Ready? Let’s begin.
We’ve already learned that lazy money means making more money per hour in your spare time than you would make at work. So far, so good. The goal is not to make thousands of pounds after a month of hard work, but rather to make a good wad of cash in as short a time as possible. It doesn’t matter if you only make £20 if it only takes ten minutes, right?
We want to make as much money as quickly as possible. So when you begin, be sure to target the easiest, laziest money you can identify.
Where shall we start?
Six Central Pillars of Lazy Money
There are six central ideas to making lazy money. When you first start out, the best way to make easy money is to grab a pen and paper and start thinking about these six key themes.
Let’s go through them together, one by one.
1.Cancel all your pointless subscriptions.
Think about all of the regular payments you make every single month. Write them all down. This can be everything from utility bills, telephone bills, Internet bills, your mobile phone contract, credit card payments… If you pay it regularly, write it down.First things first: what can you ditch? I guarantee that if you think hard enough, your list will contain at least one subscription that makes you say “Oh, I’ve been meaning to cancel that for ages…” Well, today’s your lucky day. This is an amazing way to kick off some long-term money savers.
2. Pay less for the subscriptions you want to keep.
Cancelling stuff you don’t want is easy. But what about the payments you need to keep up? I can’t live without a mobile. And I enjoy my magazine subscription! And my council tax, well… I can’t save anything on that, can I? Of course you can. Some of these can be reduced by making the most of cashback offers while others can be negotiated down (I’ll show you how soon).
3. Make your money work harder for you.
Got savings? Receive a regular salary? Have an overdraft? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you can probably earn hundreds every year by making your money work harder for you. Better yet, it will only take an hour or two of your time! I’m not talking about investments; I’m just talking about being smart.My post about making the most of interest rates talks a little further about specific ways to earn lazy money in this way. I’ll continue to blog on this topic in the future.
4. Get paid to get rid of unwanted stuff.
Look around you. I’d bet that there are at least three things in the room you are sitting in that you could sell right now and you’d never really miss them. So what are you waiting for? We’re all sitting on hundreds and hundreds of quids’ worth of stuff that we don’t even want or use, but we don’t find the ten minutes it takes to list it on eBay and the ten minutes it takes to post it.Depending on what you have to sell, this can be a great source of lazy money with a lovely high wage.
5. Save on new purchases.
This one is a corker. By making the most of voucher codes and coupons you can quickly and easily save shed-loads of money on stuff you were already going to buy. Does that sound like the easiest, laziest money of all time, or what?
6. Get things for free!
The sixth pillar is one for those readers who are willing to make a little sacrifice in terms of quality. And frankly, this is often less “lazy” than it appears—you’ve got to have a keen eye to get good free stuff! That said, there are plenty of ways to get things you want for free, and saving all the money you would have spent on all that stuff translates to some pretty lazy income.
If you’ve been playing along, your paper should now be full of scribblings that identify hundreds of pounds of easy, lazy money that you can make right now. Not bad for five minutes of reading!
Putting It Into Practice
You have a list of things to tackle and lazy money to make, but how do you actually get started?
Start by finding the three things you’ve identified that will be quickest to put into action, then find the three things that will earn or save you the most money. Make a new list of those six key actions, ordered by how much effort it’ll be do cross off each item, and see what you fancy!
Don’t feel obliged to go for the biggest winner—sometimes the quick money makers are the best way to kick-start your earning.
As with all things money, you might want to keep track of what you get up to. What did you do this week? How long did it take you? How much did you make from the task? By tracking this information you can quickly figure out what your average lazy money wage is.