How You Can Make Money Using Your Home
With many of us already locked in a seemingly never-ending struggle to reduce our household bills, anything we can do to bring in a little extra income will be welcomed. Our homes have the potential to be decent money earners for most of us, even if we often overlook their potential in this regard. Here are some of the ways you can make money from your home.
Get a Lodger
If you have a spare room in your property, why not rent it out? A lodger can help to mitigate the impact of your rent payments and other bills by splitting them between you. The government even runs a ‘Rent a Room’ scheme, under which homeowners can earn up to £4,250 from renting a room in your main home, tax-free. As long as you aren’t charging above £354 a month to your lodger, you won’t have to worry about any tax paperwork.
A growing number of homeowners are now electing to rent their home out to commuting lodgers. These lodgers only need to use the room on weeknights when they are working. Website’s such as mondaytofriday.com can help you with this. Going down the commuting lodger route means you get to bring in some extra cash while also still having the place to yourself at the weekend.
Turn Your Spare Room Into a B&B
The idea of having a stranger staying in your home on a long-term basis is very off-putting to some people. A better alternative might be to make a room in your home available to holidaying guests on a short-term basis. This will allow you to charge relatively high rates compared to renting the property out, and also gives you the option to take back the room more easily. Anyone with a spare room and a desire to make some cash can opt to begin a bed and breakfast service.
A slight variation on this idea would be to rent your property out only while you yourself are on holiday. Airbnb is a very popular way of doing this and will take a lot of the hassle out of the process for you as an owner.
Let Your Property
Let’s say you have a property in London and a spare room London. A growing number of spare rooms London are being let out, but not through a letting agent. If you have a room to rent in London, you have many options beyond the usual flatsharing London arrangements. A room to let London used to be a burden, but with more people than ever looking for London rooms to rent, it is now an easy sell. However, even if you have rooms to let in London, most people won’t know what they need to do to rent rooms in London out to tenants. There are now a variety of services that can help with this.
One of these new services is londonshared.co.uk, if you have a room in London going spare, you can make it available to anyone interested in renting a room in London. London Shared will handle all the details, renting directly from you and paying you market rate or higher. This means that you are guaranteed to receive your rent payments on time.