I thought I would just give you a bit of information about myself, my background and delve into how and why I decided to start matched betting.
Well firstly my name is Joe, and I live in sunny Manchester (looks out of the window at the rain and sighs). I’m 27 years old, I’m a self-employed digital marketing consultant, and I share a house with my long-term girlfriend.
Being part of the Millennial generation or “generation rent” isn’t that great, trying to get a job after the recession wasn’t easy and after several employed positions I decided to go it alone and set up a company that helps small businesses with online marketing which is now my full time employment.
Why I Decided to Start Matched Betting
Before I opted to start matched betting, I was saving a small amount of my wage every month (still doing this) and putting into a “high interest” savings account which returned a whopping 1.5%. It was at this point that I started to Google potential side-hustle ideas which would present a much larger return on investment and stumbled across matched betting.
I was (as you probably are now) highly sceptical, after having being a sporadic bettor in my university days, with a system that locks in profit every time. However, I put aside £90 (plonked most of it into Betfair), signed up to the Oddsmonkey Free Trial, completed the Coral and Betfred sign up offers and hey presto! I was £40 richer in the space of one evening! I thought, “Hey, I could get used to this!”.
For work commitment reasons I didn’t come back to matched betting for a few months but when I did, I put all of my spare cash at the time (a few hundred pounds) into a new separate bank account, signed up to Oddsmonkey Premium and began matched betting properly for the first time around about halfway through November 2017 and I haven’t looked back since.
About My Matched Betting Challenge
After amassing some decent early profits in the space of 30 days I decided to pay myself some of that back and then put £500 aside to start the £500 to £5000 challenge (see page here). I quickly realised that putting away money in a savings account for the short to mid-term future was a waste of time with interest rates set as they are, so I thought I might as well invest 1-2 hours a day making my money work much harder.
To give you some context, if I invested that £500 in a savings account at a guaranteed interest rate of 1.5% (compounded monthly) it would take me a soul-destroying 154 years to reach £5000. Even at 3% it would take 77 years…and in 77 years I won’t even be alive to collect my miserable returns!
So my challenge is to see how quickly I can 10x my money. Starting on January 1st 2018 (I actually started on Jan 2nd…but who’s counting 😉), my target is to 10x my money within 1 year exactly. But I am competitive so I would like to hopefully complete it long before then. Put it this way, I don’t want to be hoping and praying that a horse comes in 2nd for a free bet on New Year’s Eve! I will be putting my profits towards more holidays/travel plus it would make a nice dent in my savings towards an engagement ring for my long-suffering girlfriend, so then she has to put up with me for a lifetime!
In order to achieve my target I need to make at least £416.67 per month, every month, for the duration of a year. This works out at roughly £13.88 per day. Now I only have a few hours a day to do matched betting, sometimes I won’t have time to do any at all. I don’t tend to have weekends free either as I usually spend it with family or friends (or both!) so this will have to be achieved with about 30 mins worth on my lunch break and whatever time I have spare left in the evening after work. I will try and free up as many Saturday mornings as I can so I don’t miss out on easy weekend profits before we either welcome guests or set off to meet people, and I can almost guarantee I’ll never have a Sunday free (may or may not be hungover 😳!).
As you will see from my November and December 2017 profits, matched betting tends to follow a peaks and troughs pattern. Some days you will make £5-£10 when there isn’t much going on, and other days (usually Saturday) there is a bonanza of offers all at once. On these days you can expect to earn anywhere from £30 to £80+ for as little as one hour’s work, it’s no wonder so many people are starting to get on this! Even if you had a demanding job and couldn’t face working into your evening, you could easily make £300 a month just by doing this every Saturday morning for 2 – 3 hours.
The Matched Betting Blog
Anyway, now you’ve got my condensed life story, why I chose to start matched betting, and the premise for my £500 to £5000 matched betting challenge it may be a good time to head over to the posts either in the matched betting section or the advantage play section of this website which should give you everything you need to get going.