I regularly get asked, "What is it that you actually do?" Below is some photos from my office which may help answer that question.
Picture 1 - a minor income stream for me is Google Adsense returns on this blog. Writing is easy when you (i) write about what interest you, and (ii) you plan out what you write. As easy way to plan is to stick to some basic templates. On the wall of my office I have half a dozen template plans pinned up.
At the moment I have 5 self published books on Amazon which provide me with a small monthly income. Previously I write an Ebook which I sold in good volumes via Ebay. I have a new book in the pipeline but have lost control of its length. Therefore I need to edit it and create more than one book from the remnants. The fashion at the moment seems to be to use the Amazon Kindle Publishing route. Suits me.
To the outside eye this blog may seem like a disorganised hotchpotch of half baked ideas but it is actually a repository of content which I will use at some point in the future.
Picture 2 - back in my teens I played a lot of Rugby and hence did a lot of weights to keep fit. Over time I began to enjoy the Weightlifting more than the Rugby (less arseholes!) When I left University and started working I let the Weightlifting slip and piled on the pounds. Now I'm in my Mid 30s and I'm carrying too much weight. I've got Liver problems and more off the back of this extra weight. In order to tackle it I've been doing lots of walking. In a sort of pseudo-LOA magic attempt I've pinned up a photoshop'd image of my head on a beefcake body!
Outside of my moneymaking activities one of my top hobbies is playing darts. I'm not great at it but I really enjoy it and can see myself getting better. One of my challenges this year is to hit a 180. I managed it in the pic below but I was cheating as I had thrown 9 darts! I believe that any skill can be mastered (a la Tim Ferriss) and I also know that there is good money in Darts tournaments. Once I've hit a 180 my next step will be to win cash. Any prize money at first!
I make a small but regular income by selling second hand books on Amazon. My system is really simple: I buy books in bulk for 10p or less on Ebay and then relist them on Amazon individually. This is marginally profitable. I reckon I made c. £500 last year without putting too much effort in. At the moment I have an inventory of c 2500 books. All of these are housed in my little office. I have 17 Ikea Lerberg units in this room! I've just turned Pro on Amazon and I'm sending off my first batch of FBA titles soon. In the foreground of your pic you can see my desk and laptop. I work from this desk most days on my Retail Analyst work.
My first real job was at Ind Coopes Alloa. I worked there for 4 years between 1997 and 2001. It has completely gone now and an ASDA store stands in it place. I cut this pic from the local paper to remind me of it. This may be weird but I reckon if I adjusted for inflation my wages in 1997 would've been better than I get now! All that cash just for rolling kegs about. No wonder it went out of business.
It was at the Brewery that I learnt that you get paid more the less work you do! Nobody tells you that in school do they?
I must admit that I am a geek. I own my own A-Frame. On the board at the moment I have details of a debt snowball I am rolling up. A Debt Snowball is when you pay off a small debt and then roll your monthly payment straight on to your next debt. I currently run 6 different mortgages due to my property portfolio. I am looking to work up a debt snowball so that I can pay the smallest one off. The online calculators tell me that I do this in 10 years. Imagine that. Once the smallest mortgage is paid off it would only take a very small amount of time to pay off the rest (by selling up and moving the cash across to pay down the next smallest). I would estimate it would take me roughly 13 years to pay off all my mortgages in this fashion. By doing this I would easily be a millionaire by the age of 47. Who wants that though? I want to be a millionaire at 35! I've been wasting my time for too many years LOL.
At the bottom of the board you can see my chart where I keep track on all the rent payments coming in.
Just off pic to the left is my electronic gear including my hidden camera tie. Back in 2009 I did lots of work for a Management Consultancy firm. To the layman this was "Mystery Shopping". I very much enjoyed it - it wasn't like working at all. Since 2009 I've done intermittent projects for the national guys. Moving forward I want to get more work off my own back. I currently have an ad on Gumtree offering my services.
Here is another pic of some of the bookshelves in my wee office. I have all my books sorted by first letter of the title. Having such a library is a fantastic resource as well as being a pretty fluid income stream. Every night I pick a book of the shelf to read in bed. I'm not a nostalgic person though. Every book goes back on the for sale shelf the next morning.
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