Expense/Income Tracking

In order to keep track of my financial progress or lack of progress I have decided to calculate my net worth a few times a year.

My net worth as of 02/2/2017 is as follows.

Assets
Cash – $7043
IRA – $24,745
Roth IRA – $10,598
Solo 401k – $1041
Car/Stuff – $4000

Liabilities
Student Loan – $131,813
Credit Card – $2238

Net Worth = $-86,624

My net worth improved slightly since I last calculated it. This was mostly due to a strong month of FBA sales in December.  My net worth should continue to improve over the next couple of months since I’m working full-time at my seasonal tax job. If I were to not count my student loan I would have a positive net worth of $45,189.  I’m going to start tracking my net worth both with and without my student loan to see how much of a negative effect the student loan is having on my net worth.

I now have credit card debt in addition to the student loan debt.  This was actually good debt though. I took a 0% balance transfer with a 2% transaction fee from one of my student loans. This allowed me to take advantage of a credit card deal and also buy more inventory for FBA. I’ve already made a good profit from making the balance transfer. I could pay it off now, but since it is at 0% I’m delaying that in case I find another profitable use for the money.

I’ve been using Personal Capital (affiliate link) to help track my net worth. It keeps track of all of my financial accounts and my student loan making it pretty easy to calculate my net worth each month. It is free to sign up. If you would like to sign up I’d appreciate you using my link. All blog income, including affiliate income, goes to paying down my student loan.

Personal Capital

Here is a breakdown of my income for December.

 
My December income was pretty good. Amazon sales go crazy from the last half of November through Christmas and I was able to send in quite a bit of inventory to benefit from those sales. December was my most profitable month on Amazon FBA so far. I hope I’m able to send in more inventory and do even better next holiday season. If I was able to make this much every month from FBA I wouldn’t need any other sources of income. If I was able to make this kind of money from FBA and  earn a full-time job income I’d be doing really great.

FBA income will be way down this month now that the holiday sales are over. Also, I won’t be sending in much inventory this month since my time will be taken up by my job. On the plus side, I will be working full-time this month and will make a decent amount of money. I’ll only get one paycheck  this month so my income will actually be lower this month. It should be a nice amount higher the next three months though. I plan to build up a nice cushion of savings in order to be able to travel and/or do whatever the rest of the year without being overly worried about money.

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for December.

December was a low expense month. A big reason for the low expenses was the use of gift cards purchased in November that were reflected in November’s expenses. The use of a previously purchased movie gift card allowed us to go to the movies a couple of times and still have a $0 entertainment expense for the month. The use of restaurant gift cards allowed me to only have a food expense of $56.36. Most of that total was made up of the $50 a month I contribute towards groceries each month.

The big bills were $500 to my student loan and almost $300 of phone expense.  If you take away those two expenses I would be under my monthly target of $1000 in expenses. The student loan payment was made to reach the max  $2500 student loan interest tax deduction.

The phone expense reflects over $250 spent to purchase a Nexus 5x in order to switch to Google Fi phone service. My Virgin Mobile phone died on me and I decided to try out Google’s phone service. I didn’t want to spend so much on a phone, but the 5x was the cheapest phone they had.  The new phone plan should save me a few bucks a month, but it will take a long time to make up for the cost of the phone.

I expect January to be a low expense month and most of my expenses should be in their normal range. Sometime this week I plan to post a yearly summary of my expenses and income.

How was your month?

Here is a breakdown of my income for November.

My November income was an improvement over October. It still needs to be a lot higher. It should get to an okay level once I start my tax job.

Most of the improvement in income in November came from increased Amazon FBA earnings. Black Friday shoppers and early Christmas shopping in general helped boost my FBA earnings. I’m hoping for a record month of FBA earnings this month.  I’ve sent in a lot of inventory and plan on buying and sending a lot more inventory before Christmas. Even with a record month I doubt I’ll make as much as I really should be making. I do feel like I’m slowly making progress on my FBA business, but I think I should be making a lot more. It would be nice to get my income up to about $5000 a month which I think is possible. I’m just not sure how to do it.  FBA will get put on the back burner once I start my tax job so it will be a while before I’m able to ramp up the FBA business again after this month.

Although the income is less than I like, it is enough to pay my basic bills and keep me going until I start making more money from the tax job.

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for November.

November was a high expense month.  I had a few low expense months in a row so I suppose I was due for a high expense month. The expense isn’t as bad as it would first appear though since a good chunk of my November expenses went towards paying future expenses. Also we had a trip to Las Vegas for four days and Greenville,SC for another three days which increased my expenses a bit.

I signed up for the Chase Sapphire Reserve card and paid a $450 annual fee. Although I hate paying a large annual fee like that I will get much more value from the card than I paid for the annual fee. I’ve already used the card to get $300 credit for flights next year. I’ll get another $300 travel credit next year and I’ll receive a 100,000 point bonus that is worth $1500 in travel expenses. Taking that into account I paid for a lot of next  year’s travel in November.

I also bought a bunch of discounted restaurant gift cards and a couple of movie gift cards. My restaurant expense should be zero this month and probably next month as well. The movie gift cards should cover my movie expense for this month and possibly a bit of January’s expense. My gift card expenditures in November will lead to much lower food and entertainment expense this month and probably next month as well.

All of my other expenses were pretty much in their normal range. I don’t expect any major changes to my expenses other than the ones I already discussed. December should see my expenses return to their normal level.

How was your November?