Money Making and Money Saving?

[tickling]

Hi and thank you for reading!

I will make this thread a bit of an introduction to me as well and what I hope to achieve. Maybe it will some sort of therapy as well. I was going to start this in January but lets start it now to see what I can do.

First of I am married with 4 kids and the last number of years have been very trying. As result of the property market crash we have been made bankrupt last year. Our house needed a lot of work done to it and we had massive negative equity we were told that going bankrupt was our best option. We were young and naive when getting our house at the time and the companies kept saying you want more money and we said yes. We got ourselves into the position where we had no spare cash left as our mortgage was to high and when the repairs where needed we did not have the money.

We made a slight mistake with our first rented house poor landlord and massive damp but after that year there we moved again and have not firm roots in a new house for the last 10 months and touch wood will be staying in our new house for the foreseeable future. Our new landlord is very attentive and wants "very long term" tenants. Going bankrupt has been a blessing in disguise we now have no credit now!

On the work front I have as stable as a job you can get however I am not happy. My job is layered in bureaucracy and lots of office politics which I do not like. I am not the most social of people and find the social situations pretty awkward. On the internet I am fine though! Every since I started work I have always wanted to work for myself but as you know life gets in the way. I have recently got promoted and with it the yearning to get out of the rat race has increased as my increase in pay is slight but the change of job significant. I am sorry if that if that annoys anyone as know a lot of people are struggling at the moment and here is someone moaning about getting a promotion. :'( I just find the grind of day to day job working for someone else depressing and do feel I need to get out for my own sanity.

My ultimate goal is to be earning enough money to leave my current job and work for myself. Before I get there I have lots of little goals to go. I also believe you need to spend money to make to money and to save money so I am willing to put my hand in my pocket to get things done. Also it is about making my life better to. Currently we are living to each day we get money. We have no backups if something goes wrong so if we miss a payment from Tax credits or my pay check we are struggling for food etc so we need to fix that. With 4 children we cannot go on that situation so I have a plan to get that going.

Going forward the surveys and whatnot I think I get my partner to do as she would have more time to do that. My goal however is start developing a website or something of that ilk as I would need something which is more sustainable and under my control rather than relying on other people. I hope to use this diary to help me fresh out my goals and ideas and encourage everyone to come on board and yell, shout, give encouragement, call me a numpty on this thread.

I have rambled enough so far but we update how I get on and my plans. Hope I haven't bored you and you will join in!

 

[Jon]

Interesting diary , look forward to following it

I would say though that you don't have to spend money to make money

There's loads of ways to make decent money online without spending any in the first place

 

[tickling]

Thanks for replying Jon. To clarify what what I said I dont mind sticking £5, £10, £15 pound down to get some return Im not talking £1000s ;D. For making money online I will be looking at quick easy wins like quidco etc but anything requiring "work" I will not be looking at as I will explain below as after writing the post yesterday it gave me a lot of ideas and gave me some inspiration on how I would like to go forward.

I didnt expect to write another post so soon but writing the first one helped me a lot to see how I want to proceed and it was some sort of therapy and helped me see the big picture.

To give a little more background I have been looking at working at home for myself for a long time and have given up due to lots of things. During the time we were going through our bankruptcy and other stuff, I stumbled onto what I thought was good idea for a website. However due to the pressures of all that I never got to flesh out the idea to more than a barebones WordPress website with a couple of articles. Following the post yesterday I went back and checked how it was getting on. I am not going to name the site at the moment for a number of reasons I will come too but will hint at what the site is.

I have not touched this website in over 10 months but somethings stood out to me. Firstly I am getting traffic on the website everyday. While not big numbers (between 2 - 10 people a day) but its surprising as the site hasnt been updated in so long. These people are not bots but actual people! Secondary which was totally unexpected my website was put on a larger site and leaked to an article I wrote which generated 500 hits. These two things have told me that this website has legs and should be developed further. The webpage is also ranked number in google for the slang term!

Going over the website again I have a grand total of 11 articles on it. Its a mixture between how to guides definition of terms and some news. What I recommend to everyone is download OneNote or something similar to your phone, laptop or computer to keep it handy. Just having a quick look round I have came up 30 bread and butter articles. By this I mean content which should drive people to my website which wont need updated often like how to guides. On top of these there would be there would be potential, or there should be!, daily articles of news etc. With OneNote I have jotted these ideas down on my phone so I can come back to them to develop them further.

Another benefit of these bread and butter articles is that they could be reused as an ebook. This would be a two fold strategy as it would allow me to sell my content and should also allow me to provide a link to the website in the book. I would be using the website to link to affiliate links rather than adsense.

After developing the articles the website should be able to move onto the main point of the website to make money. This will be done by an affiliate marketing there will be a hard balancing act of articles to affiliate to generate money and I want to be fair to the readership that any reviews will be honest and fair.

So there is a good plan forming hopefully for the website and ebook idea. The reasons for not naming the website as yet are numerous. Firstly I want to try and build the traffic organically and secondly my paranoid self worried about people taking over the idea. Also I want to hid my name from the DNS from the domain. Hopefully the name of it and what it is will come clear soon

What I did not touch on much in my first post is is saving money and how to stop living from pay day to pay day. At the moment what happens is that our money is really divided into two. I pay the ongoing monthly bills and my other half pays the weekly things from the tax credits etc. This works well to a certain point in that there is a constant flow of money in but its usually all gone when we receive it. Its a case for us to be much better with our money.

I want to change this for as obvious as it sounds its not good not having any money encase something comes up. For example unexpected money needed for school, money for petrol etc. We are running in a just in time approach in that everything is running till next payday. We have enough petrol in the car till next week. We have enough food in the house till next week etc. If any of the money we get is late we may struggle or if things dont run to plan. For example I have had to take annual leave as I did not have enough petrol to get to work on occasion

One of the biggest drains of money is food and my biggest worry. The kids are well fed and we have the basic supplies of food for when things get tight like pasta etc. However I now want to not worry about food so my plan is to get a chest freezer in and do a big freezer shop a month. That way we should always have a stock of food in the house which can be supplemented on a weekly basis. This should allow us to have more money to make do during the week and have a proper cashflow encase if things come up.

How will be pay for this? I have been thinking about this for a while and again its a simple solution. Switch of the extra pay channels! For the last number of weeks if not months I have noticed a trend and its not becoming ever so prominent now we are watching less and less tv. The only things which we watch live where I am a Celeb and football. Sky movies isnt watched at all and Sky sports is only watched at most once a week when my team is on. Now they out of the champions league the draw is even less now! With Netflix, Amazon and youtube us as a family do not watch enough pay TV to justify the cost of it. So why are we paying for it? There is the saving to pay for the monthly shop!

Writing these posts helps me fresh out these ideas more and hope others start diaries as well. Not just for me for you as well as it allows you to focus and see the big picture.

My plans for this week are

1. To write the bread and butter articles
2. Get my affiliate details updated.
3. Its payday this week lol so I will see if I can get the chest freezer. Should be able to do it if a follow through with no4.
4. Cancel sports and movies and see if I can get an even cheaper deal.

Do you think I should write the bread and butter articles which should draw people to my site. Or develop the ones which should have the potential to make money or a combination of both? Thanks for reading!

 

[busybusy]

Hi.
I have found your two posts very interesting. My tip for you is cancel the sport/tv and don't bother looking for a cheaper deal, just don't replace it. You won't miss it and will save you loads and in turn ease a bit a pressure off you.
Good luck with your quest!!

 

[tickling]

Thanks busy busy. The sports and movies are going no matter what Im just hoping to get my price down even further after removing them.

 

[doublemum]

We are downsizing soon and when we move, the subscription to Virgin TV is going, don't tell my children! Even they watch less and less now. Incidentally if you live anywhere near me I've just switched off my big chest freezer to defrost it with a view to selling it! I completely agree with you that it's cheaper to have a freezer to batch bake or chuck in yellow sticker items, but where we are moving doesn't have a garage and we'll have no room for it.

 

[finditforless]

I also did the whole cancel Sky thing and moved over to BT TV and I must admit I haven't noticed a difference at all other than being £40 better off per month and a nicer Youview box.

With the articles I would write a mixture of bread and butter articles and the ones to make money and then schedule them to be mixed up a bit so that it isn't 4 sales articles in a row and it keeps things fresh. I have also found Google Keep is very good for that (A bit like Onenote) where you can just save ideas / pictures or articles for later to give you content to write from.

If you are looking at doing the quidco type things and blog articles, my site (link in signature) may be of interest as there have been some good offers on chest freezers too

 

[tickling]

Just a small update I think and happy new year all!

I managed to do a couple of things on my list. I managed to get my freezer and it is blessing and well worth the money. People may debate the nutrition value of frozen food but for me it is more important to get food in and not to worry about kids going hungry. We did a Iceland Christmas and it was a reasonably successful. the turkey was good enough for us and the kids as we always get the fresh turkey which ends up being wasted so we tried this and will be doing next year. The ham wasnt great though so wont do that.

Second thing I did and I was really surprised with the outcome was ring up virgin to remove the sports and movies. Well a piece of advice is that at the moment if you are a virgin subscriber you are in powerful position at the moment as they have upped the pricing. Part of the contract is if they make changes to your bill you can cancel which I found out so I rang up to cancel and they are giving me sports and movies for free for 3 months and the kicker is I am getting Netflix for free for 6 months. When my 3 months of free movies and sports is up will be removing them,

With my website I have decided to hold fire for a couple of months and this is for two reasons. Firstly I think I need more steady foundations and more experience before I start the big venture. This leads into my second I am thinking of getting my experience by setting up a website to do with this adventure of saving and making money. I do enjoy writing these posts and will continue to do so but I do want to expand some of them. With this big website I am thinking off it will require me to put many hours into posts and get my head round wordpress a lot more. I really do think this website has really massive potential but I need to get everything into place first as I will, in order for it to really work, need to get two pieces of equipment.

Anyways this was longer than than I thought. As always feel free to post and ask questions!

 

[queen81]

Just a small update I think and happy new year all!

I managed to do a couple of things on my list. I managed to get my freezer and it is blessing and well worth the money. People may debate the nutrition value of frozen food but for me it is more important to get food in and not to worry about kids going hungry. We did a Iceland Christmas and it was a reasonably successful. the turkey was good enough for us and the kids as we always get the fresh turkey which ends up being wasted so we tried this and will be doing next year. The ham wasnt great though so wont do that.

Second thing I did and I was really surprised with the outcome was ring up virgin to remove the sports and movies. Well a piece of advice is that at the moment if you are a virgin subscriber you are in powerful position at the moment as they have upped the pricing. Part of the contract is if they make changes to your bill you can cancel which I found out so I rang up to cancel and they are giving me sports and movies for free for 3 months and the kicker is I am getting Netflix for free for 6 months. When my 3 months of free movies and sports is up will be removing them,

With my website I have decided to hold fire for a couple of months and this is for two reasons. Firstly I think I need more steady foundations and more experience before I start the big venture. This leads into my second I am thinking of getting my experience by setting up a website to do with this adventure of saving and making money. I do enjoy writing these posts and will continue to do so but I do want to expand some of them. With this big website I am thinking off it will require me to put many hours into posts and get my head round wordpress a lot more. I really do think this website has really massive potential but I need to get everything into place first as I will, in order for it to really work, need to get two pieces of equipment.

Anyways this was longer than than I thought. As always feel free to post and ask questions!

This is not the green site where people pick fault with everything you do

I think it's a good idea - I have a little freezer as that is all I have room for. You could also go to the reduced section of your local supermarket and buy things for pennies that you can freeze. And you can freeze veg. You can freeze allsorts!!

 

[busybusy]

Must agree, freezers are great.

LOL - what a funny sentence I have just typed.

 

[tickling]

Thanks for responding. Honestly cant think why we didnt get a proper freezer before now it helps massively and allows the kids to have desserts more often to. Got to feed them up as they are starvos! Got a free wordpress blog up and running and have my first post up and two more scheduled for tomorrow and Thursday and none of posts mention freezers yet! Needs some work though and will try and get it swapped over to a real domain at the end of the month. Its going to be a long 3 weeks till payday but this year money saving and money making will be different just need to get over the Christmas aftermath.

 

[Jon]

Thanks for responding. Honestly cant think why we didnt get a proper freezer before now it helps massively and allows the kids to have desserts more often to. Got to feed them up as they are starvos! Got a free wordpress blog up and running and have my first post up and two more scheduled for tomorrow and Thursday and none of posts mention freezers yet! Needs some work though and will try and get it swapped over to a real domain at the end of the month. Its going to be a long 3 weeks till payday but this year money saving and money making will be different just need to get over the Christmas aftermath.

completely get what you are saying here..


Christmas aftermath for me runs until my main payday in January which can't come soon enough!

 

[tickling]

Yeah Jon its a long old month 3 weeks today until I get paid and every year I forget how tough January is. Like I said in my previous post I posted my blog post yesterday and a good start no advertising or telling anyone the address and people have viewed it and have my first comment as well. It was general introduction blog post. My advice to everyone is build it and they will come. Take 30 minutes to register and write your first post and thats the start of your journey. As the famous expression goes a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.

 

[usa1]

Hi

How are things going?

 

[sparkleandshine]

I would love to get a freezer and be able to shop at Iceland but the kitchen where we are now is woefully inadequate size wise and its just not an option. Another one to consider to save money and one I will be doing soon as soon as I can get myself organised is getting rid of contract mobile phones and replacing with pay as you go.good luck with it all were not in a great situation either jobs and money wise at the moment but as you say just keep breathing and taking one step forward at a time.

 

[Blackpepper1]

I would love to get a freezer and be able to shop at Iceland but the kitchen where we are now is woefully inadequate size wise and its just not an option. Another one to consider to save money and one I will be doing soon as soon as I can get myself organised is getting rid of contract mobile phones and replacing with pay as you go.good luck with it all were not in a great situation either jobs and money wise at the moment but as you say just keep breathing and taking one step forward at a time.

We don't have room for one either. Now just got a fridge/freezer so limited space wise.
Used to have one years ago, we had a box freezer then got stuff out of Iceland so it was well used.
We have never needed to be on a contract mobile phone wise we are just on Pay As You Go with Sainsburys which are really good price wise as far as calls and texts go.