Andy Hough

February Expenses – $946.17

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for February.

Household $429.55
Entertainment $79.30
Transportation $58.02
Food $100.77
Student Loan $106.00
Travel $0
Phone $26.81
Health $145.72
Total $946.17

 

My February expenses were fairly low. I managed to make my stretch goal of keeping my expenses under $1000 a month for the third month in a row.  The streak will end when I have to pay for my dental implants. I’m hoping I can keep the streak going until them.

My food expenses were low since I managed to keep my fast food expenses under $50.  There are also some dinners out with my GF that I put in the entertainment category. Those were kept fairly cheap with coupons and/or gift cards. I did pretty well in that category considering Valentine’s Day and my GF’s birthday were in February.

My health expenses were a little higher due to getting sick and needing some prescriptions. The total would have been much lower if I hadn’t paid $53 at CVS for a drug I could have gotten for $4 at Walmart. I won’t be filling any more prescriptions at CVS. I can’t complain about the overall cost of the sickness. My GF being a nurse managed to get me a couple prescriptions from her nurse practitioner and doctor without having an official doctor visit. I will have to pay some lab fees this month, but they won’t be too much.

March should be another low-cost month. We do have a vacation to Las Vegas coming up at the end of the month. The airfare was free and the room is free other than the resort fee so the vacation shouldn’t cost too much.

February Income – $2161.46

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Here is a breakdown of my income for February.

Online Income

 $243.82
Interest

$14.53

Cash Back

$12.35
Amazon FBA $0
Jobs $1890.76

Total

$2161.46

 

February was a decent month for income, but not as good as I hoped. Missing three days of work due to being sick resulted in my job income being a good deal less than I planned. Online income went down by quite a bit. This wasn’t a surprise since it was unusually high the month before.  I didn’t manage to make any money from bonuses or Amazon FBA. I actually lost a little on FBA which I will take off this month’s total.  My interest income went up a little since I loaned my GF $10,000 to buy a car. I might write more about that later.

The job income should go up this month and hopefully I will be able to make a little more money from my alternative income streams. I’m hoping to not work at a job the rest of this year once I finish my tax job so I need to bump up this income.

 

If you haven’t joined Mr. Rebates yet you can get a $5 bonus for signing up through my referral link and I’ll make a little money for referring you as well.
Mr. Rebates

 

Double Sickness Week – Shingles Plus…

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This was not a good week for my physical health.  I’d had a rash on my chest by my underarm for about a week which I had thought was just a rash. It started hurting last Sunday night which made me think it was not just a rash.  When I told my GF about it the next day she said it was probably shingles. My GF is a nurse and got her friend who is a nurse practitioner to look at it and she agreed that it was shingles. Although the shingles was annoying and caused me to lose some sleep I could deal with it and work through it.

Tuesday the plan was to get my shingles prescription after I got off work. After lunch Tuesday I started to feel unwell. I ended up leaving work about an hour early and by the time I got home I was sick as a dog. I had a fever, nausea, chills, aches, and fatigue. Looking at shingles symptoms I saw that it could cause flu-like symptoms so I figured that was what I was experiencing. This was worse than any flu than I’d had for many years though.

Sick as a dog
Sick as a dog

I didn’t get much sleep that night and in the morning I felt even worse. I decided I needed to tell my GF another symptom I was experiencing. It really hurt when I peed. This is not something you want to tell your GF. 🙂 Since I knew it couldn’t be an STD we figured it must be a urinary tract infection and I started taking an antibiotic for this infection.

Having shingles and a UTI seems bad enough but things were actually worse. After taking the antibiotic Wednesday and Thursday I felt only a little better on Friday. My GF decided I should go to her office so she could run a urinalysis which confirmed I had an infection and that it looked more serious than just a UTI. Her doctor sent me to get some blood work done which confirmed I had prostatitis. I’d never heard of it before, but it is a bacterial infection of the prostate which can be pretty serious. With the new diagnosis we switched to a different antibiotic and it seems to be working.

My theory is that these illnesses all started with my oral surgery a couple of weeks prior. The dentist prescribed me a steroid to keep the inflammation down. One side effect of the steroid is that it can weaken your immune system. Apparently, it really weakened mine. When I have my dental implants done later this year I will be sure to let them know I do not want to take a steroid.

Although I was off work three days I didn’t get any blogging or much of anything else done. I felt so bad I all I wanted to do was sleep or sit on the couch and watch TV. Now that I’m feeling almost normal again I should have a better week this week.

January 2015 Easy Money Summary

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January was a decent month for easy money. This is the first month I have kept track of my easy money, but I think this was a better than average month.

In January I received $20 in Amazon gift cards from Swagbucks. If you would like to sign up for Swagbucks I would appreciate if you would use my referral link. Doing so will help me earn Swagbucks and won’t cost you anything. If there is interest I will share what I do to earn Swagbucks.

I earned a $25 Gyft gift card for signing up for Moneystream. That offer is no longer available. I used my Gyft gift card to buy an AMC Theatres gift card. With this gift card, a gift card from Christmas, and a gift card from redeeming my Discover card cash back we won’t have to pay to go to the movies for a while.

I received $10 in Total Rewards from Caesars’s Entertainment that we can use when we go to Vegas next month. Also, I earned rewards by playing MyVegas Slots that I can redeem for free stuff on our next Vegas trip. Rather than tracking the loyalty points I earn on MyVegas I am just going to count rewards redeemed.  Since the value you get for your loyalty points varies quite a bit for different rewards I think this better reflects what I’m getting from the program.

I earned a $5 bonus on my Emerald Card. This deal was only available to H&R Block employees. I also earned a $100 referral bonus from Motif Investing. I have a referral link for that bonus in the sidebar or you can leave a comment and I’ll email you a referral link. If you sign up through the referral link you can also get a $100 bonus. You will have to make a couple of trades to earn the bonus though. It ends up being a slightly over $80 bonus which is still a good deal.

Overall, I made $160 in free money in January. February should be even better. I already had another person sign up through my Motif referral bonus. I also opened a Bank of the West checking account which will pay me $150 in bonuses although I’m not sure if they will post this month. And I opened a Personal Capital account through a referral link which should reward me with a $10 Amazon gift card.  If all of those bonuses come though I’ll be ahead of January and there is still a lot of month left to make more easy money.

January FIRE Numbers- SWR 35.89%, 33.43 Months of Expenses Saved

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My FIRE (financial independence retire early) numbers improved a bit in January.  This isn’t too surprising since I started my seasonal tax job in January which allows me to put more money into savings. My safe withdrawal rate improved to 35.89% from 37.67% in December. My goal is to get the SWR down to 4% so the lower my SWR is the better.The 4% SWR translates into having 25x your annual expenses in savings or 300 months of expenses in savings.

I have 33.43 months of expenses saved. This is probably the better number to look at when calculating my progress towards financial independence. A SWR of 35.89% might not immediately seem like it is a long way from getting to a 4% SWR, but when I see have 33.43 months of expenses saved and I need 300 it is obvious I have got a lot more savings to do. I hope to also bring down my average monthly expenses which will help me reach the 300 goal faster. Even though the goal of 300 months of expenses is far away it is nice to know that if I suddenly stopped earning money at all I would have almost three years before I ran out of money.

February should be a low expense month and I plan to put most of my paychecks into savings. As long as the stock market isn’t absolutely terrible I should make some nice progress towards FIRE this month.