Andy Hough

January 2020 Goals

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These are more actions that I will take rather than goals I will achieve. If following the actions results in me losing weight and saving money I will be happy with those results. I’m not concerned about shooting for a certain number for the month.

This month I will be strict with my intermittent fasting. I’ll do all my eating within an 8 hour window. I’ve had a bad habit the last few months of eating snacks or meals after I’ve finished working for the day. This results in me eating just an hour or two before I go to sleep. That isn’t good for my digestive system and it doesn’t help me lose weight since I’ve generally already had enough to eat for the day when I have my nighttime meal. This month I won’t eat after work. I need to learn to not always give in to my cravings and that it is ok to be a little hungry. Cutting out that meal will save me calories and hopefully lead to me losing weight. It should help me sleep

I’m also going to eat fast food no more than 3 times a week. That might sound like it is still a lot. Last month I had fast food 26 out of 31 days. Cutting back to 3 times a week will be a significant reduction. I’m also going to plan and prepare my food to take to work the night before. If I wait until morning I know I’ll get lazy and just buy fast food rather than taking food from home. This should also help me lose weight.

I’m going to try an experiment this month and do most of my spending with cash. I use my credit cards for almost everything so this will be a pretty big change. I want to see if using cash reduces my spending compared to using credit cards. I’ll still use my credit cards for my recurring online bills. I’ll also use a credit card for gas since that will get me 5% back and I don’t think I’ll buy more gas just because I’m using a credit card. Any other credit card usage must be planned ahead of time and there must be a reason for using the card.

Lastly, I am going to track and share on the blog every single thing I buy this month. I already track my spending down to the penny, but I don’t break down all of my expenditures. For example, if I buy groceries I would just list the expense as groceries in my monthly budget. This month I’m going to detail every single thing I buy. I think that sharing everything I buy will lead to me buying less. This would be due to me not buying something just because I don’t want the hassle of having to blog about it later and also I may not buy something because I’d rather not share it on the blog. For example, I bought a lot of junk food last month- chips, soda, snack cakes, cookies, etc. – and I’d be a little embarrassed to share exactly how much junk food I bought.

Today I spent $450 on rent. I also spent $11.25 to pay my rent with my credit card. I did that to meet a spending requirement to get a 60,000 mile bonus on my Virgin Atlantic card. That will be recorded as a travel expense. My $19.89 Regal Unlimited movie subscription was accounted for today. This allows me to watch as many movies as I want at my local Regal theater. I can’t cancel it until Summer. Lastly, I spent $2.21 to upsize a free small popcorn coupon I had to a large popcorn. This is the drawback to the movie subscription. I watch enough movies for the subscription to be a good value. Unfortunately, I have a hard time resisting the popcorn which is bad for my weight and my wallet. This year I intent to only buy popcorn when I have a free coupon. After today I hope to have a few days with no expenditures at all.

Some Goals for 2020

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I only have one definite goal for 2020 at this time. My current goal is to save $2500 a month for the first four months of 2020. That will be a difficult goal to achieve. Working in my favor is the fact that I’ll be working two jobs during that time. I’ll need to work 15 hours a week at my tax job while still getting 40 hours at my document review job. That will be difficult to achieve in January when training at my tax job will be during my doc review job hours. After January I will be able to work Saturdays at the tax job making it easier to get my full hours at the doc review job.

January will also be a 5 payday month with 3 of the paydays being double paydays. That should allow me to get off to a good start at saving money. I will also get my tax refund and sell some things during the first 4 months to help me reach my savings goal. Since I have basically unlimited work hours between the 2 jobs I won’t be spending much, if any, time on trying to make money from side hustles. It makes more sense to focus on the guaranteed income during this time.

Some of these savings will be in my 401ks. Both jobs have 401ks that I participate in. I’m planning on having 100% of my tax job pay directed to my 401k. I’ll also be depositing 20% of doc review income into that 401k. I’ll adjust that as necessary to still be able to pay my bills and meet my other savings goals. I also plan on maxing out my IRA. Once I determine how much I need to contribute to my traditional IRA to get my federal income tax to $0, I’ll contribute the remaining allowable contribution amount to my Roth IRA. Once I’m ready to contribute to the IRAs, I’ll have to dial back the 401k contributions.

After the IRAs are maxed out for 2019 I will start saving in a regular savings account. I plan on traveling several months in 2020 and I will need some savings to live on during that time. I will review how I’m doing at the beginning of April and adjust my retirement savings to ensure that I have enough savings for travel.

Some other goals I plan to make later in 2020 are to lose weight and increase my blogging/online income. I intend to start on my weight loss while I’m still working, but I’m not yet ready to make a concrete goal for the weight loss. Blogging/online income is something I’ll work on this summer. Once I have more free time this summer I might be inspired to pursue more goals. I’m leaving the option for more goals open at this time.

Later this week, I will publish a post with my tentative plans for 2020. What are your goals and plans for 2020?

November Income – $3724.75

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Here is a breakdown of my income for November.

Interest$3.09
Amazon FBA($10.71)
Bank Bonus$50
Cashback$27.39
Dividends$18.04
Amazon Merch$4.42
Job$3632.52
Total$3724.75

My income for November was better than usual due to having five paydays during the month.

Amazon FBA income was once again negative for the month. This was due to having two returns during the month. Returns having been killing my FBA income this year. That is part of the reason I’ve spent much less time on FBA this year. Next year I might reevaluate what I’m selling and try to get the FBA income going again.

Dividend income was up a little bit. There were a surprising number of my stocks that paid a dividend in November considering it is not an end of quarter month. Most of my stocks do pay a dividend in December so this total should increase a little more this month. I do my dividend investing with Robinhood. If you sign up using my Robinhood referral link we will both get one share of free stock. Thanks to anyone who signs up using my link. Every little bit helps.

There was once again no online income or expense for the month. I’m still considering making a new wager with HealthyWage and blogging about the process which will hopefully lead to some affiliate commissions. I need to lose some weight before I can make another wager though. My links for Bluehost (aff link) web hosting didn’t result in any commissions. I’ll keep trying. I need to do some review posts or something different to create interest. Next year once I’m not working two jobs I will concentrate more on trying to increase affiliate income.

I made $4.42 from shirt sales on Amazon Merch. I seem to consistently have two sales a month. Perhaps that will increase this month with Christmas sales. I have previously promised to write more about my efforts to make money with Amazon Merch and I will eventually. It will probably be sometime next year before I write that post though.

The job income provided almost all of my income for the month and that will be true again this month. I’ve already started my tax job. Adding that to my regular job I will have over 60 hours available to work each week. I won’t be working that many hours, but if I want to make extra money it makes more sense right now to put in more time at one of my jobs where I have guaranteed income than to work on a side hustle that may not pay off at all.

How was your month?

November Expenses – $1623.85

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for November.

Household$117.67
Rent$450
Entertainment$47.78
Transportation$158.20
Food$214.12
Travel$140.19
Phone$28.67
Student Loan$132.58
Health$323.79
Total$1623.85

My November expenses were lower than the last couple of months , but still a little higher than I prefer.

Entertainment was for movie concessions and my Regal Unlimited monthly membership fee. This expense should be about the same this month.

Transportation expense was for gas and the annual personal property tax bill on my car. This expense will go up this month since I had to get an oil change and will still be driving a lot.

My travel expense was the annual fee on a new credit card that will earn me lots of airline miles as a signup bonus. There was also a $44 expense for taxes and seat selection on a plane ticket from LAX to Tokyo for next June. I usually don’t pay for seat selection, but paying $40 to snag an exit row bulkhead seat on a transpacific flight is well worth the price for the additional comfort.

My food expense was a little better this month, although still much higher than I think it should be. I still indulged in fast food and junk food way too often. I’m doing slightly better so far this month so I think this expense will be down a little bit.

My phone bill was down quite a bit since I used very little data during the month. It will probably be a little higher this month since I’ll likely use a little more data.

My health expense was for one month of health insurance, one month’s dues for a fitness center membership, some medicine, and a $175 for an emergency dentist visit. I got an infection in my gum surrounding my new implant right before Thanksgiving. I didn’t want to take a chance on it getting worse over the Thanksgiving holiday and being unable to see a dentist so I paid extra for an emergency dentist visit. The infection is all cleared up now. This expense should be down quite a bit this month.

This month’s expenses should be slightly lower. Hopefully, next year I will be able to start having months with less than $1000 of expenses again. How was your month?

October Income – $779.82

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Here is a breakdown of my income for October.

Interest$2.56
Amazon FBA($6.59)
Ebay/Other Selling$125
Cashback$5.43
Dividends$10.37
Amazon Merch$4.42
Job$638.63
Total$779.82

My income for September was pretty low. This was due to being off work for three weeks for my trip to Thailand.

Amazon FBA income was negative for the month. I didn’t have any sales and spent a little shipping in inventory at the end fo the month.

There was once again no online income or expense for the month. I’m still considering making a new wager with HealthyWage and blogging about the process which will hopefully lead to some affiliate commissions. I need to lose some weight before I can make another wager though. My links for Bluehost (aff link) and  (aff link) Hostgator for web hosting didn’t result in any commissions. I’ll keep trying. I need to do some review posts or something different to create interest.

Dividend income wasdown a little bit. I do my dividend investing with Robinhood. If you sign up using my Robinhood referral link we will both get one share of free stock. Thanks to anyone who signs up using my link. Every little bit helps.

I made $4.42 from shirt sales on Amazon Merch. I will write more about my efforts to make money with Amazon Merch in the next couple of weeks. .

Although I had several sources of income, none of them add up to very much. The job is what provides me with a decent amount of income. This month will be much better since I will have five paydays.

How was your month?