Financial stuff

I Won’t Be Living in a Van in Florida this Winter

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van interiorI was planning to be writing a post this month about my plan to spend this winter living in a van in Florida. Unfortunately, that plan has fallen through.

The plan started when I was offered the opportunity to work my tax job remotely this tax season. Since this  gave me the option to work basically anywhere with an internet connection I decided I would like to live somewhere warmer than Kansas City for the winter months.  I’ve also wanted to give van living another try. That led to me deciding to live in Florida in a van for the winter.  The weather would have been great for living in the van. My expenses would have been low and my job would have paid the same which would have allowed me to save money/pay down loans at a good rate. This plan has now been scrapped since I was informed there won’t be any remote tax positions this year after all leaving me without a job.  Luckily, this notice didn’t come any later since I had just that morning looked at a van that I was seriously considering buying. Procrastination worked in my favor this time.

Now I need to figure out what I’ll do instead. I’ve thought of several options but I’m not sure which -if any- of the options I will take. The first option is to just stay here in Kansas City and drive for Uber and keep working at my FBA business. This would be the easiest option.  One drawback is that although Uber and FBA should make me enough money to pay my expenses I don’t think I’ll make enough money from them to make much progress on paying down my loans or saving money. Another drawback is that I’d still be in KC for the winter and I’d really like to get out of the cold weather.

Another option is to go to Florida (or maybe Texas) anyway and figure out how to make money once I’m there. Since I don’t have certainty of the tax job income I wouldn’t buy a van. I’d make a bed in my car and live out of my car. There is enough room in my HHR to sleep comfortably, but it would be pretty cramped to live out of. One good thing about this option is that if it didn’t work out I could come back to KC and I wouldn’t be out much money.

A third option would be to live in Guatemala for the winter. I know from experience that I could rent a room for about $100 a month and would be able to live very cheaply there. The airfare there and back would negate quite a bit of the savings though.  Also, I wouldn’t have a reliable way to make money there.  Perhaps, the biggest drawback to this option is that I would be committed to staying for the winter. If I changed my mind it would be quite expensive to change my plane ticket.

One more option would be to stay in Kansas City and find another job. This would be the most practical option. I don’t like this option much though. I’d really like to get out of KC for a while this winter and I’m doubtful that I could find a job that I like ok and pays well.

I’m sure there are more options than what I’ve listed here. Let me know what you think of these options and if you have any other options to share I’d love to hear them.

Flippy Friday – Ipad Air 2 16gb

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apple ipad air 2Welcome to the latest edition of Flippy Friday where I share one of the items I recently flipped through the Amazon FBA program. This week’s item is  the Apple Ipad Air 2 16GB. Ipads are great products to flip because they sell quickly. I don’t normally like to spend this much money on one item to flip, but I make an exception for iPads since they are quick sellers.

This opportunity became available when Target had these iPads on sale for $399. These iPads were going for about $445 on Amazon. Although the Target price was $45 cheaper than Amazon once you added in sales tax and Amazon fees this would have been a small money loser.  Fortunately, Target also had a Cartwheel deal for 10% off iPads which could be applied to the sales price of the iPads. This brought the before tax price down to $359. Once tax was added I ended up paying $388.19 for my iPad.  It sold the day it arrived at Amazon for $449. After fees I made $32.88 on this flip. That isn’t too bad for less than an hours work.

I also bought a second iPad using discounted Target gift cards. The cards were 7.5% off which just about covered the sales tax. This resulted in an almost $60 profit on the second iPad.  I also received 2% cashback on my credit card that I used to purchase the discounted gift cards. Although I don’t break my shipping cost down per item I know that the credit card cashback was easily enough to cover my shipping cost.

Many FBA sellers don’t like to bother with items with this small of a profit margin. I think it is worthwhile selling a more expensive item even though the margin is smaller since it still results in nice dollar amount profit. It would have been possible to use the Cartwheel discount four times. After my iPads sold so quickly I was wishing I had purchased a couple more. For now, I don’t want to take the risk of spending too much money on one item. I can’t have my cash flow tied up for too long and there is always a possibility that the price will drop dramatically after I’ve purchased the items. I’m happy with the profit I made on these two iPads and wish I was able to find deals like this more often.

Flippy Friday – John Cena WWE Deluxe Trainer

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Since at least one reader has expressed in learning more details about how I’m making money with Amazon FBA I have decided to start a feature where I share the details of an item I’ve sold on Amazon. I’m calling this feature Flippy Friday. There won’t be a post every Friday but I hope to have a post on most Fridays.

The first product sale I will share with you is the John Cena WWE deluxe trainer.  This is a toy that I bought back in April and sold in May. I found this product while looking for clearance items at Sears that I could sell for a profit on Amazon. I haven’t had much luck finding products at Sears to sell on Amazon. This product is one of the few items I’ve found to resell from Sears and it was one of my more profitable items. I bought the trainer for $14.97 and I was able to sell it for $54.25. It is rare that I find an item that I can sell for that much of a markup. After deducting the $14.32 in fulfillment fees from Amazon I made a profit of $24.96. Since I also had shipping fees my actual profit was a few dollars less.  I don’t keep track of my shipping fees by product, but if I shipped this item by itself it would have cost me about $4 or $5.  If I shipped it with other items then this item’s share of the  shipping cost would have probably been only about $2. Either way it was a pretty good profit. What makes this an even better deal is the fact that I purchased this item with Shop Your Way points which meant that I effectively paid $0 out of pocket. Although not many items at Sears are normally profitable Amazon flips when you factor in special deals that pay extra SYW points more items become profitable flips. I’ll write more about the SYW program in a later post if anyone is interested.

After making a nice profit and quick sell with this item I went back and bought two more of these trainers. Unfortunately, it appears that many other FBA sellers also bought this item on discount. The price plummeted from $54 to $20. I sold one at $20 which resulted in a $4.44 loss and I still have one more that hasn’t sold yet. This just goes to show that even if you have a product that was previously profitable there is no guarantee that it will remain that way and you have to accept the fact that you will have some losses. Buying a product that has an over 3x markup is a low risk purchase, but it doesn’t eliminate the risk.

If you have any questions about anything in this post or FBA in general please feel free to ask. Although I’m far from an expert on FBA I will share what I do know.

Some Strategies for Paying Off My Student Loan

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studentloanpayoffPaying off my student loan is going to be a humongous task which will take several years. My goal is to have it paid off in less than ten years. I’d like to pay it off quicker than that, but even the ten-year goal is a stretch based on my current finances. My expenses are about as low as I can get them so most of my strategies for paying off my student loan sooner will be related to earning more income. Since it will take years to pay off my student loan some of these strategies will likely change over time while others will be abandoned entirely and new strategies adopted as they become available and/or I become aware of them.

My first strategy for paying off my student loan quicker is signing up to have my student loan payment automatically debited from my checking account. Doing this lowered my interest rate from 6.875% to 6.62%. That isn’t much of a decrease in the interest rate but when you are dealing with six figures of debt it does make a difference. It will be about a $25 month decrease in interest on my loan.

I also want to refinance my loan. I applied to refinance my loan with Sofi. They have variable rates as low as 1.9% and fixed rates as low as 3.5% which would save me a lot of money. Despite my 798 credit score my loan application was swiftly rejected due to my income being so low relative to the amount of my debt. I can’t really blame them for rejecting my application. I’m considering reapplying to refinance just part of my loan later this year. I have found that there are a number of new refinancing companies with competitive rates and term lengths. Does anyone have any recommendations for a student loan refinancing companies? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

Another way to refinance part of my student loan is with my credit cards. One of my credit cards offered me a 0% interest rate for 18 months on a balance transfer with a 2% transaction fee. I signed up for the deal and am having my credit card company transfer part of my student loan to my credit card. The transfer is still processing so I’m not sure if it will work the way I planned. After this transfer is done I might do another balance transfer deal on another of my credit cards. I just have to make sure that I can pay the balance off before the 0% interest rate ends.

Reducing the cost of the loan is helpful but to make significant progress on paying it down I need to make more money. A lot more money. I should have a document review job starting next week and I’m hoping that there will be a steady amount of document review jobs the rest of the year. These jobs are currently my best source of guaranteed income so I’ll keep working them until I know for sure that I can make more money elsewhere. Whatever I make from the job above my basic expenses will go to paying down my loan.

One job won’t be enough to pay off the loan quickly though. That is why I signed up for Uber.  This weekend will be my first weekend driving for them. After the weekend I should have a good idea of how much I can make through Uber. If nothing else, it should provide me with a little extra income when I’m between jobs. My plan is to drive for them nights and weekends while working my regular job. I really like that I can drive for Uber whenever I have time and don’t have to commit to a schedule.

I’m still working my Amazon FBA business and I think I’m slowly learning and getting better at it. I’m hoping to make at least enough from FBA to pay my regular student loan payment.

Blog income has mostly dried up, but I’m hoping I can revive it somewhat.  I need to work on increasing my affiliate and referral income from my blogs. Posting regularly on my Bank Bonuses blog should help with that. I also plan to have one or two posts a month on this blog about products or services for which I have affiliate or referral links.  I only write about services/products that I actually use and think are a win/win so you don’t have to worry about this becoming a spammy blog.

This past week I’ve made some decent progress on my e-book. I’ve procrastinated writing this book for years, but I am finally going to get it finished. It should be done by the end of this month. Once that book is done I have a couple more ideas of books to write. If I am able to publish two or three books by the end of the year they will hopefully produce a nice bit of additional income.

Those are the strategies I currently am using/am planning to use to reduce the cost of my loan and make more money. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.

Paying Off My Student Loans

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studentloanpayoff I have decided to pay off my student loans. This is something I’ve been considering since last year. After doing some calculations on a student loan calculator I saw that when my student loans are finally forgiven under the income-based repayment plan I would owe almost six figures in tax on the forgiven amount. Financially, I come out about the same whether I pay the loan off over the next 10 years or pay the minimum allowed under the IBR plan. It makes more sense to pay down the loan now while I’m able to make decent money though. Under the IBR plan the loan would be forgiven when I’m 67 years old and I don’t want to have six figures of tax debt at that age.

At the beginning of April I owed $138,690.66 on my student loan. Hopefully, that is the highest it will ever be. At the end of April the balance was $136,888.70. I managed to pay off about 1.3% of the loan during the month. I’ve added a widget in the sidebar to track my progress. I wish I had started paying the loan down earlier, but it wasn’t until 2013 that I was making enough to pay down the loan. I need to increase my income a lot more to be able to pay off the loan in reasonable period of time. The interest rate on my student loan is 6.875% and I incur over $600 of interest each month. That is over $7000 a year down the drain. That makes it tough to make progress. If I were on the 10 year plan my monthly payment would be approximately $1383. Therefore, I need to pay more than that if I want to have the loan paid off sooner than 10 years. That will be extremely difficult, but I don’t think it is impossible.

My main strategy for paying down the student loan is to pay everything I can towards my student loan. It is a pretty simple strategy. After paying my modest expenses, the rest of my income goes toward the student loan. Since I don’t have a steady income right now I am keeping a cushion of $3000. Once I have a steady source of income again I will reduce that cushion down to $2000. If I hadn’t bought a car in April I would have had an additional $6000 to pay towards the loan. I need the car to make money so that was a necessary expense. I’ll have a post next week on my various strategies to pay down the loan. If you have any tips on how I can pay down the loan quicker I would love to hear them.