Adding It Up – January

January was the first full month of my campaign to record all the extra money I made on top of my monthly salary, and it wasn’t a bad month. I made £41.21, all of which is now sitting in my slush fund. £20 of that came from cash-back earned from my recent Netflix subscription, and the rest was from selling a book, a CD, and a PC game on Amazon Marketplace.

In the latter stages of January I made a few more sales through Amazon Marketplace, but as they pay in two-week intervals, I should get the money some time in February.

February looks just as good as January. I have the above Amazon sales money to come through, and have just sold an unopened Gandalf from Lord of the Rings figure on eBay, as well as a new printer ink cartridge.

So far for February – £29.08 (with an Amazon payment still come through from last month).

I also got an email the other day from a charity shop who I donated some old books and PC games to. They didn’t seem to have any resale value, but I thought they could put them to good use, and it seems they did, making £12 from my donations. I’m not sure if this was from selling all the stuff I gave them or just some of it, but it’s all good news. I’m registered with Gift Aid, which means the charities can claim the tax back from the sales, at 20% – which is pretty good. If you donate goods to charity organisations for sale, I urge you to do the same. Of course, when I’m in charity shops donating things, I often buy things too, so it’s win-win.

One of the features of Gift Aid is that charity organisations are obliged by the Government to write to you tell how much money they made from the donations you provided. I can tell from the semi-sarcastic wording of their emails/letters that they see this as an inconvenient layer of bureaucracy, which is true, but it’s interesting to see how much was raised.

So, while the cash slowly builds in my set-aside account, I’ll have to think about something to do with it, as well as finding other ways to build extra-curricular income.