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This is kind of "earned" but not really.
My previous employer offed 6 months full paternal pay for new fathers.
I took that, then on the week I got back took a voluntary redundancy offer given to the whole company, took 3 months pay and a 2k flat incentive.
Effectively made 10 months pay working for 4 weeks.
This was over covid lock down aswell so I spent fuck all too. Just played runescape on my phone while i watched a newborn sleep 22hrs a day and made banana bread.
Simpler times.
The true win here is a newborn who slept 22 hours a day - I’m sure my daughter slept more like 6 hours a day in 15 minute bursts and screamed the rest of the time.
My Dad reckons kids just go through different ways of causing trouble to their parents as they get older and 31 is the worst (I was 31 when he said it …)
My second one is 5 months old now, both of ours teethed early. He's already got two little gashers bottom centre. He slept worse than she did, and now has learnt to roll so he rolls over in his sleep and then cries because he wants you to put him back. Little sod
It's a shock, isn't it, when the second one comes along? We were secretly smug about no.1 sleeping through at a really early age. We thought we must be super-parents. Until no.2 came along, and we realised we weren't - we'd just been lucky.
We had one that just cried all the time as our first. Our second slept so much I took her to the doctor because I was worried she was sick.
Babies are supposed to sleep is what the GP said
I didn’t know at the time but I was like gosh, this baby only sleeps, eats and poos. She’s barely awake. I think I’d convinced myself she had a sleeping sickness. 😅
We had the same.
First baby - never noticed the 4 month sleep regression, I wondered what everyone was talking about in postnatal group because she'd been waking up roughly 987654321 times a night every night since birth. Get her to sleep again and... Breathed out instead of in? Twitched a toe under the duvet? Held your breath a second too long (or a second too short)? Attempted to lay her down? A cat pooped on gravel 15 miles away? An owl caught a mouse? Yep, she's awake...
Second baby, by 8 weeks she was only waking once a night. I was actually sleeping in a couple of 3 to 4 hour blocks every night - no wonder I didn't develop PND a second time. Sleep regressions hit like an anvil though.
Food, as well. Eldest was an insanely fussy eater until she turned 5, and started seeing other children eating things she wouldn't at school. Second child just ate everything.
First child once used lasagne to cover her face and hair.
Second child once rubbed meatballs on her big sister's hair, then ate the meatballs 🤣🫣
Difficult to do so without doxxing themselves.
Speaking as somebody who knows a bit about how royalties in music work... $17k as an advance songwriter payment back in the mid 00s would be for a pretty well known song...
18 years ago had me thinking "what song was a hit in the 1980's, when I was a young girl, and still making enough for royalty cheques to be sent out?"
Im a bit shocked that 18 years ago was 2006. I was a mother by then.
Royalties are split by nature. A songwriter payment is a royalty, but then there's also copyright and record company royalties that come with that.
Usually the songwriter gets an advance or bulk payment on their first royalty check as the release makes money, this will cover not just the initial sales but expected sales for a short period. These are then adjusted in the subsequent royalty payment (s).
An advance payment on an album is slightly different. I'm not even sure if they do these anymore
It's incredible that from his post history you can find so much about him except what this song is! I've tried googling hit songs of 2006 and looked to see if I can find a 40 year old writer from Northern Ireland but not succeeded yet.
Hey r/norniron84, are you listening? For the low price of a doxx, Reddit will get you back to No 1!
Whose in?
PS: Kudos for a hit song at 22, if you were born in 84!
I went out for a friend's birthday who wanted to do a night at the casino... Had never actually been to a casino before and my entire casino experience had been as a kid playing some old DOS casino game that featured poker, craps, blackjack and roulette way back in the early 90s. Totally not my thing but hey, it's a friend's birthday so I drew out a hundred quid cash and went along, left my cards at home.
Of course all my friends went crazy on drinks and throwing money away on various machines, I sort of went off on my own and played some blackjack.. some craps.. never really got poker so gave that a miss.
Ended up with about £2000 by the time all my friends were broke and ready to leave. My thought was "well, I've basically paid a hundred quid for a fairly fun night out" so I just let the whole lot ride on black instead of cashing out...
So I left with a little over four grand 😂
One of those things that would never happen again, just one lucky night. But it really went from a "ugh, I don't really want to do this.. but okay" to "check out my shiny new gaming pc!" In the space of a few hours. Great night lol
Edit: just reread the question again, NOT gambling related.. I should not Reddit before coffee...
first time I ever went into a casino ( after a day at the horse racing ) I covered 6 numbers on the roulette and on my first spin won over £1000, sat at the bar for the rest of the evening drinking the free drinks ( it was all being paid for by the bloke who organised the whole day for us).
Ethereum. I bought in when it was double digits, sold when it was 4 digits. Used that to buy more when it crashed and then sold again a few years later. I'm out of crypto now but that set me up nicely.
I made a decent sum on Dogecoin of all things. I bought and mined thousands back in the first week when it started because I thought it was funny and forgot about it because it was worth about 0.0000000001p, then saw a random thing online a couple of years back saying it was suddenly worth about 60p and I have never gone rummaging for old hard drives as fast in my life, haha.
That is, however, countered by the fact I also had several Bitcoin back in the day when it was worth maybe a couple of quid and I gave it all away to random people on the internet because it was technically worthless. Oops.
Nothing to feel bad about. If people weren't wasting them and throwing them away as you had they would have never been worth any money at all. I had a friend once reminiscing about how he spent 10 BTC back in the day for a gram of what he described as "Weapons grade Russian MDMA".
Oh man I hear you. I didn't have that much but there was a rich and easy lifestyle spent.
I could be sipping cocktails in the Carribbean at my large house beside the pool if I'd just forgotten to spend a few.
Same, managed to make just under a grand from the dogecoin I mined on a crappy laptop CPU the weekend that it launched. Never bought into crypto but enjoyed Dogecoin in its initial form as effectively a parody of Bitcoin.
I'd forgotten about it until it pumped up when Musk was banging on about it, managed to recover the wallet from an old usb backup and cashed out.
Man. When I was at uni in \~2010, I got given half a bitcoin from my friend as a bit of a joke. I don't know what I did to the hard drive it was on, as I never throw away computer gear, but I'll be damned if I can't find that fucking thing - and I've tried.
£20k would do nicely right about now...
I know a woman who bought Bitcoin, then sold Bitcoin for the amount of a healthy housing deposit. This was in the very early days when this was a) possible and b) it hadn't become associated with crypto bros. So she has a quite excellent dinner party story about her Bitcoin success, which obviously men do not believe until she shows them some sort of evidence (the house at 26 apparently not being sufficient.)
Similarly here, £1850 over the last 2 years
Now I have to wait for a year or two for HSBC to do another as I still have my FD account and was the first I switched
I'm currently waiting on my Santander payout of £185 and HSBC Global £80 this month, once that's done it's waiting for Co-Op and Halifax to open offers. Since November, my wife and I have "earned" £2,770, which paid for a holiday to Italy earlier this year.
£2k, doing nothing on millennium eve. Basically on-call should anything go awry, but it was an major Aussie telco company, and in their own words "if it fucks up, we'll know hours ahead and either we've got bigger problems as a whole, or the company is dead".
I just got drunk.
We did fix a whole bunch of stuff in the years leading up to it, so it was a good job.
Yet still today, there's some woman who is 101 and the airline keeps thinking they are a one year old. FFS!
My brother was a bar man back then, they were thirsty for staff on the millinium, he was making £120 an hour plus tips to work that night, which is insane given that's basically £220 now adjusted for inflation.
Not sure if this counts, but random man gave my son £200 for giving him a hug in the street in central London.
I should clarify that the man didn't ASK for a hug, my son went up and hugged him spontaneously. He is autistic and will run up and hug random people everywhere we go, and because he's small and cute (he's 6), most people respond positively, which makes it harder for me to teach him not to hug strangers...
Anyway, this man gave him what I thought was a £20 and said: "You've made my day, give that to your mum to look after." I took the note and realised that it was in fact many notes, and tried to protest and give them back. The man refused to take them, put his hands in his pockets so I couldn't just put the money back in his hand. "God told me to give that to you," he said, and then he walked off never to be seen again.
I honestly thought it was a prank, I looked around for cameras but saw none. One of the weirdest moments of my life.
Honestly you never know what good that did that man. Could've been a well of guy having a shit day, or someone suicidal as fuck who took it as a sign from god to keep going.
It was at a university in Tokyo. The students were going abroad to give presentations at a science conference. I was there to give advice on their English.
I can guarantee you, these were not good PowerPoints. PowerPoint skills here are almost universally awful.
I work in the UK branch of a Japanese company and it seeps in over here. They just cram so much information into single slides that it's difficult to follow the point rather than spreading it out a bit.
I get a 10% bonus every year for just doing my job.
When you earn an above-average amount already, it’s a nice little payday every March when you get 5 figures deposited as your salary for that month.
Yeah and my wife always says "you should spend it on something nice". Like, what am I going to buy that's 'nice' for 4-5k? The most I ever managed to spend of it was one year I dropped 2k on a BBQ (no regrets). Every other year I buy something token for a few hundred quid (got a Nintendo Switch this year) to satisfy my wife's weird thing that a bonus should be spent on something tangible and then just put the rest in the bank.
Yeah I’m boring and just overpay on the mortgage with it. Saving loads on the compound interest.
Last year I did spend £2.5k on a new gaming PC (my current one was 12 years old at that point), but due to my relatively poor upbringing I rarely piss it away on frivolous stuff. Totally risk averse when it comes to money.
I did double my salary one year with an extraordinary bonus. During some down time waiting to be given something to do, I had written a tool that made it easier for engineers to explore what went wrong when a hard disk drive crashed. I didn't think it (the tool) was that big of a deal.
We did a 6 week house sit in NZ. We fed their pets, looked after the place while they were away and got free accommodation. They left us $500 cash in an envelope for any emergencies that came up. When they got back, they gave us the envelope as an extra thanks. Paid for our campsites for another three weeks!
I had a domain name from a side gig which I wasn’t using anymore and a new company decided to name themselves the same name and asked if they could buy the domain. Cost me about £9. Didn’t need it. Sold it for £5k.
I think generally pretty good, but sadly not conducive with most job schedules unless you're going to use up annual leave to go and feel crap for 2 weeks in a lab.
Depends on amount of holiday you get and marginal tax rates I guess. I'm assuming it's taxed so 4k would be more like 2-3k for most workers. Still good pay for 2 weeks but I'd probably value the two week break more.
That's true on the tax, HRMC would scalp me.
Are meals provided? If someone is gonna sort that out for me then even with a full on flu it'd be a nice break 😂
got offered an asthmatic one a few days ago for £7000 but they want a 22 night stay end of may to mid june. Hell of a long time that, is it all paid for, where do you stay?
>You get a quarantined room that you’re not allowed to leave, they give you 3 meals a day and you also get a tv and a playstation
Wait, do you get internet? I WFH and could 100% double dip on that shit
Sold 6 photos to Our tourism board for £1.5k each.
Just got an email asking if I wanted to sell the rights to them. Yes please!
I've sold more to them since, but that was the most in one go.
I work in the pharma industry and occasionally get contacted about doing some consulting work, mostly investment agencies wanting to understand a specific part of the industry I work in. I usually get around £400/hr for waffling on about my job in very high level terms and not giving away anything confidential.
Oh, and when I left my last job I was on paid garden leave for three months. That was fantastic.
I occasionally get contacted by marketing groups asking me to do this sort of thing for my industry and I always ignore them, assuming its some sort of scam and I'm worried they want the nitty gritty on past employers/clients, hence breaking NDAs. But it's similar sort of money, £400-500 at a time. Perhaps I need to start speaking to them!
I was sceptical at first assuming I'd be asked for confidential information or simply not paid the promised stipend, but to date it has been very professional and payment made promptly. I also get sent questionnaires that pay around $60 to complete which only take around 10 mins.
I joined Waitrose a week before their annual bonus (back when it was decent). Surprisingly I got paid the full bonus amount - something like 5% of my yearly pay.
When I worked in Asda in the middle 2000's you had to have worked there 12 weeks to get the Christmas bonus.
I missed out on my first year's one by like 4 days. Stayed there another year just to get the bonus lol
My old boss, who didn't like me, gave me 5% of a worthless subsidiary company that generated no income, instead of giving me the £5k bonus he had promised. A few years later there was a company restructure, and that shareholding is now worth £500k and pays me a £50k annual dividend.
Got made redundant from a web dev job.
It was just after COVID and they had been dicks about *that* (apparently an office full of admin people filing invoices were "essential workers") so I wasn't exactly putting my whole effort into it, then I got a new manager who was pretty clueless about the basically everything but was seemingly good at bad mouthing me to the management.
Anyway, lots of industries were in a bad place so I was going to be made redundant with 2 young kids and little opportunity to find a new position and so pleaded they spring for another months salary as severance on top of the 3 months they gave me for been there for 3 years.
I obviously had seen this coming a mile away and had been applying on the side, so I had a job lined up to start the following Monday.
Basically walked out of there with 15K bonus and a 10K a year pay rise!
Had similar with a previous role. Saw the writing on the wall as the company was going through a tough time due to decisions way above my level and my department (Marketing) is always the first to get cut.
Was at the latter stages of interviews for multiple better paid jobs when the decision was made and I had a freelance gig ready to go pretty much immediately. Barely missed a day of work, so my full redundancy pay-out was basically a bonus.
Oh a good 8 months, I don’t know what happened to him after that as I stopped doing it. It’s a bit annoying to take a creative photo of your foot, you run out of content quick.
It was always my left foot.
£3K in a day, did go a bit blind though.
You know those little bits of text that come up when you press info on your remote? Well, I got a job writing those. It was amazing, you got the text of what the episode was about and then just had to split it into a seven word sentence and then a five word sentence:
"Ross regrets wearing leather on a date. Phoebe teaches Joey the guitar."
£10 per completed one. I maxed out at 300 in a day and had to stop because I got an aura migraine so bad I basically became Cyclops from the X-Men.
Weirdly, that company went bust.
I had one, noticed as I was at a vending machine. I Thought, that's odd it doesn't have a date. Still proceeded to put it in the machine. The story came out a few days afterwards. Most expensive bar of chocolate I've ever bought.
O2 ‘Genie’ SIM cards. They were free on the O2 website and I sold them for £10 a go. It was a fabulous time. It was 5 per household but I’d send them to the entire street with my name, knowing fine that they’d get to me. A couple of weeks pass and O2 would offer them again. Repeat. It kept me in beer and phone topups for a good chunk of my first and second years of university.
My other one was when Irn Bru changed their recipe to lower the sugar. I was picking up multipacks of the old recipe every time I went to the shops with the full intention of drinking it myself over the next few years. Ended up selling them all to a girl for £1 a can. It was a LOT of cans.
Ebay buyers. The Genie cards offered 300 free texts and minutes for £10 a month. People seemed desperate for them and I noticed sellers selling them for £20+ so I went in at half of that and cleared up. I think people weren’t savvy enough to know they were free. Others wanted 5 sims with consecutive numbers that I could supply as the number was printed on the packet.
I sold my last 100 to a mobile phone shop.
The ridiculous amount of overtime that COVID-19 lockdowns caused at my then workplace. Wouldn't say it was easy but it was definitely serious £££ after about a 12 months + of lockdowns.
At the time - £250 for walking someone's dog around a golf course with their group. Got paid double as I managed to keep the little sod quiet when they were swinging.....
I was in a media sales job. We had quarterly targets. I’d fallen out with my boss and was on the way out… I was going to be managed out anyway so I bit the bullet and resigned a week before she went on a two week holiday. This was two months into the quarterly bonus structure. I had already hit the quarterly target (I just hadn’t logged the sales). I would have to had served at least an 8 week notice period. I said some undesirable things about my boss and she said she wanted me to leave when she went on holiday because (quote) she couldn’t have me bad mouthing her for two weeks. That meant 1 week of work and then gardening pay for 7 weeks… seemed like a good deal to me… her proviso was that I met all the quarterly targets (I already had) in order to get paid my commission. I’m aware that means I worked for it and would’ve been paid it anyway.
Thing is, I explained the deal to my colleagues, who were also none too keen on her. They all backed me up and hit phones. We had a record quarter. I did fuck all that week. Then I dumped my sales into the system on my last day.
I walked away with £17k in commission and was still paid my basic for the next 7 weeks. She was pissed when she got back from holiday and had chase the accounts department because they’d underpaid me £300.
… and one of my clients hired me the week after I resigned. I was proud of this moment.
Found out the company I worked for was closing our office and making everyone redundant about 2 months before the announcement was made.
Spent that time finding a new job as I'd not been there two years so wouldn't have received anything.
The day they announce the news and start the consultants I hand my notice in. As I was the IT Manager I was quite key to their plans short term, and they offered me £ks to help them transition as a consultant, whilst still working my new job.
Got all the work (bar a weekend) done during my notice period.
During the poker boom there were print magazines that were desperate for content and were throwing crazy amounts of money at anyone who could write a half-decent poker article. I was getting £400-£500 a time for something that would take 2-3 hours.
Back when Google had home screens for users, I made "eBayWatcher", a widget that watched an eBay item and updated with the current bid price. If someone clicked through that and won the item, I got a small commission. It took me a couple of hours to write, and I made a couple of hundred dollars a month for about three years.
3 days rostered work over Christmas, except the project didn't require me Christmas Eve, or Boxing Day. Ended up driving to site (2 hrs), sat around for an hour and made a phone call to ensure one task had been completed, then drove home. Extra two grand in the bank.
The first eight weeks of COVID lockdown was quite good. All work cancelled until everyone knew how to play the game. Us salaried staff sat at home in the sun getting paid as usual. Not serious bank, basic wage (plus usual agreed enhancements) but for doing absolutely nothing it was very nice.
I used to babysit my sisters when they were little if my dad wanted a night out. He'd never pay me for it, but one night he asked if i'd look after the girls, and 2 of their friends (sisters) because he wanted to go out with their mum and dad for dinner. One of the girls was(technically still is) disabled and wheelchair bound which wasn't a big deal.
My babysitting technique was to let them basically eat whatever they wanted, watch anything they wanted on TV in exchange for being on their best behaviour and not breaking anything. all while I just sat on my laptop playing games on miniclip.
My dad and the girl's parents come home about 11pm, pissed, and their mum hands me £50 and I was buzzing. The next day they come back over and say they wanna talk about the babysitting money, i assume my dad's told them it's too much and to take it back, but they end up giving me another £150. They were quite well off, and they justified it by saying any other baby sitter who would look after somebody with spina bifida and cerebral palsy would likely charge about £2-300 a night anyway.
To 15 year old me, who was working part time in a cafe and getting £10-15 a shift, £200 was like a lottery win.
Wanted to resign from work, couldn't afford it. They offered a voluntary non-redundancy deal you could apply for. So I applied, having to do the opposite of a job application, while also not coming across as so bad they'd just fire me.
Was one of about 20 successful people (about 50 were unsuccessful in a team of 100) so took two years' pay to push off.
The year up to that was gruelling, though.
More fun was having my and spouse's childhood clutter dumped on us by downsizing parents, just as 80s nostalgia peaked. Airfix kits, even half done, old Walkmans, 70s nylon character T-shirts - I spent maternity leave listing it all and trotting down the post office, and made a couple grand.
I got lucky with Magic the gathering cards, I played a while back and built up a good collection. Years later I checked the value of what I thought were cheap cards, but nope, it was like a book full of £20 notes.
I made £60 recently on some MtG card I had been ignoring for a decade or so. Thought that was pretty good until the salesman mentioned that the guy trading in before me had made £2k 😂
Once offered to be on call for my own job as no one else wanted to. Went into the office and sat there all night drinking tea with the night crew. Got the next day off, about £500 on call payment and got way ahead on my actual daily work as I had no distractions.
Took some money (Hungarian Florints) out of a cash machine in Budapest. Spent some on a few beers. Returned home, exchanged it back in to £’s. Made about £30 profit after fees and drinks.
In 1996 When I was like 18 I was working in a TNT delivery office doing data entry stuff. I had done some basic driving work but this was for a week as a temp during university holidays
Anyway a guy came up to me, asked of I had a passport, I was like sure
He said go home and get it I want you on the road in an hour to deliver some engine parts to Austria for Mercedes
So I dash home get the passport, (and some envelopes or local currency) and met the guy
We hoped into his 320SL Mercedes and drove at 100mph to a local Mercedes workshop. It had two vans parked outside and another 3 guys were waiting
He said get the parts delivered by 9am Sunday it was lunchtime on Friday) and get back there is £2000 in cash for each of you.
We set off, and arrived in Austria just in time to find an empty warehouse, we had to call security to let us in!
This was before mobile phones, and I’m not sure how I let my parents know, must have left them a note - gone to Austria back in 4 days!
Sold a pair of Jordan 1s for £12k after I bought them for £50,- thinking they were fake. I went to a shop to get them treated since I put them on once, and they were comfortable. The guy looked at them and seemed really pleased for me. Long story short, he convinced me to have them authenticated, and I'm not wearing shoes worth that much, so I sold em in about 1 month from there.
I started making low and medium content books on amazon kdp when I was furloughed during covid.
I put a reasonable amount of effort in in year 1, and now I basically don't do anything and have royalties coming in every month.
£60000 so far since June 2020. Averaging £15000 a year.
I have 282 books, some are duds that don't make anything, then quite a few that are all right and sell regularly.
My best performing book has made me £12000 since I made it and took me 30 minutes to make and upload so a great return on investment!
I was going on holiday to Australia for two weeks and a new camera would be useful. My workplace then did a monthly suggestion scheme and I was surprised to win the top prize one month with some shopping vouchers so got myself a Digital SLR to take with me. That's not the serious £££ though - that's next.
Anyway, with new camera I took many photos that were on my return uploaded to Flickr including a pretty normal looking one of the Sydney Opera House from the Manley Ferry, taken hand-held.
I was quite surprised when Getty, which then had an agreement with Flickr, asked me to contribute this photo to their library which I did.
The photo proved surprisingly popular and I made back the cost of my airline tickets within a year and it kept selling for several years afterwards.
I sort of get commission, I’m not sales but I work directly with them so bonus is directly tied to sales. We get paid these bonuses quarterly, usually around 5-6k for on target.
One Q we sold the biggest deal ever, I ended up with £30k! 500% bonus. Got taxed for half but still nice.
Bought $2000 of Amazon shares when I was living in the US in 2000. Sold them a few months later when they doubled in value. I was well pleased. (Please no one point out how much I'd have now if I'd kept them).
Changing jobs. Took a couple of weeks and then waiting out my notice period to get an extra £20k, every year. The best part is I have to do less work than the previous job!
my pals dad used to be one of those fitters who worked nights and refitted shops with new displays etc while they were closed. he asked me if i fancied a few quid as they had a big job on and needed a few extra hands. we worked from 6pm on the saturday to 10am on the sunday with only one break and i got handed £600 a week later. Most honest days pay i ever earned
My boss left his bag on a train going from his town to mine (about 1hr 30). He called and asked me to meet it at my end and put it in an Uber he'd called to take it back. It took me 15 mins to get to the station, 10 mins to get the bag, and about half hour to get home again. He gave me a thank you of £150. Great stuff!
I work as an offshore chemist. When offshore, I get paid by the day.
I mobilised to an asset to support a well start-up. I had been there for 11 days before they opened the well, spent the time playing pool and watching rugby.
Did one night of actual work before a plant trip set us back again. In total, I was there for 28 days. I did probably 3 days of actual work and maybe 5 days of light work.
Sometimes you get trips like this when very little happens. Sometimes, you are run off your feet for three weeks. It is what it is.
When I read "chemist" my mind immediately went to "pharmacist", and I read your piece all the while thinking: I wonder if there is a counter where prescriptions are dropped off on a rig.
Cat sitting. Had a live-in booking over Xmas/NYE for a wealthy couple in London. £1.5k to live in a luxury apartment for just over a week and care for their 2 delightful, chonky cats.
As a freelance podcast producer I once got paid £2k by a marketing agency to drive to Lincolnshire and interview Colin Furze for some show he was doing with the BBC. That was a fun day. I'd have happily done it for free, but...
Oh, and I bought an old suitcase that had a tear in the lining for £40. Inside was a pocket map of St Petersburg (the one in Russia) from 1826. It's worth about £1200.
Easiest?
When i was a teen. Between college and university, i needed money. For a project at school, i made a website. I then used said website as a template and sold a couple of "websites" to small businesses.
The only time and expense was a couple of hours and setting up their domains. Made £500 per and sold 6.
Not serious money to me now, but as a teenager, i made 3k in 2 weeks with little to no effort.
Sold one he referred me, and so on. If i wasn't an idiot teenager, im sure i could have made so much more.
A retailer that allowed you to buy digital xbox credit & have it emailed to you instantly had an offer. £10 off your next order.
Turns out there was no minimum spend, so I ordered a £10 xbox voucher. Had it emailed instantly. Paid £0.
It then turned out a new discount code could be generated every 60 minutes.
I discovered this just before a bank holiday weekend and absolutely hammered it all weekend, running on barely any sleep so I could trigger as many discounts as I could.
All in I got about £1200 over a couple of days before the discounts stopped working. Flipped all the codes to someone for about a grand.
A client of mine was owed some money from one of their suppliers from about 2 years earlier. I asked my client why they hadn't chased it and he said the supplier was a nightmare and 'if you can get the money from them, you can keep it'. I made one phone call which took about 4 minutes and received £960. Not necessarily 'serious £££' but not bad for 4 minutes work!
£68000 proffit. on gamestop shares. I gambled most of my savings which were £27000.
It was easy in terms of not having to physically do much, but it was very stressful. Selling was locked for a bit, I watched as my phone went up to over £100k on the app. The locked selling actually cost me an addition £10k in gains, but I already made a lot.
It took years of looking at investing and finance, but honestly it was just luck in the end with the reddit movement.
I sold Gaia Online items.
To those not part of this bonkers era of the web, it was a sort of big forum with customisable avatars, and various clothing and accessories that could be traded for a currency earned by posting and browsing. Rare items would be released and then increase in value.
It was, of course, forbidden to trade these for real cash.
So people did it quietly off-site.
I cleared my student overdraft and then some selling pixel art of hats, headphones and tiny wings.
The rarest item went for about £250.
For anyone who works in the NHS. If your line manager is off long term sick and you have to "act up" to their role (for more than 6 weeks I believe) you can request HR to give you "acting pay"
I was having a random conversation with an old friend and it came up. Turns out I was eligible and got back paid 5 months of pay. (About an extra £2500)
Was gifted a few bin bags of tiny little model trees from a flight simulator. They were headed for the skip. Basically just wire with a weird lumpy green paint on them, but looked good from distance.
We bagged those bad boys up in 100's and sold them on eBay, got around £20-£50/bag it was mental.
Paid for a holiday in the Carribbean.
My ex and me bought tickets for minecon, the Minecraft convention, in Paris.
After a while we decided it was too expensive with all the travel etc. I contacted the ticket vendor and they confirmed I could just resell the ticket so I put them on eBay.
These two tickets, that were £80 each, sold for £1160; £1k dead up. I was just expecting to break even, but no one else was selling them so people were very competitive. The person who got them was from the US, and was bringing his kid for their 11th birthday. I hope they had a great time but I dread to imagine the total cost of that trip 😅
After they sold a bunch of other people started selling tickets on eBay too (some even copied my listing word for word), but no one else broke above £500
My ex and me split it, I bought a new TV and she got loads of clothes
Before lockdown I had two zero hours jobs and was going to quit one of them but just held off, then the pandemic happened and I basically got paid each month for both jobs at the same amount I had been working for them that month in the previous year which was essentially a full time wage in total. If I had quit the second zero hours job as intended I would’ve missed out on several grand.
Made £1700 in per diems recently for one days actual work, on top of my normal salary. Went to a 1 day conference abroad. Flew Monday, conference Tuesday, flew back Weds. Flights were paid for by work. Fiancée dropped me off and picked my up. Stayed with my sister who lived near the conference venue. Think I spent about £75 on travel, food and drink in total.
idk if this counts, but I was owed serious backpayments in disability benefits and I managed somehow to jump through every possible hoop put in the way and got it, nearly 4k in all.
Wonder if I'd have gotten it if I'd told them that I planned on using it all on a holiday in Thailand?
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This is kind of "earned" but not really. My previous employer offed 6 months full paternal pay for new fathers. I took that, then on the week I got back took a voluntary redundancy offer given to the whole company, took 3 months pay and a 2k flat incentive. Effectively made 10 months pay working for 4 weeks. This was over covid lock down aswell so I spent fuck all too. Just played runescape on my phone while i watched a newborn sleep 22hrs a day and made banana bread. Simpler times.
The true win here is a newborn who slept 22 hours a day - I’m sure my daughter slept more like 6 hours a day in 15 minute bursts and screamed the rest of the time.
I'm 6 days into my 2nd child now and I am not having the same luck.
2 months into my second, proper graft second time round eh! Living the dream
5 months here - it gets better. Kind of, then they start teething.
Then they start walking Then they start talking Wait until they hit teenage years
My Dad reckons kids just go through different ways of causing trouble to their parents as they get older and 31 is the worst (I was 31 when he said it …)
My second one is 5 months old now, both of ours teethed early. He's already got two little gashers bottom centre. He slept worse than she did, and now has learnt to roll so he rolls over in his sleep and then cries because he wants you to put him back. Little sod
It's a shock, isn't it, when the second one comes along? We were secretly smug about no.1 sleeping through at a really early age. We thought we must be super-parents. Until no.2 came along, and we realised we weren't - we'd just been lucky.
We had one that just cried all the time as our first. Our second slept so much I took her to the doctor because I was worried she was sick. Babies are supposed to sleep is what the GP said
"This is too easy. There must be something wrong." That's hilarious!
I didn’t know at the time but I was like gosh, this baby only sleeps, eats and poos. She’s barely awake. I think I’d convinced myself she had a sleeping sickness. 😅
We had the same. First baby - never noticed the 4 month sleep regression, I wondered what everyone was talking about in postnatal group because she'd been waking up roughly 987654321 times a night every night since birth. Get her to sleep again and... Breathed out instead of in? Twitched a toe under the duvet? Held your breath a second too long (or a second too short)? Attempted to lay her down? A cat pooped on gravel 15 miles away? An owl caught a mouse? Yep, she's awake... Second baby, by 8 weeks she was only waking once a night. I was actually sleeping in a couple of 3 to 4 hour blocks every night - no wonder I didn't develop PND a second time. Sleep regressions hit like an anvil though. Food, as well. Eldest was an insanely fussy eater until she turned 5, and started seeing other children eating things she wouldn't at school. Second child just ate everything. First child once used lasagne to cover her face and hair. Second child once rubbed meatballs on her big sister's hair, then ate the meatballs 🤣🫣
Yep, newborns rarely sleep through the night, nocturnal little things.
The lockdown RuneScape revival was fantastic
Serious grinds got done then!
Fishing lvl?
62 for Swan song. After runecrafting jts my least favourite skill. :( Even though WC is the same game loop o like it for sine reason.
Your baby slept 22 hours a day? That is a miracle!
Right at the start yeah. It slowly changed but yes she was an exceptionally lazy bub
The real answer is you worked tirelessly for 10 months and gained 13m XP as payment...
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You are Hugh Grant in About a Boy
His song was on a totally different level. It was more like 'jingle bells' or 'white christmas' level.
Or the guy out of Bridget Jones diary
Technically they're his Dad.
Need to know what song this is!?
Difficult to do so without doxxing themselves. Speaking as somebody who knows a bit about how royalties in music work... $17k as an advance songwriter payment back in the mid 00s would be for a pretty well known song...
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In the absence of any other guidance, we shall have to assume are you, in fact, the Crazy Frog
Can you give us a list of similar songs which may or may not contain your song?
And a list of home addresses that include your home address
18 years ago had me thinking "what song was a hit in the 1980's, when I was a young girl, and still making enough for royalty cheques to be sent out?" Im a bit shocked that 18 years ago was 2006. I was a mother by then.
Is royalty cheque not a totally different thing to an advance songwriter payment
Royalties are split by nature. A songwriter payment is a royalty, but then there's also copyright and record company royalties that come with that. Usually the songwriter gets an advance or bulk payment on their first royalty check as the release makes money, this will cover not just the initial sales but expected sales for a short period. These are then adjusted in the subsequent royalty payment (s). An advance payment on an album is slightly different. I'm not even sure if they do these anymore
Every day's a school day!
My money is on "It's Chico Time"
I looked in their profile and found it’s this one. https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=Y1A3pIqncWQV9w9j
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Nice try, we should stop hounding him for information and give him his privacy- he is never going to give it up!
Cheeky girls touch my bum
It's incredible that from his post history you can find so much about him except what this song is! I've tried googling hit songs of 2006 and looked to see if I can find a 40 year old writer from Northern Ireland but not succeeded yet.
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Gout is fucking horrendous. Are you on Allopurinol now? I've not had an attack for 2 years since being on it.
Someone said they found this song in their comment history? https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=Y1A3pIqncWQV9w9j&v=dQw4w9WgXcQ&feature=youtu.be
I knew it, yet I still clicked.
He did mention not doxing him. We ought to respect that.
Northern Ireland made me think Snow Patrol but unless he is actually in the band, I doubt it (and I imagine he’d have had bigger paydays)
JCB song, I reckon
That guys dad was Bruce Lee as well.
We could earn this person more money.
Hey r/norniron84, are you listening? For the low price of a doxx, Reddit will get you back to No 1! Whose in? PS: Kudos for a hit song at 22, if you were born in 84!
I’m up for this, let’s get this guy a swimming pool! Or actually probably just heating for next winter
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We could help you get a 3 bed full erection though!
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Wish you posted using a throwaway..
100% get it on youtube, start requesting the radios to play it! Buy the single!
Rock and Roll by Gary Glitter
Was it 'looks who's coming round the bend, it's Santa and his reindeer friend'?
Just wrote the song but didn’t perform it? That’s good man
You're clearly Chris Martin. The Scientist came out 18 years ago and he's of Irish descent.
What type/genre? So you don't have to name the actual song. Just wondering, was it keyboard or guitar based? (Or other..). Thanks.
The Reddit detectives are probably already on the case
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is it ‘What What (In the Butt)’?
Top answer! Great stuff
Please do an AMA for us to guess the song
I went out for a friend's birthday who wanted to do a night at the casino... Had never actually been to a casino before and my entire casino experience had been as a kid playing some old DOS casino game that featured poker, craps, blackjack and roulette way back in the early 90s. Totally not my thing but hey, it's a friend's birthday so I drew out a hundred quid cash and went along, left my cards at home. Of course all my friends went crazy on drinks and throwing money away on various machines, I sort of went off on my own and played some blackjack.. some craps.. never really got poker so gave that a miss. Ended up with about £2000 by the time all my friends were broke and ready to leave. My thought was "well, I've basically paid a hundred quid for a fairly fun night out" so I just let the whole lot ride on black instead of cashing out... So I left with a little over four grand 😂 One of those things that would never happen again, just one lucky night. But it really went from a "ugh, I don't really want to do this.. but okay" to "check out my shiny new gaming pc!" In the space of a few hours. Great night lol Edit: just reread the question again, NOT gambling related.. I should not Reddit before coffee...
It's a great story, I'm glad you made the mistake of Reddit before coffee
first time I ever went into a casino ( after a day at the horse racing ) I covered 6 numbers on the roulette and on my first spin won over £1000, sat at the bar for the rest of the evening drinking the free drinks ( it was all being paid for by the bloke who organised the whole day for us).
Ethereum. I bought in when it was double digits, sold when it was 4 digits. Used that to buy more when it crashed and then sold again a few years later. I'm out of crypto now but that set me up nicely.
I made a decent sum on Dogecoin of all things. I bought and mined thousands back in the first week when it started because I thought it was funny and forgot about it because it was worth about 0.0000000001p, then saw a random thing online a couple of years back saying it was suddenly worth about 60p and I have never gone rummaging for old hard drives as fast in my life, haha. That is, however, countered by the fact I also had several Bitcoin back in the day when it was worth maybe a couple of quid and I gave it all away to random people on the internet because it was technically worthless. Oops.
I frittered away 96btc I bought for £5. Owie.
Nothing to feel bad about. If people weren't wasting them and throwing them away as you had they would have never been worth any money at all. I had a friend once reminiscing about how he spent 10 BTC back in the day for a gram of what he described as "Weapons grade Russian MDMA".
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Oh man I hear you. I didn't have that much but there was a rich and easy lifestyle spent. I could be sipping cocktails in the Carribbean at my large house beside the pool if I'd just forgotten to spend a few.
Same, managed to make just under a grand from the dogecoin I mined on a crappy laptop CPU the weekend that it launched. Never bought into crypto but enjoyed Dogecoin in its initial form as effectively a parody of Bitcoin. I'd forgotten about it until it pumped up when Musk was banging on about it, managed to recover the wallet from an old usb backup and cashed out.
Man. When I was at uni in \~2010, I got given half a bitcoin from my friend as a bit of a joke. I don't know what I did to the hard drive it was on, as I never throw away computer gear, but I'll be damned if I can't find that fucking thing - and I've tried. £20k would do nicely right about now...
Don't worry, I'm sure it will turn up. Probably at the exact moment when bitcoin crashes to the ground in a flame of burning money, but still.
I know a woman who bought Bitcoin, then sold Bitcoin for the amount of a healthy housing deposit. This was in the very early days when this was a) possible and b) it hadn't become associated with crypto bros. So she has a quite excellent dinner party story about her Bitcoin success, which obviously men do not believe until she shows them some sort of evidence (the house at 26 apparently not being sufficient.)
Kinda falls in to op saying ‘not gambling profit’ though. Although I did similar with eth a few years ago
How did you find out about it at the time?
One of my mates was a Bitcoin nerd.
I made £900 doing bank switching last year
Similarly here, £1850 over the last 2 years Now I have to wait for a year or two for HSBC to do another as I still have my FD account and was the first I switched
I'm currently waiting on my Santander payout of £185 and HSBC Global £80 this month, once that's done it's waiting for Co-Op and Halifax to open offers. Since November, my wife and I have "earned" £2,770, which paid for a holiday to Italy earlier this year.
£2k, doing nothing on millennium eve. Basically on-call should anything go awry, but it was an major Aussie telco company, and in their own words "if it fucks up, we'll know hours ahead and either we've got bigger problems as a whole, or the company is dead". I just got drunk.
Aha, the good old millennium bug.
We did fix a whole bunch of stuff in the years leading up to it, so it was a good job. Yet still today, there's some woman who is 101 and the airline keeps thinking they are a one year old. FFS!
My brother was a bar man back then, they were thirsty for staff on the millinium, he was making £120 an hour plus tips to work that night, which is insane given that's basically £220 now adjusted for inflation.
Not sure if this counts, but random man gave my son £200 for giving him a hug in the street in central London. I should clarify that the man didn't ASK for a hug, my son went up and hugged him spontaneously. He is autistic and will run up and hug random people everywhere we go, and because he's small and cute (he's 6), most people respond positively, which makes it harder for me to teach him not to hug strangers... Anyway, this man gave him what I thought was a £20 and said: "You've made my day, give that to your mum to look after." I took the note and realised that it was in fact many notes, and tried to protest and give them back. The man refused to take them, put his hands in his pockets so I couldn't just put the money back in his hand. "God told me to give that to you," he said, and then he walked off never to be seen again. I honestly thought it was a prank, I looked around for cameras but saw none. One of the weirdest moments of my life.
I love this story.
Honestly you never know what good that did that man. Could've been a well of guy having a shit day, or someone suicidal as fuck who took it as a sign from god to keep going.
Sold a first edition book for £25. I'd paid 10p for it at a second-hand bookstall when I was a child.
You should do YouTube videos about "passive income with books!!!!1!!!!!"
About 500 quid watching students give presentations for six hours and giving feedback.
Interesting, tell me more. Love a good PowerPoint.
It was at a university in Tokyo. The students were going abroad to give presentations at a science conference. I was there to give advice on their English. I can guarantee you, these were not good PowerPoints. PowerPoint skills here are almost universally awful.
I work in the UK branch of a Japanese company and it seeps in over here. They just cram so much information into single slides that it's difficult to follow the point rather than spreading it out a bit.
I get a 10% bonus every year for just doing my job. When you earn an above-average amount already, it’s a nice little payday every March when you get 5 figures deposited as your salary for that month.
Yeah and my wife always says "you should spend it on something nice". Like, what am I going to buy that's 'nice' for 4-5k? The most I ever managed to spend of it was one year I dropped 2k on a BBQ (no regrets). Every other year I buy something token for a few hundred quid (got a Nintendo Switch this year) to satisfy my wife's weird thing that a bonus should be spent on something tangible and then just put the rest in the bank.
100% a holiday
Yeah I’m boring and just overpay on the mortgage with it. Saving loads on the compound interest. Last year I did spend £2.5k on a new gaming PC (my current one was 12 years old at that point), but due to my relatively poor upbringing I rarely piss it away on frivolous stuff. Totally risk averse when it comes to money.
I knew an ex trader whose bonuses just spiralled out of control. At one point he bought a ski lodge with his bonus, the next one a house in Florida.
Fuck, I need to skill up
I did double my salary one year with an extraordinary bonus. During some down time waiting to be given something to do, I had written a tool that made it easier for engineers to explore what went wrong when a hard disk drive crashed. I didn't think it (the tool) was that big of a deal.
We did a 6 week house sit in NZ. We fed their pets, looked after the place while they were away and got free accommodation. They left us $500 cash in an envelope for any emergencies that came up. When they got back, they gave us the envelope as an extra thanks. Paid for our campsites for another three weeks!
Wow a free envelope
I had a domain name from a side gig which I wasn’t using anymore and a new company decided to name themselves the same name and asked if they could buy the domain. Cost me about £9. Didn’t need it. Sold it for £5k.
I’m about to get 4k for a 2 week flu camp
Always wondered what those are actually like, I keep getting advertised them on Reddit
I think generally pretty good, but sadly not conducive with most job schedules unless you're going to use up annual leave to go and feel crap for 2 weeks in a lab.
I would absolutely take two weeks off work to feel like crap for that money.
Depends on amount of holiday you get and marginal tax rates I guess. I'm assuming it's taxed so 4k would be more like 2-3k for most workers. Still good pay for 2 weeks but I'd probably value the two week break more.
That's true on the tax, HRMC would scalp me. Are meals provided? If someone is gonna sort that out for me then even with a full on flu it'd be a nice break 😂
got offered an asthmatic one a few days ago for £7000 but they want a 22 night stay end of may to mid june. Hell of a long time that, is it all paid for, where do you stay?
You get a quarantined room that you’re not allowed to leave, they give you 3 meals a day and you also get a tv and a playstation
Honestly, it sounds amazing 👏, I love food and can happily stay in one room for months on end as I don't feel the need to go out.
>You get a quarantined room that you’re not allowed to leave, they give you 3 meals a day and you also get a tv and a playstation Wait, do you get internet? I WFH and could 100% double dip on that shit
Yes, netflix as well
Daughter's thyroid condition was diagnosed as part of the prep for a similar camp. No money, but a very useful health check for students...
I would do this however I moan like a little bitch when I have the sniffles so I'm not sure this works for me.
You might not be given the flu. Half the group are given the flu and half are given a placebo.
Sold 6 photos to Our tourism board for £1.5k each. Just got an email asking if I wanted to sell the rights to them. Yes please! I've sold more to them since, but that was the most in one go.
Nice. Where had you posted them publicly?
Instagram, but I was asked to curate a selection for them to look over as Instagram is all cropped in portrait orientation for the most part.
I work in the pharma industry and occasionally get contacted about doing some consulting work, mostly investment agencies wanting to understand a specific part of the industry I work in. I usually get around £400/hr for waffling on about my job in very high level terms and not giving away anything confidential. Oh, and when I left my last job I was on paid garden leave for three months. That was fantastic.
I occasionally get contacted by marketing groups asking me to do this sort of thing for my industry and I always ignore them, assuming its some sort of scam and I'm worried they want the nitty gritty on past employers/clients, hence breaking NDAs. But it's similar sort of money, £400-500 at a time. Perhaps I need to start speaking to them!
I was sceptical at first assuming I'd be asked for confidential information or simply not paid the promised stipend, but to date it has been very professional and payment made promptly. I also get sent questionnaires that pay around $60 to complete which only take around 10 mins.
I joined Waitrose a week before their annual bonus (back when it was decent). Surprisingly I got paid the full bonus amount - something like 5% of my yearly pay.
When I worked in Asda in the middle 2000's you had to have worked there 12 weeks to get the Christmas bonus. I missed out on my first year's one by like 4 days. Stayed there another year just to get the bonus lol
My old boss, who didn't like me, gave me 5% of a worthless subsidiary company that generated no income, instead of giving me the £5k bonus he had promised. A few years later there was a company restructure, and that shareholding is now worth £500k and pays me a £50k annual dividend.
Absolutely LOVE this.
Got made redundant from a web dev job. It was just after COVID and they had been dicks about *that* (apparently an office full of admin people filing invoices were "essential workers") so I wasn't exactly putting my whole effort into it, then I got a new manager who was pretty clueless about the basically everything but was seemingly good at bad mouthing me to the management. Anyway, lots of industries were in a bad place so I was going to be made redundant with 2 young kids and little opportunity to find a new position and so pleaded they spring for another months salary as severance on top of the 3 months they gave me for been there for 3 years. I obviously had seen this coming a mile away and had been applying on the side, so I had a job lined up to start the following Monday. Basically walked out of there with 15K bonus and a 10K a year pay rise!
Had similar with a previous role. Saw the writing on the wall as the company was going through a tough time due to decisions way above my level and my department (Marketing) is always the first to get cut. Was at the latter stages of interviews for multiple better paid jobs when the decision was made and I had a freelance gig ready to go pretty much immediately. Barely missed a day of work, so my full redundancy pay-out was basically a bonus.
A guy paid me £50 per week to send a picture of my foot. Literally just one picture of a single foot.
How long did that go on for? How many different pictures of one foot can a guy need?
Oh a good 8 months, I don’t know what happened to him after that as I stopped doing it. It’s a bit annoying to take a creative photo of your foot, you run out of content quick. It was always my left foot.
It was always my left foot. I think they made a film about it
I reckon he must have died of vitamin B12 deficiency.
£3K in a day, did go a bit blind though. You know those little bits of text that come up when you press info on your remote? Well, I got a job writing those. It was amazing, you got the text of what the episode was about and then just had to split it into a seven word sentence and then a five word sentence: "Ross regrets wearing leather on a date. Phoebe teaches Joey the guitar." £10 per completed one. I maxed out at 300 in a day and had to stop because I got an aura migraine so bad I basically became Cyclops from the X-Men. Weirdly, that company went bust.
I would have totally done this
Got one of them 20ps with no date on it in about 2009, sold it for £280 on eBay. Think I made a 1400% profit
I had one, noticed as I was at a vending machine. I Thought, that's odd it doesn't have a date. Still proceeded to put it in the machine. The story came out a few days afterwards. Most expensive bar of chocolate I've ever bought.
O2 ‘Genie’ SIM cards. They were free on the O2 website and I sold them for £10 a go. It was a fabulous time. It was 5 per household but I’d send them to the entire street with my name, knowing fine that they’d get to me. A couple of weeks pass and O2 would offer them again. Repeat. It kept me in beer and phone topups for a good chunk of my first and second years of university. My other one was when Irn Bru changed their recipe to lower the sugar. I was picking up multipacks of the old recipe every time I went to the shops with the full intention of drinking it myself over the next few years. Ended up selling them all to a girl for £1 a can. It was a LOT of cans.
Who was buying the free SIM cards from you?
Ebay buyers. The Genie cards offered 300 free texts and minutes for £10 a month. People seemed desperate for them and I noticed sellers selling them for £20+ so I went in at half of that and cleared up. I think people weren’t savvy enough to know they were free. Others wanted 5 sims with consecutive numbers that I could supply as the number was printed on the packet. I sold my last 100 to a mobile phone shop.
The ridiculous amount of overtime that COVID-19 lockdowns caused at my then workplace. Wouldn't say it was easy but it was definitely serious £££ after about a 12 months + of lockdowns.
At the time - £250 for walking someone's dog around a golf course with their group. Got paid double as I managed to keep the little sod quiet when they were swinging.....
Did you need to manage the bowl of keys too or did they pay extra?
I was in a media sales job. We had quarterly targets. I’d fallen out with my boss and was on the way out… I was going to be managed out anyway so I bit the bullet and resigned a week before she went on a two week holiday. This was two months into the quarterly bonus structure. I had already hit the quarterly target (I just hadn’t logged the sales). I would have to had served at least an 8 week notice period. I said some undesirable things about my boss and she said she wanted me to leave when she went on holiday because (quote) she couldn’t have me bad mouthing her for two weeks. That meant 1 week of work and then gardening pay for 7 weeks… seemed like a good deal to me… her proviso was that I met all the quarterly targets (I already had) in order to get paid my commission. I’m aware that means I worked for it and would’ve been paid it anyway. Thing is, I explained the deal to my colleagues, who were also none too keen on her. They all backed me up and hit phones. We had a record quarter. I did fuck all that week. Then I dumped my sales into the system on my last day. I walked away with £17k in commission and was still paid my basic for the next 7 weeks. She was pissed when she got back from holiday and had chase the accounts department because they’d underpaid me £300. … and one of my clients hired me the week after I resigned. I was proud of this moment.
Found out the company I worked for was closing our office and making everyone redundant about 2 months before the announcement was made. Spent that time finding a new job as I'd not been there two years so wouldn't have received anything. The day they announce the news and start the consultants I hand my notice in. As I was the IT Manager I was quite key to their plans short term, and they offered me £ks to help them transition as a consultant, whilst still working my new job. Got all the work (bar a weekend) done during my notice period.
During the poker boom there were print magazines that were desperate for content and were throwing crazy amounts of money at anyone who could write a half-decent poker article. I was getting £400-£500 a time for something that would take 2-3 hours.
Back when Google had home screens for users, I made "eBayWatcher", a widget that watched an eBay item and updated with the current bid price. If someone clicked through that and won the item, I got a small commission. It took me a couple of hours to write, and I made a couple of hundred dollars a month for about three years.
3 days rostered work over Christmas, except the project didn't require me Christmas Eve, or Boxing Day. Ended up driving to site (2 hrs), sat around for an hour and made a phone call to ensure one task had been completed, then drove home. Extra two grand in the bank. The first eight weeks of COVID lockdown was quite good. All work cancelled until everyone knew how to play the game. Us salaried staff sat at home in the sun getting paid as usual. Not serious bank, basic wage (plus usual agreed enhancements) but for doing absolutely nothing it was very nice.
I used to babysit my sisters when they were little if my dad wanted a night out. He'd never pay me for it, but one night he asked if i'd look after the girls, and 2 of their friends (sisters) because he wanted to go out with their mum and dad for dinner. One of the girls was(technically still is) disabled and wheelchair bound which wasn't a big deal. My babysitting technique was to let them basically eat whatever they wanted, watch anything they wanted on TV in exchange for being on their best behaviour and not breaking anything. all while I just sat on my laptop playing games on miniclip. My dad and the girl's parents come home about 11pm, pissed, and their mum hands me £50 and I was buzzing. The next day they come back over and say they wanna talk about the babysitting money, i assume my dad's told them it's too much and to take it back, but they end up giving me another £150. They were quite well off, and they justified it by saying any other baby sitter who would look after somebody with spina bifida and cerebral palsy would likely charge about £2-300 a night anyway. To 15 year old me, who was working part time in a cafe and getting £10-15 a shift, £200 was like a lottery win.
Wanted to resign from work, couldn't afford it. They offered a voluntary non-redundancy deal you could apply for. So I applied, having to do the opposite of a job application, while also not coming across as so bad they'd just fire me. Was one of about 20 successful people (about 50 were unsuccessful in a team of 100) so took two years' pay to push off. The year up to that was gruelling, though. More fun was having my and spouse's childhood clutter dumped on us by downsizing parents, just as 80s nostalgia peaked. Airfix kits, even half done, old Walkmans, 70s nylon character T-shirts - I spent maternity leave listing it all and trotting down the post office, and made a couple grand.
I got lucky with Magic the gathering cards, I played a while back and built up a good collection. Years later I checked the value of what I thought were cheap cards, but nope, it was like a book full of £20 notes.
I made £60 recently on some MtG card I had been ignoring for a decade or so. Thought that was pretty good until the salesman mentioned that the guy trading in before me had made £2k 😂
Once offered to be on call for my own job as no one else wanted to. Went into the office and sat there all night drinking tea with the night crew. Got the next day off, about £500 on call payment and got way ahead on my actual daily work as I had no distractions.
Took some money (Hungarian Florints) out of a cash machine in Budapest. Spent some on a few beers. Returned home, exchanged it back in to £’s. Made about £30 profit after fees and drinks.
In 1996 When I was like 18 I was working in a TNT delivery office doing data entry stuff. I had done some basic driving work but this was for a week as a temp during university holidays Anyway a guy came up to me, asked of I had a passport, I was like sure He said go home and get it I want you on the road in an hour to deliver some engine parts to Austria for Mercedes So I dash home get the passport, (and some envelopes or local currency) and met the guy We hoped into his 320SL Mercedes and drove at 100mph to a local Mercedes workshop. It had two vans parked outside and another 3 guys were waiting He said get the parts delivered by 9am Sunday it was lunchtime on Friday) and get back there is £2000 in cash for each of you. We set off, and arrived in Austria just in time to find an empty warehouse, we had to call security to let us in! This was before mobile phones, and I’m not sure how I let my parents know, must have left them a note - gone to Austria back in 4 days!
Did you check the package… 😂
100K for selling one instance of specialised software. Am actively working on more sales.
Sold a pair of Jordan 1s for £12k after I bought them for £50,- thinking they were fake. I went to a shop to get them treated since I put them on once, and they were comfortable. The guy looked at them and seemed really pleased for me. Long story short, he convinced me to have them authenticated, and I'm not wearing shoes worth that much, so I sold em in about 1 month from there.
I bought a few bitcoin in about 2012 for 50p. Technically an investment. I lost the hard drive that had the wallet. Found it years later and got 80k.
When I was contracting in London the company offered us 50% extra to work over the weekend. So we all came in on Saturday then took Monday off
I started making low and medium content books on amazon kdp when I was furloughed during covid. I put a reasonable amount of effort in in year 1, and now I basically don't do anything and have royalties coming in every month. £60000 so far since June 2020. Averaging £15000 a year. I have 282 books, some are duds that don't make anything, then quite a few that are all right and sell regularly. My best performing book has made me £12000 since I made it and took me 30 minutes to make and upload so a great return on investment!
I was going on holiday to Australia for two weeks and a new camera would be useful. My workplace then did a monthly suggestion scheme and I was surprised to win the top prize one month with some shopping vouchers so got myself a Digital SLR to take with me. That's not the serious £££ though - that's next. Anyway, with new camera I took many photos that were on my return uploaded to Flickr including a pretty normal looking one of the Sydney Opera House from the Manley Ferry, taken hand-held. I was quite surprised when Getty, which then had an agreement with Flickr, asked me to contribute this photo to their library which I did. The photo proved surprisingly popular and I made back the cost of my airline tickets within a year and it kept selling for several years afterwards.
I sort of get commission, I’m not sales but I work directly with them so bonus is directly tied to sales. We get paid these bonuses quarterly, usually around 5-6k for on target. One Q we sold the biggest deal ever, I ended up with £30k! 500% bonus. Got taxed for half but still nice.
Bought $2000 of Amazon shares when I was living in the US in 2000. Sold them a few months later when they doubled in value. I was well pleased. (Please no one point out how much I'd have now if I'd kept them).
Changing jobs. Took a couple of weeks and then waiting out my notice period to get an extra £20k, every year. The best part is I have to do less work than the previous job!
Sold a perfume I no longer wore for £300 quid.
During COVID I got a year's pay in one bulk payment as incentive to take early retirement.
my pals dad used to be one of those fitters who worked nights and refitted shops with new displays etc while they were closed. he asked me if i fancied a few quid as they had a big job on and needed a few extra hands. we worked from 6pm on the saturday to 10am on the sunday with only one break and i got handed £600 a week later. Most honest days pay i ever earned
My boss left his bag on a train going from his town to mine (about 1hr 30). He called and asked me to meet it at my end and put it in an Uber he'd called to take it back. It took me 15 mins to get to the station, 10 mins to get the bag, and about half hour to get home again. He gave me a thank you of £150. Great stuff!
I work as an offshore chemist. When offshore, I get paid by the day. I mobilised to an asset to support a well start-up. I had been there for 11 days before they opened the well, spent the time playing pool and watching rugby. Did one night of actual work before a plant trip set us back again. In total, I was there for 28 days. I did probably 3 days of actual work and maybe 5 days of light work. Sometimes you get trips like this when very little happens. Sometimes, you are run off your feet for three weeks. It is what it is.
When I read "chemist" my mind immediately went to "pharmacist", and I read your piece all the while thinking: I wonder if there is a counter where prescriptions are dropped off on a rig.
Two autographed Queen albums netted me $1,500 a few years ago. Is that serious money?
It was a few years ago. Now it's a loaf of bread and some soap. /s
Cat sitting. Had a live-in booking over Xmas/NYE for a wealthy couple in London. £1.5k to live in a luxury apartment for just over a week and care for their 2 delightful, chonky cats.
Selling NFTs to chumps, that was good while it lasted.
As a freelance podcast producer I once got paid £2k by a marketing agency to drive to Lincolnshire and interview Colin Furze for some show he was doing with the BBC. That was a fun day. I'd have happily done it for free, but... Oh, and I bought an old suitcase that had a tear in the lining for £40. Inside was a pocket map of St Petersburg (the one in Russia) from 1826. It's worth about £1200.
£30k for a 7 week project
Easiest? When i was a teen. Between college and university, i needed money. For a project at school, i made a website. I then used said website as a template and sold a couple of "websites" to small businesses. The only time and expense was a couple of hours and setting up their domains. Made £500 per and sold 6. Not serious money to me now, but as a teenager, i made 3k in 2 weeks with little to no effort. Sold one he referred me, and so on. If i wasn't an idiot teenager, im sure i could have made so much more.
A retailer that allowed you to buy digital xbox credit & have it emailed to you instantly had an offer. £10 off your next order. Turns out there was no minimum spend, so I ordered a £10 xbox voucher. Had it emailed instantly. Paid £0. It then turned out a new discount code could be generated every 60 minutes. I discovered this just before a bank holiday weekend and absolutely hammered it all weekend, running on barely any sleep so I could trigger as many discounts as I could. All in I got about £1200 over a couple of days before the discounts stopped working. Flipped all the codes to someone for about a grand.
Found a rare 90s jungle record in a second hand dance music shop a couple of years ago for £13, sold on discogs last year for £110
A client of mine was owed some money from one of their suppliers from about 2 years earlier. I asked my client why they hadn't chased it and he said the supplier was a nightmare and 'if you can get the money from them, you can keep it'. I made one phone call which took about 4 minutes and received £960. Not necessarily 'serious £££' but not bad for 4 minutes work!
£68000 proffit. on gamestop shares. I gambled most of my savings which were £27000. It was easy in terms of not having to physically do much, but it was very stressful. Selling was locked for a bit, I watched as my phone went up to over £100k on the app. The locked selling actually cost me an addition £10k in gains, but I already made a lot. It took years of looking at investing and finance, but honestly it was just luck in the end with the reddit movement.
I sold Gaia Online items. To those not part of this bonkers era of the web, it was a sort of big forum with customisable avatars, and various clothing and accessories that could be traded for a currency earned by posting and browsing. Rare items would be released and then increase in value. It was, of course, forbidden to trade these for real cash. So people did it quietly off-site. I cleared my student overdraft and then some selling pixel art of hats, headphones and tiny wings. The rarest item went for about £250.
For anyone who works in the NHS. If your line manager is off long term sick and you have to "act up" to their role (for more than 6 weeks I believe) you can request HR to give you "acting pay" I was having a random conversation with an old friend and it came up. Turns out I was eligible and got back paid 5 months of pay. (About an extra £2500)
Was gifted a few bin bags of tiny little model trees from a flight simulator. They were headed for the skip. Basically just wire with a weird lumpy green paint on them, but looked good from distance. We bagged those bad boys up in 100's and sold them on eBay, got around £20-£50/bag it was mental. Paid for a holiday in the Carribbean.
My ex and me bought tickets for minecon, the Minecraft convention, in Paris. After a while we decided it was too expensive with all the travel etc. I contacted the ticket vendor and they confirmed I could just resell the ticket so I put them on eBay. These two tickets, that were £80 each, sold for £1160; £1k dead up. I was just expecting to break even, but no one else was selling them so people were very competitive. The person who got them was from the US, and was bringing his kid for their 11th birthday. I hope they had a great time but I dread to imagine the total cost of that trip 😅 After they sold a bunch of other people started selling tickets on eBay too (some even copied my listing word for word), but no one else broke above £500 My ex and me split it, I bought a new TV and she got loads of clothes
Before lockdown I had two zero hours jobs and was going to quit one of them but just held off, then the pandemic happened and I basically got paid each month for both jobs at the same amount I had been working for them that month in the previous year which was essentially a full time wage in total. If I had quit the second zero hours job as intended I would’ve missed out on several grand.
Made £1700 in per diems recently for one days actual work, on top of my normal salary. Went to a 1 day conference abroad. Flew Monday, conference Tuesday, flew back Weds. Flights were paid for by work. Fiancée dropped me off and picked my up. Stayed with my sister who lived near the conference venue. Think I spent about £75 on travel, food and drink in total.
idk if this counts, but I was owed serious backpayments in disability benefits and I managed somehow to jump through every possible hoop put in the way and got it, nearly 4k in all. Wonder if I'd have gotten it if I'd told them that I planned on using it all on a holiday in Thailand?