By Jasmin Birtles For The Daily Mail

Published: 17:02 EDT, 7 October 2022 | Updated: 17:14 EDT, 7 October 2022

The higher cost of mortgages will be a headache for many families already budgeting hard to meet all the bills.

Say you have a £200,000 mortgage that was on a 2 per cent rate and you’ve had to remortgage at 6 per cent, your repayments will now be an extra £441 each month, and that’s a lot of cash to suddenly have to find.

So it’s time to get your house to pay for itself. Ensure that lazy old pile of bricks makes you money instead.

If you have a spare room the obvious money-maker is to take in a lodger, whether full-time or part-time, permanent or temporary. You can make up to £7,500 a year tax-free from renting a room which is a good incentive in itself.

Can’t bear the idea of a full-time stranger in your home? Try a part‑time one through sites like fivenights.com or mondaytofriday.com where you get working professionals who only want to be there part of the week. For full-time lodgers, try spareroom.co.uk, roomies.co.uk and roombuddy.co.uk.

The higher cost of mortgages will be a headache for many families already budgeting hard to meet all the bills

Another option is to host a foreign exchange student, but this does come with some responsibility; you’re not just renting out your spare room, you’re agreeing to care for a young person. It’s decent money and could help towards mortgage costs. You can get more information from UK Guardians or Education First (EF).

You could also do what my friend Amanda did for a year or so and turn your spare bedroom (or dining room or other spare space) into a dance studio or other work-type space instead of renting somewhere else. Amanda took the furniture out and ran yoga classes there. You could charge £13 to £25 per person, depending on your area and level of skill.

Use your bathroom to make your own skincare products to sell or give as Christmas presents. There are recipes online and thousands of videos on YouTube showing you how to make lip balm, moisturiser, eye cream and more. Pick up cheap pots on eBay, Amazon and onbuy.com, and you can sell them at local markets, car boots and online for a profit.

You can also make a tenner or more by storing up old toilet rolls and selling them on eBay in batches (around 50 is ideal). Crafters are always on the lookout for these handy cardboard tubes, and gardeners will use them as propagating tubes (they are particularly good for sweet peas).

In the kitchen, you could make money hosting dinner parties, create a pop-up restaurant in your dining room, set up cooking classes and much more with eatwith.com.

If you have a spare room the obvious money-maker is to take in a lodger, whether full-time or part-time, permanent or temporary. You can make up to £7,500 a year tax-free from renting a room which is a good incentive in itself

Hosts need to be able to cook as you will be charging for what you produce but you can charge anything from £20 to £60 per person. You’ll need to budget for the cost of buying and preparing the food. It’s a great way to meet new people and to earn a bit of money on the side.

If you’re a Bake Off fan you could make money, like my neighbour Sarah does, by baking cakes and biscuits to sell at markets or direct to her growing clientele. She also makes jams, marmalade and chutneys.

To do these food-based money-makers properly you need to register with your local authority and do a short course in food hygiene. The Food Standards Agency has details at food.gov.uk/business- guidance/starting-a-food-business- from-home.

There’s money to be made from your driveway, too. If you don’t use the drive or have room for another car, rent it out to car owners through parklet.co.uk or justpark.com. The guys at justpark.com say that, on average, you could make £15 to £25 a day if you live near a sports stadium, £80 to 250 a month if you live near a station and £100 to £200 a month if you live near a high street.

Are you feeling Christmassy yet? No, nor am I. But I am thinking about how we can all do the festive season without going into the red yet again.

One way is to make the most of seasonal job opportunities. There are loads, including being a Christmas postie, working in department stores over Christmas and the January sales, doing temporary waiting and kitchen work in hotels, restaurants and nightclubs, and being a chalet girl (or boy) for the ski season.

There are temp jobs open with the Post Office as a mail sorter (£11.99-17.71 an hour). Go to angardstaffing.co.uk.

Recruitment website Indeed has dozens of seasonal jobs, including Christmas jobs at department stores and a wealth of sales assistant jobs. Look under ‘Seasonal Jobs’ at indeed.com.

The John Lewis Partnership, which includes Waitrose stores, is hiring 10,000 seasonal staff across the country. Find out more at jlpjobs.com.

If you have a car, you can do a bit of well-paid driving (rates tend to go up around Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve). Join Uber or get in touch with local taxi services. For example, in Scarborough, Bee Line Taxi Services is looking for drivers now (glassdoor.co.uk).

If you have childcare experience and a clean Disclosure and Barring Service check, you could get nanny work or evening babysitting. Offer your services on nextdoor.com, Gumtree and local Facebook groups, put a card on the noticeboard at a supermarket or newsagent, or try agencies such as sitters.co.uk or kidsitter.co.uk.

If you or your grown-up child wants to get away for the season, ski resorts need help. For example, Skiworld wants a team leader for the 2022/23 season (seasonworkers.com).

An outside electric socket, or, even better, an EV charger outside your home, means you can allow electric car owners to charge their vehicles. List it on justpark.com/ev/justcharge so that electric vehicle owners can find you and you can make a £1 to £1.50 profit per hour of charging.

If you don’t use your garage (and it’s not full of junk) you can rent that out, too, on one of the parking sites, or rent it as storage at spareground.co.uk or stashbee.com. If it’s a big, spacious one you could even develop it into an office or a holiday let and rent it out on Airbnb or Peerspace.

A shed can also become a lucrative source of income. You could convert it into a home office and rent it out. Or you could turn it into an urban chicken coop or rent it as storage space. Do be aware that if you’re going to be running any sort of retail/catering/food/beverage business from your home, you may need to check with your local authority for any regulations.

You could even rent out all or part of your garden as allotments for neighbours.

Frankly there’s not much money to be made this way as allotment rents are kept very low — anything from £10 to £50 a year depending on where you are in the country — so it’s not going to bring in a lot of cash.

However, you can reasonably do a deal with your ‘tenant’ that you will receive a portion of all fruit and veg grown in your garden through the year as well as the basic rent.

If money is really tight, I have been telling people who are struggling to pay their new, high-priced mortgage that it’s worth moving out and staying with relatives or friends (for a low rent), and renting out their property until they’re able to afford to move back in. It’s a drastic step but at least it means you keep your property.

Obviously you can rent it through an agent; put it on Gumtree; or, if it’s in the right area, you could rent it to tourists through Airbnb.

The advantage of this is that you’re likely to make more per week, but the disadvantage is that you might have void periods where you would lose money.

For those living in an interesting, period property (including 1960s brutalist tower blocks), or somewhere large and airy and located near a major city, you could make very good money — anything from £500 to £2,000 a day — renting it out to film and TV crews.

It’s not a decision to be taken lightly though. Film and TV crews can be huge — there might be up to 30 or 40 people milling around, potentially breaking things. Mind you, a YouTuber or photographer would only have a small number of helpers in tow, although they would pay the lower end of the fees.

There are lots of sites where you can list your property to rent it to film and TV crews. Some of the best known are location works.com, amazingspace.co.uk and shootfactory.co.uk.

Peerspace.com lets you list your home for free as a film or photography location but also as a meeting place, a party space and more.

It charges 15 per cent per booking but gives you extra possibilities for making money from your home. You can even advertise spare storage space to rent.

Feeling nippy? insulate your CURTAINS!

As the nights draw in you might be looking at your curtains and blinds a little more closely and wondering if they could do more to keep the heat in for you.

The answer is yes, they could! Windows are a prime area for loss of heat in the home, so the more you can do to stop all that lovely warmth going out, the better.

If you like the curtains you have, you could make them more draught-resistant by adding some thermal lining.

The National Trust has some helpful videos on how to line your curtains with an insulating material (nationaltrust.org.uk/ features/how-to-make-thermal-curtains).

Dunelm has thermal curtain lining material for £12 a metre and ready-made thermal curtain linings from £10. You can buy ready-made thermal-lined curtains from outlets such as Argos from £30 a pair and John Lewis from £25.50. For a really cheap option, sew a PVC shower curtain (for around £5) to your existing curtains, then add lining to cover it.

As the nights draw in you might be looking at your curtains and blinds a little more closely and wondering if they could do more to keep the heat in for you

If you prefer blinds, install thermal ones —blindsbypost.co.uk sells thermal ones from £9.99 upwards. Research from energy.gov has found that up to 40 per cent of domestic heat loss can be saved by installing thermal blinds, which equates to a 10 per cent saving on energy bills. So if, say, your home has the average energy outlay of £2,500 a year, it means you could potentially save £250 a year, or £21 per month, with thermal blinds.

BlindsbyPost has a 10 per cent discount code for Daily Mail readers. It’s valid on all thermal blinds, there is no minimum spend and it is available until December 31, 2022. Just put the code DAILYMAIL10 in the box when you get to the checkout.

Get paid to go on the holiday of a lifetime to New Zealand 

How do you fancy being paid to drive round Australia and New Zealand in a plush camper van, posting your experiences on social media?

As well as receiving a salary of 5,000 New Zealand dollars a month (£2,500) you would also be given extra cash for your living expenses, have your flights and visa costs paid and get a fully-furnished van to travel in. Sounds too good to be true? Well actually it’s a real job opportunity and is being offered by payroll company Deel.

The successful applicant needs to be someone with at least three years’ experience as a social media manager, influencer or brand ambassador, who has good communication skills and a valid driving licence and passport. It really helps if you have some personal connection to New Zealand or Australia, too, and you need to have a Covid vaccination pass as they are conditional in those countries.

Get your skates though, as applications (deel.com/dream-job) need to be in by October 11.

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