Expense/Income Tracking

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for May.

My monthly expense total will now reflect just my expenses, keep that in mind when comparing them to expenses for the last year or so.  My expenses were higher than I like in May.  There were several areas for improvement.  The easiest one to work on is gambling.  That should be zero for June.

My biggest expense was for transportation and that will be my biggest expense this month as well.  I spent about $475 on gas in May.  I’d like to significantly reduce that this month.  Part of that total was because of the road trip I took at the end of May that extended into June.  There will be no more road trips this month which should allow me to save on gas.  The transportation total also included my taxes and registration for buying the van.  This month the total will include my first van payment so those will pretty much offset.

Overall, I expect my expenses to be much lower in June although I haven’t gotten off to a great start.  Driving less and not gambling at all should allow me to keep my expenses under $700 for the month of June.

Here is a breakdown of my income for April.

As you can see my online income took a big hit.  It will probably be even lower this month.  If I could keep it around the thousand dollar level I’ll be happy.  I did  a fair amount of mystery shopping during the last half of April but I won’t receive that income until later this month.  I got a start on selling stuff last month and I plan to sell a lot more stuff this month.  After this month I probably won’t have much left to sell unless I buy stuff to resell.  I might do that since I’m looking at ways to increase my alternative income and passive income.  I definitely want to have a higher income than this but I can do ok at this income level if necessary.

Here is a breakdown of our expenses for April.

April expenses were lower than March but still a little high.  Most of that was due to various expenses (registration,insurance,tax,maintenance) involved with buying another car.  I also had to start paying my student loan and incurred a one time interest expense.  My expenses for May will be much different.

Here is a breakdown of my online income for March 2012.  This is going to be the last report breaking down my online income for a while.

Google Adsense – $295.91

Affiliate Income – $367.75

Brokered Ads – $62.63

Direct Ads-$2670.81

Total – $3397.10

My online income for March was actually quite good.  Unfortunately since Google has greatly reduced the amount of traffic they are sending me and hit me with Page Rank reductions I won’t likely be back to this level for a long time.  I’ll be lucky if I can keep my income to the thousand dollars a month level. I’m going to be looking at ways to increase my passive income and alternative income which won’t necessarily be online.  Since Google doesn’t like the advertisements I was placing on this site I will no longer be taking those kinds of advertisements and looking for other ways to make money.  Once I have the site revamped I’ll ask Google to reconsider their penalty but it will be some time before I can do that since I can’t remove  advertisements until my contracts run out.   I won’t be doing online income report posts because there won’t be much to report.  You will still be able to see the amount of my online income by looking at my monthly income posts.

Here is a breakdown of our expenses for March.

Our expenses were way too high in March.  This was mainly due to my hiking trip.  Hiking is actually an inexpensive hobby but I managed to turn it into an expensive one by staying in hotels way too often.  This makes two months in a row that our expenses have been higher than our income.  Combine that with the fact that my online income is going to be way down and it is easy to see why our savings are rapidly dwindling.  I’m not too worried since my wife and I are taking steps to get our finances back in order.  We are both going to do better at watching our spending this month.  I’m looking for new sources of income which might even include a job.  My wife’s business has some big deals which should be closing soon which will result in a nice increase in income.  The combination of reducing expenses and increasing income should get our savings back up to a comfortable level.

Since our expenses were so much higher last month I broke down them down into more categories.  We usually don’t even have a hotel or travel or charity or even clothing expenses so getting rid of those categories this month will bring our expenses way down.