Expense/Income Tracking

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?

Here is a breakdown of my income for October.

My October income was an improvement over September which wasn’t much of an accomplishment given how low my income was in September.  On the plus side my income was greater than my expenses. Although I’d prefer to make more I’m okay with this level of income for now since I know I’ll be making a lot more once my tax job starts.

Most of the improvement in income in October came from increased Amazon FBA earnings.  Since there should be a lot more Christmas shoppers online this month I should be able to make more money this month. My week vacation might hamper that a little bit, but I’m going to try to work extra when I get back to get my earnings higher than last month.

I did have a couple of sources of income carry over from September. I made $20 referring people to Decluttr. If you would like to sign up for Decluttr you can get a $10 bonus by clicking through my referral link and using my referral code DXR9HCGXYL. You need to sell Decluttr at least $10 of stuff to qualify for the $10 bonus. I’ll receive a $10 bonus for the first ten qualified referrals as well. I made $75 referring people to an online health study. If you buy your own insurance then you might qualify for the health study. If you use my health insurance study referral link we can both make $25 when you successfully complete the study.

Overall, my earnings weren’t too bad considering I didn’t work a job at all and I spent less than 40 hours a week working on the various things that did make me money.

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for October.

October was a super low expense month. Since my income was also low it is good that I was able to keep my expenses low. I’ve been lucky the last few months to not have any big expenses come up. That lucky streak will end this month. I signed up for the Chase Sapphire Reserve card and will be paying a $450 annual fee. That is a pretty big fee. It is especially big compared to the size of my expenses. I think the fee will be worth it since I’ll receive a sign-up bonus worth over $1000 and will also receive a $300 travel credit this year and next. I think I’ll be able to travel quite a bit next year using the points from this card.

Other than the increase in travel expenses I don’t think any of my other expenses will change much this month. I would like to decrease my food spending just a little. Since we have a week-long trip to Las Vegas and South Carolina coming up next week it might be difficult to keep the food spending down.  I’m okay with that as long as I feel like I get good value for the money spent.

How was your October?

In order to keep track of my financial progress or lack of progress I have decided to calculate my net worth each month.

My net worth as of 10/1/2016 is as follows.

Assets
Cash – $3710.82 (+$397.63)
IRA – $23,877.79 (-$26.52)
Roth IRA – $10,450.23 (+$71.49)
Solo 401k – 988.09 (-$4.45)
Car/Stuff – $4500 (-$100)

Liabilities
Student Loan – $130,181.70 ($518)

Net Worth = $-86,654.77

My net worth decreased by $179.85 since the last update. Since I didn’t  have any luck finding a job last month I wasn’t able to contribute any money to my investments or pay extra on my student loan. Although I did have a small increase in my assets it wasn’t enough to overcome the $600 of monthly interest incurred on my student loan.

I do have a job starting in January so I’ll be able to improve my net worth at that time. I’m hoping I’ll be able to find something in the meantime to increase my income and reverse this net worth slide.

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 September.

My income wasn’t very good in September. I didn’t have any luck finding a job. There was some good news on the job front though. I was officially hired for my seasonal tax job. That job doesn’t start until January so I’ll be looking for other ways to make money until then.

I did have some new sources of income in September. I made $20 referring people to Decluttr. If you would like to sign up for Decluttr you can get a $10 bonus by clicking through my referral link and using my referral code DXR9HCGXYL. You need to sell Decluttr at least $10 of stuff to qualify for the $10 bonus.  I’ll receive a $10 bonus for the first ten qualified referrals as well.  I made $75 referring people to an online health study.  If you buy your own insurance then you might qualify for the health study. If you use my health insurance study referral link we can both make $25 when you successfully complete the study. I also made $10 from User Testing. I might write more about User Testing later.

All of the new sources of income are nice extra sources of income, but none of them have the potential to make significant money. Since it is now Q4 I will try to kick my Amazon business into high gear.  Most FBA sellers make the majority of their income during the Christmas season. If I am able to make the majority of my FBA income these last three months of the year then I’ll consider it a successful year. In addition to FBA I’ll be looking for other ways to make more money. It shouldn’t be too hard to make more money this month than I did in September.