This week I gave matched betting a go. It's everywhere, damn near evey financial blogger goes on about it and is either selling you their product or an affiliate link to someone else's. I'm not going to do that.
Matched betting is, at its, simplest, taking advantage of all the free bets that online bookies give you to sign up as a new customer. Coral is the site most suggest you start on: they give you 20 quid in credit if you open an account and bet £5. BUT... you can't just withdraw that 20 quid in cash. You have to gamble it. Matched betting works by offsetting that bet with another one on another site. So if Man U is playing a match, you bet your £20 of credit on them to win. On another site you "lay" the bet: you do a matching bet that they won't win.
In theory, that means win or lose you make back that £20 credit in cash. In theory. Bookies are not daft. Someone, somewhere, needs to get a cut and the blogs suggest counting on getting about 75% of the free credit back in cash. And by working your way round all the online bookies then you can earn from £800 to £2400 depending on who you read.
The reality is that I've made about £7 profit so far this week. Better than nothing, a couple of pints for free. But I've also got £50 of my own cash tied up in bookie's accounts to leverage that. Not so great. And it has probably taken me an hour a day of work to achieve that. A pound an hour? Is it worth it? I don't know. I'll see.
My first mistake was making my first deposit with Coral by using Paypal because I had £50 in it from some Ebay selling. And I didn't read the T&C's, because only deposits made with a credit or debit card qualifies for the £20 credit. I only found this out after making my first bet. Duh.
My second mistake was trying to do it on the cheap. The "lay" bet, the bet you make that something won't happen, is an expensive bet. A simple £10 bet could require you to have £40 in your account for an easy 3/1 flutter (because you lay the bet on a betting exchange rather than a true bookie; don't ask me, I have no idea how or why this all works). By keeping my bets small and my exposure small I ended up with really small margins on the maths behind extracting the free cash.
Whatever, the end result is that I really don't think it is worth my while. Most bloggers seem to rave about it and I wonder if that is just so you'll click through their affiliate links. I'm going to give it another couple of goes but I'm really cynical.
You make money but it's hassle and you also open yourself up to a big loss if you screw up the calculations or the betting process. Ask me again in a few weeks.
On the heating front, only heating the rooms I am using with an oil filled radiator is working well. I'm going to do a meter reading tonight and see how it has impacted my electricity bill. The wood I bought from a local sawmill is top notch. Burns well and heats the place nice. I posted on Instagram my views on firewood merchants. A bigger bunch of utter fucking chancers I am yet to meet outside of used car dealers. The amount of shit I've wasted money on in the name of "premium seasoned hardwood logs" is shocking.
This week's budget saving is £19.52 which brings me up to £89.62 since the start of the year. The Chip app has auto-saved about £20 for me. I also got £75 compensation paid into my account this week from the AA because I complained about shit service I'd received. Starting to feel like I'm in control of my finances after Christmas but this is also the shittest period of the month in the run up to pay day.
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