The pub where themoneymountain all started
Welcome to The Money Mountain, a great little money blog, where we want you to follow along with our project.
A finance blog with a difference!
If you’ve stumbled across this site then welcome! We think you’ve hit on a gem of a finance blog here. But of course we’re biased.
You might be thinking: “not another finance blog”, but wait – there are some important differences on our site.
Quite simply, we think what we’re doing is different, and hopefully better. Here’s why:
- We’ll actually road test money making ideas so you can see what works. Whether it’s through glorious successes or miserable failures we’ll help you learn some lessons without making the mistakes. We’re aiming not to recommend anything we haven’t tried ourselves.
- We’re going to entertain you along the way. A big part of this project is going to be having a bit of fun as we go. Don’t get us wrong, we’re very serious about making money and getting a little more financial freedom, but let’s enjoy it.
- There are 3 of us combining on this project. Bringing different voices, perspectives and ideas to the subject of making money. 3 times the ideas, 3 times the fun, 3 times the size of the disaster if it all goes wrong.
- We’re giving our readers a 10% stake in our fund. We’re absolutely serious about this – read more about it here!
So, we hope that this site takes your interest, and we’d like to welcome you along for the ride.
How did this get started?
Three hopeless dreamers united by the desire to have more freedom from the reality of their respective “9-5’s”, Ben, Chris and Dave forged their plans to achieve this like all great ideas… over a few drinks in the local pub.
The revolutionary idea: a money making blog of course, no-one’s tried that yet, have they?
Whilst none of us are going to be jacking in the day job just yet, we’re going to be using this site to record our efforts stepping up our money making game. It’s working too, in the first 2 years since we started, we’ve made over £5,000 of additional income.
We’ll explore a range of ways to earn money and improve our wealth in ways we weren’t doing before. If we think there’s something that might work (and it’s doesn’t involve breaking the law or selling our kidneys) then we’ll investigate it.
Important: This site is all about us trying out ways of making money. We will absolutely not engage in anything that is illegal or, in our view, unethical. It’s important that you also realise that, whilst we may make investments and tell you about them, none of what we write should be viewed as investment advice. As always, do your own research and treat any financial discussion on the internet with the upmost skepticism.
The Fund
Starting at zero, we’ve pooled all of our money-making efforts together into a fund, which tracks our progress. We keep a tally of it and give you monthly updates so that you can see how we’re doing. As we said above, 10% of our fund is set aside for the readers, so naturally we know our readers want to know how it’s going.
Here’s what goes into our fund:
- Profits from side-hustles and business ventures on top of our day-jobs.
- Profits from investing
Actually, it’s almost easier to say what doesn’t go into our fund:
- Money that we would have made without this project. The whole point of starting this project is to push ourselves to make additional money that we wouldn’t have done already.
- Savings we make on expenses. There are lots of great money-saving blogs out there and, although we totally buy into this philosophy, this isn’t really a blog about cutting your personal expenses. We prefer to focus on the money making and investing side of things.
What’s the long-term plan here
The aim is to make money, invest, and have fun doing it. Sure, a big part of this is having fun, but there’s a serious side to it too. Like you and everyone else, we’d like to have more cash and we want to see our fund grow.
We’ve got lofty dreams for this project and want to make a difference with it. We hope that our journey will be a source of lots of helpful ideas that you can put into practice too. We’ll show you what’s possible, and what – in our view – is best avoided when it comes to making money.
Join us, and follow our journey as we don’t just write about ways of earning extra money, but we actually go out and do it. We’d love to have you along for the ride.
Who are we?
Chris: Lives the dream as an accountant working in London. A big fan of making money on the side and getting it invested in passively managed funds (yes, more on that sexy subject over the course of this blog). To date he’s probably been a bit more all-you-can-eat buffet than Warren Buffet, but it hasn’t stopped him dreaming.
Lives outside London and has 3 kids.
Dave: Sought to achieve financial freedom through investing in a well-known high street franchise, has turned out not to be a great idea. Accidentally stumbled upon running my own e-commerce business which turned out to be a much better idea. I’ll talk about both of these experiences as well as other exploits in the course of this blog.
Muddling through and hoping for the best has taken me this far, what could possibly go wrong!
Ben: Financially conservative and quite risk averse, but who has dabbled in various money making schemes to-date, none of which have lead to financial freedom, but most of which have generated a positive, if not always market beating, return. Loves peer-to-peer and crowdfunding (VERY low level investments) as well as the more quirky possibilities in money making. I will be trying to make some of these more accessible to you in my posts.
Home counties born and bred, went away, came back; settled down with someone prepared to put up with my shenanigans and two dogs.