I'd like to suggest something, a good way of making money, but please do your own research. This is not gambling, because your money is not at risk, but it may seem like it. My husband does it, and makes £500 a month without ever risking his own money. Read all of this before you say "its gambling, i'm not interested" because it isn't.
Google "matched betting". You'll find a money saving expert thread on it. I'll cover the concepts very briefly. You'll need at least a couple of hundred pounds as a float to get going.
Everyone will be familiar with bookmakers. You go in, you place a £10 bet at odds of 4/1 (or 5.0 to use the decimal equivalent). If your horse loses you get £50 back - your £10 bet, plus £40 winnings. This is gambling and you will always lose.
However, you may have heard of Betfair, BetDaq or Smarkets. These are "betting exchanges". On these sites, you can BACK a horse/team as you would at a bookies, or you can LAY a horse or team.
When you lay a horse, you are betting that it won't win.
So let's see it in action:
I go into a betting shop and place a bet of £10 at 5/1. If i win, i make £40. The bookie, on the other hand, loses £40. If i lose, i lose £10 and the bookie earns £10.
But if you place a bet at somewhere like Wiliam Hill, and then lay it off at Betfair, then you have essentially been both punter and bookie.
With me so far?
So you could place a £10 bet on a horse at 4/1 on William Hill and scoot across to Betfair and lay that same horse.
If you won, then you'd earn £40 at William Hill, but lose £40 at Betfair.
If you lost, you'd lose £10 at William Hill, but win £10 at Betfair.
It doesn't work quite this way for two reasons:
- Because betfair charges 5% commission on winnings (or losings, since you are betting the horse WON'T win)
- Because the prices at the bookies and betfair are usually a little out of line.
If you've not understood this, then read the above again until you do.
So here's how you make the money. Firstly, there are around 100 bookies in the UK that offer free bets when you place a bet with them. So what you do is this.
- You open a new account at a bookie, place say £10 in there and bet £10 on the outcome of a race
- You go to betfair and do the same in reverse.
- In theory, you've lost nothing by doing this. In reality, you would lose maybe £1 if you were unlucky, because of the commission and the spread (the difference between the bookie price and the exchange price).
- But now, you have qualified for a free bet.
- You do the same again using the free bet.
So the transaction looks a bit like this:
Back a horse for £10, lay a horse for £10, lose £1
Get £10 free bet, back a horse for £10, lay a horse for £10, lose £1.
So you started with £10-£1 = £9.
Then your free bet £10-£1 = £9
So you've turned your £10 into £18.
Now it is more complicated than this, because you actually adjust your lay stake based on the odds offered. There are calculators available to do this. You would make £1000-1200 just from sign ups.
But that's not all. There are offers on nearly every day of the week in which you can make money. My husband spends about 4 hours each weekend and earns somewhere between £400 and £600, averaging around £500, each month. If you had the time, you could do this every day.
So, it's not gambling, because it doesn't matter whether your selection wins or loses. It is complicated to do well and i have deliberately simplified here so that you are not tempted to dive in without doing lots of research first. However, it is something that is perfectly doable, from home, using a couple of bits of freely available calculator and it is something that hundreds of people are doing every month.
"Matched betting" - google it.
