Income Report May 2019 - Post Travel Depression

Welcome to my income report for May 2019

In May I have earned $139 in total.

A whole dollar more than the previous month.

I am not happy about it, but it could be much worse.

As I predicted last month, my passive income has reached a breaking point and will be on a continuous decline from now on.

If there wasn't a random sale in May, my total income would be 10% lower.

May

...was not a very productive month.

I spent more than two weeks traveling across Ukraine and Moldova with my workmates.

It was a long-planned trip and it was worth every penny.

We had a blast partying like there is no tomorrow.

But the consequence of such a prolonged vacation is the post-travel depression.

Yeah, it is a real thing.

Immediately after my return, I felt how pointless is the life of a mediocre office rat in this world of endless possibilities.

It reminded me of the reasons, why I started this blog and my journey towards reaching my fullest potential.

Yet, bills have to be paid.

So I had to force myself to quickly cool down my temptations and come back to reality.

It took me more than a week to get used to my old daily routine.

The only time I managed to squeeze in some coding session was in the last week of May.

Next month won't be much better, because I followed some random advice on Reddit, that the best cure for post-travel depression is to plan for the next trip.

Clever, right?

So I will be on the road for the majority of June and I won't bring Macbook with me, so I don't expect any progression next month.

Good House Music Youtube Channel

Is my nonprofit project and it is going well.

I have 8 subscribers now, which is great.

Gaining new subscribers is what keeps me motivated to create and upload content on regular basis.

Unfortunately, I couldn't keep up with my weekly upload schedule.

It takes so much time to render each video and I can't occupy my bro's PC all the time.

When I reach 1000 subscribers, I will invest in some gear and upgrade my prehistoric Intel Core I3 to AMD Ryzen or something with more than 10 virtual threads.

On the marketing side, I tried to promote my DJ sets on Reddit, but not successfully.

I guess house music fans don't hang out on Reddit, but on Soundcloud, so I have to explore that marketing channel as well.

The only way to move forward is to focus on the most popular labels and start creating remixes, mash-ups, or original tracks and build my brand around my original production.

Maybe next year or someday before my retirement.

I have to learn to play on the piano first, lol.

For now, I have to upload 20-30 videos first. That is the good amount of content, that I will aim for now.

Financia.cz

It has been a month since I shipped my first Flask MVP.

As it is with every new web project, traffic is almost zero in the beginnings.

I didn't expect much, but I hoped for larger traction.

First, there are a lot of passive backlinks, that was built by the past domain owner.

Nonetheless, most of them are from link catalogs, that don't have any authority over my niche.

Second, I thought people would search for saving accounts more.

But none of the above had any impact on the number of impressions.

What I can try is to:

• Use the free Google Adwords coupon and redirect some search traffic to my site.
• Add time deposits products. This will take me the whole day.
• Add different product types. This will take me weeks of analysis, research, and implementation.
• Add static product pages. Again my estimation is in weeks.
• Add blogging feature to my Flask app and start creating static content. This will take at least a month of development

Each of these options requires a very high time investment, so I will work on it depending on my mood and energy level.

Income Breakdown

P2P Lending

At the end of May, I was invested in over 620 loans.

For the first time in history, two risky loans in my portfolio fell into the default state.

This means I can forget about my principal.

Defaulted loans go to the court and it can take hundreds of days before there is any resolution in the case.

In the best-case scenario, I will get 30% of the amount, that is recovered by the P2P lender.

In the worst case, I will lose about 15% of my total profit.

To be fair, it was my fault, that I didn't restrict my P2P lending bot sooner.

And in both cases, I would invest in them manually in the beginnings.

Yes, I was that hungry for short risky loans.

What is worse.

I thought I cut off risky ratings from my P2P lending bot logic last month, but a month later I found out, that I have a bug in my code.

That means my portfolio got even riskier.

Fortunately, it is solved now.

Savings Accounts

The Time-limited campaign on one of my saving account has expired last month.

Another one will expire in the next two months.

That means my passive income stream is on a continuous decline.

In May, Czech National Bank announced, that they hiked interbank rates for the last time.

So there is practically is a zero chance, that retail banks will increase their saving rates in the foreseen future.

Fortunately, one of the challenger banks increased interest rates on their savings accounts to attract new capital.

I couldn't resist and immediately moved the majority of my savings to their new savings account.

Hopefully, their interest rate will stay at 1,58% for a few months.

Sell Items Online

I haven't sold anything for 4 months straight.

Until now.

I managed to sell a PC power supply unit, that was left after a major desktop upgrade I did a year ago.

I hope the buyer will not claim any refund, because I sold it cheap and the power supply itself is not very good.

It can handle Intel Celeron or Pentium chips at best.

Sometimes I am surprised, that I get multiple quotes for multiple items in a short time.

Other times I am left dry for months without any interest.

But I am happy, that I can sell anything at all with so little effort.

Every two months, I lower the price and re-upload items to Czech "craigslist".

By spending 5 mins. a month I get some cashback and free myself from unused materialistic possessions.

What can be improved next month?

Business development

In June I plan a long trip to Belarus, so I won't be able to work on my coding projects.

My long term goals are still the same.

Finish my Django React secret project first. Everything else is secondary.

Project development

Regarding my Django React project, I am still working on the refactoring of my React codebase.

It takes so much time to review my spaghetti code, understand what I thought it should do, remove all hardcoded helper variables and functions, and fix all issues, that comes along the way.

My rough estimate is, that I reviewed about 35% of my codebase.

When I am done with refactoring, I can migrate the DB engine from SQLite to PostgreSQL and deal with deployment issues.

Can't wait to finally ship this project.

Wish me luck and see you in the next income report!