Making Money

It’s a Match!

Emer FarrellLeave a comment

In my continued efforts to maximise the money I have, I have been looking into the various different ways of making my money grow. Matched Betting is something that has come up in a lot of searches so I wanted to see what it was all about.  

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it – Matched Betting is often described as ‘gambling with no risk’. The idea is that you use the many different online bookmaker free bets and special offers, together with a betting exchange site. To simplify it; you are betting on both outcomes of a sporting event – both the win and the loss. For example, you bet on the horse to win with the bookmaker, and you bet on the horse to lose on the exchange.  

Online Bookmakers give free bets for a variety of reasons – new joiners, big sporting events – all to entice you to use their site. Examples of these might be ‘Deposit €10 and get €30 in free bets’ or a free €5 bet in a specific event. So when you are matched betting, the idea is that you find and use these free offers, along with the ‘lay’ bet on the exchange site.  

There are a number of sites that will help you with odds calculation and finding the offers; and I used Oddsmonkey to help me. Oddsmonkey has an easy to use interface and their Oddsmatcher tool shows you realtime bet and lay information, along with step by step guides to availing of the free bookmaker bets. They have a free trial version, but also offer a premium subscription service. They also have a busy forum where tips are shared daily. 

My Matched Betting Stats over a week period: 

  • I signed up to 7 Bookmakers 
  • I used Betfair Exchange 
  • I lodged €71.95 in total to the Bookmakers 
  • I lodged €300.42 in total to the Exchange 
  • I made 19 bets in total 
  • The profit I made was €69.06 

So my thoughts on Matched Betting are that it is possible to make a tax-free profit, it isn’t that hard to get your head around and it doesn’t take up much time. There are plenty of people who are making a lot of money from it, and it seems like a nice little side hustle. However, I don’t think it’s for me at this time. I’m not sure I can put my finger on why, but I just didn’t enjoy the gambling side of it. Yes, it’s not gambling in the true sense of the word – as long as you don’t make any mistakes, the element of risk is removed. Perhaps it’s the influx of promotional mails and notifications from the bookmakers, or perhaps it’s that I don’t have any big interest in sports.  

It may be something that I look into again, when I have paid off my debts – the lure of tax free profits is too tempting to completely give up on! How about you, have you tried Matched Betting? Are you turning over a nice profit from it? Or perhaps you have some questions – let me know! 

Shop & Scan

Emer FarrellLeave a comment

I must have been on the Nice List one year when Santa very kindly brought me a Supermarket play set – complete with basket, till and conveyer belt. I would spend hours and hours putting through “my customers” (harassed family members!) shopping, always making the ‘beep’ sound as I put each piece of fake food through the scanner. I took such good care of that toy, and my nieces and nephews still play with it today in my parents’ house.  

As I got older and started college, I got a part-time job in a supermarket and got to make the ‘beep’ noise for real – and get paid for it!! As my career changed over the years, I haven’t had much opportunity to beep, scan and play shopkeeper. Until now….! 

I’ve been using Shop and Scan for a few months now, but didn’t want to share anything with you all until I was fully familiar. I have to say, I’d recommend it to everyone – you receive points for scanning in your shopping each week, and those points can be exchanged for gift vouchers for places like Currys, Brown Thomas, Argos, Amazon and charity donations. It’s not exactly money for nothing, but scanning in shopping takes only a couple of minutes, so it’s next to nothing. 

You can find all the info on the Shop and Scan website, but basically you sign up for an account and they send you out a small scanner, a reference book and instructions on downloading their software to your laptop. Each week you then record your shopping; scanning each item, letting them know where it was from, how much you paid and sending a picture of the receipt. Each week I’ve been getting 200 points, and there are also bonus points to be earned also. 100 points is equivalent to €1 for the majority of their rewards, so you can look at it as at least €2 each week. The points do add up, I’ve been doing it for a few months and I have €36 available to redeem. It’s not going to allow me retire or jet off to The Maldives, but it’s better than nothing! 

It’s worth looking into if you’re looking for some ways to make a little extra money – this one definitely doesn’t require much effort and gets a thumbs up from me!