The idea of being retired for many people is to not have to work but to enjoy time without a job. But for others it is just a case of not having to go and work at a specific job, they are happy to still work and do something.
Retirement might mean different things to different people but there are a couple of truths to retirement which are the same for everyone:
- Retirement is about relaxing and doing what you want, when you want. Whether that is chilling on the sofa at home watching TV or working a part time job or your own home based business. Retirement is your time to do what you like and as much or little of it as you want.
- You will be spending money. Depending on how much you have coming in from pensions or other sources, doing the things you enjoy and living in general is going to cost you money. It is possible that you could end up dipping into your savings regularly. Which is probably fine if you have many millions squirreled away in a bank somewhere but not so good if you do not have a lot in the way of savings.
With healthy food and great healthcare available to us all, people are living longer, and unless you have a good pension, a lot of savings and/or a source of passive income, your money could soon start to dwindle.
Unfortunately, not everyone retires with total financial security. Apart from the state pension, many people retire with little or no other money available. This will make retirement hard. It could in fact make it a miserable old time, and that is not what retirement is all about.
Retirement should be about freedom.
The freedom to enjoy your time.
The freedom to do more of the things you enjoy.
The freedom to travel.
The freedom to become you.
But without spare money, that freedom could see you being imprisoned in your own home, unable to do anything other than read, listen to the radio and watch TV.
If money is going to be tough for you and you are looking for ways to help ease the pain and supplement your retirement, here are 5 great ways to make money online from home.
1.Writing For Paying Clients
Ok, this one might not be for everyone, but I include it here in this list for several reasons.
- It is virtually free to do and requires little investment if any.
- Most people can write to some degree or another.
- It requires very little equipment.
- It can and has made a lot of people wealthy, depending on what kind of writing you do.
- You can start earning money today.
Most people today have access to a smartphone, tablet or laptop, and that is all you need to get started with writing. You will need to be connected to the internet but all mobile phone contracts now come with internet connection as standard.
With free tools like Google Docs, anyone can write using a standard smartphone. If your fingers are not brilliant at typing on a small touch screen then do not worry… it’s 2020, smartphones have a fantastic piece of software called ‘Speech To Text’.
It is quite self-explanatory, you press the microphone icon, speak into your phone, and the software will do the rest. The words you speak will be converted into text, ready for editing. It is incredibly easy.
There are a lot of people looking to have writing work done. Some want to pay peanuts but others understand the price of a well written article or sales letter.
Plus, when you write for other people, you free them up to get on with other work and so writing content for other people can demand good money.
What Kinds Of Writing Will People Pay For?
There are quite a few different kinds of written work people are willing to pay for:
- Emails and email newsletters.
- Blog posts, articles and website content such as ‘About Us’ page.
- eBooks and reports.
- Ghostwriting fiction and non-fiction
- Sales letters and sales copy
- Summaries and descriptions
- Transcription
You do not necessarily need your own website to find the work, although it is good to have a place to showcase your abilities, work can be found at many dedicated market websites like Fiverr.com, Guru.com and Upwork.com.
$5 for a 300 word article may not seem like a lot, but neither is writing a 300 word article. A 300 word article can be written using a smartphone while sitting on a toilet. I know this why? Because I have done it… several times.
You do not need to be brilliant at writing either. If someone is willing to only pay $5 for a 300 word article, it doesn’t need to be outstanding, well, let’s put it this way, they shouldn’t expect it to be outstanding.
Spell checkers come as part of writing programmes like Google docs and Microsoft Word. Spell something wrong, or miss out a comma or a word and these programmes will alert you and help you to correct it. You really do not need to be a fantastic writer to make money.
But, if you are a better than average writer, you can charge more.
If you are a great writer, you can charge whatever you like as long as you get the work.
This guy writes 4 x 1000 word articles per month for £657. That is £164 per article. Not a bad little earner. A 1000 word article can be written in a day or two depending on the topic. It is possible to write all 4 in a day.
If you are any good at writing sales copy, try out as a copywriter. Copywriters can charge decent money for a sales letter which converts fetching several thousand pounds.
The difference between writing sales copy (copywriting) and writing blog articles or emails is that sales copy is designed to get people to buy, it is results focused. If you wrote a blog post which is specifically to share information but not ask the reader to do anything you may get paid upto £100. But if the sales copy you have written generates thousands of pounds in a week, month or year then you can ask for more money.
A product owner who wants to make £100,000 in one a month selling his product would happily pay £5,000 – £10,000 for the sales copy which is designed to do that.
2. Earn Money Offering Virtual Assistant Services
This one is probably a little easier than writing but it is similar, as in that you provide a service for a paying client.
Like writing, this online job is one which you can start today with little or no specialised equipment.
Nor will you need to invest any money to get started. Unless you decide to build a website from which you offer your services from. A website should cost you no more than £150 for 2 years but you do not need one.
Websites like Fiverr.com, Upwork.com and PeoplePerHour.com are market places where service providers and those who need work doing meet.
Virtual assistant jobs can be anything from formatting a person’s blog post to managing a person’s email inbox.
Why would you someone pay another person to read and delete messages or format a blog post when they can do it themselves?
Quite simply, the answer is… because they are busy, and having someone to do specific time sucking jobs makes more sense to them.
A busy business owner, writer, website owner will often follow the 80:20 law. Known as the Pareto Principle, it states that 80% of effects comes from 20% of causes. With this in mind, 80% of a business income comes from 20% of its output and so a business and business owner will focus more of their time on those 20% causes which create more 80% returns.
Why would a business owner spend 2 hours deleting emails which earns them nothing when they could pay someone £10 or £20 to do it while they spend that time doing something else which ultimately earns them several hundred or thousand pounds?
The same reason that a business owner employs a cleaner or cleaning company to clean the offices. They could do it themselves, but why when someone else can do it quicker and better for a few pounds leaving them to get on with more profitable work.
Thanks to the 80:20 law, there are plenty of small jobs which need doing and plenty of business owners looking for people to do them.
I will also include tasks like proofreading and editing into this section.
There are a lot of people who write their own books and web content who require a second set of eyes to look for spelling and grammatical errors.
You do not necessarily have to have a masters degree in written English either for this job. It may help but most content creators are just looking for the most obvious errors pointing out.
As long as the writing is readable and understandable, most writers and website owners do not care about their content being perfect in the eyes of an Oxford English Literature Professor.
If you enjoy reading, proofreading could be a great side job for you especially if you get yourself aligned to several self-published authors.
3. Buy & Sell Items On eBay/Facebok
Ok, this one is pretty obvious. The title says it all. One of the easiest ways to make money is to buy and sell items on eBay, and now more recently on Facebook.
EBay was once the place people went to sell their unwanted secondhand items. Now it is a huge ecommerce platform where people and big businesses alike sell new and used items.
There are both pros and cons for selling on eBay. Unlike other online money making opportunities, eBay requires you to ship physical items out to your buyers. But with some planning, the cons can be reduced to a more manageable problem.
The best way to use eBay is to find a product or products which are either small and easy to post, big enough that people need to collect it from you or you sell a product which you have sourced from another company who will deliver it for you, known as dropshipping.
As this is a side business to help supplement your pension and your retirement you do not want to be making too much work for yourself. Unless you are happy to do that.
With that in mind you should spend some time asking yourself questions, and coming up with product ideas as to what you want to sell.
Some people use eBay and Facebook to flip products they have bought elsewhere. These people are known as flippers and resellers and the business model is known as flipping and reselling.
They flip products for a quick profit. They buy an item, either new or pre-used, for a few pounds then they sell it on eBay or Facebook for more. This is one of the easiest businesses to get started with.
The only problem is that you may find yourself having to buy a lot of varied products. Ideally you want to find a small line of products which are roughly the same shape and size making posting and packing easy. The last thing you need is to be dragging a big bag of heavy parcels to the post office for posting.
Resellers trawl through charity shops, car boots, markets and supermarkets looking for special deals and bargains. They buy as cheap as possible and sell for as much as they can get. They try and buy only things they think will sell.
Some people specialise in one or two items like popular branded footwear, clothing, music and films which they find in charity shops. Sometimes focusing on a specific item makes it easier to search for those products as you are not wasting time with other items, trying to figure out if they are worth anything.
The other thing that eBayers and Facebook sellers do is create something from scratch at home. Turning a hobby into a side business.
Not as straightforward or as easy as buying something from a charity shop or market and then listing on eBay or Facebook later in the day, but it can be just as profitable if not more.
Some items can be made from materials sourced for free from around the area. Furniture made from unused pallets, scaffold boards and reclaimed wood is one such item.
A bed frame, old scaffold boards, and two chair legs upcycled into a piece of stunning garden furniture. Someone somewhere would happily buy it. And it costs very little to put together.
4. Write Fiction & Become A Self-published Author
Ok, so this is not for everyone. It is quite a big industry to get into, however, if done correctly – or your books are groundbreakingly brilliant – you can make a lot of money from becoming a self-published author.
You do not need to be the next J.K. Rowlin, Steven King, or James Patterson to make good money publishing books. There are literally thousands of people who make a fantastic monthly income from writing books.
The great thing about books is that they fall into what is classed as the perfect business model:
- You only write a book once and it can sell for many years. People still buy books by Roald Dahl today and yet he has been dead since 1990.
- Each book becomes an individual income stream. When you have published your first book you write a second. And when that book is published, you write a third and so on.
Book Publishing is A Multiple Source Income Business
Each book is a separate income stream generating you money.
Imagine having 5 books all generating just £100 each per month. You would be earning £500 per month.
Now imagine one book suddenly, without any reason, stopped selling for a couple of months. You would lose £100 each month for a short period but… and this is an important but… you would still be earning £400 per month.
If you earned money in the way the majority of the population does, exchanging time for money, what would happen if you suddenly, without warning, lost your job?
You would stop earning.
You would lose all of your income, every penny of it would stop.
But when you publish books, you create multiple income streams.
It gets even better than that, if your books are great and you get a hardcore following of fans, your books become cross promotion tools, selling your other books in the series.
How many people who have enjoyed reading a book by Stephen King or James Patterson have gone on to read more?
Mark Dawson is a popular best selling author and he regularly generates over $100,000 per month from the sales of his books. He has 77 books/book combinations on Amazon which netted him over $159,000 in September 2019
He sells books individually and also as bundles creating several income streams. They are now available as audiobooks and have been translated into other languages.
One of his characters has been licensed by Hollywood and will soon become a big budget movie of TV series. Not bad for a guy who started writing fiction while he worked a day job.
You may never get to that level, but there are literally thousands, if not millions of people who are making several thousand pounds a month from a smaller library of books.
It is very possible to generate a fantastic monthly income by writing and self-publishing books using sites like Amazon. Writing when you want, and from where you want. This is a way to make money online from anywhere in the world.
Authors do not only sell books to generate money, as a writer they can often write their own wage in several other ways.
For example: Seanan McGuire who is a best selling author also makes over $10,000 per month writing short stories on Patreon.com – an easy to use subscription/membership platform.
She used to create at least one short story per month, so it is safe to say that she is generating another £10K a month from her short stories on top of her book sales.
Writing is powerful.
Being able to write is a very profitable skill and if it is something which you want to explore, we will cover it more in future posts.
Enter With Caution
This is something which you can’t go blindly into. There will be costs when building a self-published author business. Manuscripts will need editing and proofreading, covers will need designing and you may need to run a series of adverts on Amazon, Facebook and Bookbub.
Some of those things you may be able to do yourself, but it will require some investment in both time and money.
5. Football Trading
Football trading is by far the quickest and easiest way to start earning money online. There are pros and cons to think about first but you could start today with no specialised equipment required.
All you need is a smartphone or a tablet to get started, a few free apps and a small amount of money to use.
When it comes to football trading it is advised that you:
- Do not use money you cannot afford to lose.
- Start small using a small percentage of your available funds (called a bank)
- Use a well disciplined and strategic approach to your football trading.
Football trading is gambling… but at the same time it’s not.
You use gambling websites and apps to place bets – referred to as trades, but you do not make bets on likes or hunches, you place trades on well researched possibilities.
A football trader trades the market, placing their trade on an outcome which research points is most likely to happen..
A gambler, on the other hand, places bets often on the outcome he or she would like to happen or on a hunch that a specific result may happen. They do very little research.
Football and sports traders use websites like BetFair and BetDaq
Trades are placed ONLY when certain criteria is met which points at a possible result happening.
Football traders do not just throw £50 on Liverpool to win against Barcelona in the Champions League just because they themselves are a Liverpool fan.
No, a football trader would place a trade against their own team if the research pointed to them losing.
And it is not necessarily the final result they are waiting for that is important. It can be the short term result which really matters.
Tax Free Profits In Nine Minutes Flat
As an example: Did you know that only a small percentage of football games result in a goal scored in the first 10 minutes. Statistically, it is somewhere around 25% of the games will see a goal scored in those first 10 minutes.
That means, at least 85% of football games WILL NOT have a goal scored in the first 10 minutes.
Understanding that, a football trader would compare the match odds between the two teams, using several websites.
They will dive deep and study recent past performance of the two teams, specifically their goal scoring.
They will look closely to see whether both teams have scored a lot of goals in their most recent matches and whether they have been scoring goals in those important first 10 minutes.
If the trader was happy with their goal research, happy with the market odds and liquidity (money in the market), the trader will place their trade.
This trade will often be a substantial amount of money, £250, £500 or even £1000.
This is the really important bit, the sports trader DOES NOT go away and forget about the trade they have just placed. They wait and watch the clock count down until 9 minutes had elapsed and then trade out if no goal had been scored.
If the game went as planned, the research was right, the odds moved in the right direction and no surprise goals were scored during that 9 minutes (Not 10, they always use 9 to be extra safe) the sports trader will cash out and walk away with a nice lump sum of money.
It’s not hard work… just a little daunting if you have never done it before.
Professional football traders can often make a days wage or even a weeks wage from one football match if they have placed a big enough stake.
They can generate thousands of pounds each month trading football matches using various methods thanks to websites like BetFair.
BetFair is not a bookmaker, they do not back or lay bets against you. They are a betting exchange, they allow other people to back and lay bets against you instead. They are a middleman service who take a cut of all transactions made through their platform.
TAX FREE Winnings
The great news about sports trading is that for UK residents any profits are TAX FREE. Because any form of sports trading is technically classed as gambling, winnings are exempt from any TAX.
That is, unless it becomes your main source of income then you may need to pay TAX on your winnings. (Typical TAX office, changing the rules as and when it suits them!)
Football Trading: The Basics
A football trader makes profits by riding the odds of a market. They place a large sum of money in a specific market and wait for the odds to change in their favour. When the odds are showing a profit they lock it in by cashing out.
They never leave a trade open for a game to finish unless the games has gone against them and they have been forced to set up several recovery trades. More about that later.
BetFair has a lot of different markets and so a trader can trade across a whole range of outcomes. If two teams of equal quality were meeting up and the recent games of both teams ended with no more than 2 goals scored, a football trader could trade using the Under/Over markets. As long as the odds were right.
As an example: two teams are about to meet and their last 5 matches, for both teams, ended with no more than 2 goals scored. A football trader would consider placing trades in the Under 2.5 Goals market.
However, if two teams meeting up had a recent match history where the last 5 games ended with 2 goals or more, a seasoned trader would consider using the Over 1.5 Goals market – as long as the odds were in their favour.
It is vitally important that a football trader trades out after a set time and walks away with whatever profit they are left with. They NEVER wait for the game to finish with an open trade.
That is not trading, that is gambling.
A successful trader never gambles.
The only time a trader waits for the game to end with an open trade is when the game has gone against them and they are forced to take action. If an unexpected goal has been scored, the seasoned trader will be forced to go into a recovery position and place further trades in other markets to ensure that they do not lose their money.
They aim to finish with either a small profit or break even. They never lose money.
This is known as a recovery position, and it is not for the fainthearted.
Being forced to place many bets in many markets in order to recover your money requires you having a lot of money in your BetFair account. This is why a professional trader never uses more than 10% of their bank when placing the original trade.
They need to have enough in their account so that they can place those recovery trades and win their stake money back.
A trader who is possibly about to lose £200 when a trade goes against them could soon be using several thousand pounds placed across a lot of different markets. These recovery trades will counteract each other out so when the final whistle is blown, the trader doesn’t lose a penny. Sometimes they may even make a small profit.
When a trade goes wrong and you are forced to take up a recovery position, it is a very nervous situation to be in and an unseasoned trader may require a clean set of pants when finished!
If you like the idea of making some TAX free money to supplement your retirement by trying football or sports trading then it is advised to practice first by paper trading. Do not use any money unless you are sure you are ready.
We shall cover more football and sports trading methods and systems in future posts so keep an eye out for them.
There you have it, 5 ways to supplement your retirement by making money online. If you do try any of the above and have some success or have a question or two you would like to ask us then please feel free to message us on Facebook or via email at admin@kickassretirement.co.uk