Browsing tag: money

One of my most lucrative mystery shopping companies recently made some changes to the way certain surveys were done. Result: an easy stream of income – up to $80-100 a month for little effort – is no longer worth it to me.

So I’m focusing more on the well-paying individual surveys, which do require more work and time, but at least they’re interesting. I’m also starting to reap the rewards from online surveys; I’ve cashed in well over $100 that I can remember off the top of my head in the last nine months. There were movie passes, Rebel Sport vouchers (we bought a pricey basketball, among other things), a Warehouse voucher, free Vodafone topups, and donations to charity.

Granted, that’s the culmination of a couple of years of survey-taking. But I’m happy with what I’ve got out of it. I’m young; I have much more time than money, and the hourly rate I can command isn’t really all that high. I’m really not sure about Donna Freedman’s assertion that you can make “anywhere from $50 to $250 a month for “work” that can be done while you watch your kids play in the yard”, but perhaps we get a lot fewer paid surveys down this way.

You do have to put a bit of effort in, though. Most importantly, keep your profile up-to-date – living situation, education and work, shopping habits. The more accurate information they have about you, the more likely you are to get surveys.

Donna suggests starting a dedicated e-mail address just for surveys – that’s not a bad idea, IF, and only if, you’re going to check it regularly (ie, every day). Surveys, when they come around, usually fill up quickly and you can’t afford to waste any time getting in. I’ve been doing SO many since starting FT work and being at a computer all day!

But hey, if certain sites aren’t paying off, just don’t bother. Even if the cashout threshold is low, if you’re struggling to get past, say the $2 mark, it’s not worth the time.

This story from the weekend was about a girl who had her phone go missing. The person who had it said they would arrange to return it to her. Between then and her realising that the person had been lying, the thief racked up more than $2000 on her account. Now she has to repay Vodafone directly, while the thief pays her back in small weekly installments.

Most people say it’s her fault for not alerting the company to the fact that her phone was stolen earlier. And fair enough. But the thing is, she truly believed that person was honest and intended to return it to her.

I’m a pretty trusting person, even though T has had the exact same thing happen to him (on Christmas Day, nonetheless) yet never ended up getting his phone back. And if it had been me, I would have probably taken that person’s word too, and gotten slammed with that massive bill.

And that is just another reason to be glad that I use prepay. It may not be a very ‘adult’ thing to do, but it’s cheap and keeps me safe.

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Head over to Money Relationship to check out this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance; Adam kindly included my post on how I essentially scored myself a payrise.

T is currently between jobs. The last couple of weeks have been ridiculously tight – it’s the first time he hasn’t had any income at all, whether it’s from working, or (as for much of last year) from unemployment. I’ve pulled a little bit from his EF to help pad the budget, but I do not want it to fall below $1000, and that’s just where it’s sitting at right now.

One thing I’ve been looking at is moving onto the collective contract at work. Basically, a lot of employees – mainly those who don’t work regular 9-5 kind of hours – are a member of a union and are bound by its employment agreement. Without going into all the details, it was greatly beneficial for me to transfer over to this, rather than stay on my individual contract.

Now that I work weekends, I qualify for the weekend allowances, which effectively doubles my rate. And when you consider I work 32 weekend hours every fortnight, that’s a big difference! It’s something like a 30% raise (Yeah yeah, I call myself a personal finance blogger and can’t even be bothered crunching the numbers. Whatever.)

Anyway, I’ve finally worked it all out, spoken to the appropriate people (easier said than done, given our HR manager is on parental leave. I went through four separate people to get this straightened out!) and am now getting extra compensation for working weird hours.

Realistically, I should have done this weeks ago. Why didn’t I? Well,

a) we weren’t a single income household, and there wasn’t that pressure
b) I wanted to wait until my three-year anniversary at work, so I could take advantage of a slight base rate increase
c) I’m a natural procrastinator – lazy, if you must.

And it wasn’t just the stress of not being able to make ends meet. I was spurred on even more after Her Every Cent Counts wrote a great post on maximising income when you’re still young (Haven’t read the post? Go! Now!)

So if you have the opportunity to increase your income – do it! You have no excuse. Take it from me.

So after a lot of time spent trying to wrap my head around the intricacies of our tax system, I’ve decided not to go ahead with GST registration.

Basically – and this was confirmed by an acquaintance who’s a tax consultant – it’s just not worth my time. My turnover is low and I don’t have enough expenses to claim. In fact, apart from the odd phone call, I’m really not sure what I could deduct.

I don’t have a space set aside primarily as a home office. I use my computer for some business, but only a few hours a week – and how do you even go about proving what percentage of time that is? And as for “depreciation”…I don’t even want to go there. Unless I go fully freelance (which I dont’ anticipate doing for at least, oh, a decade or so) or make over $60k a year (when I’d be required to register) I’m sticking with having my taxes paid for me.

What I DID learn, was:

• “If you’re registered, you need to file GST returns regularly. You add up the GST you’ve received, then deduct the GST you’ve paid from this total. If you’ve collected more GST than you’ve paid, the difference is payable to us. If you’ve paid out more in GST than you’ve charged, we’ll refund the difference.”
• You can account for GST in three ways: the payments basis, the invoice basis or a hybrid method. In the payments method you account for GST in the taxable period in which you make or receive payment. On the invoice basis you generally account for GST in the earlier taxable period in which you: issue or receive an invoice, or– receive or make any payment.
• You can file tax returns every one, two or six months.
• A tax invoice isn’t needed for supplies of $50 or less.
• If you set aside an area of your house principally for business use you may be able to claim GST on part of the costs of running your home.

For anyone who’s interested though, I’d recommend reading the IRD booklets IR365 and IR375.

And before I forget, head over to Canadian Finance to check out the latest Carnival of Personal Finance! My post on paying bills online was included this week 🙂