat any money you take from it is a bonus. Some similar sites to Swagbucks and Qmee that are also worth signing up to include PrizeRebel and UK pollsters YouGov. For something a bit different to filling out surveys, Clickworker.com is a website where you can carry out small work tasks – some people have coined the term “microwork” to describe this – in return for small payments. The idea is that you can dip in and out of the work whenever you have the time, which means it can be a good home working option. Though Clickworker.com is a US company, it is possible to sign up as a Clickworker from many different countries, as long as you are able to receive Paypal payments. The site offers a wide variety of different tasks that can include anything from proofreading to categorising websites and data to writing product descriptions or even participating in academic studies. They are typically jobs that only take seconds or minutes, rather than hours, to complete. By performing hundreds of these small tasks you can end up earning a reasonable hourly rate, but it is dependent on enough jobs being available to work your way through. There have been many reports of people not getting enough work through the site to make it worthwhile and therefore they end up earning subpar hourly rates. Clickworker can be unreliable, but there is one main thing you can do that will help your chances of getting jobs from the platform that will boost your profits and make it worthwhile. When signing up to clickworker the website will give you various assessments to complete that will help work out your suitability for certain tasks and in addition to these there is sometimes an assessment available for the “Universal Human Relevance System” (UHRS). Dystopian sounding name aside, UHRS is actually just a secondary microworking platform that Clickworker members can gain access to through completing the assessment. Gaining access to UHRS will increase the amount of work available to you and it is a good way of making Clickworker worthwhile. When there is UHRS work available, workers who are prepared to sit and grind away at the tasks can earn decent regular money. Without UHRS, you may face stiff competition for Clickworker jobs and struggle to make good cash. Regardless, it is important to keep in mind that you should treat microworking lightly. Clickworking is not worth your stress or commitment and it does not really work as a full-time job proposition – I mean, who wants to spend a large chunk of their day jumping from one mindless data entry job to the next? That being said it can be a good way to earn some extra cash from your sofa. Like with other ways of earning online cash, it usually pays to keep your sources diverse, so try out Shepper and EasyShift for similar microjobs to Clickworker. On top of clickworking, it is possible, though not guaranteed, to win expensive tech, holidays or thousands of pounds in cash through the art of comping. By entering free competitions you can give yourself the chance to win big. The odds may be small, but the more you enter the better your chances of hitting a winner. You may wonder why there are so many companies giving away big prizes through competitions online – the reason is simple. Competitions are actually a cheap chance for companies to promote their products when compared to traditional advertising. A £10,000 cash prize may sound extravagant to us, but it is far cheaper for companies to stump up for that than a primetime TV advertising campaign, which can run into the millions. On top of that, companies usually require entrants to hand valuable data over when entering competitions. While you may not think that your phone number or email address is worth much, these can be valuable pieces of information for companies to gather from potential customers. When I was at university, a lecturer gave me a very good piece of advice when considering why there is so much free stuff available on the internet: if it’s free, then you’re the product. This is the case for Google, which offers most of its services to users for no cost, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as promotional online competitions. All are free because the companies involved are profiting from your data – that is how they make their money. So how does comping work? It is all about putting in the hours – systematically entering hundreds of free competitions, rather than doing the odd contest. The more you enter, the more you are likely to win. Depending on your work ethic – and a slice of luck – this could result in anything from small prizes to lifechanging amounts of cash. Usually entering these competitions involves nothing more than filling in an online form and giving up your email address, phone number, or both. Sometimes you may have to answer a question as well, but you can usually get the correct answer with a quick Google search. If you want to get into comping, the best place to start is with the Competitions Time forum board, where dedicated compers post links to loads of contests. As I said above, comping is never going to be a reliable source of income, but if you can enter competitions quickly and for free, then why not have a go? You may get lucky and hit a winner.

Chapter Six Financial independence, retire early So far, we have looked at ways of generating income online, but this chapter is going to give you something a bit different – offering you ideas on how to save your earnings and invest the money you already have. Financial independence, retire early (Fire) is an online movement that started in the US in the 1990s but has grown-and-grown in popularity since. Millions of people worldwide are now putting Fire’s financial teachings to the test by trying to save as much of their earnings as possible, invest them sagely and retire early. I noticed Fire’s rise in popularity a couple of years ago – it has developed from a small, cultish online group into an almost mainstream financial movement – and I got hooked on the idea of writing an article on it for Vice, where I gave it a go for a month and spoke to many people who have followed it for a lot longer than that. What I found from trying Fire and speaking to the key people involved with it was a money-savvy movement that had lots of ideas about saving, frugality and investing that I had never considered before. Like I said in the introduction to this book, I was rubbish with money before I started writing about it, learning about Fire was one of the big things that helped me think differently about my income. While I did not agree with everything that fans and devoted followers of Fire told me, it did give me a fresh outlook on money – and how best to hold onto it and grow it. The main principles of the Fire movement are fairly straightforward. Its adherents try to save 50 per cent or more of their earnings each month with the aim of hoarding enough cash to be able to invest it, quit their day jobs and live off of interest and dividends. Many people do not fully retire once they reach this point, using their investments to free themselves from spending eight hours a day at a boring job and instead focussing on doing stuff they like more, that does not necessarily pay as well. According to the principles of Fire, followers can retire once they hit the target of savings worth 25 times their annual spending. This means that if you can get by on £15,000 a year, you need to save £375,000. If you need £40,000 to get by, this rises to £1m. Obviously, these are huge numbers to average people (me included!), but by saving a high proportion of your income these targets can become feasible. Fire’s figures are underpinned by now-famous blogger Peter Adeney, who writes under the name Mr Money Mustache. A few years ago he calculated that if you set aside 10 per cent of your income, it would take 51 years to reach savings of 25 times your income – but by upping this to 50 per cent of your income it takes just 17 years. At 75 per cent, it falls to seven. This calculation is backed up by something called the 4 per cent rule, which was first set out in a 1998 paper from Trinity University in Texas. It states that if you keep your pot of money invested in diverse stocks and shares, you can live off the “safe withdrawal rate” of 4 per cent a year with your money never running out, though penny-pinching may be necessary in recessions. Of course, saving such a high proportion of your income in the first place is a big barrier to reaching financial independence for a lot of people – so I gave it Fire a go to see whether it can work for an average Joe like me. When I tried Fire, I was working full-time as a video journalist at The Times and writing occasional freelance articles on the side of it. My yearly salary of £34k was just shy of the London average at the time and I aimed to save half of it for a month. On payday I took away half my wage for saving: after tax, rent, bills and monthly subscriptions like Netflix and Spotify, I was left with £377 for the month – a budget of around £12 per day to cover food, travel and any other expenses. I settled into a new routine quite quickly and stuck to it. I slashed my spending by cutting back on work lunches, commuting costs and food shopping. I stopped drinking almost entirely and my social life really took a hit. I realised how much I relied on the pub to see friends and as the month wore on this took its toll, but it probably did my physical health some good! The changes that I made to my spending were not that extreme at first, but they were enough to keep me to my budget. Little changes added up to decent savings. Not extreme frugality, but a solid basis for saving. One aspect of the Fire movement that appealed to me was its anti-consumerist aspect. A number of Fire blogs argue that if only we bought less and stopped caving into immediate desires for material things, we could save more and abandon the daily grind. Some even combine the Fire movement with environmentalism, arguing that if you buy less stuff, you can save money and the planet at the same time. The lifestyle is often painted as a mixture of stoicism and financial savvy – and if you agree that spending does not equal happiness, then the Fire movement might be for you. Although there are still a number of bloggers and Fire followers following a frugal lifestyle as a sort-of protest against consumerism, I found that as the movement has grown and become more accepted as a mainstream personal finance option, it has simultaneously moved further away from its roots. Looking at online fire blogs and forums you are now more likely to read posts from retired investment bankers and well-paid IT workers preaching the benefits of Fire than you are a hippie who just wants people to stop buying so much crap and save the environment. Although FIRE began as a frugality-inspired reaction to counter rabid consumerism, in some ways it has come full circle and is now seen by many highly paid people as a quick way out of the rat race, but without much focus on truly living a frugal lifestyle, at least in the way an average earner might consider it. In researching my Fire article I spoke to a banker-turned-blogger who “retired” at 34 – he was netting a huge yearly salary before he quit his day job and boasted of multi-million pound property

investments. Is that really in the true spirit of the Fire movement? Of course, Fire does require you to have an income that you are able to save in the first place and the bigger this is then the easier Fire becomes. Although it began as a reaction to consumerism, early retirement and financial independence in the truest sense is really only feasible for high earners. The maths behind the movement is built on a sliding scale – the higher your saving rate, the quicker you can retire. Achieving a high savings rate can be difficult or impossible if a large proportion of your money is spent on essentials such as food and rent. So if saving half your mediocre salary seems a bit extreme to you, as it did to me, you might be wondering if there is a middle ground between extreme frugality and carefree spending. Fire bloggers I spoke to generally agreed that it is not a binary choice and saving 50 per cent of your salary each month is not the only way to achieve a comfortable future. Saving and investing money is not useless just because you cannot save enough of it to stop working altogether. Every extra pound you put away can give you more freedom and more choices later on. It was easy to become disillusioned with Fire when every person I spoke to about it seemed to earn a six-figure salary or own expensive property, but they were right: cutting back on pointless spending and saving now could really take the pressure off later down the line. I saved £1000 after my first month of trying FIRE, which was a bit over half my monthly income at the time after tax. It was hard work, but it was also eye opening. I noticed how much pointless stuff I bought during an average month: clothes, food and things for the house were all easy to cut back on. Although it felt good to have so much money left over at the end of the month, saving such a high percentage of my income also felt like an unsustainable grind. Even some Fire bloggers I spoke to said that was inevitable on an average or low salary. The more you earn, the less of a squeeze it is to save a bigger proportion of your money. A major criticism of Fire followers is that many of them seem to earn big salaries, or have received large inheritances – how does that make financial independence achievable for the rest of us? The truth is, Fire is built on the assumption that you will save and invest more as you progress up the career ladder, but if that is not something that you think applies to you, you can still put some Fire advice into practice in your finances. Even just starting to think about how to save and invest what you can afford is a good strategy for managing your finances. If you think early retirement is unlikely (and I doubt I will achieve it!), saving and investing can still benefit you whether that means putting money away for retirement, a deposit for a house, or just to gain some financial security. In the UK we are terrible at saving money on the whole – around 15 per cent of us have no savings at all – so anything that can help us manage money better is a good thing. As an average earner, I have found that it is possible to make use of Fire’s principles, even if you do not fully jump into the financial independence movement. As we have looked at in previous chapters, by using a combination of matched betting, casino offers and clickworking, it is possible to generate a second income online. Although Fire is not a money-spinner like these, it can be really useful for managing and growing your extra income once it starts to mount. If you do not have much money left over to save at the end of the month – and let’s face it, you probably would not be reading this book if you did – try generating an income using the first chapters of this book. After that, Fire comes into its own. Beyond advising people to save a large proportion of their earnings, Fire also relies on its followers to invest and grow their savings piles. If you do not know much, or anything at all, about investing then don’t worry. Most Fire bloggers advise a pretty simple strategy: investing in low-cost exchange-traded funds (ETFs). These funds are made up of stocks and shares from across the world and therefore tend to be less exposed to sudden movements if a particular country’s economy suddenly goes down the pan. It would be risky to pin your future on one company’s stock price, but a fund that has many different stocks, from many different companies based across the world, reduces this risk. The more diverse a portfolio, the less exposed it is to sudden movements in the market. One benefit of the Fire movement being so full of people from financial backgrounds is that they tend to know what they are talking about when it comes to money – there are hundreds of blog posts, podcasts and forums out there that can help you reach the right decision about investing. One of the best I found during research for my original Fire article was blogger Barney Whiter. Barney trained as an accountant and worked in finance for 20 years before becoming financially independent and retiring in his early 40s a few years ago. He now no longer has to work again, but he still runs a finance blog, The Escape Artist, where he talks about investing, politics and anything else vaguely related to the economy or the Fire movement. Like many Fire followers, he invested his savings in EFT funds and he has written at length about the benefits. In particular, he rates the Vanguard range of funds, which have low charges and good global diversification – important to keep the chance of market shocks as low as possible. Charges can be as low as 0.06% a year with Vanguard funds, against 1.5% on some actively managed funds. This may sound like a minor difference, but it adds up over time and he points to it as one of the main things to consider when you are looking at making a long-term investment, such as saving for retirement. Once you have fully read up, considered your options and settled on a fund, then all that is left to do is sit back and let your money work for you using the power of compound interest. Compound interest is the addition of interest to the principal sum of an investment. In other words it is interest-paid-on-interest and this can be a powerful financial force. Although investment returns can never be guaranteed, it is easy to calculate how quickly an investment will double in value depending on its yearly rate of return using

something called the rule of 72. This rule is a simple way to determine how long an initial investment will take to duplicate itself, given a fixed annual rate of interest. By dividing 72 by the annual rate of return, you can get a rough estimate of how many years your investment will take to double. At an eight per cent annual rate of return, which is fairly conservative, your investment will double every nine years. At a 10 per cent rate of return, that money will double every seven years. Over many years this can turn even a modest amount of money into a lump sum – remember, that amount will double again and again and again as long as you have it invested. This is an essential piece of the Fire puzzle that makes everything else its followers rely on fall into place. Without compound interest, saving half your wage – or squirreling away a second income – would be almost pointless. But with the power of compounding it is possible to grow even a small investment into something worthwhile, as long as you give it enough time. *** With the ongoing pandemic, now may not seem like a very good time to be talking about investing when we are sure to be in a heavy recession soon. The coronavirus pandemic is what financial brains refer to as a black swan event – something unpredictable and beyond what is normally expected of a situation that has potentially severe consequences. But there have been black swan events before and the market has always eventually recovered. The important thing to remember is that we are not trying to make a quick buck from the market, as I tried and failed with forex, instead we just want it to provide something like its average rate of return over the long-term. We do not want to do what Dave Portnoy, a multimillionaire known for gambling on sports, recently did when he decided that a sudden switch to fast-paced day trading on the stock market during the pandemic might pay off. He quickly lost £550,000 of a £2.3m investment in mere minutes as the market swung. As I cautioned with forex trading, quick returns are not realistic from financial markets unless you have a huge slice of luck on your side. Even then, the chances of keeping that luck rolling diminishes over time. Instead, keep it boring – invest slowly and only ever what you can afford. Eventually things will pick up again. If they do not and things get so bad that the stock market never recovers, well, you will probably have much more than just your investments to worry about. The current crisis may not seem like a smart time to hinge your future on the continuing ability of capitalism and the global economy to keep ticking over – but it has before and it more than likely will continue to do so. Investing while the market is shrinking can be risky, but for those with a sensible plan, it can also be a good time to be brave. If you are not feeling particularly brave in the face of the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu – and who could blame you – then Fire’s principles are still worth looking at. As we face extended periods of time locked down, unable to see friends, drink pints at the pub or go to the cinema, it can be tempting to spend the money we would have spent in normal circumstances on the mindless crap that is being advertised to us from the screens we now spend all day looking at. But the current crisis can actually present an excellent time to start saving, provided you have an income and are disciplined enough to avoid buying all of that unnecessary stuff. With a good plan, including using some of the tips in previous chapters of this book to generate an online income, you may even come out of the pandemic with more money than you started with.

Chapter Seven CONCLUSION From the time I started writing about making money online, back in 2018, I have paid off my outstanding debts and reached savings of around half my annual income. This was not immediate and it was not always a smooth journey, but it was enough to knock my finances into a far healthier state than when I began. I am still in the process of building on this by using the methods outlined in this book and hunting for new online side hustles to explore. The simple money-making techniques I have outlined in this book are a great way to start building a second income online and I hope that by writing about my experiences and outlining the ways I have made through the various side hustles I have tried, you too can make some good money. I did not start out with a strategy – except for wanting to find ways to make cash online – but through my research I stumbled across multiple ways of earning a second income and then found that the Fire movement offered some good ideas on what to do with the money once I had earned it. Side hustles like matched betting, casino offers and clickworking can generate thousands of pounds of extra income over time. Using this book as a starting point, I recommend seeking out other online resources that can help you learn these processes quickly and make them even more efficient ways of making cash. Once you get the ball rolling it becomes easy to start building on your returns. It was at this point in my side hustle journey that I discovered the financial independence, retire early movement. Although it is not without pitfalls, Fire gave me some great ideas about how to save and invest the money I had made. Almost by accident, I discovered a process that made it possible to build savings fairly quickly through side hustles and then found a way to save and invest the money I had earned. Of course, I am not the first person to stumble onto this path – there are thousands of people out there who are putting the principles of Fire into practice in the hope of saving and investing enough to reach financial independence. I doubt I will ever hit that mark Putting away half my income every year seems too much like sacrificing the present for a future that may never happen, but Fire got me thinking about saving and investing, which are just as important as earning money in the first place. Through side hustles and the Fire movement I have gone from being rubbish with money to building a modest savings pile in a couple of years. I hope reading this book gives you everything you need to do the same. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now – popular Chinese proverb

About The Author Hayden Vernon

Hayden is a freelance journalist and video producer. He has written for a number of publications including GQ magazine, The Independent and The Times Literary Supplement. He is also an associate lecturer in journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London. Over the last two years he has written a series of articles about making money online for Vice.com, the source for many of the ideas in this book. You can see a collection of Hayden's articles at haydenvernon.com or direct any abuse to his Twitter account, @haydenvernon.