Weekly Update: 5th February 2020

Finally reached pay-day. It seems like a fucking long trek between my last pay and this one. As far as I know, I've managed to make it without blowing any of my direct debits. But it has been hard work.

For starters, I'm still cold. I'm not convinced about my strategy of using electric heaters just to heat up individual rooms that are being used rather than running the central heating. It works great in my daughter's room, she's got an oil filled radiator in there and running it on half power with the thermostat on halfway means her room is comfortable.

I've accepted my bedroom is unheated and, therefore, really fucking cold. It's probably a good thing that I'm not sharing it with anyone at the minute because I doubt anyone in their right mind is going to put up with those conditions. Except for maybe some survivalist nut, I don't know. On the plus side, I'm actually sleeping better. When I was trying to keep it warm over Christmas I found I was waking up all the time. With it being cold, I tend to sleep right through.

The fan heater in the living room doesn't even make a dent. It takes the chill off and that's about it. I still remember being a kid in Scotland and getting up in a freezing house in the morning. I used to eat my breakfast sitting in front of a calor fire. Thirty years on I would have hoped that my life had moved on from that but apparently not.

Unless I light the woodstove then the living room is still like a fridge. I've got pretty good at managing it now and I can get by on 2-3 logs a night. By that reckoning, I've got about another week of wood. I'm going to do a meter reading tonight as well and see what sort of impact running electric heating has made on my bill. If it's less than an extra £50 (what Calor gas was costing me a month) then it's fine. Fuck it, spring will be here soon.

I started using an app called Chip. I've mentioned it before, it squirrels away a few quid here and there from your current account as the month goes on and it sees how you are spending. Last month it put away £109 for me and I didn't even notice it. The reason I mention it is that I finally got my £10 welcome bonus that I signed up with.

I'm still ploughing on with matched betting despite the hassle and, in my opinion, fairly low reward. I think I'm up to about £60 of free money and god knows how much cash tied up in accounts. I've taken a 10 day trial of Oddsmonkey today and just when I went to use it tonight the website is on its arse. Great.

Once again I managed to come in under budget on my weekly spending. I think there have been two things that have helped. The big one is cutting back on my supermarket spending. I do most of my spending in Aldi now and only go to the bigger shops for stuff I can't get there. I've swapped a lot of the branded products that I normally bought, like laundry liquid and shower gel, to Aldi's own brands. Nobody has died yet so can't complain. I actually quite like the smell of their laundry liquid. Algodon or something? Whatever.

The other thing has been trying to cut my fuel costs. I'm regularly averaging 5-6mpg more on my daily commute now that I've got used to my new car. That's good, I was shitting it that I'd bought a car that was pissing money down the bog. I'm also trying to not use my car as much. I've been walking and cycling to local places that I would normally have driven to. Taking my lunch to work has cut down on my trips at dinnertime as well. If I don't take anything? Fuck it, go hungry. It's not the end of the world and strangely I think my energy levels might stay a lot more steady over the day.

So that's it. One of my financial aims for this week is to start rounding up my spending. For example, if my shopping comes to £15.70 I'm going to round it up to £16 and stick the 30p in the savings pot. I'll give it a week and see how I get on. There's a new bank, Monzo, that does that automatically but I figure I can do it just as well myself. Will it make a difference? I don't know. I'll see over the course of the week.

I've saved £36.53 on my weekly budget this week. That brings me up to £151.19 now. Chip has £109 in the savings account and there's maybe £50-60 in the matched betting fund. So that's quite a healthy little pot that I've managed to build up in just a month. If I can do that every month then I'll be happy.

The great matched betting pay-out...

My free sign-up bets have completed. Grand total of £12.89 by using 50 quid of my own cash to leverage 30 quid in free bets. That 50 quid is still currently sat in my accounts at Ladbrokes, Coral and Betfair. It took me about 30-60 minutes every evening to earn that so fuck knows how much time I'd need to drop to make anything bigger.

I've made some pocket money. Wow. I'm going to stick with it for a month and see how far it goes. Like I said in my previous post I am distinctly unimpressed with matched betting. You can definitely make money at it but it doesn't appear to be the golden goose pissing cash into a bucket while you sit back.

Weekly Update: Matched Betting

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.