April Income – $3068.26

Here is a breakdown of my income for April.

Online Income

$343.86
Interest

$4.00

Dividends

$14.64

Cash Back

$24.16

Job

$2631.60

Bank Bonus

$50

Total

$3068.26

Note: This is an updated version of this post since the first one I published somehow included the information from last month’s income post rather than the new information I wrote for this month’s post. This will be my best attempt at reconstructing what I originally meant to post.

April was a pretty good month for income since I received three paychecks.  Unfortunately, those were my final paychecks from my tax job which is now finished for the season.

Online income is still decent, but my affiliate income has completely dried up.  I’m not sure if I will make any affiliate income this year.  Affiliate income and blogging income are no longer a priority for me though.  I plan to experiment with a couple of different ways to make online income this year.  More on that when my plans come closer to fruition.

My income from dividends,Mr. Rebates , and other alternative sources of income remains small.  However, since I’m able to keep my expenses so low this small source of income still amounts to about 10% of my expenses which I think is a significant contribution.

My prospects for income this month aren’t so good.  It appears unlikely that I will get a job and receive a paycheck before the end of this month.  I do plan on selling some stuff this month, but I haven’t done too well at that yet.  I’m not too worried though since I have plenty in savings and I am confident I will be able to bring in a decent income again soon.

April Expenses – $1336.35

Here is a breakdown of my expenses for April.

Household $417.73
Entertainment

$28.04

Transportation

$440.70

Food

$191.76

Travel

$28

Student Loan

$106.00

Phone

$26.81

Health

$56.31

Total

$1336.35

 

My April expenses were higher than I like.  I spent $380 on repairs for my car or I still would have made it under the $1000 level for the month though.  My food bill was a lot higher than normal due to eating out while I was traveling for my hike.  My actual travel expenses were low at $28 since I was able to get most of my expenses reimbursed by my Capital One Venture card, my Southwest Visa card and my Barclaycard Arrival™ World MasterCard® – Earn 2x on All Purchases. That isn’t bad for a 12 day trip with 2 hotel stays, 1 hostel stay, a commuter train ride, two taxis, an airport shuttle, and a plane ticket. This was also the first month that I had to start paying my student loan which keeps my fixed expenses higher than they were.

I think May should be a lower expense month.  The transportation expense will go back to normal and everything else will remain about the same as in April. The only exception to that would be the entertainment expense which will go up in May since it was artificially low in April due to using some gift cards and being gone on my trip for half of the month.

I think I could have a good shot at getting my yearly average monthly expense below $1000.  I do plan on having some dental work done though which will likely ruin my chance at having the lower expenses.  The dental work has been put off for a while though since I couldn’t afford it the past few years. It is more important to get my teeth healthy now than to keep my expenses below the $1000 level. Even with the dental expenses I think I will have respectably low expenses for the year.

My $3000 Weight Loss Bet

If you have been reading this blog for a while you probably know that I’ve been wanting to lose weight for years, but have never had any success losing weight.  I even had a $500 weight loss challenge a few years ago where I promised to give away $500 if I didn’t lose 40 pounds by the end of the year.  I didn’t even come close to losing 40 pounds and ended up giving away the $500.  Apparently, the fear of losing $500 wasn’t enough to motivate me to lose weight.

Despite my past results I am once again making a bet to motivate myself to lose weight.  This time I have upped the ante. Since $500 wasn’t enough to motivate me to lose weight I am now betting $3000 that I will lose 25 pounds in six months.  The bet was made with Healthy Wage.  I wrote about Healthy Wage a couple years ago.  They are a company that allows you to make weight loss bets. If my weight loss bet is a success they will pay me $3600.  That would be a profit of $600 for me since the $3000 is just a return of my own money. I’m thinking that the fear of losing money and the reward of winning money will get me to lose weight.  Since I had to pay the $3000 upfront I’m also motivated to get my money back.

I’m starting my hike tomorrow which will be my main method for losing weight.  I’m thinking that once I have my weight loss jump started by hiking I will be able to continue to lose weight when I return to everyday life.  Since I can’t hike forever I do eventually need to get in the habit of eating better and exercising more when I’m at home if I’m going to be successful at losing the weight and keeping it off.  I will give updates on my progress (or lack thereof) during the next six months.  Check back in six months and hopefully you will be reading a post about me winning this bet.

*** If you are interested in making your own Healthy Wage I’d appreciate it if you would let me refer you to Healthy Wage since I’ll get a $20 bonus for everyone I refer to Healthy Wage.  Just leave a comment stating you want a referral email and I’ll send one out as soon as I can. Thanks.

March Savings Rate – 77.72%

In March I made $2959.78 and saved $2300 for a savings rate of 77.72%.  That savings rate is artificially high due to my having some extra money in my checking account at the end of February that was added to my savings in March.  Plus I took advantage of two different bonus offers from Motif Investing and Kapitall that added $100 to my savings and will eventually add approximately $100 more.  If you would like to sign up for Motif to get the $100 bonus leave me a comment and I’ll send you an email with a referral link. You do have to invest $1000 and make at least one trade to get the bonus.  Also, I will get a $100 bonus for referring you.

My safe withdrawal rate decreased to 39.05% from 42.89% the month before.  This is the first time I have gotten my SWR into the 30s.  It would be nice if I could get my SWR into the 20s before the end of the year.  As the SWR gets lower it gets harder to make progress though.  I’ll need to keep my income up, my expenses low, and my savings rate high for the rest of the year to get the SWR down to the 20s.   My ultimate goal is to get my SWR down to 4%.  That goal is probably many years from being met. The 4% SWR translates into having 25x your annual expenses in savings or 300 months of expenses in savings. Once I reach that point I will consider myself financially independent.

I now have 30.72 months of expenses saved compared to 27.97 the month before. Since I am only working half of this month I won’t be able to add a lot to savings.  I do believe that I will still be able to get my SWR down a bit and my months of expenses saved up a bit.  May and June of last year were both big expense months.  I’m hoping that May and June of this year will be low expense months.  I base my average monthly expenses and my SWR off of my trailing twelve months of expenses.  So replacing two bad months in my trailing twelve months with two good months will help lower my average monthly expense quite a bit and it will also help improve my SWR even if I don’t manage to save much money in the next couple of months.

March Income – $2959.78

Here is a breakdown of my income for March.

Online Income

$425.20
Interest

$4.74

Dividends

$62.87

Cash Back

$21.66

Job

$2433.31

Mystery Shop

$12.00

Total

$2959.78

March was a good month for income although not as good as February. That isn’t too surprising since I didn’t get a $1000 tax refund in March like I did in February.

My online income continues to chug along without much effort on my part.  I’m making about $450 a month this year which isn’t anywhere near as much as I used to make online, but it is still good money considering how little time I devote to it. If I remain unemployed once I come back from my hike I will see what I can do to increase my online income.

My passive income such as referral income from sites like Mr. Rebates and dividends is pretty small, but it adds up over the year.

My last day of work is the 16th of this month.  I will still get two full paychecks this month.  The job loss will not affect me until next month.  I’ll get my final paycheck of the tax season in May, although it will only be for a few days.  Since my bills are low and I’ve saved a lot of money during the tax season I don’t need to worry about money for a while. Once I return from my hike, which I’m guessing will be sometime in mid May, I will concentrate on getting my income back up to its current level.