Andy Hough

October Expenses – $1432.16

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for October.

Household

$378.33

Entertainment

$285.37

Transportation

 $468.93

Food

$100.25
Medical/Dental

$57.44

Utilities

$97.52
Debt $30
Bar Expenses $14.32

Total

$1432.16

My expenses for October were a little higher than I prefer.  This was due to my entertainment and transportation expenses being high.  The entertainment expense was high mainly due to out trip to Omaha and should be much smaller this month.  The transportation expenses was high due to the trip to Omaha and my trips to St. Louis for the medical study and I had to pay for six months of insurance.   I will be able to deduct the mileage to St. Louis and some driving I did for mystery shops so this expense isn’t as bad as it looks.  Transportation expense should be down substantially this month.

I came pretty close to hitting my target of $100 a month for food.  This amount is roughly half for groceries and half for eating out.  I plan to adjust this down to $75 a month with most of that amount going towards groceries.  Dinner dates with my wife are included in the entertainment category  and I get several opportunities a month to eat for free from mystery shopping so cutting back to $25 a month for eating out shouldn’t be hard.

I plan to pay more on my debt this month and the other expense categories should remain about the same.

Rebates Money – Forums for Hot Deals, Finance, and Cash Back Stores

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The following is a guest post from Hustler, who blogs on Hustlermoneyblog.com about bank deals, credit cards, and hot deals. He shares his story on starting a new site RebatesMoney.com to provide the best Forums for all Hot Deals, Finance, Careers, Business, and more.

Over the last 4 months, and working in conjunction with a team of specialists, We have created Rebates Money – a Forum for all Hot Deals, Cash Back Stores, Finance, and many more. It’s a new beginning, I hope, to create a place to share all top deals and help you build personal financial wealth in all aspects of your life. Working with some of the best people in the business, our motto is to put the members first and to build a vibrant community with an emphasis on personal finance. In the future, we will continue to install more features to build Rebates Money to meet all your financial needs.

There are many advantages in comparison with other Deal Forums:

1. Hot Deals + Cash Back Stores combo – Other forums will make money from your sales whenever you click through their links and buy something. At Rebates Money, we will find the best deals and tell you where to get maximum cash back using our Cash Back Stores function. At our Cash Back Stores section, simply put in your favorite place to shop online, and you will find the best cash back percentage from sites such as Mr. Rebates, Ebates, ShopDiscover, and others.
2. Finance, Careers, and Business – Not only can you find all the latest bank and credit card deals, you will be able to discuss all aspects of personal finance to help you increase/retain your wealth.

How would you like to win $100? In order to have a spirited forum, we need your help to be part of our growing financial community. Simply Sign Up for membership to Rebates Money to enter the $100 promotion.We will be holding the $100 Cash Bonus drawing on November 1st using a random number generator. I look forward to see TightFistedMiser’s readers over at Rebates Money and be part of our growing community.

September Investment Income – $93.78

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My September investment income rose slightly to $93.78 from $91.96 the month before. The rise was from stock market gains as I did not add to my portfolio. You can tell I have been procrastinating a lot lately since it is almost November and I’m just now getting my September investment income posted.

Disclaimer: This is not my actual investment income. To get this figure I first add up my retirement savings, emergency fund, and any other money I consider permanent savings. What the total of my savings would earn at 6% interest for a month is my monthly investment income. My goal is to get this amount to $1000 a month. If I have $1000 in monthly passive investment income I will be able to retire early. You can see what my actual investment income for the month was by looking at my monthly income report and adding the interest and dividend amounts.

Online Income Report – September 2010

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Here is a breakdown of my online income for September 2010.

Google Adsense – $372.50

Affiliate Income – $375

Direct Ads – $615.23

Text Links – $48

Total – $1410.73

I was quite pleased with my online income last month.  It was the most I have made in a month.  The Adsense was way up because I had an article that appeared on Yahoo Finance which brought me lots of very clicky traffic.  Adsense will be down this month unless something like that happens again.  My affiliate income should be up this month though partially because of the extra traffic from the Yahoo article and partly because of luck.  The direct ads will be down because I’ve been turning down some ad offers to help protect my page rank.  I do have over $100 in recurring monthly ads so I will still make at least that much.  Overall, my online income will be down but I’m hoping that I can hit the $1000 mark for the fourth month in a row.

This is my gross online income.  The online income I report in my monthly income posts is minus my hosting and domain expenses and some other basic expenses so it will always be smaller.

I’m working on adding some more sources of revenue and my plan is to get my monthly income consistently over $1500 and hopefully more.

Ehow Two Years Later

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It was in November 2008 that I started writing for eHow.  Inspired by Pat’s eHow experiment at SmartPassiveIncome.com I planned to write a 100 articles in a month.  Like many of my plans that didn’t happen but I eventually wrote six articles for them but two of them were later deleted so I only have four articles there now.

So far I have earned $74.71.  I also earned about that much in affiliate income but I don’t have any links now.  That might not sound too impressive but considering I spent maybe three hours writing the articles it is a pretty good hourly rate.  I’m on pace to make slightly more than $35 from them this year and that should continue in the future.  It is now a steady passive income source.

Ehow has changed the way their site works so I can’t submit any more articles and make passive income.  There are other similar sites out there but I’m not sure if any of them are worth writing for.  I wish I would have wrote more articles for eHow but I won’t complain about making $35 this year for doing nothing.