The Bumper Guide to Making Money as a Student

We can help to alleviate student money worries during term time via our handy guide to money making as a student. Don’t expect to become a millionaire overnight, but do expect to find a whole range of tips that will help you to build up a bit of spare cash.

Managing your finances as a student can be challenging at the best of times and having to do that with a backdrop of hard study can be difficult. It is also likely that many students will be living away from home for the first time so taking care of utility bills, cooking and all the rest of the less glamourous side of student living can sometimes be a distraction or downright stressful for many!

We will try to make the money side of things a little easier by providing a selection of tips and ideas that should help to make you some money as a student.

1. Sell Unwanted Items such as Books and CD’s DVD’s

You won’t have time to be listing to music and watching films with all the hard study involved, right? Perhaps not, but all the same you could raise some extra cash by clearing out some of your things that you no longer need, listen to or watch. Why have things gathering dust that will never be used again if you can raise some money by selling them.

There are a range of sites online that you can sell your gear ranging from eBay and the Amazon marketplace that will take all sorts of things to more specialist sites like MusicMagpie that take small consumer electronics and multimedia like cd’s and DVD’s.

2. Become a TV extra

If you are a budding thesp or just want to see your face on TV (albeit very fleetingly) why not become a TV extra? There will be quite a lot of competition and it may well turn out to be quite boring but you could earn around £70 a day and brag to your friends that you’re in Hollyoaks! The website Beonscreen is a good place to start when looking for opportunities.

3. Sign up for Cashback Websites

If you tend to buy a lot of your stuff online then you should consider signing up to cashback sites such as Quidco and Topcashback. These cashback sites essentially pay you for shopping at selected retailers. Basically, it works by the online shop paying the cashback site a commission in order to send paying customers to buy items or goods and once the sale has been made the customer is then given a portion of the commission received by the cashback company.

Some of these payments can be extremely generous amounting to over £100 cashback for things such as certain mobile phone contracts, broadband contracts, etc. There are literally thousands of the most popular online retailers that are enrolled onto cashback schemes so every time you plan to buy something online it pays to check out the cashback site first to see how much cashback you would get and whether a competitor would offer you a higher rate of cashback so you could make more money by switching your allegiances. Money for nothing…

4. Get a job

This option of probably one of the least popular choices for making money when you are a student, but it is also likely the most effective at raising regular money.

It would be incredibly hard to work full time whilst studying fulltime so if you are considering work it would be preferable to work part-time or work hours that are outside of regular business hours. This is one reason why bar work is so popular with students because your shifts can be out of hours when there are no lectures.

Working while studying can also help to gain valuable work experience in the given field you wish to follow, so keep a look out for any student placements or summer jobs at companies in your area of study that could help you to make some money and contacts in your industry.

5. Rent out your parking space

If your student accommodation comes with a parking space which you don’t need you could consider renting the parking space out. This is a fairly new idea which is most popular in city centre locations or places close to important business links.

If you are a student in London and are lucky enough to be living in a prime location there are people that would be happy to pay you hundreds if not thousands of pounds per year just to have a guaranteed parking space in the city. You can advertise your parking space on sites like Gumtree, Justpark or Parklet.

6. Become a part time copywriter for a website

As part of your study you will likely have to write numerous essays so you will be used to churning out written content with a view to meeting particular word counts. There are many companies (particularly web based) that are crying out for written copy for their websites or blog from quality writers with a high standard of written English.

You could pick and choose a style of writing that suits you, for example, if you enjoy or are studying a technical subject such as computing or electronics you could specialise in writing reviews for consumer electronics such as mobile phone reviews, or laptops, or tablets for instance.

If you search on sites such as PeoplePerHour you will find hundreds of paid copywriting opportunities of which you would be able to fit around your studies when you have spare time.

7. Be part of a clinical study

This option isn’t for the faint hearted as it will involve companies testing new products or drugs on you prior to them being potentially released so there is an inherent small danger that there might be some sort of adverse reaction to the product, but this is rare.

There are some clinical studies that are even residential and can make the test subject a few thousand pounds!

Some of the lower risk clinical studies that I have personal experience of were being paid to test a new deodorant which involved a quick underarm spray and then having a lab assistance sniffing the end result. My personal favourite (although not strictly speaking a clinical experiment) involved myself being asked whether I wanted to be a beer tester for a new range of ales when I was a student. This involved drinking 4 free pints of beer of a new range of beer from the same brewery and giving them my opinion on the flavour for which I got £20! Unfortunately, I can’t offer any advice on how to get this type of work as I was only randomly approached whilst in the local student pub and it has never happened since – just lucky I guess.

8. Free Bet Gambling

Many people will not want to get involved in gambling full stop and if that is the case, then feel free to move onto the next student money making tip. If you are still with us, there is a way of utilising the free bets that online bookmakers offer to new customers to never lose. Essentially, it involves hedging your bets i.e. using the free bet to bet on one result at one bookmaker and using “matched betting” to bet the opposite at a betting exchange such as Betfair.

If the method is followed correctly, then you are able to increase the free bet amount so that although you will lose money on the losing bet, you will make that loss up by making more money on the winning bet, therefore, guaranteeing a profit. If this technique is followed at other online bookmakers then you stand to build a balance of several hundred pounds profit. Once you do have the profit, please do withdraw the money rather than continuing to gamble though as the bookmaker is hoping that you will continue to gamble and lose all your profit. So by withdrawing your profits you will be truly following a guaranteed scheme that will beat the bookie!

9. Mobile Phone Recycling

Most people have owned several mobile phone over the years, often the old phones are kept in a draw gathering dust. You could actually use a mobile phone recycling service to get money for your old phone.

You might be surprised at how much you could get for your old phones and just which models of phone they accept (the recyclers often take very old phones).

The process is very simple. Go to one of the many mobile phone recycler comparison websites and enter the make and model of your phone and the comparison tool will list a number of different websites and order them based on the highest paying website for your phone. If you decide to go ahead, they will then send you an envelope for you to send back to them containing your phone. You will then get paid once they receive the phone.

Bear in mind that you will need to fulfil the terms and conditions of the recycler, for example, there are different gradings of phone such as working or non-working and this will affect the price you are offered so be honest when you send in your phone as it might complicate the payment process and the amount you are awarded.

10. Mining for Bitcoins

This is perhaps one for the computer science students out there because mining for bitcoins will take a bit of technological clout.

In a nutshell a bitcoin is a form of digital payment that is created by computer programs running algorithms constantly in competition with each other. You could run a personal computer in the background to try to mine bitcoins, but these days the competition is so fierce that success would be unlikely so you could pool resources and mine for bitcoins with other users.

Rather than go into detail, have a look at http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/08/how-to-mine-bitcoins/ for more information if you are interested in giving it a go.

11. Real world referrals

There are businesspeople out there that are prepared to pay (and pay handsomely) for information. There are a variety of different niches in which you will be paid to refer information which is then utilised by the company in question. For example, recruitment agencies will often pay a cash amount if you refer a candidate for a position that is then offered the job. Property developers will sometimes pay for information on property development opportunities that will make a good return on investment – this could be a commercial developer looking for a space to build housing or a business developer looking for a building or land to place a new shop, or pub for instance.

Have a look around the Internet at recruitment agencies, property developers, chains of pubs, and you will be surprised at what is offered for the “right information”. Then use your imagination and find other opportunities where business might require referrals.

12. Online referrals – usually called affiliate marketing

A very popular form of making money for students is affiliate marketing. This involves (usually) setting up a website, partnering with an affiliate network (this is a company that arranges deals with hundreds of different companies known as “merchants”), adding the merchant links to the website and when a customer clicks on one of the links and makes a purchase online the affiliate network will award a commission to the owner of the website (the affiliate).

This method of making money is so popular because the overheads in starting up are so small (it is free to sign up for affiliate programs), creating a website is very cheap to do and can be done in spare time and the creation and maintenance of a website can create useful workplace skills (and even be quite fun if your website is based on something you enjoy).

Being involved in affiliate marketing gives you the empowerment of being your own boss, earning money through your own skills and hard work and doing it at your leisure. If it doesn’t work, you haven’t lost anything, if it does you could be one step from starting your own online marketing company and becoming a .com millionaire entrepreneur.

13. Dog Walking Services

In between lectures students have been known to have a spare hour or two so why not advertise your services on an online message board such as Gumtree as a dog walker.

You can combine getting out and about with a love of dogs and get paid around £7 per walk for the privilege.

14. Become a Mystery Shopper

Depending on your point of view (or gender) this could be a dream way to earn money or a complete nightmare. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, would be to go to a shop and buy a product of service for which you will be reimbursed for what you buy and also be paid for your time.

The pay can vary depending on what the task required would be so you could receive as little as a few pounds up to £100 or more.

To start, you would need to sign up to what is essentially a mystery shopper agency and once a job in your area or within your required criteria becomes available you will be offered the opportunity. Popular companies to sign up for mystery shopper work include Marketforce and GFK.

15. Police identity parades

There are still some police forces in the UK that will pay you to appear in a police line-up parade. Payment is usually £10-£15 for a couple of hours work and you can receive extra payment should the line-up take longer than expected.

This may not be everyone’s cup of tea to make a few extra quid, but if you have the stomach for it give your local constabulary a call and see if they are currently hiring for paid identity parades.

16. Complete online surveys

A quick and easy way to earn money is to complete online paid surveys. There are several companies that are dedicated towards capturing the opinions and thoughts of consumers in order to help companies with new products or consumer opinions. The surveys typically only take a few minutes to complete and you can earn from 50p to a few pounds per survey completed.

Popular survey websites include Valuedopinions, Pineconeresearch, Opinionpanel, Mysurvey and Yougov.

Do bear in mind that if you sign up for multiple surveys then you might end up being deluged with junk mail and/or emails from various companies so if you are completing surveys for money it would probably be smart to use a dedicated email address just for surveys so that your main email address does not get overrun with promotional emails.

17. Fiverr

For those that haven’t heard of Fiverr it is a form of social marketplace for those that wish to sell their unique services for $5.

You could offer your services in virtually any type of business discipline you could think of on Fiverr, from translating documents, to voice over work, designing logos, singing, animating and general marketing. There is quite a lot of run of the mill things on the site such as offering to tweet or “like” a product to a list of a persons’ social media followers but there are also some truly bizarre offerings such as the man that will sing you a Happy Birthday song whilst smearing mayonnaise over his chubby belly. Worth $5? You be the judge.

If you have any unusual hidden talents this is the marketplace where the $5 sales could really mount up because there is a global audience for Fiverr – it is currently within the top 200 busiest websites on the Internet.

18. Student Tax Refund

If you have ever been in employment whilst you have been a student it is worth checking that you have not been overpaying on your tax as you may be due a tax rebate. There are clearly a lot of students that are owed a rebate because recent statistics show that nearly £100 million in tax has been overpaid by students.

Tax rebates can go back as far as 2008 so it is worth checking because in many instances a student will inadvertently overpay tax because the employer has used an incorrect tax code or an emergency tax code which would lead to an overpayment.

The important figure to remember is that students (as of 2014) can earn up to £10,000 per tax year without being liable for tax.

If you believe that you are owed tax then download the P50 form which can be found here http://search2.hmrc.gov.uk/kb5/hmrc/forms/view.page?record=1CVVZ8XMWiI&formid=764 complete the relevant sections and post to –

HM Revenue & Customs,
Pay As You Earn,
PO Box 1970,
Liverpool,
L75 1WX.

19. Sell Unwanted Textbooks

There is always a roaring trade for second hand course text books, particularly in the popular subjects, because buying the books brand new is so expensive.

Selling second hand course books is usually very easy as there is such demand on campus from freshers or the year below yourself. Alternatively EBay or the Amazon Marketplace are other good options to make money from your old textbooks.

20. Sell your photography

If you’ve got an eye for a good picture you could sell your photos to a number of different online image repositories where you will get royalty payments when your photo is sold/downloaded.

Obviously the photos need to be of a good quality to be accepted so images taken on an old Nokia phone are out of the question. Useful image quality guidelines can be found at http://www.istockphoto.com/help/sell-stock/training-manuals/photography/quality-standards-what-were-looking-for and if you think you have got what they are looking for you can submit your work at http://www.istockphoto.com/participate/contributor-lounge