Aside from money, what do you enjoy about domaining?

[cm]

Really good point. I've led this lifestyle since around 2016 and the freedom it gives being able to do as you please is potent. When Brightwork failed in 2022 Q4, people started asking me if I was going back to a 9-5 job. I said I couldn't, I could not stand working for someone else.

I get to see my children whenever I like, family whenever I like. I walk my dog non-stop in the Lake District, where I am also lucky enough to be able to enjoy photography, I have no deadlines, only those which I set myself. I'm also happy knowing that I'm not working £12 an hour for some mega corp that doesn't give a shit about you, or out there building someone else's dream. It's not perfect, the money isn't consistent and needs to be supplemented by other work, but at the end of the day, since 2016, I've generated my own income and forged my own path, whilst having the freedom to do as I please.

Am I millionaire? Not by any stretch of the imagination. But ask me if I'm rich?

 

[ben]

At least we know if you fail at finding friends you can at least be employed by someone to use a search engine to find public posts, made on public forums. Care to go into greater details? You seem to think you know enough about me to judge any position I come from, random stranger on the internet. Do continue.

 

[RegalDomains]

When Brightwork failed in 2022 Q4, people started asking me if I was going back to a 9-5 job. I said I couldn't, I could not stand working for someone else.

I've sort of got the opposite problem. Well not really, as I agree entirely with your sentiment, but I have something chaining me to the 9-5.

I successfully made a full-time living between the age of 21 to about 32 (with some years better than others) running an eCommerce business, affiliate marketing, a large content site which made a lot on Adsense when big CPMs were possible on Adsense (and before everybody had adblock)

Largely loved it, had freedom from the 9-5. Apart from that time Google Panda wrecked my network of affiliate sites built on exact match domains, that was tough.

At 32 my wife got pregnant at just about the time that my earnings from all of the above tanked simultaneously, so went back to work the 9-5 life for the stable pay cheque (its actually 8-4 though ). I'm 39 now.

In the process though I managed to blag my way into an employer which offers a really good defined contribution pension, I pay 3% of my salary into the pension and they pay 17%. I had to face up to the fact that whilst I'd kept the lights on and paid the bills, I'd got to that point in my life with nowhere near enough in pension funds and it would probably have been a terrible idea to walk away from that deal considering the circumstances.

So now I've got golden handcuffs in a sense, where I struggle to see a path to escaping the 9-5 without sacrificing the chance of heating and eating into my 70s in the process.

That said, I'm doing more and more online, and the proportion of my income coming from 'stuff' I do online has sort of organically crept up to about 25% of my income, up from 0% (I literally liquidated absolutely everything 5-7 years ago and started from scratch).

Guess if I could envisage anything it would be growing that to the point where I could work part-time and take the various benefits offered by my employer, whilst making up the rest online. At the moment though I find myself with more disposable income than ever, day job pays all the bills & the side hustles are generating a decent amount of bonus cash, some of which I also syphon into a pension, this additional income is making me think about some more adventurous travel etc in the medium term (in other words, long haul!).

I'm entrepreneurial and a maverick at heart, but check my pension balances every morning with my first coffee to remind myself why I need to get through another day of corporate bollocks.