Hello and welcome to the fourth instalment of The Journey. One more month has gone by in my journey to pay off my mortgage within 5 years.
It’s not been a great month for me. I’ve been struggling with motivation as a result of a major dive in mental health. This has meant that I’ve scaled back my efforts for most of the month and have been re-assessing how to go forward.
But time marches on so let’s look at what’s been going on:
What’s changed
Let’s start with some good news: Crypto is having a bit of a rally. I’ve invested the money I held back last month in a few different cryptocurrencies and prices are holding at the moment.
I don’t think this will be an end to the crypto winter just yet, but I am hopeful that prices will at least go sideways for a while.
What I have been working on
Accountable Hub (the project I was working on the previous month) has been shelved for the time being. It was a time blackhole that I couldn’t put my all into at the moment.
Because I am a front-end developer, I was having to learn backend with AWS. This meant that progress was extremely slow as for every feature I wanted to add, I had to learn new things on the backend.
I would like to pick up Accountable Hub again in the future when I can find someone I want to work with and who can handle the backend.
To rally a little from losing the excitement of Accountable Hub, I have dug up an old project I built – Poo Timer. I released this handy little app to Google Store a couple of years back but it was removed by Google. Apparently, the bots they use don’t have a sense of humour when it comes to descriptions.
I’m going a different route with Poo Timer this time. I intend to release it as a Progressive Web App instead of on Google/Apple store. I have the domain www.poo-timer.com so after a couple of fixes (I’m having issues where the colours appear all wrong on certain mobiles), I’ll start promoting this.
Meet Poobert
Despite the issues I’ve been having, I almost managed to publish my quota of blog posts, only falling short by 1.
Unfortunately, missing this one post has meant I’ve now fallen behind and I’m struggling to get back in the swing of things. I’m now 3 behind my schedule.
Writing this journey post will hopefully spur me on to get writing again.
Mortgage Progress
Although I’ve not made any payments towards the mortgage yet, I have sold the second motorbike and will be putting some of that money towards the mortgage this month.
My first overpayment!
Hopefully, paying off that little bit more from my mortgage will give me a boost in motivation.
What’s next
A new idea is brewing between my partner and me – a joint family internet-style project. We are excited about the idea but are currently unsure if we have the time to pursue it. Watch this space for more information next month.
For the month of August I will:
- Publish 5 blog posts to The Five Year Mortgage. This will take me up to 30 informational posts where I will stop for a while.
- Ensure Poo Timer is fixed and released.
- Invest/earmark money for crypto
- Make the first overpayment on mortgage
Thanks for reading,
Iain McClafferty – The Five Year Mortgage
