Expense/Income Tracking

Here is a breakdown of my income for June.

June was another terrible income month although it was at least better than May.  My various sources of income just don’t add up to a very significant amount.  They have a long way to go to provide replacement income for a job.

I did have three sources of income this month that I didn’t have last month. The first was a bank bonus of $150. That was pretty easy money. I need to find a new bank bonus to do now. The second was mystery shopping. This income is a month behind so this is from shops I did in May. I did a couple more in June so I’ll have mystery shopping income in July as well. The third source of income was unemployment. This is the first time I have ever filed for unemployment. The process wasn’t too difficult. The pay isn’t great though. I only received one week of unemployment since one week counted as a waiting week and the week after that I was employed again. The one week I did receive was a small check since it was based on my Missouri earnings last year and I made about 40% of my income in Kansas last year. My Uber earnings also reduced my check. I’m glad I don’t have to depend on an unemployment check to pay my bills.

The good news is that I did find employment and work the last two weeks of June. This is a document review job that I have done before. It is project based so my employment and hours fluctuate depending on whether there is a project available for me to work on. I only worked two days this week since my project came to an end. I’ll be starting a new project on Monday that will hopefully last until the third week of July when I’ll have to take some time off for my dental implant surgery. With the paycheck I received today and the one I’ll get next week my July earnings will already be more than my June earnings. I’m hoping I can add a lot more earnings before the month is over.

Here is a breakdown of my income for May.

May was a terrible month for income. I was supposed to start a temporary document review job in May, but the start date was delayed three separate times. I’m still not sure when (or even if the job) will start. I was way too lazy in May. I kept off working Uber more or doing other things to make money since I thought I would be starting my document review job soon and making good money from that. Since I’m not sure that I’ll have any job income this month I need to start driving for Uber a lot more and start selling a lot more stuff. It is doubtful those two things will be enough to replace my job income, but I should be able to make a lot more money than I did in May. My savings took a hit in May and I can’t continue to let that happen.

One tiny bright spot was my FBA earnings.  This month’s profit was about $5 higher than last month’s making for my new best profit month ever. Unfortunately, this month will most likely not be a good month for FBA income. Since I didn’t make much money last month my Amazon payments mostly went to paying my personal living expenses rather than being used to buy more inventory. I have very little inventory left to sell on FBA. Unless I can find some really cheap inventory to sell or my job starts I won’t be able to buy any new inventory this month and the FBA income will dwindle.

I do have a lot of stuff around the house I can sell on eBay,Craigslist or Facebook. I need to concentrate on doing that this month rather than buying new things to sell. I should be able to make at least a few hundred dollars from selling stuff if I get most of it listed online for sale.

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for May.

My May expenses were once again fairly low although I did miss my goal of $1000 or less in spending for the month. If It wouldn’t have been for some medical bills and medicine I would have made the $1000 goal. The $1000 spending goal probably won’t be achievable for the next couple of months since more bills will be coming due.

Usually my only health expenses is $83.13 for my health insurance. This month I also had to pay $159.19 for a doctor visit and lab fees, and $28.51 for some medicine. These medical bills were not related to my accident. I also paid some medical bills related to the accident, but I’m not including them here since I expect to eventually get reimbursed for those bills. I’ll have another medical visit this month that is unrelated to the accident so this month so depending on when the bill is due my medical expenses will be higher than normal again.

Travel and entertainment expenses were low because I was able to erase most of them using my credit card rewards. Office Max had a deal in May that allowed me to rack up quite a bit in rewards. It isn’t likely that there will be that good of a deal this month which means the travel and entertainment expense will be higher. I don’t plan on traveling this month so that expense might still be $0. Entertainment expense should still be fairly low since I do have some free gift cards to use up.

My transportation expense was fairly low since my only expense was $58.53 for gas. This total was helped by a free $20 gas card an insurance company gave for getting an auto insurance quote from them. Some of this gas was used driving for Uber or going on mystery shops which I’ll be able to deduct the mileage for those on my taxes. Once you factor in the mileage deduction my transportation cost for the month will be even lower.

I did make some extra student loan payments in May as well, but I’m not reporting them here since they throw off the average. You can see my progress on paying off my student loan in the right sidebar.

Other than the exceptions I have already noted my June expenses should be about the same.

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for April.

My April expenses were not too bad considering I bought a car and took a vacation to Niagara Falls. If it weren’t for the six month insurance expense of $198.66 and the car registration expense of $60.50 I would have made my $1000 target.

The reported monthly total doesn’t reflect all of my personal expenses for this month. I left out the purchase price of my car since it would throw off my expense average. Also, since the car is an asset it doesn’t make sense to immediately count the entire cost as an expense. My friend JK at MyFrugalMiser has a good way of dealing with the car expense. He expenses the car depreciation monthly according to the amount of miles driven. Although this is a reasonable way of tracking the car depreciation expense I will not be doing this. Mainly, because I don’t want to bother tracking my mileage. Also, because a lot of miles will be business miles and it doesn’t seem accurate to count the depreciation as a personal expense when it is also part of the business mileage expense.

The monthly total also doesn’t reflect the extra $2383 I paid towards my student loan since including that amount in my monthly total would throw off my monthly expense average. Although, I won’t report the extra amount paid on my student loan in my monthly total I will always report it in my expense post and possibly elsewhere.

For some reason my monthly phone bill declined from the usual $26.81 to $26.30. That decline will be short-lived. I bought a new phone last month because my old one wouldn’t run the Uber app I needed to drive for Uber or the Amazon Seller app which is extremely helpful to have for my FBA business. Since I upgraded my phone I lost my grandfathered $25 a month rate on Virgin Mobile and will now have to pay a $35 a month rate. That is still a pretty good deal and I plan to write off the extra $10 a month as a business expense.

Even though we took a three night vacation in Niagara Falls my travel expense for the month was only 80 cents. That is in part because some of the vacation expense was paid in the previous month and a lot of the travel was free or almost free. For the amount of the vacation expense I did have to pay during the month I was able to get reimbursed for most of it by my travel rewards credit card.

This month my expenses should be about the same other than the car expenses. I might also have increased medical expenses since I’m guessing some of my medical bills will become due. Other than that it should be another low expense month.