Expense/Income Tracking

Here is a breakdown of my income for March.

My online income came down a lot but I’m still happy with it.  I’m on track to make a lot more than last year.  My interest income is high because I’m including ING Direct referral bonuses.  April will be another low income month but in May I’ll return to work and start making some decent money.

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for February:

My expenses were way too high last month.  I spent $440 on a new clutch for my car which made my transportation expense much higher than normal.  My vacation in Cancun made my entertainment expense abnormally high.  The bad thing about that is I spent almost $100 on entertainment at home.

Those expenses should return to normal this month.  My other expenses should remain in the same ballpark.  I would really like to get my food expense back under $100.  I only went $10 over last month which isn’t bad considering I was on vacation for five days but I would just like to show myself that I have the self-discipline to get my food expense back under budget.  I’m hoping for total expenses of less than $1000 this month.

I decided to keep track of my hours spent blogging last month so I could determine my hourly wage for blogging. The resulting figure is very misleading.  I spent 21 hours on blogging in February.  That figure includes actual time writing posts and working on the blog.  It doesn’t include time spent reading other blogs or corresponding with other bloggers.  If that time was included my hours would easily double.  The total hours is also lower than normal due to February being a short month and my spending little time on the blog while on vacation.

My blogs made $617.40 last month.  That is by far my best month and won’t likely be repeated.  My income being abnormally high and my hours being lower than normal result in an hourly wage that is much higher than normal.  I’d guess my usual blogging wage is closer to minimum wage but last month was the first month I kept track of my time spent so I can’t be sure.

If I could make that wage every month I wouldn’t look for a job I’d just spend more time blogging.  That wouldn’t really work since some of the income realized this month covered several months of sales.  Also doubling my hours blogging wouldn’t result in a doubling of income.  The return for hours spent blogging would rapidly decline as my hours increased.  It is nice to make that much for the month though and it makes a goal of earning a living online seem possible.

Here is a summary of my income for February:

My online income was by far my best ever.  This won’t be duplicated soon though because I was paid for two year long link placements which likely won’t be repeated.  Also I received my Adsense payment which usually takes me a few months to hit the minimum payout.  It could have been even higher but the referrals I received from Prosper and Lending Club I invested in loans and will count them as income as payments are made.

The interest income includes  ING Direct referrals or it would be much smaller.  I’ll probably have quite a few of them this month as well.  I’ll have to find some more ways to increase my income.

My net online income for 2007 was $883.84 out of a gross income of $1025.38.  Which comes out to roughly $73.65 a month.  I’ve got a long way to go if I want to be able to live off my online income.  Although I do also make money from other alternative sources such as paid surveys and bank bonuses.

Most of my income was generated by my other blog Bank Bonuses.  I’ve yet to fully monetize this blog.  I don’t want to put Adsense on here and I want to keep any ads unobtrusive.  But I do want to make more money so I’ve got to come up some other ways to generate income from this blog.