Income Report Feb 2019 - Desert of Desertion

Welcome to my income report for February 2019

In February I have earned $256 in total.

A modest increase over the previous month, but still far from my current goal of earning $200 of side income per month on average.

There is not much to say.

I thought I would be making big bucks by doing small and quick freelancing gigs.

It didn't happen and I burnt out instead.

More on that in the freelancing section.

February

...is a month of desertion.

Lack of sunlight, freezing weather, upcoming tax duties, bad luck, and slow progress.

It all adds up to the overall feeling of tiredness.

Six months have passed since I started this journey and I am starting to feel a slight burn out.

The routine of working 9-5, then developing my side projects until midnight, is not sustainable in the long term.

I can take another vacation and travel to a more inspiring country with better weather for a week, but it is a sunk cost without an adequate payoff.

I know I would be action faking instead of executing.

The finish line is so close. My project is only a few steps away from public beta. I can't slow down or give up right now.

I have to push through and ship that damn thing.

Only then I can balance out things I neglected in my life. Like getting a driver's license.

Income Breakdown

Savings Accounts

This category groups all interest income earned on money deposits and saving construction plans.

Nothing much happened since last month.

A new challenger bank, Trinity bank, has entered the Czech market.

Unfortunately, this bank focuses primarily on the affluent client segment and does not need client deposits.

Therefore their savings products are average at best.

Another bank, Moneta Money bank planned a big merger with most hip digital banks in the Czech market, Air bank, but the deal fell through.

Both banks offer below-average interest rates and the merger was an opportunity to redo their product offering.

Maybe next time.

P2P Lending

This category groups all my income from investing in P2P loans.

At the end of February, I was invested in over 420 loans. Luckily none is in default, yet.

Only three loans are suspiciously overdue for longer than two months.

I will keep my P2P bot active until I reach 500 loans in total.

Freelancing

This category groups all my earnings from freelancing gigs.

In February, I managed to finish only one gig on Peopleperhour.com.

The gig was about automating the content creation process on buyers' WordPress website.

I thought it would be a great opportunity to learn WordPress API and to dust off my python skills.

The delivery took a month from the initial bid to the final payment.

It took so long due to my bad luck.

One of the content sources changed their API just a day after I delivered my work.

I had to redo everything and lost a week of my free time.

The buyer refused to settle the invoice unless I make it fully functional again for free.

The lesson learned is to chunk your gig into smaller parts and keep working only if the buyer paid for the last delivery.

Don't bulk your work into a big project or you might end up like me.

In total, I have spent over 25 hours on this gig.

Again, I didn't beat the minimum hourly wage of an average McDonalds worker.

This has to stop.

I will keep hustling, but only if the gig is reasonably paid and at the same time represents an opportunity to learn new business models.

It means I will 100% fail to reach my goal unless I come up with a new reliable source of income.

What can be improved next month?

Business development

In March, I will keep bidding on Peopleperhour, but more effectively. I will constantly overbid the price set by the buyer and negotiate it down as needed.

On the finance side, I have finally downloaded and tested the Interactive Brokers Tradestation platform and I am horrified by its user interface.

It will take time to skim through the user manual and learn to safely execute trades.

Therefore the project of automated stock trading is on hold until I am 100% sure, that I can ensure the best manual execution.

Project development

In February I made significant progress with my Django React project.

I finished social networking functionality and learned Django templating basics.

I have the landing page done and I could say I finished the minimum viable products.

But it is far from done though.

Let's say the house is built, has walls and the roof, but if you would want to have a shower then it's not yet possible.

I have a long list of edge cases, that are not solved and will break my app in the future.

What must be done beforehand is the complete the on-boarding process and adding the user authentication process to my frontend app.

After that, I can launch a public beta.

My backlog is endless, but the most important steps remain untouched.

• Migrate from SQLite to Postgres SQL
• Buy cloud hosting and set up a production-grade environment
• Somehow integrate user authentication and registration process into React frontend and Django backend

My second project based on the Flask React stack is progressing well.

I learned how to create DB models in Flask, more importantly how to display and filter data using Jinja2 templating system.

If it goes well, I might finish the minimum viable product next month.

In its core, MVP will display a list of fixed income products and calculate optimal asset allocation.

Content development

Somehow I miraculously managed to squeeze 10 - 30 minutes of writing into my morning routine.

Make a coffee, sit down, and write a few words.

At this pace, I can produce 100-250 words a day. That means one low-quality blog post a week, or one low-quality book a year.

Sounds exciting, right?

The moment I come up with a book outline, I will start immediately working on my first book!

That would be all for this month. See ya in the next income report!