online income

Tracking Passive Income

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To keep track of how I am doing in my quest for early retirement I have decided to add another monthly financial measurement. I will be tracking my passive income. For the purposes of this measurement my passive income will be my online income, interest, and stock dividends. My online income is only partly passive but to keep things simple I am counting all of it. Since I will likely keep blogging whether I need the money or not it doesn’t seem too inaccurate to include my online income in my passive income total. My online income, interest, and stock dividends can vary quite a bit from month to month so I am going to measure my passive income by my trailing twelve month average. This should smooth out the peaks and valleys a little. Hopefully the overall trend will be that of rising passive income.

Over the past 12 months my passive income has averaged out to $412.04 a month. My goal is to have this consistently over $1000 a month. At that point I will consider myself retired. Even once retired I will continue to participate in money-making activities of my choosing so it wouldn’t be the traditional form of retirement.

My Online Income Was Way Down This Year

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My online income dropped to $3740.12 this year from $4644.28 in 2008. There were two reasons for this. The first one is that in 2008 I made about $1500 from credit card referrals. I don’t think I even made $150 from credit card referrals this year. People were not applying for cards and many of the credit card issuers cut back or eliminated their affiliate sales.

The other cause of my decline in income was from decreased competition. The site Bankaholic.com sold for $15 million last year and that spawned a ton of new bank sites. My bank blog BankBonuses.info has been my main source of online income but its amount of search engine traffic declined this year due to all the new sites.

With the acquisition of MyRetirementBlog.com my income should go up in 2010 but I would like to increase the income from my other sites as well. I don’t currently break down my income by site but I am going to start doing that next year so I can get a better idea of where my money is coming from and hopefully come up with some ideas to increase my earnings. I will probably start breaking my income down by source also.

I know there are a lot of bloggers that read this site – Did your earnings go up or down this year?

November Income – $357.16

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Here is a breakdown of my income for November.

Online Income

$219.37

Interest

$57.36

Stock Dividends

$14.83

Bonuses

$50

Mystery Shop

$8.00

Survey/Cashback

$7.60

Total

$357.16

My November income was pretty poor. It was mostly passive income at least.  It shouldn’t be any problem increasing my income this month. I already know my online income will increase due to scheduled Adsense and affiliate payouts. Dividend income will increase since many of my stocks pay dividends this month.  I will also have job income which should help although I probably won’t be working a lot of hours.

September Income – $385.07

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Here is a breakdown of my income for September.

Online Income

$215.10

Interest

$77.86

Stock Dividends

$86.11

Survey

$6

Total

$385.07

September was not a good month for income.  This isn’t too surprising since I was traveling for most of the month.  On the positive side $385.07 isn’t bad income since most of it was passive income.  I’ve already passed September’s income this month so October should be a much better month for income.

June Income – $3221.68

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Here is a breakdown of my income for June.

Online Income

$232.83

Interest

$82.63

Survey/Bonuses

 $103.00

Stock Dividends

$62.32

Ebay/Craigslist

$65.77

Medical Study

$2425

Cash Back

$250.13

Total

$3221.68

This was a great month for income. Since I’ve started tracking my income this is the first time I’ve made over $3000 in a month. The bulk of that was the $2425 from the medical study but I also made a solid $796.68 from other sources. My online income was a measly $232.83. This might seem ok but I’m on pace to make less online this year than last. The main cause for that is a severe decline in credit card affiliate income this year. Combined with dropping adsense on this site I have a lot of income I need to replace. I am looking at different ways of making extra online income. My experiment for last month didn’t work but I’ll keep trying different things.

I received a $250 check from my credit card company for accumulated rewards. That was nice but since they changed the reward program it doesn’t look like I’ll be receiving a check that big again. It was also a good month for dividends due to how the quarterly payment schedule fell. This month’s income will likely be down since the medical study is ending and I need to pay some taxes out of this month’s check.