If you’ve read much of our website you will hear us talk about how we funded a lot of our van build and travels through something called matched betting. We’ve written about what exactly matched betting is (read about it here) and also how to get started yourself (read about that here) and we’ve had hundreds of people (around 543 people at the point of writing this) sign up and start using matched betting to fund their van builds, travels or whatever adventures they can imagine. As a demonstration of how this can work and what a positive impact it can have on your funds we decided to show how you can go from £50 to £500 in your account thanks to matched betting.
In the following article I’ll briefly go over the offers I’ve taken to turn £50 into £500, if you want an in depth guide on how each offer works please either read our guide or you can sign up to Profit Accumulator who have an extensive guide on how to start of their own as well as being where I found all of the listings for these offers. So without further ado lets get kickstarting your van fund…
Step 1: Sign up to Profit Accumulator
Before I crack into the offers the first step is to sign up to Profit Accumulator. You can sign up for FREE account even though it means you only get the first few offers but even the free account gets you access to the all important Calculator which is what we’re going to be using to calculate what we need to place with the bookies and the exchanges. If after you’ve tried the free offers Profit Accumulator provides and you are happy with the money you have made you can always upgrade to a platinum account at any time for just £17.99 a month (which is only the cost of doing just 1 offer a month)
Step 2: Coral Offer
Now that we’ve signed up for Profit Accumulator we can follow their video on the step by step process of some of these offers. The way all of the offers we are going to be doing in this article work is that we will place a bet with a bookie, this bet is going to qualify us for a free bet with the same bookie. It is this free bet we will turn into real money and therefore make us some profit (hopefully you’ve already read our guide on what matched betting is so this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise).
The current offer with the bookie Coral is “Bet £5 and get £20 in free bets” therefore we will be placing a £5 bet with Coral and they will then give us £20 to bet with in free bets. The way in which we guarantee that we won’t lose money with these bets is by laying off the bets in what’s called an exchange. For example if we bet on Team A to win the football match with Coral we would then lay Team A with the exchange which is the same as saying we think that Team A will not win the match. Therefore if Team A wins the match then we make money with the bookie and if they do not win we make money with the exchange. Using the calculator on Profit Accumulator we can make sure we don’t lose any money and guarantee we make profit from our free bets.
For this Coral offer I found the following:
I found these odds for a football match between Man City and Wolves. The calculator shows that I can place my bet on this match for £5 at the odds of 1.50, if I do this then I would need to place a lay bet of £4.84 on my exchange (in my case Smarkets) and no matter what happens I will lose 16p. This is called my qualifying bet and it will unlock £20 worth of free bets for me.
I was happy with this small qualifying loss so I deposited £5 into Coral and the remaining £45 into Smarkets and placed the two bets. Once the bet had been placed I received £20 worth of free bets from Coral.
Now with the £20 of free bets I can simply follow the same process except I change the calculator to look at Free Bet (SNR) and I can place my bet with Coral using the £20 free bet and then lay the bet with the exchange Smarkets and regardless of the result I will have converted the free bet (ie. fake money) into real money, in this case £13.15.
As we increase the money we have to play with the more money we will be able to make out of each free bet and the easier this process becomes. Now that these two matches have finished our balance sheet looks like this:
Step 3: Repeat the process
The above step is very much just a quick gloss over how matched betting works, you will need to do some more reading before you delve straight into it however that gives you an idea of how I started from £50 and now have £62.99 to bet with. I won’t go into every offer in as much depth but basically I’m just repeating the above process over again with a number of other bookies. The next bookies offer I did was Betfred whose offer was “Bet £10 and get £30 in free bets”. After withdrawing £10 from my Smarkets account I opened a Betfred account using this money. I found a qualifying bet with minimal losses using Profit Accumulators software and bet and layed the bet with the bookie and the exchange respectively.
Once the qualifying was finished and the bet had settled I withdrew the money from Betfred (because the bookie bet had won) and transferred it into Smarkets so I had more money to play with. I then bet on a horse using my £30 free bet and layed the bet in Smarkets to make a profit of £24.55.
Now I’ve finished my second offer lets take another look at my balance sheet:
I followed exactly the same process of moving my money from bookies to exchange and to new bookie accounts, making sure as much of it as possible was in the exchange as I could so I could take better odds and offers with higher values over the next few weeks as I built up my bank and got more familiar with matched betting. After opening accounts with 9 bookies and a few weeks worth of matched betting my current balance is finally over £200. Not bad from starting at just £50
I’m not far off reaching my half of my target of £500 all from doing offers which can be done when signing up for these 9 bookies. As the phrase goes, it’s death by papercut and I’m slowly but surely making money seemingly £8 at a time!
Step 4: Just keep repeating…
It may not seem that fun but it really is a lesson for those wanting to try matched betting, it is a bit of a monotonous process but it brings results. Over the next month or so I just kept signing up to bookies and completing offers. Finally after a few months of matched betting I hit my target of £500 after starting at just £50. Here’s my final balance sheet:
What did I learn?
When I first started matched betting around 4 years ago I had more money to invest which meant I was able to do more offers faster and more effectively than Olivia was able to do so however this task taught me how much more difficult it is when you have a limited budget to start matched betting like she had. After seeing how selective I had to be with the offers I chose and having to wait for money to move accounts I appreciate the time it takes to do matched betting in this way. But one thing it also taught me was that you can do matched betting with as little as £50 to start with, you can increase this with just a few hours a weeks worth of work up to £500 and there’s plenty more offers to do not to mention the daily offers which are sent to me through Profit Accumulator.
If you’re looking for a way to kickstart your van fund while you’re in the planning phase or if you’re looking for that extra cash to invest in your build then matched betting is still a great way to do this we think!
Sign up to Profit Accumulator to learn how to do what I just did
