July Expenses – $1383.86

Here are my expenses for July.

Household

$406.92

Entertainment

$70.75

Transportation

$148.56

Food

$63.70

Medical/Dental

$112.55

Phone

$34.59

Travel

$466.79

Debt

$80.00

Total

$1383.86

These expenses were a little higher than I would like. This is mainly because of the travel expenses. Travel is now a separate category from entertainment to give a more accurate picture of where I am spending my money. I was hoping that my expenses for August would be very low but since I’ve returned early from my hike my expenses will probably not be too low. They should be lower than July though.

I’m Back from my Hike

I wasn’t enjoying the hike as much as I thought I would so I decided to cut it short and return home. There are a few things I’ve learned from this hike that will allow me to make changes for the future.

It is best to get in shape before starting a hike. Hiking will eventually get you in shape but being out of shape will make the first few weeks hiking unnecessarily uncomfortable.

August isn’t the best time for hiking. It is too hot and too buggy. Maybe if I had been hiking before that I would have gradually acclimated to the conditions like a boiling frog but just going from the couch in my air-conditioned house to the warm and muggy outdoors wasn’t a pleasant transformation.

Sometimes you have to spend more on gear. I bought a cheap tent and it would probably work well in the winter or early spring. In the summer thought it is just too hot because it doesn’t have a separate rain fly. There might be a cheap tent that would fit my needs but it is hard to find. For any future hikes I’m going to splurge and buy a tarptent. My rationalization for this is that if it keeps me out of staying in a hotel a couple to times it will pay for itself.

Sometimes cheaper gear works just as well or better than more expensive gear. I bought a Camelbak type bladder to use while hiking. I couldn’t stand the plastic taste of water from the bladder though. It also leaked when I didn’t tighten the tube connection to the bladder tight enough. A $1 Gatorade bottle worked as an adequate replacement to the bladder and didn’t have any leaks.
Another bonus to using the Gatorade bottle is that replacements can be bought in just about any town.

Referring to both the bladder and the tent you should test your equipment in the conditions that you are going to be using them. Doing that would have let me know the tent wouldn’t work and that I wouldn’t like the bladder.

I spent way too much on this trip. My budget for the entire hike was eclipsed in just the first few days and my trip total is about double what I had planned on spending for the entire hike. My budget probably wasn’t realistic for someone who hasn’t been hiking recently. I still think it is a feasible budget but I wasn’t able to resist staying in hotels on this trip. Maybe with a better tent and more time getting acclimated to being outdoors I could change that.

I did have success in getting home relatively cheap despite deciding to come home at the last minute. Airfares were too high since I would have only been booking a day or two before traveling. The train wasn’t a good option since I would have had to take a bus to a town with a train and then take a train to Chicago and then a different train to KC. That made taking a train almost as expensive as flying. Going home on the bus would have been the cheapest option at about $150. The trip would have taken a day and a half though. I’ve had unpleasant experiences on Greyhound in the past and will avoid taking any long trips on their buses if at all possible.

Renting a car one-way from Reading, PA to KC ended up being the cheapest option. Their rate was $87.99 a day but they wouldn’t let me reserve it for less than one day since the distance between Reading and KC is almost 1100 miles. I made the trip in about 20 hours though and they didn’t charge me for a second day. With insurance, taxes, fees, and gas my total cost was about $200. I think that was a decent deal for traveling on the spur of the moment.

I also learned that my readership quickly declines when I am not updating this blog. My daily visitors has fallen by about half. That does make sense thought that people would stop visiting if there is nothing new to read. I’m now going to work on getting that readership back up.

Eating on $10 a Week

The following is a guest post from Cindy Brick. Her blog is located at CindyBrick.blogspot.com.

Ever need your money to stretch twice as far on short notice? There are few things you can suddenly cut down to near-nothing – except food. With care, you can live on $10 for a week….or $40 a month, using different sources of protein. You’ll do even better planning for two weeks than one, because your money will go further when you can buy in larger quantities.

Here goes, for two sample weeks. Prices are based on the Denver, CO area.

GROCERIES:

2 pounds carrots 1.00

2 bunches green onions 1.00

2 gallons milk 3.20

2 dozen eggs 2.50

2 loaves bread 3.00

1 jar peanut butter 1.50

1 whole chicken (4 lb) 3.20

1 pound hamburger 1.60

1 pound tofu 1.50

1 pound rice .70

1 pound margarine .60

—————

19.80

I’m assuming you have salt and pepper and at least a few spices. (Garlic, oregano, marjoram, hot sauce, curry powder.) If not, salt and pepper will work just fine. A little sugar helps out, as do ketchup or barbecue sauce, as well as soy sauce and bouillon cubes.

Prep work: Cook the chicken for broth, after cutting off the legs and breast portions; use a BIG pot of water. (Add bouillon cubes, if you’ve got them.) Chop the carrots and green onions; add a triple handful while simmering the broth. (Pick the meat off the chicken bones, and put back into the soup. Split the hamburger into four portions, and the tofu into three.

Breakfasts – toast, eggs, French toast (toast dipped in egg and fried, then sprinkled with sugar), leftovers.

Lunches – any of the supper choices, plus fried egg and peanut butter sandwiches

Suppers – Chicken soup (at least 10 portions)
Chicken breast (2 portions)
Chicken legs (2 portions)
Hamburger (4 portions – cook one with rice for ‘porcupine rice,’ one formed in small meatballs and baked or simmered in chicken soup, one mixed with a torn slice of bread and baked for meatloaf, and one baked or grilled, then served as a sandwich with bread.

Tofu (3 portions) – fry two with veggies and serve with rice, grill or bake one (marinate first in soy sauce, if you’ve got it), add some to chicken broth.

Use the veggies either as a side dish or cooked along with your protein. Any leftover eggs are good simmered in the chicken broth (egg drop soup), or stirred into the rice (fried rice). Use the milk for drinking, or add to the soup for extra protein. (If you’re not big on milk, buy just one gallon, plus a box of tea bags.)

For the next two weeks, try substituting or adding 10 pounds of potatoes ($3.00), beans (.70 a pound – substitute for meat), a jar of spaghetti sauce ($1.60), lettuce or greens ($1), or macaroni (.80 a pound). My daughters swear by ramen noodles (.35), tuna (.80) and noodles (.80 a pound). The key is limiting your portions, adding some ingredients for flavor (like onions, celery and so on), and using every single scrap of food. (I even rinse out jars to get every drop, then add the liquid to broths and sauces.)

A few extra bucks can get you a pack of small candy bars ($1), fresh fruit (keep it to $1.50 a pound or less), and luxuries like coffee!

Most of us have more than ten bucks a week to spend on food. It’s helpful, though, to know you can do it if you have to. For more, try these interesting, if sometimes unimaginative blogs:

http://budgeteating.blogspot.com
http://www.hungryforamonth.blogspot.com

July 2009 Goal Review

It is the end of the month and time once again for my monthly goal review.

My first goal is to increase my passive income. I made slight progress on this. I purchased another dividend paying stock. I’d still like to buy a rental property if I can find a good deal. Since I’ll be hiking most of August I’m unlikely to do anything towards this goal for the month.

My second goal is to lose 30 pounds. I went backwards on this one. My weight has now gone up to 225 pounds which is the most I have ever weighed. I’m hoping to lose a lot of this weight on the hike but having all this extra weight will make hiking a lot harder. At the end of August I should have some good progress on this goal.

My last goal was to increase my RSS subscriber count to 500. I made progress on that goal this month. I hit a high of 430 subscribers during the month and I am now consistently over 400. This is without doing anything special to promote this site. Hitting 500 subscribers still seems like a reasonable goal and I will do some promotion later this year to help reach that number.

I met two out of my three goals this month. For August the only goal I really want to make progress on is losing weight. If I manage to lose a significant amount of weight and just maintain on my other goals I will consider that a successful month.

June PPC Campaign Results

I ran a PPC campaign for my site BankBonuses.com during June to make a little extra money. I’ve run PPC campaigns in the past with mixed results. I usually make either a very small profit or a very small loss. I’ve been making adjustments to hopefully make my PPC campaign consistently profitable.

My initial results for June were disappointing when I examined them at the beginning of July. My revenue from Adsense and Chitika were a couple dollars less than what I spent on Adwords and I had no affiliate sales. My goal is to have my ad revenue equal my PPC expenditure and any affiliate sales will be profit. As it turns out I did have an affiliate sale in June but it didn’t post until a few days into July. I also found out that I had a couple of $25 Wachovia Visa gift cards in the mail for referring new customers. I don’t have any way of tracking where the referrals came from so I am going to guess that one was generated at Bank Bonuses and the other one was generated by my eHow article on the Wachovia $25 referral bonus. These unexpected earning combined to create a nice profit for June.

I’m running the PPC campaign again this month. I’ve already made an affiliate sale although it is for a smaller amount due to a promotion they have running this month. My ad revenue is running slightly higher than my PPC expense and I’ve made a couple more Wachovia referrals in addition to a couple of ING Electric Orange referrals. Even if I don’t make any more sales I will once again have a nice profit this month.

Even though I’m making a profit the past couple of months it still isn’t a lot of money. There are lots of things I could do to improve my site and my PPC campaign. I’ve been reading ShoeMoney’s PPC course and once I’m finished I will be implementing some ideas from the course. If I can be consistently successful with this PPC campaign I will start some more campaigns. I’ll keep you updated on my results.