Tight Fisted Miser Turns 10

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I published my first blog post on Tight Fisted Miser way back on January 28,2007. It is hard to believe I’ve been writing this blog for over ten years now. I’ve been blogging even longer than that. My mostly abandoned Bank Bonuses blog was started back in December 2005. That makes me one of the longest running personal finance bloggers around.

This blog got off to a pretty good start when I first published it. I was able to attract a small amount of readers right away and my audience slowly and steadily grew for the first few years of this blog’s existence. Part of that was probably due to there being a lot fewer blogs around back then. I also wrote better and more frequent blog posts back then. I never kept track of site stats, but I think this blog’s reach peaked sometime in 2011. That was also my most profitable blogging year. I made about $20,000 from my blogs that year. I made just a little over $1000 from my blogs last year. My audience and income have both diminished considerably in the last few years.

The blog is still alive though. One of these days I will get back to blogging regularly and hopefully build the blog back up to where it used to be. It won’t be too soon since I’m working now, and then I’ll be in Europe, and then I’ll be hiking. But after I’m done with all of that I just might get the blog going again. In the meantime I will at least have my monthly income and expenses reports. I started this blog to show that being frugal allows you to have a decent life without earning a lot of money. And I feel like I’m still living proof of that. I hope to keep this blog going for another 10 years. To all who are still reading this blog, thank you for reading.

January Income – $1967.70

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Here is a breakdown of my income for January.

Mystery Shop $6.5
Interest $2.77
Online Income $434.95
Amazon FBA $269.6
Cash Back $12.66
Job $1241.22
Total $1967.70

My January income was pretty good, although it was lower than December’s income. This was due to a sharp drop in my Amazon FBA income.  The FBA income went down due to fewer sales after the holiday rush, a lot of returns, and me sending in a lot less inventory since I was busy working. Although I worked the entire month I only received one paycheck so the job income wasn’t as much as it will be this month.  Now that I’m working job income will be the primary source of income and my other sources of income will be neglected until tax season is over. This month and the next two months will be great income months. By the time the job ends I should have a nice amount saved for the rest of the year.

January Expenses – $683.52

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Here is a breakdown of my expenses for January.

Household $455.42
Entertainment $40
Transportation $0
Food $100.84
Student Loan $0
Travel $0
Phone $24.79
Health $62.47
Total $683.52

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January was a  ridiculously low expense month. This was partially due to having gift cards to pay for some of my food and all of my gas. This was one of those rare months where no unusual expenses popped up.  Since my income was low last year my health insurance has gone down to $56.97 a month. My required student loan payment has gone down to $0. All of the income from this blog will still be paid towards my student loans even though I’m not obligated to make any payments this year.

Although February is a shorter month than January I am sure it will be a higher expense month. It is difficult to have two very low expense months in a row. This month I expect to pay more towards travel, transportation,food, and my student loan. Even with those increased expenses I expect to keep my total expenses below $1000.

How was your month?

February 2017 Net Worth Update

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penniesIn order to keep track of my financial progress or lack of progress I have decided to calculate my net worth a few times a year.

My net worth as of 02/2/2017 is as follows.

Assets
Cash – $7043
IRA – $24,745
Roth IRA – $10,598
Solo 401k – $1041
Car/Stuff – $4000

Liabilities
Student Loan – $131,813
Credit Card – $2238

Net Worth = $-86,624

My net worth improved slightly since I last calculated it. This was mostly due to a strong month of FBA sales in December.  My net worth should continue to improve over the next couple of months since I’m working full-time at my seasonal tax job. If I were to not count my student loan I would have a positive net worth of $45,189.  I’m going to start tracking my net worth both with and without my student loan to see how much of a negative effect the student loan is having on my net worth.

I now have credit card debt in addition to the student loan debt.  This was actually good debt though. I took a 0% balance transfer with a 2% transaction fee from one of my student loans. This allowed me to take advantage of a credit card deal and also buy more inventory for FBA. I’ve already made a good profit from making the balance transfer. I could pay it off now, but since it is at 0% I’m delaying that in case I find another profitable use for the money.

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

Paris Vacation and Other News

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paris eiffel tower There haven’t been many posts this month since I started my tax job. I know a lot of people work full-time jobs and keep blogs going, but once I’m done with a day of work I don’t feel like doing anything. I procrastinated so long there is no point in doing my net worth post this month because it is almost next month. Starting this week I will have one day off during the week and Sundays off. My plan is to do any blogging on my weekday off. The job is going about as well as could be expected.  The main thing I don’t like about this job is that I have to be there forty hours a week. That is a problem with about any job I would work. Next season I might be able to snag a remote position. I think the job would be a lot more palatable if I were able to work from home. The main reason I’m working this job is to build up a nice cushion of money. I didn’t have any specific plans for using the money other than a hope to travel some this year.

I now have something to spend that money on. Last week I booked a flight for me and my GF to Paris where she will stay ten days and I will stay twenty-three. The Paris trip came about due to there being some super cheap flights from Boston to Paris. I was able to book a round-trip ticket for $324. I booked the flight through the Chase Ultimate Rewards travel portal using my Sapphire Preferred card which gives me 1.5 my points when they are used for travel. That meant I only had to use about $215 worth of points to book the ticket. I was able to book both of our tickets using my credit card points and I still have enough points left for another $1500 of travel. Most of the points came from the very generous credit card sign up bonus. Credit card spending for my FBA business helped boost my points quite a bit as well. We’re using Southwest points to get from Kansas City to Boston.  I now have to come up with a plan to cover our hotel for the trip. My GF and I both just signed up for a credit card that will give us each two free nights. That will take care of four nights so we’ll need to cover six more nights. I’m considering booking a place through AirBnB. Their prices are pretty cheap compared to a hotel and they would be very convenient. There is still plenty of time before I have to decide on that.

In addition to the flight and hotel there will be the cost of seeing the various sights, local transportation, food and other stuff. I’ll try to get deals on that stuff too. Since I got such a good deal on airfare I can probably splurge a little on that stuff and still have a relatively low-budget vacation so I won’t worry about getting deals too much. If any of  you have tips on what we should and shouldn’t do while in Paris I would love to hear them.