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.

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.

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. 

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.

 

End of the month report - 1st of June

Total portfolio: £35425 (+2045)
Debt: 0 (0)
External funds: ZERO
Car: No
Net Worth: £35425 (+2045)

Investments UK: £31026 (+4185)
Investments overseas : £3934 (same)
Cash: £841 (-1590)
Pension: £13575 (+579)

Total Income: £1440(main job)+0 (second job) + 315= 1755
Passive income: £315 (17.93%)
Savings rate: 12.94%

Side hustle 2 profit: £1.58
Side hustle 3 profit: £ 61.47 (Betting in April £10)
Side hustle 4 value: £6255 (Funds spent in crypto:5067)
Side hustle 5 profit: £109.40

This month was quite uneventless. Yes, that is a word. I had even few bets once the German Bundesliga started. All is good now, Coronavirus pandemic seems to be pushed back slowly, the shares are recovering, the pensions are recovering, even the cryptocurrencies are recovering. Crypto-markets are booming in fact after the halving event, and i was testing few more revenue streams. Most trustworty two that i found are Celsius.network and Block.fi, both of them offering quite good return (interests between 3-11%) if it happen to have some crypto staying in the wallet without any interest (there is some risk like every investment, but they are paying weekly or monthly and those two mentioned are backed up by serious bussinesses, there are many others offering more or less, but i did not like them).

I had some nice return from internet related stuff, and in June i started a new lockdown-themed side hustle - focus groups and research - see the article here with all of them websites doing this. Basically you stay on Zoom or similar programs for 40-60 minutes chatting about stuff (coffee, banks, internet etc) and get paid for it. I did 3 focus researches until now, and i got paid £90, 45 and 60 for it. Easy work, all that you need is a good laptop with microphone and camera and free time. 

Enjoy this beautiful summer!

G.

My month in crypto ( How i made £109.40 in May)

Motto: ''I lost some battles, but i won the war.'' (Me trying to aquire financial independence)

 

This was a good month (£109.40 compared with £6.78 in April). I cannot imagine how i was just keeping my crypto in Coinbase, instead of using some decentralised finance (DEFI apps or accounts). So, slowly slowly i start to learn about them, and i went to use Binance, until they lowered the interest rates, then i moved to Kucoin exchange, as they still have a decent offer thanks to the X-pool initiative, providing you POL token on top of the interest for the main coins. 

After this experience, i made an account with Celsius.network and BlockFi, and having enough ZEN (42 Horizen coin) i made a Secure Masternode, in order to provide some extra ZEN on top of the daily faucet (which is maximised with all the boosts, this giving me 1026% bonus, so 10 times more than the basic amount). I just made an account on MyCointainer, but i am still learning about this one (just got some BeanCash there which i got for free from cryptofaucet). I am also receiving Neo staking bonus in form of Gas tokens. 

I have also received small amounts of crypto from PublishOx, using Brave browser, various good paying faucets (all the links in my signature) and using EarnCrypto.com website (some high paying surveys when i am bored, travelling with train/bus/car or in a waiting room).

In May, on Celsius.network i got $8.16 in interest and $60 in promo codes bonus.

On BlockFi i only deposited a small amount (it was a promotion in May with more than $200 deposit and you will receive $100 on 1st of August if you Hodl the crypto until then. I received $0.71 in interest and a bonus/compensation of $25 in GUSD because i asked for it after their website had a data breach (see the articles about hacking and compensation in here and here).

On Kucoin Exchange soft staking i received $8.92 (most of it as POL tokens due to me staking on their exchange).

 

On Binance staking (i use the savings account for this) i received $1.31 in interest.

On my ZEN Masternode i received a massive $1 for staking, but i just started the masternode on the 17.05, so i will give you a more accurate reading after one full month. By the way, you only need 42 ZEN to do a masternode, and the cost for the needed coins is around $224. The return is said to be in the range of $45 per year ( check the rates in here).

I had also received $20.76 combined from using Brave, writting on Publish0x, using few faucets and websites paying in crypto for surveys. 

So, my total amount of crypto, that i got for free in May, in form of interest, staking or doing few easy tasks is:

$135.03

 

 

My crypto-related links  

 

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

Eobot (mining/wallet )- link here 

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

Coinbundle (investing in crypto bundles) - link here  

MyCointainer (staking and masternodes for some new emerging coins) - 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  

 

Free crypto (faucets and more)

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

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

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

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

Moon Dash ( 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  

EarnCrypto.com - paid for survey, videos and typing - 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    

 

 

 

Alzheimer and Financial independence

As you made enough money to enjoy and early retirement, you will probably want to be mentally and cognitively safe until some advanced age. 

If the answer is yes, read this series of articles - How to (not) lose your mind - a (not so) original approach on Alzheimer's disease (1)