No doubt this will create a fair amount of debate but here goes.

We’re running a bit short of cash. We’ve just bought a house which used up all our savings and we ended up using credit cards to bolster things. We’ve still got things that HAVE to be done on the new house, particularly before winter kicks in and I hate being in debt. We could muddle along for 6-12 months I’m sure and eventually settle things down but I hate being exposed in this way so I’m looking to make some cash quickly to clear the credit cards, get the urgent work completed and get us back with some rainy day money. I reckon about £5000 will see us sorted again, so not a huge amount.

So, make money fast schemes. What have you tried and what seemed to work well. I’ve been considering ebay selling which looks OK, I’ve got plenty of storage and the principle seems to be sound, buy lots of stuff cheap and then sell it all sharpish. Obviously finding it cheap is where the money is made and there’s plenty of tools to tell people what’s selling well. We’ve both still got day jobs but can do plenty in the evenings and weekends.

Anything else that’s worked for you? I’m absolutely not afraid of hard graft and would have no issue with working a full day at work and then shooting off to another job in the evening if it sorted us out quickly.

And by all means slander away if you think that’s in order.

Thanks for any helpful information.

Matched Betting is a quick and easy £1k with very little risk other than through human error.

You can “help” your friends do it too. I did it as a student, then helped pretty much all of my close friends do it (for a 50/50 split).

Lots and lots and lots of info on MSE.

sell your bike.

Do you got a purdy mouth? 😉

gerbils?

spend all of your savings on gerbils in a male/female split of 1:9, or more if you want the chaps to work a bit harder

wait a few weeks and Voila! you have easily increased your flock by a mahoosive amount

then sell the babies while they are still cute

easy 🙂

Send £2500 paypal gift to thehaggishasitcovered.com
I will triple your money and send £5000 back.

You can be trusting in me very muchly 🙂

I think I would find it a lot easier to save an extra £5k per year than earn it. Shopping from aldi/lidl, no sky tv/magazines/etc, no new clothes/CDs/DVDs. Don’t buy anything except essentials. Start hitting boot fairs/charity shops.

What is matched betting?

A guy I know is placing £10 on Watford to win each time they play, individual games not the season. If they win he will double his stake, reckons he will clean up this season. I am skeptical 😆

I suggest you adjust your attitude to being in debt, that will be simpler than making 5k “just like that”. Get your CC debts on to 0% cards or ‘low interest for life’ if you can’t be bothered switching when the interest free period ends then set up direct debits to pay them off as aggressively but comfortably as you can. Not a sexy answer to your question but probably the most realistic.

Or do the gerbil thing^^^

Volunteer to be a Peruvian drug mule. That seems to be working a treat

Open a brothel 😀

Requires investment though 🙁

(allegedly)

Become a drug dealer.

Drop the luxuries such as sky and sell your bike/s.

Blackmail.

Kidnapping?

Got a car? Sell it. Got anything else valuable? Sell it.

It the only guaranteed way to raise money fast. Otherwise with get rich quick schemes just be prepared to afford to lose you money.

Go contracting

Or do the gerbil thing

Take it from me. The gerbils will breed far quicker than you can get rid of them!

Thanks. I’ve already done the credit card thing this morning. New Nationwide card with 26 months 0% transfer rate. As soon as it arrives I’ll be shifting the two cards total, about £1500 across to that. I’m happy eating beans on toast and stuff for a few months, maybe treat myself to a 2 litre bottle of aldi bitter at the weekend.

It’d still be nice to gain some extra capital though, just to pay for the work that needs doing.

Put your missus ‘On The Game’?

Relative ?

5k isnt much in the grand scheme of things ? Bank loan ? Additional CC. If its important to get the work done, then do so and pay it off from a weatherproof house rather than one with buckets everywhere.

Got kids?

Send ’em down t’ mine!

Alternatively, what’s your day job? Could you tutor people in your ‘speciality’ / degree subject in the evenings or at weekends?

If you go down the eBay route you might want to bear in mind that you’ll (a) be liable to tax and (b) will basically be running a business so will have the joy of Distance Selling Regulations to enjoy.

do the work yourself? Sell the car, wife, kids…

You say you’ve got space….

break a few MOT failure/cheap cars at the weekend and then sell the parts.

Should allow you to create a fair few quid if you get hold of the right type of cars in the first place.

Go into business competing with superstar?

Design a not so garish logo, Chuck £££ into a load of pedals, seatposts, bars, stems from reputable factories (i.e. it’s cost more than the cheepest crap, but you wont have to deal with warenties), post a photo on here of a bike dripping in anodised bling, casual include a link to your hastily designed website.

All you have to do is not be a tool and you’ll overtake superstar.

sell the other house.

Thanks. I’ve already done the credit card thing this morning. New Nationwide card with 26 months 0% transfer rate

26 months! Blimey, that’s good. I’ve never come across anything over 15 months interest free on balance transfers.

x2 for matched betting.

Have been through it a couple of years back, for an easy couple of k over the space of a few months, doing the simple UK/mainland european offers. Some folks make a serious part time job of it and continue to pull in cash year on year. It requires nothing except for the internet, a hundred quid or so to use as a float, and time.

The best time to do it, handily enough, is late night / small hours of the morning, when the bookies are closed and aren’t adjusting their odds. Its quite compatible with a day job.

Barclaycard comes with 28 months interest free! Already got one though.
http://www.confused.com/credit-cards

This is great stuff chaps, ta.

I would sell the other house if I could. 🙁 At least we have a tenant now but one of the things we ended up agreeing to was go halves on the kitchen with ’em, one other area we’re having to cough up short term which is stretching us even tighter.

If you want to save money in the long term you need to learn the difference between a want and a need.

Get some cutesy bottles, some nice peppers, some oil & vinegar and some nice string/cards and make folksy bottles of peppers to sell at craft markets.

Or get on your local Freecycle network and snap up anything worth having for car boot sales (books, clothes, records etc).

We’ve still got things that HAVE to be done on the new house, particularly before winter kicks

out of interest, what are these things?

cause a new kitchen doesn’t sound like a “HAVE to be done”

cause a new kitchen doesn’t sound like a “HAVE to be done”

Well it does for the OP – keep up.

At least we have a tenant now but one of the things we ended up agreeing to was go halves on the kitchen with ’em

tbh we were in the same boat last year.

we had no hot water or heating when we bought our house and it needed rewiring.

new radiators , new boiler, Gave up 2 weekends to run the pipe work and rads + boiler and remove the old stuff.

Got a man in to do the boiler. – in august, was cutting it fine really for the winter – lucky it all worked 😀

then we rewired it in a week during my christmas holidays.

again got a man in to do the fuse board and testing.

saved us about 6 grand.

Now its coming up to time to do the kitchen , i need to get a structural engineer in to do some drawings and calcs for a beam but till ive saved up enough we will just have to live with the crappy kitchen..

Im surprised , was your old kitchen really that bad that it needed to be torn out or what made you agree to change it ? seems mad as a tennent to pay for that but i guess your hoping it will lead to them staying long term ?

I think Tom hit the nail on the head. How’s your chemistry?

Apparently Isaac Asimov and Ron L Hubbard were having a conversation one day.

Ron asked his good mate Isaac how he could make a lot of money.

“Start a religion” came the answer

True story

Do you have a pet you could teach to dance to a medley of James Bond theme tunes? That could be quite lucrative.

Yeah, we really struggled to find a tenant despite everyone telling us how vibrant the rental market was. These were the only people who showed any real interest in renting, bearing in mind our house at this point was being advertised at at least 25 quid a month cheaper than anything else of similar size in the same area. (In retrospect this was in part due to the very poor agents we went with). They said they’d take it but only if we agreed to sharing the cost of the kitchen. We were getting pretty desperate by this point and so accepted. Plus they do appear to be perfect tenants at this point, they want to stay long time and are mature/pleasant and both working.

In the new house there was a load of work that we didn’t expect. The new kitchen there which we’d budgeted for plus some extra went way, way beyond what we had anticipated. There was a load of plastering we needed to do elsewhere that wasn’t immediately obvious, I’ve had to do a load of work myself to keep costs down and have spent every waking minute between moving in and now doing a ton of jobs from replacing window frames to rewiring stuff. Labour is obviously free but materials aren’t. The biggy though was the wood burning stove flue which it turns out was not installed to standards. The sealing was terrible and it ran too close to joists meaning it has to be completely pulled out and re-routed. The first week in the new house we had no hot water or oven which was awkward, we had to pay to get it done in the end.

These are the reasons we are where we are and while bearable, left us with some financial gaps to fill. As I say, we could muddle along and probably will, just cut back on non-essentials. Anything extra is good though.