An Extra Hundred a Month: Four Routes, Ranked by Effort

A specific number is a better question than "how do I make more money", because it can be answered with arithmetic. A hundred a month is a hundred and twenty per year, and there are four routes to it that differ enormously in how many hours each one costs.

Route one: cut a fixed cost, once

The cheapest hundred a month in effort terms is almost always a contract renegotiated. A broadband account that rolled onto the standard rate, a mobile contract still charging for a paid-off handset, an insurance policy auto-renewed twice, any one of those can be worth a substantial part of the target on its own.

Four phone calls, once, and the saving repeats every month afterwards with no further effort. There is no earning route on this page with a comparable ratio.

Start there even if it feels like the boring answer, because it usually gets you most of the way and it does not compete for the time you would spend on the other routes. See which contracts to attack first.

Route two: claim what you are already owed

Entitlements and tax reliefs are the other zero-recurring-effort route, and the amounts are frequently much larger than a hundred a month. A free benefits calculator run by one of the money charities takes about ten minutes.

On the tax side: marriage allowance, uniform and professional-fee relief, and overpayments from an incorrect code. Several can be backdated, which turns a form into a lump sum rather than a monthly trickle.

This is first on the list for anyone whose income genuinely does not cover their outgoings, because no earning route closes that kind of gap and an unclaimed entitlement is not a small sum.

Route three: sell what you already own

A houseful of unused possessions is generally worth more than several months of survey work, and it requires no skill, no capital and no ongoing commitment. It is also finite, which is the honest limitation. It produces a few good months rather than a repeatable hundred.

Where it becomes repeatable is space rather than objects: a driveway, a garage, storage, a spare room. Those produce a monthly figure with almost no ongoing time, and they come with obligations to check first, insurance, and possibly a tenancy or a lender.

See where clearing out ends and trading begins, because the distinction has tax consequences.

Route four: earn it

A hundred a month from survey and app work is roughly twenty to fifty hours at the realistic rate of two to five pounds an hour. That is the arithmetic, and it is why this route is last rather than first.

From a skill you already have, it is one or two hours of paid work — the entire difference between the routes. The barrier is finding the first client, which is a fixed cost rather than a recurring one, and once paid it changes the calculation permanently.

From paid user research, it is two or three sessions, which is the best-paid thing in the survey category by a wide margin and the least known. See the routes sorted by hourly return.

What a hundred a month is actually worth

Held rather than spent, it compounds. Run it through the calculator at a modest rate over a couple of decades and the total is considerably larger than the sum of the contributions, though for the first decade most of the balance is your own money, which is the part the headline figures obscure.

Against debt it is worth more, because repaying at a high rate is a guaranteed return at that rate and no investment offers a guarantee. A hundred a month against a credit card balance is the highest-return use of it available.

And as a buffer it is worth most of all in the first year, because a few months of expenses in reach is what stops a bad month becoming an expensive one.

Why a specific number works better than a vague one

Because it converts an open question into an arithmetic one. "Make more money" has no end state and no way to tell whether an activity is worth doing; "a hundred a month" tells you immediately that twenty hours of survey work qualifies and two hours of paid skill work does the same job.

It also stops the search at the right point. A great many people spend more effort researching side incomes than the side income would ever pay, because there is no target that says the search is over. A number ends it.

If a hundred is the wrong figure, pick the right one and run the same four routes against it. The order does not change as the number gets bigger, cutting a cost and claiming what you are owed stay ahead of earning until the target gets large, at which point only earning scales.

The order that actually works

Cut a fixed cost. Check your entitlements. Sell what you are not using. Then, if there is still a gap, earn it, starting with a skill if you have one and with dead-time work if you do not.

Doing it in that order usually means the earning step is smaller than expected, which is the point. Most people looking for an extra hundred a month are looking in the fourth place first.

Frequently asked questions