Obviously there isn’t much of a market for second-hand plastic bags – unless the shops all follow Marks and Spencer’s example – but for many other items there is. If like me you have a stash of DVDs that you have only watched once and may never watch again then why not sell them. The same goes for books, unless you like reading them over and over it is usually pointless keeping hold of them. eBay makes it so easy these days to sell your unwanted items but old fashioned car boot sales are an alternative. There are many other ways to get cash for your unwanted items too. You won’t believe the stuff that you can sell either. Car boot sales in particular are great for getting rid of stuff you can’t believe you ever bought in the first place.

The only thing to be careful of is to make sure you aren’t selling something you think is rubbish that is actually worth a fortune. So before you sell your entire record collection for £2.80 make sure there are no limited editions in there that could be worth hundreds of pounds. Not only can selling your unwanted items make you a bit of cash but you will free up so much space around the house. Perfect for filling with new rubbish!

Image Source – D’Arcy Norman

• Morning Coffee – Having a coffee on the way to work is very nice but at most of the coffee shop chains you will be paying £3 for a coffee. You can miss it out and have one at work instead, maybe have one occasionally as a treat!
• Water – Do you drink bottled water? If so that is probably at least another pound. You should be able to get water from a cooler at work and tap water should be fine at home.
• Lunch – The biggest expense of the day. If you buy your lunch every day you will typically spend about £5 if you take sandwiches and fruit from home it shouldn’t cost you more than 80p. It should be healthier too as you know exactly what is going in to the sandwich you make.
• Petrol – Take a look at petrolprices.com to find the cheapest petrol in your area to make an instant saving. It may only be a few pence a litre but it will add up over a year. The biggest way to save though is to drive a bit slower. I commute about 30 miles each way to work, mainly on motorways. If I set off a few minutes earlier and drive a 10mph slower I save about £2 a day. Over a year that is too big a saving to miss out on.

Some of these ideas may seem small but work it out over a year and it it really adds up. Most people work at least 230 days in a year. The above savings save me £9 a day, multiply that by 230 and it is £2070. That is too much money to miss out on it. Obviously you don’t want to cut every daily expense out as there is no point saving money if you have a lousy time every day because of it. There are a lots of things though that you do as part of your routine and are really just a waste of money. One final bonus tip – if you buy a daily paper consider viewing it online instead. Nearly all the papers have a website that has all the same stories.

Imagine what a difference an extra 20% could make if you end up very short on money. If you save all the money you aren’t spending then it will be there for you to fall back on when you are going through a bad patch. I realise this is no good to you if you are already struggling to get by, but if you aren’t you should consider spending a little more time making savings.

As you are already on a money saving blog reading this then the chances are you do already try to save money. What a lot of people do though is make a few changes and consider a few big purchases. What you should be doing is making savings on everything not just the odd time you remember.

Many people talk with their friends about how much they saved on something like their car insurance by using a comparison site. They think they have done well and are making the most of their money. What they fail to realise is that if they did the same with their home insurance, life insurance and even their mortgage they could be saving more than 5 times as much.

So if you are only making the odd saving and not thinking how you can save on every expense then now is the time to start. Remember it is much easier to save by choice rather than by necessity.

You don’t have to be an expert in a subject to start a website about it but if you are knowledgeable in a particular area this would obviously be a candidate. Just make sure it meets the other requirements too. If you pick a subject that you don’t know much about make sure there is somewhere you can research it before starting the website.

When you first start the site you have to make sure you can add a lot of relevant content, the quicker you can do this the more likely you are to start making money. You also need to start driving traffic to your site. Search engines are the easiest way of doing this. Getting a good ranking can be difficult though. You need to start getting some quality links to your site. This can be achieved by writing quality articles that other people will want to link to.

Once you have some some traffic you can start making money. The most common way of doing this is to display adverts on your site. Take a look at this ProBlogger article for a good list of some of the options. Don’t expect to make money straight away but stick at it and as your traffic builds you will start to make more. The key is to keep writing quality content to bring more and more visitors.

After your first site is starting to make money you can find yourself another niche and build another one. This should be easier due to the knowledge you have acquired from the first one. What is key though is to make sure you don’t forget your first site as the visitors will stop coming if you don’t keep adding content. You can keep building sites until you are at a level you feel comfortable with and have the time to keep them all updated.

An alternative route is to use a service such as “Build A Niche Store” (BANS) to help you build a site that makes money through the eBay affiliate system. There is an initial set-up cost but it does mean you can get lots of sites up and running quickly. You will still have to the work to get traffic though. I have seen a number of places recommending BANS but I haven’t used it myself. If you think it is right for you then make sure you research fully before parting with any money. If you have used it before then add a comment below with your opinions.

Remember the most important part of setting up a niche site is finding the right niche so spend a lot of time on this and choose carefully.

If you are looking for something like a computer peripheral try places like supermarkets and the big stationary stores like Staples. That happened to be where I picked up my bargain. Most people know you can buy computer peripherals in Staples but people don’t often make a special trip to the store to hunt one out. There is something else working in our favour too in this instance. If you are out shopping in Staples for stationary you are unlikely to pay any attention to computer peripherals. This means it isn’t a big seller for them and once they have realised that something has been sitting on the shelf for a while they start to reduce it until it does sell.

This works for all kinds of items, obviously it doesn’t work in every instance and you can’t really hunt round lots of different stores if you want something in particular. What you should do though is be one of the few people that does pay attention to these items when you are in the shop for another reason. Just make sure you don’t fall into the trap of buying something you don’t really need just because it is cheap. That isn’t saving you anything.

I hope this helps you get a great deal at some point, and remember to keep an eye out for bargain sausages next time you are in the hardware store!

Image Source – Spigoo

1. Police I.D. Parades
How does making money for standing on the spot sounds? You get £10 for the first hour and then £5 an hour after that. All you have to do is stand their while someone sees if the recognise the real criminal. However work is very irregular and more and more forces now use video line-ups so you would only get paid once to make the video.

2. Football Steward
If you like football how does getting paid to go to the match sound? With rates of pay from £5-15 depending on training it sounds too good to be true. The downside is that you will be expected to look at the crowd and not watch the game.

3. Mystery Shopper
So you aren’t a big fan of football? How about shopping? Getting paid to go shopping may sound like to a dream job to some. You can paid about £6 a visit but can do many visits in a day and it isn’t always just shopping either. You could get paid to eat to eat at restaurants and report back on how it was too.

4. Online Surveys
They can be quite boring but getting paid to do them might make it easier. Fees range from £3 to £50 depending on how long it will take. There are a number of scam sites offering paid surveys so do some research before you sign up to one.

5. Life Modelling
So how does getting paid to have your picture painted sound. You don’t have to be in great shape but you do need to be very patient. If you don’t mind sitting still for long periods it could be for you. You can get paid about £6 an hour or £7 an hour unclothed.

That should be enough to get you started, it isn’t going to be enough to let you retire early but it all adds up and there isn’t much work involved for most of them.

A second but riskier way of making credit cards work for you is to transfer the balance of them to other cards. This is getting more and more difficult to do as the credit card companies are wise to this loop hole. The idea is to use a card for your day to day purchases and before you start getting charged interest transfer the balance. Many credit card providers offer 0% interest on balance transfers so you can leave the money in your account for longer before having to use it to pay of the balance without incurring interest. Be careful of transfer fees though as some providers now charge a one off percentage for transferring a balance to them, this is to prevent people taking advantage of the process described above.

Lots of people think that starting a website is a good way of making their fortune. For some people it will work but you need a really good idea that nobody has thought of before. Then you need to get people to come to your site. It isn’t as easy as people think. For every successful website there are thousands of failures. So before starting out make sure it is a really good idea and also remember that hardly anyone really does become a millionaire through their website. The easiest way to make money from a site is to display adverts on the page. Otherwise you could look for a product to sell through your site.

Another popular choice for making your fortune is to sell items on auction websites, like eBay. Find something people want and buy in bulk to sell it on for a profit. The hard part is finding the things that people do want and you know will sell. Get this sorted and you are well on the way. You have to sell a lot of items to reach a million though and you are probably going to need to pay people to help when you are selling lots of items a day. What a lot of poepe don’t consider is that if you are only making a few pounds profit on every sale you will need to sell so many things a day it is impossible to run it by yourself. There are companies out there that will package and ship your products for you but obviously they charge a lot to do this, and it will eat in to any profit you make.

Finally, I can now officially reveal how you don’t become a millionaire. That is by following any “fool proof” plan to making you a millionaire. Among all the genuine websites out there are a lot of sites selling dreams – that can’t really come true. I can guarantee that nearly 100% of ebooks available from these websites are full of ideas that have zero chance of turning you in to a millionaire. They are just helping someone else get a little bit closer to becoming one themselves. They are often based around pyramid schemes, which sound great on paper but we all know are rubbish in reality. If you are ever tempted to buy one of these ebooks or sign up to any of these money making schemes take a second to think. If you are dead set on spending your money, go and throw it down a drain, you will be getting better value!

Whatever you do decide to do to set you on the way to becoming rich, the best thing you can do is get there first. The early bird really does catch the worm. Most importantly when you do make your first million come back here and tell me what worked!