Andy Hough

November Expenses – $1026.75

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for November.

Household $401.60
Entertainment $71.70
Transportation $63.06
Food $152.17
Student Loan $106.00
Travel $149.10
Phone $26.81
Health $56.31
Total $1026.75

 

My November expenses were back at the level I prefer.  I came very close to making my stretch goal of keeping my expenses to $1000 a month.  My expenses would have been under $1000 if it weren’t for my travel expense.  The travel expense was pretty cheap considering I spent five days in Cancun and three days in Las Vegas during the month.  Most of the Cancun trip had already been paid for and the Vegas trip was almost free is why the travel expense was so cheap.

The only expense I’m not happy about is the food expense.  I spent almost $100 on fast food. I plan to keep the fast food expense to less than $50 this month. All of the other expenses will probably remain about the same.  It should be another low expense month.  It is possible that Christmas will somehow mess up my low expense month, but I don’t think it will.

October Expenses – $2275.43

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for October. I thought I had already posted these, but since the post is nowhere to be found on my blog I guess I didn’t or it just disappeared somehow.

Household $464.85
Entertainment $103.51
Transportation $83.94
Food $131.05
Student Loan $106.00
Travel $580.50
Phone $26.81
Health $722.46
Total $2275.43

 

My October expenses were high due to two big expenses on health and travel.  The health expense was big due to the bone graft surgery I had to prepare for getting dental implants next year. The travel expense was high due to paying for my hotel room for November’s vacation and my last-minute passport experience.

I’m okay with the health expenses since getting my implants is important to my future dental health.  Other than the extra $70 I had to pay to get my passport expedited I’m okay with the travel expenses as well.  The Cancun vacation ended up costing a little more than I planned, but it was still a decent value.  As a once a year expense it is okay to splurge a little.

October Income – $2128.63

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Here is a breakdown of my income for October.

Online Income

 $646.25
Healthy Wage

$600
Interest

$7.01

Cash Back

$27.82

Amazon FBA

 $5.00
Dividends $1.14
Jobs $841.41

Total

$2128.63

 

My income was pretty good in October considering I only worked a couple of weeks.

My online income was almost exactly the same as last month. I keep expecting it to go down, but so far it has been holding steady.

The $600 I won from my Healthy Wage bet helped boost my alternative income quite a bit.  It was nice to make over $1200 in income from sources other than my job.

My cashback income stayed about the same. 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

November will probably not be as good of a month for income.  I didn’t do much to earn extra income the first couple of the weeks of this month since I was in Cancun and Vegas. I will be starting another temp job next week so the month should still be decent.

 

 

September Safe Withdrawal Rate – 39.48%

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I’m way behind getting this up due to last week’s vacation and general laziness the two weeks before the vacation. I plan to write a post a day this week to get caught up.

My SWR for September was  39.48%. That is down from 37.25% the month before. The decrease was due to the declining stock market in September. Since I’m writing this so long after the fact I already know that the stocks recovered in October.  When I don’t add any money to my savings the only changes to my SWR and months of living expenses saved are from my investment performance and the average of my trailing twelve month’s of expenses going up or down.

My goal is to get the SWR down to 4% so the lower my SWR is the better. That goal is probably many years from being met. The 4% SWR translates into having 25x your annual expenses in savings or 300 months of expenses in savings. Once I reach that point I will consider myself financially independent.

I have 30.38 months of living expenses saved which is a slight decrease from 32.21 months saved in August.  I calculate my months of living expenses saved by dividing the average of my trailing twelve months of expenses by my total money saved.

There won’t be any big changes to these numbers until I start working full-time again in January and can contribute more to my savings.  I’m hoping in the meantime they will at least stay about the same.

My Same Day Passport Experience

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You may know from previous posts that I have a trip to Cancun with my girlfriend and my mom planned for Monday. As preparation for that trip I got out my passport Thursday afternoon to add my passport number to my airline ticket reservation. I was dismayed to see that my passport had expired in September.  My first thought that was that there was no way I could renew my passport in time to leave on Monday.  This was a major bummer to say the least. Since it was already Thursday afternoon, I basically had one business day to get a new passport.

After doing some internet searching through Swagbucks I was somewhat relieved to see it is possible to get a passport in one day.  I first tried to get a passport using RushMyPassport.com.  I hated the idea of paying $350 plus the $170 in passport fees to get my passport, but it was better than the alternative of having to cancel my Cancun vacation. After filling out my passport application online , printing off my airline ticket confirmation, and going to get my passport picture taken I called RushMyPassport to get a letter of authorization per the instructions on their website.  Unfortunately, when I called them they said they wouldn’t be able to get me a passport in 24 hours and it would be Tuesday before they could get me a passport. Since they weren’t able to provide me they advertised and I paid for I canceled their service.  Getting the passport on Tuesday wouldn’t do me any good. They promised to refund the fee to my credit card. I’m hoping that they honor that promise. I’ll share how that turns out.

Now I was despondent once again.  A little more internet research showed that it might be possible to get a passport in one day at a U.S. Passport Agency. The problem there was that there are only 28 of these offices in the country and none of them are very close to Kansas City.  It turns out the closest passport agency to KC is in Hot Springs, AR.  It is kind of strange that Hot Springs,a town of 30,000 people, has a passport agency.  The other passport agencies that were within a somewhat reasonable distance to me were in Chicago and Dallas. I looked into flying into those cities, but the last-minute fares were too high and I wouldn’t get there early enough to make an early morning appointment. Hot Springs was my only hope.

I called their automated reservation line and managed to make an appointment for 9am on Friday.  By the time I got all of this done it was a little after 5pm on Thursday. I called my girlfriend and let her know we needed to make an emergency road trip. Luckily, my girlfriend is cool and didn’t freak out about the situation.  It was about a seven hour drive to Hot Springs so we needed to get on the road.  It was about 2:00am by the time we arrived in Hot Springs, checked into a motel, and got to bed.

The next morning I arrived at the passport agency about fifteen minutes early for my appointment.  It took a couple of minutes to get through security and then I was able to meet with a passport agent after waiting just a couple more minutes. The agent was very nice and it only took about five minutes to go through the passport renewal process.  She told me I could pick up my new passport at 2:30pm.  I was momentarily frightened when I heard “Tuesday” instead of “2:30.”  After she repeated the time, I was greatly relieved. I left the passport agency office at about 9am which was when my appointment had been scheduled. The expedited passport renewal process was extremely efficient.

I returned at 2pm to the agency to pick up my passport.  Although the passport pickup form stated to not arrive early to pickup your passport I decided to see if my passport was ready after noticing other people entering the agency. I was in luck and was able to meet an agent immediately upon entering the office and she had my passport.  I was extremely happy to receive my passport and know that I’d be able to go on my vacation.

If you need a passport in one day it is possible if you go to one of the U.S. Passport Agencies.  Some of them require proof of imminent travel and there is no guarantee that you will be able to get an appointment though.  It is much smarter to check your passport ahead of time so you don’t have to get a passport at the very last minute like I did. I’m incredibly lucky that I checked my passport when I did or it would have been too late. If I had discovered my passport was expired on Friday I wouldn’t have been able to make it to a passport agency in time to get the new passport. The whole ordeal of having to drive seven hours each way, get a motel, and being stressed about whether I’d actually get the passport or not could have been avoided if I had just checked my passport when I booked the airline tickets.  If you have any upcoming international travel make sure you have a valid passport.