February Income – $4654.62

Here is a breakdown of my income for February.

February was a great income month.  The big source of income was my state and federal tax refunds. I was happily surprised to get such a big refund. I thought I might not even get a refund this year since I had about $5000 of self-employment income in 2015 that I hadn’t yet paid taxes on. I did claim zero exemptions at my jobs in order to make sure that I had enough taxes taken out from my paychecks to cover the taxes on my self-employment income as well. That turned out to be unnecessary. The $5500 I contributed to my IRA and my $2500 student loan interest deduction reduced my AGI enough that my Retirement Savings Contribution Credit was enough to eliminate my federal income taxes. The only taxes I had to pay were my self-employment taxes which were easily covered by my paycheck withholding. The refund was also increased by a large ACA Premium Tax Credit since I took less of the credit than I was owed during the year. I contributed over $19,000 to the federal coffers in the form of student loan interest last year so it was nice to get a little money back from the government.

I was happy that I made over $1000 from Amazon FBA.  My FBA income was almost enough to cover my monthly expenses by itself. I might have even made a little more if I hadn’t worked at the doc review job for seven days at the end of the month. I know a lot of people do FBA on top of holding a regular job. I don’t feel like doing much after working a job all day so FBA gets scaled way back when I’m working.

Cash back continued to be a nice source of income. Most of it was from my Discover card. They had a great 10% cash back Apple Pay promo last year that resulted in a nice bit of cash back for me. I also got cash back from Mr. Rebates (referral link) , Top Cashback (referral link), and Upromise (not a referral link)* during the month.

My other sources of income don’t add up to much and that probably won’t change. Driving for Uber isn’t really worth my time.  I don’t plan on driving for Uber again unless they raise their rates. I did make a little online income this month. This year my online income will likely be in the hundreds rather than the thousands. That would be my lowest online income year since 2007. I might work on trying to increase my blogging income later this year. For now other things take priority.

This month’s income won’t be as high as February since I won’t have a big tax refund.  It should still be a good income month though since I will have job income on top of my other sources of income.

*Top Cashback is currently offering a $20 referral bonus. Leave a comment if you would like me to send you a referral email.