Andy Hough

May Income – $146.71

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Here is a breakdown of my income for May.

Interest $6.35
Amazon FBA $14.20
Job $0
Free Stock $4.55
Cashback $3.99
Dividends $17.62
Online $100
Total $146.71

May was a terrible month for income. This was to be expected since I am unemployed while in Thailand and my non-job sources of income don’t add up to much.

Amazon FBA income consisted of reimbursement for an item that Amazon lost in their warehouse. I only have two items left in inventory. I’m going to lower my price and try to get them sold this month.  When I get back from Thailand I will restock my FBA inventory and try to build it up to where it can cover my monthly expenses.

My online income consisted of an affiliate commission from HealthyWage.  My links for Bluehost (aff link) and  (aff link) Hostgator for web hosting and Namecheap (aff link) for domain names didn’t result in any commissions. I’d like to increase my affiliate commissions. To do that I need to post more consistently and have longer, more helpful posts. So far I’ve been too lazy to do that.

My dividend income was slightly more than the previous month. I sold some of my stocks and invested the proceeds in a stock that doesn’t pay a dividend which will result in lower dividend income until I start buying more dividend stocks again.

I got one share of free stock worth $4.55 from Robinhood from someone signing up using my referral link. If you sign up using my Robinhood referral link we will both get one share of free stock. Thanks to the person who signed up using my link. Every little bit helps.

Due to the lack of job income, this month’s income will also be very small. It will probably be even less than May’s income. In July I should start making money again and will work on building my savings back up.

How was your month?

May Expenses – $1093.81

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for May.

Household$122.41
Rent$298.47
Entertainment$37.42
Transportation$0
Food$180.62
Travel$132.04
Phone$14.68
Student Loan$132.58
Health$175.59
Total$1093.81

My May expenses were a little bit over my target of $1000 for the month. For the year, I’m still averaging under $1000 a month. If I were able to keep my monthly average for the entire year under $1000 a month that would be great. That won’t be easy to do since I plan on getting over a $1000 of dental work done this year and there are always unplanned expenses sometime during the year. It will be a good goal to work towards.

Rent was low although not quite as low as I thought it would be. I had to pay about $30 in cleaning fees when I moved out of my room in Uttaradit. I added that to my rent total. I also paid for one month’s rent in Pattaya for May 29th through June 29th. After my month is up I will travel back to Uttaradit and then Bangkok staying in hotel rooms. Thus, there won’t be any rent expense for June. Taking that into consideration my rent total for May looks great.

There was no transportation expense in May. I did purchase a bus ticket from Bangkok to Pattaya and took a taxi to my hotel in Pattaya. Those expenses are both included in my travel expenses. There are cheap buses here in Pattaya which can be taken for about 30 to 60 cents. I haven’t used one yet, but I plan to use them some this month. That will result in there being a few dollars of transportation expense this month.

My food expense was higher than I’d prefer. That is to be expected though since I ate out almost every meal and also bought some meals for my girlfriend. This month my food total will probably be even higher. Pattaya has a variety of Western restaurants which I will eat at often and they are expensive by Thai standards. The Thai food in Pattaya is much more expensive than the Thai food in Uttaradit as well.

The household expense was mainly about $90 for electricity for my room. That was pretty expensive considering my rent was only $140. The temperature was over 100 degrees almost every day which led to using the aircon a lot and the resulting high electric bill. I also bought my girlfriend a small present.

Entertainment was for two movies with concessions and a dinner out with my girlfriend. Most of our dinners I just included in food. The one meal I included in entertainment since it was a fair bit more than I would have spent if I was alone. I saw both of the movies after I arrived in Pattaya. The theater near me has all of their movies available in English so I’ll be spending a lot more at the movies this month.

Travel was for a private car from Uttaradit to Phitsanulok, a plane ticket from Phitsanulok to Bangkok, a bus from Bangkok to Pattaya, a taxi from the Pattaya bus station to my hotel, one night hotel in Pattaya, 3 nights hotel in Uttaradit and one night hotel in Shanghai, China. That is quite a bit of travel for my money. When you consider it is possible to pay $130 for one hotel night, getting 5 hotel nights, a plane ticket, a bus ticket, a private car ride, and a taxi for the same amount is a great deal.

My phone bill was low since I still had some trade-in credit to use up. This month it will be higher since I’ve used all the credit and I use more data on my phone here in Thailand. I expect it to still be a reasonable amount of $30 or so.

I paid about $50 for a dental visit. I’ll be getting a dental implant this month which will cost about $1000. That will obviously result in my medical expense being much higher this month.

May was a decent month for expenses. Even though the cost of living is cheap in Thailand my monthly expenses are still about the same as in the States since I keep my expenses so low.

This month’s expenses will be quite a bit higher due to the large dental bill. Excluding the dental bill, I expect this month’s expenses will be a little lower than May’s expenses.

Get Free Stock from Robinhood

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When you sign up for a free brokerage account with Robinhood through my referral link they will give us both a free share of stock. The stock you receive is chosen at random and will be worth between $2.50 and $200. When I signed up the stock I received was worth about $2.93. The value of the stock you receive will most likely be worth about $2.50, but some people get lucky and get a more valuable stock. According to Robinhood you have a 1 in 250 chance to get a share of Apple, Facebook, or Berkshire Hathaway. That isn’t bad odds for something that will only cost you a few minutes of your time.

Robinhood is an app that allows you to make commission free stock, option, and ETF trades from your phone. They also have a desktop site you can use if you don’t want to use your phone. I was skeptical about buying stocks from my phone, but now that I have been using the app for a while I prefer using my phone and rarely use the desktop site. I like being able to just open the app on my phone and see how my portfolio is doing. Although that does lead to me checking my portfolio way more often than I should.

Of course, if you find the Robinhood brokerage account useful signing up for the free stock is an even better deal. When I signed up, I did it only for the free stock and didn’t have any plans to buy stocks through Robinhood. After selling my free stock and cashing out, I left my account dormant for about a year. Then I decided to take a flyer on the parent company of MoviePass (HMNY) and see if they could recover. That didn’t work out to well. I ended up selling the stock for pennies. I only invested $10 so it wasn’t too big of a loss.Since that purchase I have been buying stocks on a pretty regular basis. My focus is on dividend growth stocks. I’m not sure what return I’ve made on my stocks. They have done pretty well although probably not quite as well as the market overall since it has mostly been a bull market since I’ve started investing in dividend stocks. I’m not too concerned whether my stocks trail the total market a little since this is a small part of my total portfolio. The bulk of my retirement accounts are invested in index funds. I think of investing in these dividend stocks as a profitable hobby that leads to me saving more money than I would otherwise. It allows me to have a little bit of the thrill of gambling but with the odds in my favor.

If you would like to sign up for Robinhood please use my referral link and we will both get a free stock.

Dinner and a Dentist Visit in Thailand

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Sign for the noodle restaurant in Uttaradit, Thailand.
My girlfriend walking to the noodle restaurant.

This post is about a recent evening I had here in Thailand. Nothing too exciting happened, but I thought some people might be interested in my daily life here.

The evening started with a trip to a street food restaurant for dinner. There are a lot of restaurants similar to the one pictured above. These restaurants have outdoor seating with plastic stools and flimsy tables. The Thai people don’t seem to mind eating outside when it is over 90 degrees. We wait until dusk to eat so it is at least a little bit cooler and the sun isn’t beating down on us. We usually eat at a table 2 or 3 rows in since the outer row of tables is too close the noise and traffic of the street for me.

Thai Noodle Shop Menu
Thai Noodle Place Menu

The great thing about these restaurants is that they have yummy Thai food for cheap prices. The menu above shows how cheap everything is. For reference, the cheapest item on the menu is 35 baht which is about $1.11 U.S. Dinner for both of us usually is only about $2. Sometimes it is even cheaper. My girlfriend prefers to go to these types of place for dinner and that works out great for me. Eating at a Western restaurant would cost several times more than the typical Thai place. Since this is not a tourist town the menu is all in Thai. I rely on my girlfriend to order for me. She knows my limited palate and hasn’t made a bad order for me yet.

Chicken and noodles dinner.
Chicken and Noodles Dinner.

The picture above is what we had for dinner. My GF calls my dinner chicken and noodles.
I don’t know the Thai name for the dish. It doesn’t taste like chicken and noodle soup. It tastes better than that and is really good. Her dish contained chicken feet and was eaten with rice. I didn’t try that. This restaurant adds some kind of flavoring to their free water. Most places don’t do that. I don’t like the taste of the water with their flavoring added so I splurged and paid another 10 baht for a bottle of water. Not tipping is required or expected at these restaurants and tax is already included in the prices. Thus, the cost of your food is the cost of your meal.

Uttaradit Dentist Office
Uttaradit Dentist Office

After dinner we made a visit to the dentist office. The night before I had some fresh caramel popcorn that I bought at the Wednesday night market. Unfortunately, a piece of the popcorn got jammed up under my gums and I wasn’t able to floss or pick it out. I complained about it hurting during dinner and my GF suggested we go to the dentist after dinner. I didn’t realize we could visit the dentist at that time of night without an appointment, My girlfriend assured me it would be no problem. The first dentist we went to had a long queue. We left and visited another dentist. This one only had one person in front of me. It turned out this dental office had just opened the previous month. The office did look new and extremely clean. It might have been the nicest dentist office I’ve been too. It was definitely way nicer than the dental school where I’ve been getting my dental work done the last few years.

After about a five minute wait we went back to see the dentist. My GF explained the problem I was having. The dentist did speak some English so I think I could have explained the problem to her if I didn’t have my GF there to do it for me. The dentist flossed between my teeth and then went in with the dental pick and got a small piece of popcorn out. I told her I felt like there was more in there and she went back in and pulled a much larger shard of popcorn out. Although my mouth was still sore it immediately felt better once the larger piece of popcorn was removed. This is the second time this year I have had to go to the dentist to get a piece of popcorn removed. It was in the same place both times. For now, I’m going to give up popcorn until I have some more dental work done.

When we went out to pay the bill, we were told there was no charge. I was very surprised by that. I indicated that I was willing to pay, but they waved off my money. I was impressed with this dental office. If I were going to be in this town longer I would have them do my dental implant or maybe redo my bridge. When I come back later this year or next year I will get some type of dental work done there.

After that we went back to the hotel and took our evening showers. It is normal in Thailand to take 2 or 3 showers a day. After the showers, we got in bed and watched a movie on Netflix until it was time to go to sleep. Other than the dentist visit that was a typical night for us. It isn’t too exciting, but I like it.

Tidying Up My Finances

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Earlier year there was a lot of buzz about tidying up due to Marie Kondo’s show on Netflix. After watching the show I decided to do some tidying up myself. Since I prefer not to own a lot of things and don’t own a lot of things there wasn’t much tidying up for me to do. I did manage to make my sock and underwear drawer look a little nicer.

After tidying up my material possessions I considered what else I could tidy up. I decided it would make sense to tidy up my financial life. Last summer I counted all the different places I had money and it turned out I had money in 16 different places. I also had quite a few credit cards due to opening many accounts for the sign up bonuses. Even though I can use an app like Personal Capital to help keep track of all my different accounts it can still be burdensome to stay on top of that many different accounts.

Over the last few months I have closed many of my smaller financial accounts. These were bank accounts or financial apps that I opened for the bonus and then didn’t both to close since there was no fee for keeping them open. Even though there was no fee to keep the accounts open, it was better for me to close them to preserve my mental bandwidth. Some of the financial apps were opened for small $5 or $10 bonuses. Going forward, I will require a more substantial bonus before I open a new account. Although the small bonuses were easy money I still might have been better off using my time on something potentially more rewarding.

I have also canceled three credit cards. Closing credit cards can hurt your credit score which is why I kept the ones with no annual fee open even after they no longer proved useful. Since I have an excellent credit score I don’t need to worry if my credit score drops 10 or 20 points from closing a card. A drop of that amount wouldn’t affect the credit available to me. I have monitored my credit score since closing the accounts and it doesn’t seem that closing them resulted in a noticeable difference in my score. It has stayed in roughly the same 10 point range all year. I’m not going to stop opening up credit cards for the sign up bonus since the bonuses can be quite lucrative. I will be quicker to close accounts that no longer provide me with any benefit after the bonus is earned. Also, when considering which credit card bonus to sign up for I will give a preference to credit cards that provide useful benefits to me after the bonus is earned.

To make my retirement accounts simpler I moved my Roth IRA to Fidelity. I had already moved my traditional IRA over a couple of years ago. Since Fidelity manages my work 401k having my Roth and traditional IRA with them as well makes it easy to see how I’m doing on saving for retirement. I still have a solo 401k with Etrade that I might transfer to Fidelity as well. When opening my solo 401k I chose Etrade over Fidelity for some reason, but I no longer remember what it was. I need to review Fidelity’s solo 401k offering and see how it compares. There is also a chance that I will just rollover the solo 401k into my work 401k or traditional IRA. Now that I’m over 50 and qualify to make catch up contributions to my work 401k and IRA I haven’t been able to max out those contributions. Thus, it isn’t really necessary to have the solo 401k as well.

Making those changes has simplified my finances quite a bit. Since I plan to continue chasing bank and credit card bonuses my finances will not get much simpler. I think getting the bonuses is worth making my finances slightly more complex. For now, I’m satisfied with the tidiness of my finances.