2) Boarding Pets in your Home

Yes, animal lovers like to go on holidays as well. If you are an animal lover and have a big enough house that has some room to spare, you could consider offering holiday homes for pets. Since pets are more often than not considered “family-members” rather than just animals, there is a big enough market for pet-sitting and pet-boarding. The advantage is that you can easily try this business-model by offering your service to your friends and neighbors before making any decisions. If you test your idea with pets you already know, you will find out whether or not this could be a sustainable business for you.

There are several different ways of advertising your services.: If you want to offer occasional services for local people, you can put ads in your local newspaper. If you already have done some pet-sitting (or pet-boarding) for friends, you could use them to spread the word of your new business. After all, there is no cheaper advertisement than the good old Word of Mouth. Another place which should attract a lot of interest, is your local vet's practice. After all, that's where pet-owner turn up regularly, isn't it?

How much can you make?

The earning-potential of this type of business is largely dependent on the type of pets you want to board. You should be able to negotiate a price of around 50 – 200 $ per week per animal. If your place is big enough and your advertising is successful enough, you should be able to make quite a good income out of this. If you decide to run a full boarding home for pets, the prices average between 20 – 45 $ per animal per day, depending on what you offer.

What costs are involved?

If you are running a small, occasional pet-boarding service, there are no real costs involved in pet-sitting other than the time you might have to take to walk the dogs you are boarding.

Costs for food and litter (for cats) can be kept low if you ask the owners to give you enough food, litter and other equipment for their pet for the whole time they are away.

For setting-up a proper boarding-home for pets on the other hand, there are a number of cost to consider.

Those might include: The cost of land (if you don't already have it), the construction of the kennels, costs in meeting all legal requirements, employment costs, fees for cleaning, food and equipment for the pets as well as the usual business-costs of administration and marketing.


Given the high costs you could be facing when running a boarding-home rather than a small pet-boarding agency, it is advisable to start the business as a small enterprise before committing any real money to it.

1) Home-Made Jams and Cakes

If you have a passion for baking or home-made jams and chutneys, then this might be your way of making a bit on the side. You can sell your home-made produce either at local markets and fairs or directly to upmarket local tea-shops. 

The easiest way of getting started, is to find the best fairs and markets in your locality and pick out some of your favorite recipes. The initial costs of starting this business can be as low as the costs of the ingredients you need for your first yams and cakes and the fee for your market-stall. You will also have to pay for transport, power, packaging and advertising. If you do not want to put too much money into this at the beginning, try to link up with somebody who already holds a market-stall and try to get them to sell your products (in return for a sales-commission). If you are successful in finding the right partners handling your sales, you should hold onto them even when your business starts growing: The more time they spend selling, the more you have for producing the goods.

As with all food-businesses, be aware that your local health department will sooner or later be interested in your business. Therefore, it would definitely be worth going on a course that deals with hygiene, health and safety beforehand. You can easily find out the costs for those courses in your area using the internet.

There is a wide area of possibilities you can go into when it comes to specialist foods: unusual jams, special celebration cakes, smoothies, home-made ice-cream etc.

Your earning-potential depends as much on the type of produce you sell as on the sales you can make out of it. If you wish to create a reliable monthly income out of this, like with everything else, you will have to put a bit of time and effort into it. On the long run, you will need to think about: a recognizable brand, your own labels, attractive packaging and a workable distribution.

Your marketing options include: Wedding magazines, local pubs, local newspapers, flyers and handouts at local fairs.

If you are hard-working, have a passion for home-made produce and a bit of time at hand, this could be a profitable small business for you.

MONEY MAKES THE WORLD GO ROUND... Just think about it ladies, what would our life be like without a good session of "retail therapy" every so often? The only downside to this is that we have to make the money first before we spend it - at least we all (should have) learned that during and after the worldwide financial crisis. Never before was it so obvious that the world was spending more than it could possibly afford. Or, as other people might ask, how much of the money that was "lost" then has really existed (or really represented any real value)?
Therefore, we all have to ask ourselves how we can best use our money to make ends meet or where we can make a bit extra so that we can afford the things we like more easily without having to cut back elsewhere.
Within this section of our website, we will look at the different angles of finances, from the making of it over good financial planning to clever spending.