What sources of income do you have other than your job?
I get invited to do market research surveys through work and that's yielded £70 in Amazon vouchers since the start of November, although usually it's about a tenner a month. My girlfriend does the occasional Prolific survey in her spare time and gets about £40 a month for it. She also keeps an eye out for universities needing participants for their research; from one study she got a free phone, Fitbit and a payment of about £150.
I am not a financial advisor and none of these are particularly profitable but I earn a bit extra through:
Investing - About 500-700 quid a year from my stocks and shares ISA
Staking Crypto - I get a couple of quid every now and then and it requires zero effort. I'd buy more of the crypto and stake it for bigger returns but it's too volatile.
Things like you mentioned, surveys and Google Opinion Rewards.
Matched betting can net you a few hundred mostly as a one-off - Odds Monkey was an alright little tool to use when I tried it a few years back and I think they have a functional free account.
Also 'Free Spins' on the online slot machines. I know people who have made money on these but the things are black magic to me.
Admittedly, I haven't looked into it much but a lot of people advocating it seem to be doing so on the basis "it's called stablecoins, which means that it's stable". I read somewhere that a lot of the assets they're backed against are pretty much hot air.
>>9149 It's all hot-air, stablecoins in particular are long rumoured to not have the money backing them but as long as real money is still flowing in then the whole system maintains value.
There's a good video on the whole thing that was made for NFTs but which covers the ecosystem if you want to lose 2 hours of your life:
>>9150 Seeing as Bitcoin has roughly halved in value from its November peak do you think that could cause issues for crypto staking? I could imagine that a lot of lending is done on the basis that people expect values to continually go up.
>>9150 Is that true or are those rumours actually centred around the likes of Tether? Circle is audited, holds a banking license and has agreed a deal to go public.
Not sure inviting every US financial regulator under the sun to verify everything is on the up and up would be the move if you're really just operating a Ponzi.
>>9150 Dan Olson's videos are really good. Although I did disagree with much of his War on Nuggets video, but then the one about The Nostalgia Critic was spectacular (if you're as startled and confused by that man's continued success as I am anyway.
>>9154 They can always keep that application forever on hold. Most people wouldn't have difficulty in believing a federal agency might take years to review such a thing. The nuclear regulator recently rejected an application after almost two years, and other applicants have abandoned or withdrawn their applications after several years of process.
The sort of people crypto types target aren't particularly smart. They're the sort of people that actually bought Trump's line about having his tax returns under audit for well over a decade.
As one of the quotes used multiple times in that video goes, they'll say "if this looks like a Ponzi then surely everything looks like a Ponzi". That line is true, but not in the way the originator meant.
OP here again, managed to get an £150 Amazon voucher for taking part in a market research study this week. What should I spunk it on? I feel like spending it on a fancier version of something I already have, perhaps kitchen knives or clothing, rather than something I don't really need.
Forgot I have a "shared" Amazon account with my girlfriend. She's spent pretty much all of the voucher on a fucking air-fryer. I didn't realise they were so massive; it takes up more space than the microwave.
>As one of the quotes used multiple times in that video goes, they'll say "if this looks like a Ponzi then surely everything looks like a Ponzi". That line is true, but not in the way the originator meant.
Ponzi schemes are usually still quite easy to spot. The key sign that that's what an investment scheme is tends to be unrealistic yet consistent investment returns. You need to sucker investors into investing with you somehow. Why should they give you their money if they get the same kind of returns with more conservative asset classes. Also, to actually deliver those returns to at least a few people who have been your client for some time and thus not arouse suspicion, you have to keep bringing in new investors, and again, you'll only be able to do that consistently with promises of massive returns, which you can then back up by pointing at the sums you've already paid out to longer-standing clients.
If you look at Bernard Madoff, for some inexplicable reason, he seemed to be able to pay out consistent high returns that appeared to be almost completely unaffected by market crashes and other fluctuations. The reasons why he got away with it for so long were that he was very well connected in the finance industry as well as the Securities Exchange Commission, and just that people love a good lie, and that he and his employees worked quite hard to cover their tracks. His company had an entire department which did nothing all day besides pulling entirely bogus income statements out of their arses for their hundreds of clients. They were paid out an amount that seemed reasonable, at least given the fund's past performance, with some minor and equally bogus fluctuations over time, and then they concocted a list of securities that they then said they had invested their clients' money in, which seemed to corroborate the returns that were paid out.
Madoff got away with it because he was very skillful at keeping up his Ponzi scheme. It really only collapsed in 2008 during the Financial Crisis because there was a market-wide bank run. Without that, he probably could have continued it for a lot longer. Not all Ponzi schemes are that elaborate, but they don't have to be in order for you to spot them, because, again, the key telltale sign is always unrealistic consistent returns.
Worth noting that a return isn't unrealistic because it beats the market and you achieve it one time. Any retail investor can get lucky and make an absolute killing one time on a stock that goes through the roof. But it's a trick that you simply cannot pull off every time in the long run, and whoever promises you otherwise simply isn't worth your money.
She's also used redeemed vouchers from TopCashBack or whatever else she gets up to in order to blow £159 on one of those carpet shampoo cleaners. Most of the house has hard floors, it's just the bedroom, stairs and upstairs hallways that are carpeted.
I just... just... women. I gave up trying to make sense of them a long time ago.