From Lithuania with love: our last-minute lodger

Having not made it onto the Sunday Times Rich List again, you could well find yourself pimping your spare room out.

It’s a lot like internet dating — you upload an old photo of the room before it was ravaged by time and kids, making sure the picture is taken from a cunning angle to make it look wider (okay, not quite like internet dating), and then carefully photoshopping out all the dents, stains, blemishes and wear-and-tear (actually, just like internet dating). You might even nick the vase of flowers from the sitting room to stick in the spare room for the photo, the way CGI effects are added to films.

Then you have to write a profile for your room that strikes just the right balance of come-hither, without attracting every homeless nutter in town. So for every ‘Free Sky Sports’, there will be a ‘No Party Animals’ underlined in bold; bills may be included, but only for dog lovers who don’t mind kids or cats either. It’s tricky.