So I’m really pleased that I’m a finalist for the Finance Blog Awards in the money saving category. I would be extremely grateful if you could take a moment to vote for me. You don’t even need to put in any personal details, you just click a button and it is done. You can vote for me by clicking the image below or clicking here.

I hate overripe bananas, so once they’ve got a tiny speck of brown on them, they get thrown straight into the freezer – whole. Next time I’ll be putting them in freezer bags, as I ruined a tea towel whilst they defrosted.

They don’t look particularly nice, but the black colour of the skin is totally fine.

Once defrosted, I used the following recipe from Simply Recipes. Notice the lack of walnuts – because walnuts are expensive and I don’t need them to enjoy my banana bread.

• 3 or 4 ripe bananas, smashed
• 1/3 cup melted butter
• 1 cup sugar (can easily reduce to 3/4 cup)
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• Pinch of salt
• 1 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour

I cheated and used a mixer – as you can see, the bananas are find mashed up, despite their black skin

Not a fan of banana bread? Don’t worry – I’ve pinned a whole heap of recipe ideas for overripe bananas for your perusal.

A lot of people have been asking me about whether they need to declare their extra income to HMRC, and if so, what needs to be declared. Unless you’re only selling your unwanted items on eBay, then you need to be declaring your extra income. This includes but is not limited to online surveys, sponsored blog posts, mystery shopping, smart phone app earnings and more. Even if you’re working full time and paying tax through PAYE, you still must declare your extra income. The whole process of registering as self employed and then completing a self assessment each year only takes a few hours.

Of course, every blogger or eBayer doesn’t have to register. If you’re blogging but not getting any income from it, and if you’re just selling your unwanted items on eBay, you won’t need to register. But once you’ve accepted payment from your blog, or sold something on eBay that you specifically bought to sell, you’re going to want to go ahead and register for self assessment. You must have registered by 5th October after the end of the tax year you need to complete a tax return for. So that means if you’ve made some extra income between 6th April 2013 and 5 April 2014, you must register by 5 October 2014. You can register late, but you may face a penalty fine. You must then complete your self assessment and pay any taxes owed by January 2015, so as you can see, you have plenty of time to get this all sorted, and know exactly how much you earned and how much you can offset.

How much are you going to have to pay out in National Insurance and tax? Here is a brilliant calculator that allows you to put in both your employed and self-employed earnings. So, for example, if you were earning £15,000 a year from your “proper” job, and £200 a month online (with no expenses), after tax and National Insurance you will actually be taking home £148.08 from that £200 extra you’re making each month.

To register, simply go here to the HMRC website and register your business as self employed – don’t be scared by the use of the title “business”, you can apply as an individual earning some extra money. Be sure to read through carefully and answer all the questions. Once you’ve registered you will receive your Unique Taxpayer Reference, which you can use to register to complete your self assessments online. Once received, go here to the HMRC self assessment home page and on the right hand side and select “sign up for self assessment online” and follow the process.

The HMRC site is a bit of a minefield, unfortunately. But for starting out, be sure to check out their information page about Undeclared Income. If you do get stuck then they have a very helpful, freephone call centre number, where someone is on hand to answer your questions. The number is 0300 200 3310.

HMRC can take the tax in two ways – you can either have your tax code from your main job changed, so that you’re taxed through that, or you can opt to pay it yourself when the bill comes in. Personally I prefer the second option, keeping the tax I owe away from my personal income.

Remember that you can offset most expenses that you have incurred, so for example, web hosting costs, or even petrol to boot sales where you’ve purchased items to sell on. I can strongly recommend using Google Drive/Google Docs to create a spreadsheet of all your income and outgoings related to earning extra income. This will help you to complete your self assessment much more easily.

If you have any further questions then feel free to ask them in the comments. I’m no accountant, but if I can’t help you then I’ll try to steer you in the right direction.

The tour is now a video tour, and I even show you the inside of some of the boxes! This room is a work in progress – Tony’s side needs some attention and some matching furniture. He’s currently lusting after this gaming desk from Ikea, and apart from the dark colour, I completely agree!

And there’s also a special guest appearance by Autumn, so be sure to check it out!

I’m still feeling my way around for now, and my first video, a car boot sale haul video, had to be removed as the audio went out of sync somewhere between editing and uploading, but I’m still posting some videos about making money and hopefully soon enough, saving money.

So please go and check out my channel and subscribe.

From what I’ve taken away from it, The Money Shed is an independently run forum where people come together to discuss their money making efforts. Whilst you’re able to do this on the Money Saving Expert forums, you’re not able to provide links to your own site and referral links can only be posted in one particular area. The Money Shed does this differently – you can post your links in your signature and on the main posts, referrals included. People talk about anything and everything from online surveys to using YouTube to generate revenue.

Everyone is really friendly and people are willing to share advice, hints, tips and even answer questions for you. They make you think outside the box, encourage you and point you in the direction of things you’d never thought about. The membership is still quite small, with almost 250 members so far, but Jon is actively promoting The Money Shed, and you’ll see new members arriving daily.

I really cannot stress how brilliant this forum is, and how it is different to others out there. It’s a great starting point and the informal nature of it means you can’t really put a foot wrong. Here are my favourite posts so far:

• Skinnylatte makes videos for YouTube and details her earnings.
• Jon works for 63336 (I blogged about them).
• Me writing about Make Money Without a Job.

It would be great if you could head along and see whether The Money Shed is for you. You don’t need to be a member to view the posts and you may come away feeling very inspired.

I’ve been really busy in April, as I decided to develop and launch a new site – Make Money Without a Job. It’s been tough going – the domain I wanted wasn’t available, so I started the bidding process. And for some time I seemed to be splashing the cash anywhere and everywhere to get things exactly how I wanted.

But the site launched last week, and will be run in conjunction with From Aldi To Harrods and Bargainista Bride. It’s definitely a lot of work but I make no secret of the fact that I want to be supporting myself through my online ventures instead of having a job. Ideally within 24 months!

So head over to the introduction post – there’s also a Rafflecopter giveaway for a £20 Amazon voucher.

You see a penny (or any coin!) on the ground, do you pick it up, or walk straight past it?

We love picking up coins from the ground, and starting in January, we decided to dedicate one of our coin jars to what we’ve termed our “roadkill” – money we’ve found on the ground. Today, curiosity got the better of me and I had to count it up. Can you believe that we’ve managed to find £3.01 already?

Sure, it won’t buy us a portion of chips each (we’ll have to share!) but I’m impressed that this was free money, just laying around on the ground. I’ve also seen people just throw coins on the ground because they don’t like having coins on them. Crazy.

Great places to look for coins:

• The ground around car park payment machines.
• Change compartment at coin payment machines – car parks, train stations, etc.
• Around bins.
• Coin operated trolley bays.
• The ground near tills.
• Outside kiosks.

So will you be picking up coins you see on the ground?

The site & how to earn:
Bubblews is a site where, simply put, you write short posts (400 characters or more, which is roughly 100 words), and once they’re posted, you earn 50% of the advertising revenue the site gets from that post. Every time that you get a comment, a “like” or “dislike” or your post is shared on social media, you earn. So you want to make a lot of friends, called connections, and mutually interact with them. You are allowed to post 10 posts a day, and you can add your own photos. There are 15 categories to write in, and your posts can be pretty much anything as long as they’re in English and don’t use profanity.

Payment method(s) & thresholds:
You can then cash out via Paypal once you reach $50 (roughly £31). If you prefer not to receive Paypal cash, you can provide your address and a link to an item you want them to purchase on your behalf and have delivered to you. I’d opt for the Paypal cash. Once you hit that “redeem” button, expect to wait 10 days until it lands in your Paypal account.

My verdict:
I really, really cannot make up my mind about Bubblews. It can be really tedious – you can write a really good post with lots of photos and earn very little, then you can write a post saying that you’re going to bed and earn a lot. People either take their writing on Bubblews very seriously by calling themselves writers, copyrighting their work, adding a word and character count and running a plagiarism checker on all their posts, or people (like me!) post the most random drivel about their day, their lunch and anything else. The site is used by a lot of international users, who don’t have English as their first language, so you need to bear this in mind. But because of this, there are certain times of the day that are busier than others, and the website also seems to go down a lot in the day time.

It is all about connections and interacting with others, and up until I had around 300 connections I was sure that this blog post was going to be a negative one. But at around 300 connections I saw my earnings increase. It doesn’t seem to provide passive earnings – I’ve certainly not seen a great increase in my earnings when I’ve been away from Bubblews overnight. I’ve made $50.03 from 101 posts, so just $0.49 per post. I received my notification of e-cheque 5 days after requesting payout. I’ve seen some people mention getting $1+ per post, but I’m definitely nowhere near that. People have also mentioned being able to redeem once a week – again, that’s not something I’m close to achieving.

But Bubblews is definitely not a scam, it’s legit – even though tedious.

Do you use Bubblews? Do you have any great tips?

Want to see how I upcycled this beautiful dressing table from a £10 desk I bought on eBay? Of course you do!

Click here to head over to Thrift Week and read all about it – and my experiences using chalk paint powder.