L's Journal

[classical_Liberal]

Man, you are finding some cool hobbies for potential income streams! WTF, why can't I think of cool stuff like this?

[BookLoverL]

Hmm, let's see...
Step 1) Be genuinely interested in a bunch of different stuff.
Step 2) Do that stuff enough out of sheer joy that you get actually kind of good at it (or at least can see you're going to be good at it)
Step 3) Make other people aware of your talent in that area somehow
Step 4) Check if other people have already made money from that hobby somehow and copy their ideas
Step 5) Actually start trying it instead of just thinking about it

I'm not approaching all of the income streams equally seriously, since I don't want to make all my hobbies feel like work. But I'm just kind of being open to the possible methods of earning money from them? And if I just get a small amount of money each year from them, well, I've got enough things going on that it should add up to a decent amount altogether.

[Bankai]

Step 5) Actually start trying it instead of just thinking about it

I think this is where 99% of people never arrive. I have a friend who has enough ideas to fill several lifetimes but he never gets to the action stage and still works customer service job. Even if he only moved from 100% talking to 80% talking 20% doing, I'm quite sure he'd find something that works by now.

If you can do this natal reading thing once a day for £30, you never need to have a job again (assuming you can live on £900 a month). Even just once a month is equivalent to £9000 saved at 4%.

[BookLoverL]

Ooh, free food in exchange for having fun sounds great! It really is great when things line up this way.

[BookLoverL]

Happy New Year, everyone!

I know I've basically not been on the forum for like, 3 months or something. I just do that sometimes as my interests shift around, I guess.

Anyway, I made a very big decision that is probably not very ERE, but I'm glad I did. Basically, I got too fed up with living with my parents and putting up with them constantly trying to make me do things in a more mainstream way than I wanted to, and at the rate my savings were going I'd have had to live with them for several more years to buy my own house. So I made the decision to rent a place in my area.

The cost is £595 per month before other bills, which is already around 60% of my current rough income. BUT I don't regret it, because it's already paying dividends in terms of giving me the space to think and concentrate. My Tourette's symptoms have decreased, I'm not being interrupted by my mother every 15 minutes over something trivial, and I've been able to experiment with cooking, like trying baking my own soda bread and dropping the number of times I was eating meat to average 3 times a fortnight.

Plus, I fully anticipate that my income will increase this year, as I have several ideas for development of existing and new money-earning projects. So it's possible that in the first year I may have to eat into my savings a little, but in the long run I anticipate still being able to save to eventually buy.

I haven't done up my figures for 2019 yet, because all my financial records are still mostly at my parents' - I'll probably get them this weekend, so I'll calculate my profit for 2019 then.

[BookLoverL]

Thanks bigato! It will definitely help me with living my life on my terms, and I think for sure I will be able to make money faster without having to constantly fight against my parents trying to re-mainstream and mediocrify my life perspectives.

(They both spent most of their lives as the type of self-employed where you worked in a career for a while and then left to do it yourself, and neither of them are willing to consider ERE sort of lifestyle changes, or even anything that "looks" too different from the mainstream really. Plus their house is full of both business and consumer clutter. I've only moved half the stuff out my bedroom and already the space I opened up has been filled with their clutter, with no noticeable difference in the rest of the house.)

Unfortunately I have already managed to accidentally get mould on my toiletry bag due to leaving it on a wet windowsill in the bathroom and trying to save money on heating. So hopefully I can rescue that because I really like the design. But lesson learned, I guess. xD The price of freedom is that sometimes you make mistakes... xD

[BookLoverL]

Oh yeah, for sure there's a lot of overlap between autism and adhd. There's a high comorbidity with Tourette's and ADHD too, and with OCD. Personally I always felt the descriptions of autism fit me slightly better than the adhd ones, but I can relate to things shared by people with a lot of different types of neurodivergence quite often, because there's some overlap with all of them really.

Women do often get missed because it can present differently than in men, and it's important to be aware of. I think because of some of the feminine socialisation that women are usually socialised into, it can mask some of the symptoms, or doctors just aren't aware sometimes of how it looks in anyone other than stereotypical male presentation.

[BookLoverL]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5104764/

I found this article about comorbidities with Tourette's. Apparently over 70% of patients also have either ADHD or OCD.

[BookLoverL]

Since I moved I've been spending a bit more time than I'd like getting caught up in doing sort of nothing much (e.g. online and similar), but I'm hoping that this'll just be a bit of a decompression phase now that I've not got my parents feeding the External-Motivation-Voice a lot (e.g. "you're so useless, you haven't even done X!" "you should do this thing!" etc.). Back when I was at uni I'd got much more in touch with my own internal motivation, which I think may be the cause of a significant amount of family friction I've had, because the things they try to externally motivate me to do are not the same things which I am internally motivated to do. But anyway, I'm hoping that after a period of time, I'll be able to get more organised again with my internal motivation and get on with doing the things I find important in life.

I have already had the chance to practise multiple skills that I wouldn't have otherwise, though, especially on the cooking front. All my "good eating habits" willpower is at the buying stage, normally - once there is junk the house I eat it because it's there and convenient - so I've been buying food for the diet lifestyle I'd like to have, even though this requires more cooking work from me. I've been eating a lot less meat-centred meals in order to save money, and I hadn't really tried cooking vegetarian food before, so I've already had the chance to try several methods of cooking bean-based meals. I've also reminded myself how to make pastry and used that to do both pie and dumplings, and for the first time I've tried making my own bread from scratch. As proper bread with yeast needs a warm temperature to prove, I've been doing soda bread instead, and I made the second loaf of that today. To be honest, I was surprised at how easy it was. I'm also finally getting a chance to try saving leftovers, like dripping from the one lot of meat I did buy, and I'm going to try saving vegetable stock on the days where I'm doing a water-based cooking method. So my skills are advancing quite a lot on the cooking front.

I've also only bought vinegar, baking soda, etc. for cleaning products, so I'm learning how to clean things with natural products too. And I'm looking to learn ways to deal with the waste streams I'm creating more effectively, though I'm not sure yet if I have space to make a proper compost bin...

[BookLoverL]

We'd managed to get a free washing machine from the estate of a local pensioner who'd sadly died, only after my dad had helped install it we thought it wasn't working because it wasn't draining.

BUT

It turns out that the reason it wasn't draining is because my dad forgot to take the thing that blocked the pipe between the sink pipe and the washing machine pipe out.

So, that's good, because now I don't need to look for another free washing machine, or get rid of this one.

Mildly annoying though, because I could have been doing my washing here instead of having to keep taking it to my parents' still for the last two weeks. xD

[BookLoverL]

So right now I have 3 main sources of work-related income: doing maths tuition, working in an office for 2 to 3 days a week doing scanning and filing, and doing a new part time job I picked up in October that's an average of five and a half hours a week and mostly work from home. (I get some smaller bits of money too here and there, like I probably still do enough work to get around £10 per month for my dad's business, but the three I mentioned are the most significant amounts.) And my level of dissatisfaction with the office-based job has been building for a while, because it's between 12 and 18 hours a week, plus commutes, on site in an open plan office, where I need to perform full professional behaviour the whole day (and suppress the visibility of my Tourette's), and it's also really boring.

It's served a good purpose the last few years - it was the first place I worked after I moved back up here after dropping out of my failed teacher training course, when I'd been earning nothing at all for around 5 months after dropping out, and really just needed something simple and easy to build up my confidence in myself as a worker, and then later I was able to switch to doing it on a technically self-employed basis, with my clients for doing admin work at the time being that business and my dad's business. And especially since I've switched to that self-employed mode, it's provided a stable-yet-flexible core of work that gave me a decent base income while still giving me time to learn the things I needed to learn in the rest of my time.

However, now, at this point, I've been gradually and continuously working on my social skills and business skills for around 5 years. I am significantly more capable of projecting confidence to potential clients and employers, and have figured out how to get people to "buy" into me as a person more. I've been running my maths tuition business successfully since the end of March 2019. I aced the interview for the other part time work I picked up, beating out 2 other candidates despite not having previous direct experience with that type of role, only things that were tangentially related. Due to this new work I've got, I've also become a lot more comfortable with business phone calls and emails.

I don't think the office work is helping me grow any more, basically. It's not a terrible office to work in - the other people there are all decent people - but really the only positive about it is the money, and it's sucking up more time and brain energy than I want it to, especially in winter when I do 3 days because that's their busy season.

Now, what I think I really WANT to do, which I'm more directly able to pursue now I've moved out and don't have my parents pressuring me to do this or that and fulfil their idea of a model citizen, is to do more writing. So I'm planning to set a goal of working up on evenings and weekends to earning £100 per week from some sort of writing-based income, and I'm going to start looking into ways of doing that ASAP. And once I get to that, I'll give the office one month's notice of me stopping working for them.

(Don't want to just drop the office immediately before I do that because with the new rental, it'd mean I'd eat quite a bit of savings this year while I got the writing idea going. So I'd like to roadtest the writing plan before I let go of the office income.)

But yeah, I'm just so fed up with having my brain bored out of my skull by scanning 15 files of identical format in a row, and similar tasks... It's definitely time to move forward, I think.

[BookLoverL]

Well, it's not really a job that it's actually possible to do from home, because 75% of it is physically scanning the paper files that the other people in the office have prepared, and it's also a very small office building so there are no other parts of the office to move to. So I don't think they really have any way of making the environment better for me, and I already have flexible working days and my break distributed how I want since I've been self employed there. But really the issue isn't with how the company is treating me, it's with me being incredibly bored of using my brainpower to scan a lot of boring files in a row and produce a lot of almost identical invoices (the company doesn't seem to do mail-merge). xD So long term, it's just not really in alignment with my web of goals any more.

I haven't heard of the app, but I'll check it out.

[BookLoverL]

Eh, probably not, to be honest. Some of the things could be automated (though some couldn't), but I'm not really interested in that company enough to want to bother doing it. I think there are some flaws in the company that I hadn't noticed before too - I'm charging by the hour, so I always just leave at the time I said whether the work is done or not, but there's a lot of grumbling amongst the salaried workers that they're becoming overworked.

I've wanted to earn money from writing for ages - like, if I had a magic lever of make me suddenly completely FI already, I would still write at that point for fun. I know it can be tough to get going, but I think that's because most writers don't bother learning how to market their work, so they just get lost in the sea of writing nobody's heard about. So I think given that I've been reading about how to market writing in bits and pieces over the last couple of years, I have an advantage there. Obviously nothing is a given though, which is one reason why I'd like to get it going before leaving the other place. But at the other place I think I'm mostly just interested in going through the motions while also sneakily reading more articles about stuff I actually want to know about when I'm doing a task that mostly doesn't need the computer screen.

[BookLoverL]

Checking in again after forgetting to post for a while again. Am still here, have not caught COVID or anything like that.

Income has taken a hit because of the lockdown, but I think I can still hustle my way to gaining replacement work/clients and being in a decent position by the end of the year. Might end up eating into my savings buffer a bit, but of course, the advantage of having 1 year's savings buffer when I moved in the first place was precisely in case of stuff like this.

My diet went a bit less good recently because I've switched to things that don't need much prep time because I was ending up throwing away fresh produce if I bought too much because I wasn't managing to get the energy/spoons to cook it. But I've stabilised that now with a nutritionally balanced diet that's still under £15 per week for the grocery bill, but doesn't need me to spend a lot of time cooking. Part of this features a bunch of pizzas, so now I have a bunch of empty pizza boxes.

I made one of the pizza boxes into a dustpan and brush since I hadn't got one of those yet, and successfully used it to clean the kitchen floor. If anyone else can think of anything useful one could make out of approximately 30 cardboard pizza boxes I'd appreciate suggestions.

Overall though I'm happier than when I was living with my parents, because at least now I can actually relax in the times when I'm trying to relax and not get constantly bothered by them.

I suspect the low energy I had in March/April might have been some sort of decompression or something because it was the first time in a couple of years that I hadn't been constantly busy, so I think my energy will come back enough to start working towards my goals again.

[BookLoverL]

I am at least trying to buy pizzas with a few different toppings, so there's some variety that way. And I am eating other food as well. But I switched all the fresh fruit and veg to canned fruit, and/or veg I can eat without cooking it. It's not optimal, but it's sort of nutritionally balanced, and it's better than what happened before I switched which is that I lost half a stone in a couple of months through not eating often enough when I didn't particularly have half a stone I wanted to lose...

Hopefully though at some point I will have more energy to try and get into a regular proper cooking habit.

I don't really want to spend money on a rice cooker, so I don't think that would work for me, but thanks for the suggestion.

[ertyu]

If anyone else can think of anything useful one could make out of approximately 30 cardboard pizza boxes I'd appreciate suggestions.

this sounds like a fun project. the part that would make me hesitate is that oil and sauce that's soaked into the cardboard might attract pests. So, I'm thinking, it would be important to use the clean parts of the cardboard only, and that limits the size of the pieces you've got to work with.

this might be neat -- > http://fruitschaal128.semdesign.nl/english/

also, i wonder if it would work to wet the cardboard and/or make it into a sludge then use that to shape things...

lots to be found when you search for diy cardboard or diy cardboard bowl

[BookLoverL]

There's not too much oil on the boxes, because it's the type of box that had the pizza inside a wrap inside the outside cardboard. (I'm a little ashamed of the plastic it's using to do that, but anyway.) But yes, the boxes are mostly clean, though a little flimsy.

The bowl thing looks pretty cool, I'll check it out!

[ertyu]

Mostly clean boxes are good news: more material to work with!

The internet is full of diy cardboard projects, I remember seeing people who built actual sturdy furniture. Turns out cardboard is really a steady and solid material when you glue it together. Post pictures!

[Frita]

Check out this Gehry chair: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardboard_furniture The Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Arts in Denver has one. It is quite beautiful.

Can you make your own pizza? I have found that it is less expensive, healthier, and a fun hobby. (We make/eat pizza every Friday. Sometimes I make calzones or individual pizzas and freeze to heat later.)

[BookLoverL]

Thanks for the chair link!

Part of the reason I switched to having a lot of pizza was because I was having trouble getting myself to cook, so if I could make my own pizza I imagine I could cook other things properly too. But I am getting supermarket pizza from a budget supermarket, so it's like... £1.25 per pizza or something.