Give yourself a £5,000+ pay rise!

Just by being clever with space, you can give your pay packet a serious boost.

With the Comprehensive Spending Review just weeks away, it’s clear that money is about to get tighter. The Government has already announced cuts to child benefits, and they certainly won’t stop there.

With money scarce, it’s natural that we will look for a few easy ways to supplement our incomes.

However, according to some new research the average Brit is missing out on an extra £5,000 a year, simply by being inefficient with space.

Intriguing, right? Let’s take a look at how it works.

Spare rooms

Do you have a spare room? Many of us do, and if you’re anything like my wife and I (at least before we knew we had a baby on the way) you may not be using that space properly - it’s where we kept the exercise bike, a desk, basically all the stuff we didn’t really want to bin, but didn’t want in our living room.

That’s all well and good, but the fact is we were turning our back on some decent cash.

Crashpadder.com is a nifty site for people that want to make money from their spare room, without necessarily taking in a permanent lodger. You just advertise the room on the site, your going rate, and how you want to be paid. Potential tenants then apply to take the room for an allotted period of time.

And according to the site, homeowners can make thousands.The site reckons that so long as the room is filled 30% of the time, the average landlord is looking at incomings of £3,495. Of course, you could go all the way and let the room out permanently – according to Spareroom.co.uk, the average landlord brings in £4,524 for letting out a spare room for 12 months.

What’s more, as the Government’s Rent-a-Room scheme allows you to earn £4,250 each year renting out a spare room without having to pay a penny in tax, the vast majority of that income is tax-free.

Car parking space

If you have spare parking space outside your home, you could be sitting on a potential goldmine, particularly depending on whether you live near somewhere like an airport.

If you use a site like Parkatmyhouse.co.uk, much like advertising a spare room for renters, you can rent out your car parking space. Parking your car can be pretty stressful at the moment. Space is limited, official car parks are often pretty expensive, and if you dare to park in an area where private clampers operate, you could be exposing yourself to fines of thousands and thousands of pounds, as I explain in Protect yourself from cowboy clampers.

However, by using a site like Partatmyhouse.co.uk, you avoid all of that stress, finding an affordable and safe place to leave your vehicle. Obviously, if your home is located near an airport, or sports venue, somewhere likely to attract a lot of cars but with steep parking fees, you can command a decent price for your parking space.

The site reckons you can earn an average of £375 a year from utilising such a service.

Carpooling

Working in London, I don’t get to drive to work, though life would be easier if I did given the recent spate of Tube strikes.

However, if you do rely on a car for getting to work, then carpooling is an easy way to save a few bob. You can do it formally through a site like GoCarShare.com. All you do is log in with your Facebook account and post a car share request, and you should soon be united with someone undertaking a similar journey every day.

There are plenty of benefits to carpooling. For starters it is good for the environment, and if you’re the sort of person that likes a good chat in the mornings, you’ll always have someone in the car to bend the ear of!

But it’s the financial side that is the real benefit, and according to GoCarShare.com, you’re looking at a saving of £320 a year from each paying passenger sharing 33% of the miles undertaken

Using your garden

There’s an obvious way to save a few pennies by using your garden smartly, utilising it to grow some of your own food – we grow strawberries and carrots in our garden.

However, there are plenty of other ways to make a few quid out of your bit of green.

You can propagate seedlings and then sell them to family and friends as small plants, or if you’ve got plenty of space you can actually rent out your garden to enthusiasts. There are massive waiting lists for allotments in various areas of the UK, so you can take advantage by signing up to sites like Spareground.co.uk.

For more ideas on how to get the most out of your garden, be sure to have a read of How to save and make money in the garden.

Remember your insurance

However, before you go running off to rent out every bit of spare space you own, it’s worth considering your insurance position. You should speak with your insurer before renting out your home or driveway, as your policy may be invalidated by proceeding.

And it’s pretty pointless to boost your income, only to end up out of pocket when you can’t claim on your insurance should anything go wrong!

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