Mike

So now my £30,000 ($40,000) debt is now a thing of the past – its time to start looking forwards to the future.

I’ve just passed my 54th birthday and its time I think about how I would like to spend my working years before slowing down and retirement.

My current job is great, it pays me a good income £43,500 a year, however it should be very fulfilling (ecology) but because of the endless amount of paperwork, emails, meetings, health and safety and other palaver — its just not the job or lifestyle I hoped that it would be.

I suppose just like everyone else – what starts out to be a great job just ends up as a drudge. No matter how exciting the job is to begin with, it just turns into a drudge and we wistfully look elsewhere for interest and new excitements.

Mrs Getrichwithme asked me when I was intending to retire, and my official retirement age is 67, but i said i reckon that i can retire in 8 years time when I’m 62,  especially if I can continue to sock away a thousand quid a month. I currently contribute £400 a month to my pension and £600 a month into my investment ISAs.  I think theres about £5000 in my pension, and theres £25,000 in my investment ISAs… its nice to a bit of money behind me at last.

But then I’ve been thinking (a dangerous thing at times) that if I can make a bit of extra income on the side from my hobby of fishing (I am a well known angler in my local area) then it can help towards my goal of retiring at 62, or if my new fishing income streams take off, then it could result in my finishing my official job even earlier and let me just concentrate on my fishing …. which is what I intend to do during retirement anyway.

So … I’ve already been a little busy.

Back in 2008 I started to write about my fishing adventures in a blog using the google blogspot.com service. It proved to be really popular at the time, and in 2015 I realised that I’d had over 3,000,000 visits, and over 500,000 hits on my google profile. Then I did a move that I’ve come to since regret – I decided to monetise my fishing blog to take advantage of all the traffic I was generating thinking that it would help me get out of the debt situation I’d found myself in. But it didn’t work – I bought a new domain with a virtually identical name to my blogspot blog name… and transferred all the files, documents and pictures over to my new domain and hosting package… and then instantly lost 99% of my traffic. No one could find my blog anymore, It didn’t rank highly in search engines anymore, and my dreams of making a packet from google adverts disappeared down the pan.

Duh.

So fast forwards to 2020, I still go fishing, and I still regularly blog about fishing, and have a small but regular readership. In my local area I am a recognised go to authority on fishing. But I don’t make any money from fishing, despite recreational fishing being worth £1.5bn ($2billion) to the UK economy and employing over 27,000 people.

So how do I go about getting a slice of this potentially valuable fishing cake ?

At present my blog gets only about 800 hits a month (less than that if I don’t post new material), my Google Adsense revenue is zero (my adverts have lapsed), and I have no payed advertising for local fishing businesses on my site.

I have a Youtube Channel in the same name as my blog,where I share a few interesting clips from time to time, but only have 75 subscribers, and my watched hours are very low.

So……. I am going to devise a plan to make some money from my hobby – the thing I am most passionate about in life, and have in depth expert knowledge about. — What can go wrong ?

So the plus is that I am a recognised authority on my sport (but only in my local area), I have a blog, I have a few technical skills around internet publishing, and I now have a bit of cash and time to throw at a new project.

This project is called “Make money from fishing, so that I can retire early and do more fishing!” …. simple eh — what can possibly go wrong.

And thats going to lead to my next blog post which will be entitled “Making money from fishing so I can retire early and do more fishing”.

Clearing my overdraft

June 2020 – I’ve now got my monthly overdraft down to only £450 – a marvelous effort from the £15,000 of summer 2018.

June 2018 — read below….

I have a short term ambition – to clear my overdraft which has over the years seen me go £15,000 into the red on a frequent basis.

Now that I’m no longer self employed – there is simply no excuse for hitting the red every couple of months. My income whilst self employed was comprised of infrequent but large pay checks. My bank we’re happy to cover the gaps but charged me for the privilege. Now that line of work has dried up, I ended up maxing my overdraft and credit cards out… Now I have to start paying it all back. (my overdraft as of June 2018 stands at just over £10,000 at an interest rate of 35%)

Last month I managed to scrimp my way to a £500 monthly surplus – as I had some back paid work expenses hit my bank account and I’m expecting a further £300 this coming month to come back my way.

That’s going to leave me another £700 to find to get back to staying in credit/in the black at the end of each month.

Today is the 19^th August – my ambition is to raise as much extra money as I can by my next pay day on the 20^th September by selling off my unused sporting equipment and other assorted goods and junk. Anything I make that’s in excess of the amount needed to clear my overdraft by the 20^th September (payday) is going to be put into a new stock/futures trading account.

Ebay is my preferred way of selling off my unwanted stuff – I’ve tried out a few car boot sales over the years and find them to be very frustrating – people make ridiculously low offers on things that I’m trying to sell, I always drive out feeling as  though I’ve given my stuff away.

Even though the fees from Ebay/paypal when combined hit about 20% of the sale price of my stuff – at least I feel as though I will be able to set a fair price.

So lets see how I get on – and I will keep updating this page for the next month showing what I’ve sold and how much I’ve received for it.

(current value of investment account £1600)

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!