← Previous Update
It’s been a while since I last posted an update.
Over a year, in fact, since I received my 20 Cogs payment and promised to start actively using Quidco and TopCashback to maximise my earnings.
It didn’t exactly go as planned.
To begin with, my first attempted Quidco offer didn’t track properly, and didn’t give me the opportunity to contest the denied cashback. That set me back £30.00 and immediately crushed my motivation.
Then I may have had a little too much idle time!
And by a little, I mean most of the year. Yes, for the better part of 2019 I made very little progress on the Idle Experiment, opting to simply claim the passive income from Embee Meter CX, Smart Panel, and interest from my bank account.
At least until Smart Panel kicked me into gear again.
In September 2019, Smart Panel changed their rewards system. Instead of guaranteed monthly gains, they instead award an entry into a monthly sweepstakes where 10 users can win £75. They also offer surveys (which are very few and far between) that pay around £2 on completion. And while I’ll keep the app active on the off chance I’ll win the £75, it’s not exactly the app it used to be.
Not to mention, my bank account stopped paying interest!
Needless to say, that act of utmost betrayal led me to look for other ways to make money online, and also got me posting again!
So here goes—hopefully the first of many Idle Experiment updates of 2020.
I’ve been experimenting with a bunch of new apps. You can read about all of them in my ‘Idle Thoughts’ posts. Most notable in terms of earnings are Prolific and LifePoints—two great survey sites, the former of which is very rapidly becoming my top earning survey site.
Freebitco.in has been chugging along nicely, having suffered through a Bitcoin bear market and (mostly) come out the other side. The 4.08% interest, plus some good rolls, has put me over £30 in balance.
Brave Browser started paying users for viewing ads during the year, and I received a nice £40 payment from that, too. If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend downloading and using Brave as your main internet browser.
And that brings me to the final entry in this update: RealT.
Tokenized fractional real estate on the blockchain. It’s a lot of big words, but basically you can buy ‘shares’ of property—stored as tokens on Ethereum—and receive rent payments based on your share.
They’re available at as little as $77 per share, and pay around 9-14% annual return. You just need an Ethereum wallet to store the tokens, and receive your rent payments in the form of DAI, a ‘stablecoin’ that is always valued at $1.
Technicals aside, I bought 4 shares of the top property on RealT at the time of writing, which cost a total £517.15 and give 12.5% annual return.
That’s certainly better than my bank account ever was!
Expect a RealT post soon (after I receive some more rent payments), where I can go into more detail about how to get set up, etc.
I didn’t think I’d hit real estate until the ‘end game’ of the Idle Experiment, so discovering RealT has been a very nice surprise for me.
I’m excited by the prospect of earning more passive income—but I won’t neglect my Active Earners any more. I hope to smash that £1000 target this year, and I can’t wait to share more of what I’ve been trying out!
See you guys in the next update.
(hopefully it’ll still be 2020!)
Earnings Update:
Update Total: -£3.77
Previous Updates: £94.87
FreeBitco.in Balance: 0.00510019 BTC (£33.77)
RealT Holdings: £517.15
DAI Balance: $0.57 (£0.44)
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