Sunday 26 July 2020

Match betting - the end of an era

Today was my last day allocated for match betting, as my future plans will make this activity obsolete. I decided to stop, taking in account the goods and the bads. I checked my notes, and i have few interesting statistics. 

I did match betting for a total of 32 months, and my total wins amounted to £12186.63 with an average of £380.83 per month. My best month was March 2020 with a total profit of 1508.42. My worst month was September 2019 with a total loss of 281.57. 

It was a nice experience, with all the nerves consuming events, and i learn my maths better because of it. 

My next side gig now is cryptocurrency, and i have some funny stories to tell about that also. But not right now. I managed to grow a portfolio of cryptocurrency from £600 in December 2018 up to $7748 today, aiming for the 100k in few years from now. 

Nice to write again, as i was busy with thousand other things lately. 

Take care everyone!

G.

Tuesday 21 July 2020

Life in times of cholera (kidding, just COVID19)

I feel like i did not write in months. After an initial push-up to finish my book, i stopped writting for a while. I do not write, i do not do much virtually, as i had enough of it. I enjoy more going out for a walk, or doing stuff in the real world. I find happiness in working the garden, painting a door or buying a property. This later project is pushing me to the limit, even if I seems to be lucky from multiple points of view. I finally did something at the right time. If was hard doing the First buy ISA deposits every months, but I always did that first, as soon as I got my wages, and now I will finally use the deposit. I have also applied for the 20% of deposit Government scheme, and i do not pay any stamp tax on top of this. I saved some serious money, and i have very good terms of my mortgage. Basically for every 5000 extra that I pay, one year will be gone from my mortgage time. Come on crypto inspiration, do not let me down now. 

I have also decided to keep the betting to a minimum, as lately it is not as lucrative as before, and I can use that time doing some more lucrative initiatives. It was nice while it lasted, but now it is the time to stop investing too much time into it. I will probably still do it now and then, on major events. 

I decided to buy a property, and to marry, and have a wedding in the next 12 months. And a nice honey moon. How are all those aligning with FIRE? I am still thinking at it. 

That's it for today, time to run to the garrage to chase some domuments now!

Enjoy the day!
G.


Wednesday 1 July 2020

End of the month report - 1st of July

Total portfolio: £37113 (+1688)
Debt: 0 (0)
External funds: ZERO
Car: No
Net Worth: £37113 (+1688)

Investments UK: £31925 (+899)
Investments overseas : £3934 (same)
Cash: £1168 (+327)
Pension: £13852 (+277)

Total Income: £1456(main job)+170 (second job) + 258 = 1884
Passive income: £258 (13.69%)
Savings rate: 11.67%

Side hustle 2 profit: £2.30
Side hustle 3 profit: £ 152.39 (Betting in May £61.47)
Side hustle 4 value: £6926 (Funds spent in crypto:5067)
Side hustle 5 profit: £109.40

This was an interesting month. The third month in the row with me staying at home with full pay (thanks to the wonderful job management), and i want to say that i had a dramatical learning curve, as i could see this being my mini-early-retirement test. Things that we see and think about are not really like we predict them. Staying at home, doing nothing, is very hard, and that approach goes down faster. You can only watch couple hundred movies before you had enough, and to play hundred hours of computer and phone games before you do not want to do it anymore. In my first three weeks i catch up with many of my TV  shows, but now i am barely see a movies or a TV show episode any other day. Computer wise, i was playing some games for a month, in order to 'relax', but the amount of pleasure and joy deriving from entertainment declined quickly in direct relation with the increased time allocated for it. So, too much will lead to less, but not as enjoyable. I will carefully organise my hobbies prior to my early retirement carefully, and i can see this as a change of views and i will probably continue to work, but doing something more rewarding emotionally and spiritually, i would say. 

Now the good parts. I started to learn guitar and Spanish, doing up to one hour at the beginning and it was a blast, but lately, after 3 months, i am not so excited with my lessons, even if i still like it, so guitar is down to 15 minutes daily on average and Spanish lessons 5-10 minutes.

I am cooking a lot more, healthy and from scratch, and i can be choosy and buy better ingredients to experiment with them. I cleaned the whole house, couple of times, and i did lot of gardening (my garden is 85% perfect at the moment). I am shopping, walking, training 3-4 times a week  (strenght and calysthenics at home). I even run from time to time, but not as often (home trainings are quite rough and i am at my soreness limit few times a week). I had my garage door painted (and this was on the 2017 To-do List). 

So, overall, staying at home for 3 months was an interesting experience making me to re-evaluate my plans for the future. 

Now, back to the money, i had some problems budgeting in the first two months, it seems that staying a lot more at home, you tend to spend more money that usual. But i adapted to the current situation and i am back to normal now. I really need to get my cash reserves back, as they are quite low now. But i used some of them money to buy some shares when they were super low, so i cannot complain about it, as they already gained 10-12% in value. Next on my list is Ratesetter, where I want to deposit some more money in the next few months. The portfolio is increasing, even the pensions are a bit up, after an initial decrease in March-April. I did a bit of match betting, but it is not the same as before, even if i made around £150 last month. I had a bit more takeaways than usual in the past month, as pizza shops and few others opened up to the public. And i learned a bit more about cryptocurrencies, and i started to use some of the investments platforms related to them, but it is quite complicated and risky, even if they offer some good interest rates (11.90% for stablecoins - crypto meant to be always $1 in value, like virtual cash, if you don't worry much about your funds being hacked - it is a low risk but it is there nevertheless). 

Wish you a perfect July! Stay safe and grow fast!
G.

The free cash from June - my month in cryptocurrency (Interest, profit and portfolio)

 First i will start with my portfolio. 

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My main position is in BTC (26%) at the moment, used to bring interest of various DEFI platforms. Next are two DEFI tokens CEL (16%) & CRO (9%). They used to be much less, but I can't complain if they were increasing very fast. NEO (12%) is another one of my bets, especially with NEO 3.0 update on the table. Tezos (XTZ) is now down to 6%, used mainly for stacking on Kucoin (still on offer - 14.34% interest on Savings Staking). Ant the last major position goes to ETH with 5%, i am actively try to increase this in the next 6 months, before the PoS. 

My portfolio is up + £265 in relation with the aquisition cost. 

Ok, that was the boring part. 

Let's see the profits:

Celsius - £51.17 from interests and promo codes

Zen Masternode - £4.03 from rewards

Crypto.com - £3.60 from staking CRO/MCO

Publishox - 20.82 LRC. 7.91 BAT, 10.28 DAI transfered to my wallets.

Blockfi - £0.66 in BTC interest

I have also £33.84 made with different faucets (Coinpot, cryptofaucet), Coinbase Earn, Brave, XYO phone mining, GAS from NEO and Brave Browser BAT which i count all together because we are talking about lots of small amounts moved through the month. 

 

So, at the end of the month, i had £93.53 made from crypto (this is $116.18 for my American friends). These are amazing good news for me, as at the beginning of Coronavirus outbreak in March i would have only £7 monthly return from my cryptocurrencies. 

Now my focus in July is on buying up to 1 ETH, in multiple small steps. If you want to check any of my income sources, there is a list of links bellow for both platforms and websites (some may be referral, some may have bonuses explained in my other blog posts, ask me if you have any questions). 

 

 

My crypto-related links  (check ratings - 1 to 5 stars based on my personal experience)

 

Games to gain crypto

***** League of Kingdoms - link here: similar with Heroes of Might and Magic (worldwide - paying in DAI)

**** DogeWars - link here (paying in Doge, 10-100 Doge initial investment, fight bosses and 1vs1 arena)

 

Exchanges

***** Binance( good for staking/savings ) - link here

***** Kucoin( good for staking/savings ) - link here

***** Coinbase( ideal for beginners )- link here  

 

Investments

**** BlockFi (decent interest rates, but less choices than Celsius) - link here

***** Celsius.network (good rates of interests and monthly codes for free crypto, 1235256530 => my referral for $10 bonus  ) - link here

**** Coinbundle (investing in crypto bundles) - link here  

**** Stakecube (staking, masternodes and very easy to claim faucets for 28 coins/tokens) - link here

 

Wallets for multiple cryptocurrencies

***** Coinpot - link here (microwallet for all Moon faucets, Bitfun and Bonusbitcoin)

***** Atomic wallet - link here (microwallet for Publish0x DAI, BAT and Loopring)

***** Sphere wallet (for Horizen, combined with the faucet for extra bonus) - link here  

**** Crypto.com wallet (good interest staking and 50$ bonus in MCO) - link here

 

Free crypto (faucets and more)

****Lbry.tv (free crypto for watching or making videos) - link here

**** Bitfun( 3 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here

*** Bonusbitcoin( 15 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here

**** Moon Bitcoin ( 5 min countdown - automatically deposit to Coinpot wallet ) - link here

***** Horizen faucet ( 20 hours countdown - automatically deposit to Sphere wallet ) - link here

*** Tezos faucet ( 7 days countdown - automatically deposit to Coinbase or Binance wallet ) - link here

** Tron and other crypto faucet (24 hours countdown) - link here  

 

Others

***** Publish0x blog (Free BAT, DAI and Loopring for reading/writing - can combine with Atomic wallet) - link here

***** Brave browser (Free BAT for using it, based on paid ads, very good AdBlocker and high speed) - link here    

 

 

Disclaimer: This text also can be re-published on my personal blogs, such as this one.