Double Sickness Week – Shingles Plus…

by

This was not a good week for my physical health.  I’d had a rash on my chest by my underarm for about a week which I had thought was just a rash. It started hurting last Sunday night which made me think it was not just a rash.  When I told my GF about it the next day she said it was probably shingles. My GF is a nurse and got her friend who is a nurse practitioner to look at it and she agreed that it was shingles. Although the shingles was annoying and caused me to lose some sleep I could deal with it and work through it.

Tuesday the plan was to get my shingles prescription after I got off work. After lunch Tuesday I started to feel unwell. I ended up leaving work about an hour early and by the time I got home I was sick as a dog. I had a fever, nausea, chills, aches, and fatigue. Looking at shingles symptoms I saw that it could cause flu-like symptoms so I figured that was what I was experiencing. This was worse than any flu than I’d had for many years though.

Sick as a dog
Sick as a dog

I didn’t get much sleep that night and in the morning I felt even worse. I decided I needed to tell my GF another symptom I was experiencing. It really hurt when I peed. This is not something you want to tell your GF. 🙂 Since I knew it couldn’t be an STD we figured it must be a urinary tract infection and I started taking an antibiotic for this infection.

Having shingles and a UTI seems bad enough but things were actually worse. After taking the antibiotic Wednesday and Thursday I felt only a little better on Friday. My GF decided I should go to her office so she could run a urinalysis which confirmed I had an infection and that it looked more serious than just a UTI. Her doctor sent me to get some blood work done which confirmed I had prostatitis. I’d never heard of it before, but it is a bacterial infection of the prostate which can be pretty serious. With the new diagnosis we switched to a different antibiotic and it seems to be working.

My theory is that these illnesses all started with my oral surgery a couple of weeks prior. The dentist prescribed me a steroid to keep the inflammation down. One side effect of the steroid is that it can weaken your immune system. Apparently, it really weakened mine. When I have my dental implants done later this year I will be sure to let them know I do not want to take a steroid.

Although I was off work three days I didn’t get any blogging or much of anything else done. I felt so bad I all I wanted to do was sleep or sit on the couch and watch TV. Now that I’m feeling almost normal again I should have a better week this week.

January 2015 Easy Money Summary

by

January was a decent month for easy money. This is the first month I have kept track of my easy money, but I think this was a better than average month.

In January I received $20 in Amazon gift cards from Swagbucks. If you would like to sign up for Swagbucks I would appreciate if you would use my referral link. Doing so will help me earn Swagbucks and won’t cost you anything. If there is interest I will share what I do to earn Swagbucks.

I earned a $25 Gyft gift card for signing up for Moneystream. That offer is no longer available. I used my Gyft gift card to buy an AMC Theatres gift card. With this gift card, a gift card from Christmas, and a gift card from redeeming my Discover card cash back we won’t have to pay to go to the movies for a while.

I received $10 in Total Rewards from Caesars’s Entertainment that we can use when we go to Vegas next month. Also, I earned rewards by playing MyVegas Slots that I can redeem for free stuff on our next Vegas trip. Rather than tracking the loyalty points I earn on MyVegas I am just going to count rewards redeemed.  Since the value you get for your loyalty points varies quite a bit for different rewards I think this better reflects what I’m getting from the program.

I earned a $5 bonus on my Emerald Card. This deal was only available to H&R Block employees. I also earned a $100 referral bonus from Motif Investing. I have a referral link for that bonus in the sidebar or you can leave a comment and I’ll email you a referral link. If you sign up through the referral link you can also get a $100 bonus. You will have to make a couple of trades to earn the bonus though. It ends up being a slightly over $80 bonus which is still a good deal.

Overall, I made $160 in free money in January. February should be even better. I already had another person sign up through my Motif referral bonus. I also opened a Bank of the West checking account which will pay me $150 in bonuses although I’m not sure if they will post this month. And I opened a Personal Capital account through a referral link which should reward me with a $10 Amazon gift card.  If all of those bonuses come though I’ll be ahead of January and there is still a lot of month left to make more easy money.

January FIRE Numbers- SWR 35.89%, 33.43 Months of Expenses Saved

by

My FIRE (financial independence retire early) numbers improved a bit in January.  This isn’t too surprising since I started my seasonal tax job in January which allows me to put more money into savings. My safe withdrawal rate improved to 35.89% from 37.67% in December. My goal is to get the SWR down to 4% so the lower my SWR is the better.The 4% SWR translates into having 25x your annual expenses in savings or 300 months of expenses in savings.

I have 33.43 months of expenses saved. This is probably the better number to look at when calculating my progress towards financial independence. A SWR of 35.89% might not immediately seem like it is a long way from getting to a 4% SWR, but when I see have 33.43 months of expenses saved and I need 300 it is obvious I have got a lot more savings to do. I hope to also bring down my average monthly expenses which will help me reach the 300 goal faster. Even though the goal of 300 months of expenses is far away it is nice to know that if I suddenly stopped earning money at all I would have almost three years before I ran out of money.

February should be a low expense month and I plan to put most of my paychecks into savings. As long as the stock market isn’t absolutely terrible I should make some nice progress towards FIRE this month.

January Income – $1969.99

by

Here is a breakdown of my income for January.

Online Income

 $736.62
Interest

$7.42

Cash Back

$27.26
Amazon FBA $83.26
Dividends $4.99
Jobs $1255.16
Bonuses $105

Total

$2219.71

 

January was a pretty good month for income. Starting my seasonal tax job always results in a nice bump in income. I only had one payday in January so February should be even better.  My online income was surprisingly high. That was a result of hitting the minimum for payout on both Adsense and an affiliate account and also a slight increase in ad revenue. In January I finally kept complete records of my Amazon FBA sales and expenses so I am able to provide an accurate income number for the month. This was my best FBA month, but it still didn’t add up to much. For now, I will continue to dabble with FBA.  The return I get from the time I put into it is less than what I would get from my job. I mostly enjoy doing it though so I’ll continue with it whenever I find good deals. I just won’t put any special effort into finding the deals. I also made $105 in bonuses and I should make more money from referral and bank bonuses this month.

This will be the last month I have any dividend income to report for a while. I sold my last dividend paying stocks at the beginning of the month.  That money is now invested in an index fund in my IRA. Unless, I buy more dividend stocks -which I don’t plan to do- I won’t have any more dividend income to report.

My cashback income went down a little since the Christmas rush ended. Considering it is completely passive income at this point, whatever I make from it is good. If you haven’t joined Mr. Rebates yet you can get a $5 bonus for signing up through my referral link and I’ll make a little money for referring you as well.
Mr. Rebates

February should be at least a little bit better. My job income will definitely be up. My other sources of income will likely be down a little.  I’m sure it will be a good income month.

January Expenses – $919.89

by

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for January.

Household $411.05
Entertainment $44.94
Transportation $50
Food $132.82
Student Loan $106.00
Travel $39.20
Phone $26.81
Health $109.07
Total $919.89

 

My January expenses were nice and low. I managed to make my stretch goal of keeping my expenses under $1000 a month for the second month in a row. Not having a car does help keep my monthly expenses down. Entertainment expenses were also low since we were able to use gift cards we received for Christmas to go to the movies a couple of times and we didn’t do much else. The travel expenses are for airfare for two different trips. My GF and I are flying round trip KC to Vegas in March. In April we will both fly from KC to Buffalo and she will return to KC while I will take a bus to the Appalachian Trail.  Paying $39.20 for three round trip flights and a one-way flight is a pretty good deal. The flights did put a big dent in my Southwest point balance. I’ll need to build them back up if we are going to have free flights for later this year.  I intend to write a post about these trips in the next few weeks.

My health insurance is about $30 higher this year, other than that my expenses are about the same as last month. February should also be a low expense month. Until I get my dental implants or buy a car every month should be a low expense month. It looks like this will be a low expense year and I’m happy about that.