Financially speaking, students often face a pretty rough ride. With the cost of accommodation and living soaring, even seemingly generous student loans of £3,500 don’t go very far. But fear not! For those of you who (like myself) are more adverse to the idea of getting a part-time job to tide you over, there are plenty of ways to top up your weekly budget with little effort required.
1-Flog some unwanted possessions on eBay. For those of you who somehow haven’t heard of eBay. Think online auction house for unwanted goods. It’s all very simple really: upload pictures and details of each item you no longer need, set a reservation price and wait for people from around the world to start bidding. The highest bid buys! Anything and almost everything goes on eBay – from clothing and shoes to textbooks and stationary. Just remember there are restrictions on ‘the usual suspects’ of alcohol, human body parts and ‘sexually oriented adult material’.
2- Online surveys offer a happy money-generating alternative to eBay if you’re not into online flogging… (or maybe just can’t bring yourself to get rid of that ten year old T-shirt that’s become an integral part of the bottom of your wardrobe.)These days, market research is big business with over £11 billion spent globally in the industry each year. Luckily for students, we can now cash in from the comfort of our own homes. Websites including retaileyes.co.uk pay users to assess stores on their customer service and branding. Each 30 minute survey can earn you up to £10. So next time you have an hour to kill between lectures, why not hop online, tick a few boxes and voice a few opinions? That’s a night out right there!
3- Earn money by doing nothing. Firms spend over £20 billion per year on marketing in the UK alone, with a whole variety of techniques adopted. The latest craze is social media advertising. Websites, such as www. ad.ly, are willing to pay Twitter users to tweet and retweet messages promoting their products and services. You can earn up to a five-figure salary (depending on how active you are and how many followers you have) for a 2 second tweet! Easy, convenient and high-earning.
4- On-Car advertising. Believe it or not, there are students that have, and drive, cars whilst at university. Though I do not know any myself, I have been informed that they do exist. Motoring students face the additional costs of insurance and petrol on top of the average budget. Fortunately, there is a way to offset this dastardly duo, and again it is the marketing industry that comes to the rescue. The website comm-motion.com pays car owners to display adverts on their vehicles. Of course, this may not on the face of it seem particularly appealing, but with payments of £150-220 per month, surely car owners should at least consider this type of marketing? What’s more, with pretty adverts bedecking your car, it’s likely to be somewhat less attractive to thieves, which could potentially help you make savings on your insurance.
5- Escorting; for the more out-going, social student, cavendishnights.com offers this wonderful cash-making opportunity. For many, the notion of escorting will seem unappealing due to associations of the term ‘escort’ with the term ‘prostitute’. But this is simply not the case. Escorts sell their time, not their body. In recent years, demand for male escorts in particular has shot up, with women looking for dates to bring along to work functions and family parties. In fact, a date lasting just 4 hours – just one evening of your time – could earn you up to £260!
This clearly shows that there is a whole range of ways to make cash quickly and easily. The internet, as you may have suspected, has a lot to offer from selling, to surveying, to tweeting. Car advertising may appeal to some (particularly those who own a car), and even escorting may seem a pretty viable option. You could even combine all of the money-making options here to maximise your income. With so many cunning cash-generating schemes, hopefully students everywhere will become the moderately wealthy young people they have every right to be.