Blog

My already very ambitious quest, to realise my Daily Freedom Number of R 1,814.30, is under mounting threat from just about every corner!

Having formatted AGAIN just two days ago, as a result of the ongoing software issues the Windows 11 developmental trajectory is causing, my PC has now officially entered that stage in its lifecylce which has it being more of a desktop than a laptop. I did indeed say that in this next post I'm going to discuss how I plan to pursue my DFN, but I reckon it's pertinent to mention the serious challenges faced because that aligns with the spirit of keeping it real the whole Banelihackpacker movement is all about.

So yeah, things continue to get ever realer, having long since gotten really real! I'm consequently now also racing against the clock to make something tangible happen within the remaining time that my laptop-turned-desktop has as the only real tool I have to better my situation with.

Right, so to re-cap; the nett Daily Freedom Number of R 1,334.00 amounts to R 1,814.30 pre-tax gross, so that's what we're aiming for. Where we're at now is at stone-cold zero, since I haven't had a steady Content Writing income stream as of late 2022 to early 2023, and since the exploitative predator that is Outlier or Scale Labs pretty much represents my overall chances of landing any immediate AI training tasker jobs.

That's taking into account what can perhaps be logically referred to as active income -- income that I would be generating by actively doing some work, as opposed to what a Daily Freedom Number is all about; passive income.

Might as well that I don't have any active income, because that will force me to focus on what I've been putting off for about as long as I've been on this budding Digital Nomad journey, which is building up solid passive income streams.

By the way, the lights have just gone out, so I've had to pop in that Rain Go SIM card my bro Thato lent to me, which comes with 2gigs of mobile internet per month. Township life in SA continues to suck donkey ass, because clearly the declaration of load shedding being over does't apply to kasies... It continues to rain, doesn't it? And it's utterly POURING!

Anyway, back to the passive income and where we are: I effectively have one passive income stream that's actually bringing in any kind of that passive income, however little it may be. That's Web Hosting.

Of the six websites I host, charging R39 per month on a Reseller Server I'm renting for R200 per month, two are for one client whose advance payment is for the entire 12 months to come, leaving R39 x 4 in monthly Web Hosting income. So that's R156 monthly, which doesn't cover the Reseller fee overheads and of which only one R39 fee I'm relatively guaranteed to get, since the other three clients are friends of mine with whom I have an arrangement for them to pay as and when they actually have the money to pay.

I won't get into too much detail about all those numbers here though, because I've made a video dedicated entirely to breaking everything down in detail, so we'll go with taking stock of the books as currently technically operational. So that's R39 x 6 clients, which amounts to R234 monthly.

As it stands, because of the "means of income" disruptions caused by my brief work with Outlier, a.k.a Scale Labs, I'm now caught in a cycle which has me effectively cut-off from qualifying for the monthly SASSA 370 Covid Relief Grant.

So we're discounting the R370 we've been getting up until last month, putting the critical nature of the current situation into sharp focus as I now have no income at all!

So, what that works out to is moving in the opposite direction of my targetted daily freedom number, operating at a monthly loss of R234 (-) R200 as explained (-) R89 for my FNB Business Gold Account fee, and (-) R6.50 for my FNB Smart Account, which is my personal bank account. That all equals to -R61.00.

But to bring things to where they literally are right now, I have a total of R580.91 to work with, across my FNB Business and Personal accounts. The lump-sum-paying client settled his invoice for one of the sites, covering the coming month of March and the next 12 months, as that is the one which was up for renewal.

However, that R577 he rounded off to R580 includes R99 for his domain name renewal. My Reseller domain is up for renewal at the very same time his one is, so that's another R99, plus that current balance also has to cover the monthly Reseller fee and the bank charges.

Since I won't be getting my SASSA R370 grant, whatever is left over from all those deductions will effecitvely be for my living expenses, for the whole month! That's R87.41 and that's dire!

So I've mentioned Web Hosting as a tangible source of passive income to continue targetting, with the other two sources being Affiliate Marketing, and getting my YouTube channel monetized.

Passive Income Avenues for DFN

• Reseller Web Hosting
• Affiliate Marketing
• Google AdSense (YouTube Ad Revenue)

I mention these three as targets because I have personal experience with all of them, personally proving that they do indeed work. I think everything around Reseller Web Hosting is clear enough, while my experience with Google AdSense earnings admittedly wasn't via YouTube, but rather via written content on some blogs I was operating.

I still have the cheque stub, and the receipt recording my depositing of the R1,005.11 into the very same FNB Smart Account I'm still using today. That's how AdSense has evolved -- to incorporate Ads displayed over YouTube videos in addition to its traditional roots of text and banner ads displayed alongside written content.

So, given how I'm going to be operating the whole gwapsa.co.za programme, which forms part of my strategy to get my YouTube channel monetized, if I was exclusively targetting my YouTube channel as a source of income to cover the Daily Freedom Number, the channel would have to generate monthly earnings of R 276,114.15. Without going into exact details about that, basically, 20% of that would cover my pre-tax gross amount which accounts for the Daily Freedom Number.

Rather, if Web Hosting was my sole income source targetted to cover the DFN, I'd have to get a total of 1,528 clients who'd each be paying their R39 monthly fee. I plugged the values and associated parameters into Chat GPT and asked it to work that out, taking into account which income tax bracket I would subsequently fall into. That had me wondering if that isn't one way in which AI is coming for jobs such as those of accountants. I'll probably still make a video about something like one titled: "AI Takes Pretoria Accountant's Job..."

Right, so the remaining targetted passive income source is Affiliate Marketing, with the targets from that simply adding up to the full DFN amount, if of course Affiliate Marketing was my sole source to account for that DFN.

Affiliate Marketing, particularly with regards to my experience with it and my subsequently earmarked approach to it, deserves its very own post or vlog, so I'll leave it for an upcoming one!