Make money when you're sitting on the toilet

Forget reading the paper or daydreaming, your time on the toilet could be making you good money. Apparently one in ten people who make money from filling out surveys do it on their smartphone while using the toilet, and even if that's not your thing, we have found some interesting ways to make cash from the comfort of the throne.

1. Filling out surveys
The idea has come from online research site, Crowdology, which says most of its surveys take less than ten minutes, so can be squeezed into a toilet break. There are plenty of websites where you can sign up to do this. Some will pay in tokens and some in cash, and most will pay you anything up to £10 for completing a survey (although 50p is far more usual).

2. Checking Freepostcodelottery.com
This is a real rarity in the lottery world, because you don't pay to enter. You just register your postcode, and pop on the site once a day to check the winning postcodes for the day. There's a jackpot of £250 up for grabs if the postcode is yours (plus a number of other smaller prizes). The prizes come from the advertisers, so the only way you have to 'pay' to enter is by visiting the site each day - and you can schedule that for your toilet breaks.

3. Switch
Most of us put off switching everything from our energy company to our mobile phone because we think we don't have the time to shop around. Ten minutes in the bathroom is long enough to put your details into a price comparison site, and then browse the details of the cheapest deals to see if they meet your needs. It's possibly the least exciting thing on this list, but it's the only one that could save you £200 during a single trip to the toilet.

4. Using the toilet roll itself
This is a great discovery from Skintdad, who discovered that by collecting the cardboard tubes from the middle of the rolls, you can sell them on eBay for people to use for craft projects. He says the average sale price for 50 rolls is about £7 including postage. It's not going to make your fortune overnight but it's not a bad profit for something that would otherwise go to landfill.

5. Work out what you actually make on the toilet
We'll admit this one is cheating, but Plumbworld has produced a calculator which works out how much money you earn while on toilet breaks at work. It won't make you any richer, but at least you will discover that you're actually making a small fortune on the toilet at work.