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How to earn extra cash from your home

Written by Posted On Thursday, 05 October 2017 09:54

What’s the reality of turning your home into a nice way to earn spare cash?

Considering renting out a spare room or offering up your beautiful dining room as a magazine shoot space? There are lots of ways to generate cash from your home and it can be a great way to earn some spare cash if you go into it understanding both the advantages and disadvantages.

Your home as a location space

The pros

  • The opportunity to earn cash with very little effort
  • Minimal upkeep and maintenance as the space is not used by overnight guests
  • A regular income you can use to supplement what you already earn
  • Being part of creative projects
  • Work with an agency and they take care of all the details, such as insurance and bookings scheduling
  • You might meet some celebs
  • Bookings could be constant, any day of the week
  • Payments can be large, especially if your home is used as a film location

The cons

  • Disruption to family life
  • The location rentals sector is extremely competitive and you may struggle to get bookings, especially at first
  • You’ll need insurance in case anything happens while people are ‘on set’
  • You’ll constantly be clearing up after other people who have walked around your home in dirty shoes/left their coffee cups/dropped their rubbish

Your home as somewhere to stay

The pros

  • Earn money from a spare room or area that is just sitting empty
  • Get help paying off your mortgage
  • Meet interesting people from all over the world
  • Start earning from an asset that otherwise wouldn’t produce any cash until you sold it
  • Get better returns than you would for a normal short let
  • If you use a third party website most of the time you can vet guests and turn away those that you’re not sure about
  • Other than the fee you might pay to a website like AirBnB all the money that you make is yours to keep

The cons

  • Any public facing service needs to meet certain standards to do well – if you’re working another job at the same time it can feel tiresome
  • Having people in your home that you don’t know can be tough
  • Standards of cleanliness need to be exceptionally high
  • You may find yourself doing a lot of laundry and cleaning a lot of toilets
  • It’s necessary to consider fire safety and other similar measures for your guests
  • How well you do is often based on the reviews you get, which aren’t necessarily going to be fair all the time

Practical considerations

If you’re considering making money from your home then there are a number of practical considerations you need to bear in mind.

A supplemental income. It’s not a good idea to rely only on this kind of money as your main source of income instead treat this just as a way to earn extra income from your home. you can read more about this on the Money Saving Matters Blog.

Tax. There are tax implications to renting out a room in your home and you’ll most likely have to pay income tax on whatever you earn.

Space for you. Make sure that you still have space to live and that you’re not spending the entire time in your home trying to get out of other people’s way.

Go for it. If you want to make money this way put your all into it – no half measures

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Lawrence Blackwell

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