It’s December! Christmas lights are on, the shops are heaving and people start getting excited about eating far too much. Now I’m obviously not one for giving in to the mass commercialisation that Christmas is in this country, nor do I act the scourge, however this year I’ve noticed an even worse dampening of mood as the days get shorter and very much colder.

You see, I’ve had the misfortune of being assigned to cover a colleague’s project for the past few weeks. Normally this wouldn’t be much of an issue except that this particular project is based 75 miles away involving the ring of traffic hell that is the M25. This past week has been particularly bad with an average commute time of between 2 – 2.5 hours each way. On one really bad morning it took well over 3 hours to get into the office. I guess it’s a combination of darker mornings/evenings, worse weather and the day-dreamy lull of warm air conditioning that leads to more accidents on our motorways, compounded by even more accidents in the stop-start traffic that builds up as a result of it.

While I crawl along the 5-lane motorway stretch at 7mph each morning, I can’t help but wonder if there is a realistic alternative to this daily endurance test. I looked for inspiration in the form of Huw at Financially Free by Forty and his recent escape from the rat-race. His isn’t a story of a massive inheritance, cunning stock market beating or lottery win. Huw had a desire.. and a plan.. to reach the escape point which he executed brilliantly. If Huw could do it; why couldn’t I?

I raised this question to him at the last FIRE Escape meetup and the response was a resounding: “You can too!“.

Now I might not want to quit the day job, to lose the security of that regular pay-check or the problem solving challenges my work presents every day.. but wouldn’t it be nice to have the option to? Or even to supplement that income and achieve Financial Independence at a greater rate? So I’ve decided to take a change of course with my finances and road-map ahead. I’ve been dipping my toes in the alternative income ocean for the past month and the results have been amazing. Perhaps it’s time to dive in…

2016 – The year of income focus

Last year when I first started writing online and detailing my journey I wrote a post about My Story So Far. Right there in the first paragraph I talked about how I’ve always been good with saving.. cutting expenses to achieve a financial goal. And throughout the past year I’ve been detailing my monthly expenses to track in detail where my money was going and what I could do to reduce those expenses.

All of this is great, but really it’s only one half of the battle. I’ve been focused too much on cutting expenses and not enough on trying to boost existing income or search out new income streams. Perhaps it’s my risk-averse nature but when I first started reading about various online guides and courses to generate online incomes I immediately switched off and avoided. It was only upon chatting to an old university friend a couple of months ago that I was finally convinced to part with a small sum of money in order to spin up a potential new income stream in the form of matched-betting.

Since then things have been going better than I ever could have hoped. I made £300 in October, £800 in November and well over £200 so far in December! Even if these figures are completely unsustainable and will eventually fizzle out; I’ve already made a 1200% increase on that initial investment! All of this completely legal, bankable and tax-free in the UK.

So for 2016 I’m going to have a real focus on growing alternative streams of income. Huw has been kind enough to select me as one of the first of his Kindle Publishing course students and from chatting to him; I’m really keen to see what this could turn into. I’ve also started guiding one of my friends through getting started with matched-betting which could potentially lead to my own coaching opportunities? I’ll keep chugging along with various online surveys, Google Adwords and the occasional guest post on here from relevant writers.

Who knows.. perhaps 2017 could be the year of leaving the rat-race?