Don't just sit there - say something!

If I offer you advice, why should you take it? I'll just tell you how I did things, what happened, and sometimes my ideas about why. Your job is to take part in the ensuing discussion. That way, we can all have a bit of fun, and maybe learn a thing or two from one another.

Here's my story

In 1992, I took early retirement for a number of reasons:

• I wasn't going to achieve any more by staying
• I needed the money
• The current offer was almost certainly the best I'd get

It's now nearly the end of 2007, so let's see how I'm doing a against the goals I had in mind at the time. Here's the list, and I'll deal with each, heading by heading, afterwards:

• Clear outstanding debts
• Earn income to supplement my reduced pension and continue my salary growth curve

There were others, such as staying active and healthy, but they're not on today's agenda.

Clear outstanding debts

Well, yes, we did. But we soon built up new ones. For thirty years, our way of getting out of debt was to earn more money. I was in the computer industry, so life was hectic and salary growth seemed a normal part of life. Occasionally, we'd also make a leap upwards by selling a house and buying a new one.

We still haven't really adjusted to the idea of living on a pension that increases at about half the rate of inflation, and we don't want to. Surely I must be able to find a way to supplement my pension - ideally one that still works as I get older.

Create new income streams

At first, I followed the traditional approach of trying to find a new job or to start a small business. I spent 6 months pretending to be a teacher in Zambia. I'd run a summer school course for gifted children once and enjoyed it, but teaching to a syllabus and controlling classes of normal children was a very different kettle of fish.

I moved to Botswana and did manage to find a couple of years' contract work with a German aid organisation that produced a system for govenment budgeting and planning. After that, I spent several years doing very little until I settled in France in 2004.

Lots of people succeed in making money on the Web. As with any business venture, they work quite hard - get-rich-without-effort schemes only work for the people pushing them, not the marks.

I started creating hobby websites several years ago, while I was still in Botswana. The first one that cleared its costs was France for Freebooters , but it was created with FrontPage. The code is clumsy, and it's hard work to add stuff to it. I've just created New Freebooters in blog format to replace it and Don't Stop the World - I'm enjoying the ride , my first HTML/CSS site. I'll be migrating the pick of the content of these two sites to New Freebooters, adding new content, and encouraging people to interact via the Comments. I also plan to create small e-books of useful and/or amusing stuff, some of which I'll give away free and some of which I'll try to sell.

This year, I also helped to found lookatourwebsite.com Ltd, a UK company whose goal is to earn money from webistes. RopeySoles is an online retailer which started by selling espadrilles made in southwest France, and has recently added berets to its product line. Our second project, Look at France, is in the early stages of its development. Currently, the part that works is Look at France - travellers' tales , a blog format collection of travel articles about France. Finishing the main site, a travel portal for France, will take a long time and we still have decisions to make about the layout and content.

And now I'm giving HubPages a try as well. The advantages I see for using HubPages are:

• the initial part of the traffic-gathering job is done for me
• I can be a complete butterfly, with no theme or continuity
• I can also group hubs with a common theme together

2008 going to be a great year, but a busy one.

Now it's your turn

Early retirement, career changes and multiple sources of income are now commonplace. Less than half of people in employment are in permanent 'core' jobs these days. Use the comments section of this Hub to voice your opinion, tell of your experiences, give advice and generally talk about the phenomenon and its effect on people. I'll moderate to make sure that we keep the quality up, and I'll take part in the discussion. Think of it as a virtual coffee bar. Over to you.