I discontinued tracking my investment income earlier this year because I didn’t feel it was accurately portraying my finances. Now I’ll be tracking our net worth on a monthly basis which should more accurately portray the state of our finances.

Stocks: $11,574.09
IRA: $6,997.85
Cash: $4,552.57

Total Assets: $23,124.51

Liabilites: $0

Net Worth: $23,124.51

It has been a long time since I’ve figured out our net worth. It was nice to see that we are not as broke as I thought. We really should have a lot more in retirement savings by this age though. One of my main goals for the rest of they year will be to increase our retirement savings. I also want us to have at least $5,000 in cash though because I don’t feel comfortable having less than that.

On the plus side we don’t have any debt payments right now. We do have some medical bills from the accident in June but the insurance company should pay those eventually. I also have a lot of law school debt but it is on income-based repayment and with my current low income I don’t have to make any payments. I do expect that my income will increase enough in the next year that I have to start making payments. There is also a good chance that a large part of my loans will eventually be forgiven. Since I can’t be sure how much I’ll have to pay I’m just leaving the law school loan out of my net worth calculations. This should allow me to make a fair comparison of our net worth from month to month.

Here is a breakdown of my online income for July 2011.

Google Adsense – $214.63

Affiliate Income – $217.50

Brokered Ads – $57.58

Direct Ads- $1785.19

Total – $2274.90

July was another great month for income.  Some of that income was from deals made in June that I didn’t get paid for until July.  Direct ad sales have fallen off quite a bit since then but I expected that to happen eventually.  I’d like to make $2000 every month but I’m not at that level yet.  I’ll be doing good to make $1000 this month.  This month I am working on monetizing another website, increasing  affiliate income, and hopefully developing another online income stream.  My next goal is to have a $3000 month by the end of the year.

Here is a breakdown of my income for July.

July was another good month for income. My online income was over $2000 for the second month in a row.  I expect it to settle down and be closer to $1000 this month but I’m working on getting it up to the $2000 level on a consistent basis.  It is nice to not have a job and make this kind of money from alternative and passive income.  Since I’m not working a job though I should be spending more time on increasing these other incomes.  My mystery shop income was artificially high since I received a couple of delayed payments.  I’m cutting back on mystery shopping and my income from it will be much less this month.  I plan on putting a lot more stuff on eBay this month which should result in it being a larger source of income this month.  I’m also working on an offline business.  Since it works on delayed billing it probably won’t have any reportable income this month but we’re hoping it will at least have some accounts receivable by the end of the month.

When I post this report I usually get questions about where I make my money online. I’ll post my online income report later this week which will give more details.

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for July.

My expenses in July were a little higher than I prefer.  We had free rent this month due to a move-in special.  We just had to pay pro-rated rent for the last week of June.  Since we didn’t have rent to pay I used the extra money to pay off my credit card debt.  The debt was from using a 0% credit card balance transfer to pay down my student loans.  I was able to roll this debt over at 0% a couple of times but decided it was time to get rid of it.  It seemed like a good idea at the time to use the transfer to reduce the amount of my student loans but since then they changed the rules for paying back my loan making it no longer a good deal.

Household expense will be up this month since we have to pay rent.  Cable/internet will also be up since we had a free month of that.  On the plus side there won’t be any debt payment.  I would also like to reduce our food bill to under $300.  This shouldn’t be too hard since we get a lot of free meals from mystery shopping.  It would also be good to reduce our transportation expense.  We spent almost $400 on gas in July due to trips to Kansas City and Jeff City, in addition to lots of mystery shopping trips.  We don’t have any long trips planned this month and we’re trying to be more selective on mystery shopping trips since the gas expense is seriously reducing our profits.  My goal for this month is to get our expenses under $2000 and I’d like to eventually get them under $1750 a month on a consistent basis.