And so it begins...

Let's get this party started! Were the words nobody ever uttered when starting a project to supplant a 6-figure salary with alternative income streams, in a litle over 6 months. This is no ordinary project though... It's probably the dumbest one I've undertaken in 20 odd years of corporate ladder climbing (and that's saying something, I've overseen some dumb-ass initiatives). Nevertheless, it's a challenge, and one that I'm passionate about taking on, and hopeful that I can pull off. My incentives are high - more time with the family; opportunities to pursue a few ideas I've had kicking around in my overworked brain for quite a while; avoiding the woeful daily pastime of braving the English capital's public transport system.

So, where do we start. If you take a look at this page, you'll see the size of the mountain that lies ahead of us - 1.5m in savings/penions and/or 5k per month of alternative income. Hmmm, sounds relatively easy when you're typing it into a machine and not really thinking about what that means. Let's start with the basics - over the course of the next few posts, we'll look at some initial ideas and review our current spending so we have a good idea of where we're at and where we're going.

While we're doing that though, let's talk a little bit about this site. Yes, the aim is that it contributes in some small way to the ginormous pot of money we'll be accumulating over the coming weeks, but it serves a few other purposes too.

• It's clearly an outlet for my own special brand of verbal diarrhea
• It's an exercise in minimalist blogging - it's a static site; built with proprietary tooling; and designed to cost literally pence to run, regardless of it's popularity. I'll be digging into some more details on this later, as I expect it to be a toolset I'll be putting to extensive use as we roll out more domains and sites within a broader portfolio
• It's a series of lessons - some 'how-to'; some 'how-not-to'; some 'oh my, you idiot' - designed to help people similarly looking to achieve some level of financial independence and escape the rat-race (or at least exchange one track for a slightly more palatable one)
• It's my virtual couch, where I'll be venting my spleen and blaming my parents for all number of innocuous setbacks or life events over the coming months.

We'll talk about the tech aspects of this setup more as we get into some of the domain and website based income streams that we'll be attempting to tap, so if that's your bag, stick with us and we'll try and work through how things are setup and in particular how we're avoiding the cost and beating the performance and reliability of a more traditional blogging platform.

In the context of lessons, let's start with a simple one, not necessarily for financial independence, but more for life (wow, that's deep). Write things down! If there's one thing I;ve learnt over the years, it's to document stuff - whether that's code (I was once a genuine, honest to goodness software engineer); decisions; plans; ideas; you name it. Firtly, it's surprising how much stuff falls out of your brain when it's competing for a limited amoutn fo grey-matter. Secondly, and probably more importantly, you'd be surprised how useful it is to play stuff back to yourself, and how often it will open up a different perspective, or spark a tangential idea which could be a killer one. Pick a medium (paper or electronic, doesn't really matter) and keep some notes on the stuff you think about, and the stuff you do (and importantly, why you did it). This blog will be my documentation

So, we know where we're heading (1.5m / 5k); we're a long way away (100k / 0k), and we have the bones of our first plan. Brainstorm a few ideas; do a quick sending review; blog the crap out of everything. It's not a good plan, but a plan it is. Let's see where it takes us.