The Cheap Bastid» My Financial Status

After Action Report | February ’09 earnings totals

admin — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:30:47 +0000

Well February is over, it was a short month and, for a while, income was trickling in at a pathetic rate. The end of the month picked up to levels I’ve never experienced before. In fact I made more in the last week of the month than I did in the previous two weeks. March looks like it might be an incredible month for me.

Anyway, here’s my earning totals for the month.

eHow $106.05
Amazon $16.85
Adsense $3.39
Kontera $1.15
Bukisa $2.90
LendingClub* $1.10
Total $131.44

Overall I am quite pleased with my earnings. As I mentioned in an earlier post work was very hectic this month and I had much less time to make passive income. A big surprise was no Linkshare sales, I had two sales last month and none this month. Oh well, the Internet can be fickle at times I guess.

I was surprised with my Amazon earnings as well, I started off strong but fizzled out in the middle of the month. I made a few sales in the last week and although I expected to have earnings in the $20-$30 range I did pull out nice numbers for only two months at it. The sale of 10 mp3s put me into the %6 range, I should look into promoting music, they cost less than a dollar and I might be able to hit the %6.5 earning tier if I can sell just two albums in addition to the higher ticket stuff.

One thing I’d like to mention is that I finally paid off that Nautilus credit card, yay!!. I’ve been carrying that %20 debt for over a year, this month I intend to obliterate 3 more credit card balances. Leaving me in a good position to have ALL my credit card debt paid off by June.

*In my earnings list I mentioned LendingClub. This is something I’ll make a post on soon, but for now it’s a peer-to-peer lending site where people lend other people money. I’m intrigued with the over %10 return on your money. I currently have $200 there, lent to 8 different people. If you head over to that site and want to try it out send me an email. There’s a referral link I could give you, I get nothing, you get $50 deposited into your account. If you have money available to invest take a look at it, if not, don’t bother as you won’t get your money back for three years. I’m adding $25 or so a month over there.

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The Holiday financial damage…

admin — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:41:34 +0000

Well the holidays are over. My goal was to not incur any additional credit card debt and I did just that. I was, at one point going to whip out the ol’ CC for a purchase, but I fought the urge and won.

I did however spend some cash, not as much as I thought I would but still a bit, about $700, this is way less then in years past, but i’m in debt so there was no choice.

As I said in an earlier post, the work situation is a bit scary now with layoffs, so I kept my spending to a minimum, and explained the situation to my family and friends, who completely understood the situation.

It’s quite nice not to have any bloated credit card payments to contend with this month. Hopefully i’ll be able to tackly that Nautilus credit card balance this month. Looking at the numbers I should be able to zero it out by month end.

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eHow December earnings

admin — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:33:58 +0000

I have continued to bang away articles on ehow, well, as best I can. I do work all day and, to be honest, i’m quite tired when I get home. Nonetheless I managed to end up with exactly 50 articles by midnight on New Years eve (just barely made it).

Earnings were impressive considering I published most of my articles near the end of the month. I made a total of $33.05, so i’ll be getting my first payment of a bit over $34 this month.

I must say I am totally fired up with ehow, I think with some effort on my part I can easily get my earnings to about $1000 a month by the end of the year.

I’ve learned a lot about SEO, ad targeting and keywords and it has most definetly paid off. In fact, my best article earned over $10 on its own in about two weeks.

My goal for January is to get up to 75 articles and get my earnings to $100. Today is the 7th and to date i’m coming up on the twenty dollar mark, so, with the additional articles I should easily hit that magic number by the end of the month.

Not to rest on my success I will continue to study all I can about SEO and keywords until I can consider myself an expert.

Actually, I have a request, if anyone can recommend any books available on Amazon or elsewhere let me know, i’ll take a look and buy it. I’d of course prefer somebody post up their amazon affiliate link to a great book so they can make some dollars. I like to help out if I can

Also, if anyone has some tips to share I would really appreciate it.

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The last few weeks…

admin — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 02:42:48 +0000

No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth… A few weeks ago the unthinkable happened, a coworker got laid off in our department. I was almost 100% certain the IT dept was immune to layoffs due to the large number of high profile projects we have going on right now. I was wrong..

Back in the ’90s I was laid off, and completely unprepared for it. End result, I was unemployed for over a year, and with no savings, ended up in absolute financial ruin. I vowed I would never let myself get into that situation again.

Well, fast forward to 2008 and I find myself without savings and heavily in debt, a layoff now would be absolutely catastrophic for me.

So, I had to take drastic steps these last few weeks to at least prepare as best I can in case I get laid off. I spent the last few weeks pumping out article after article on ehow, which is, in my opinion, the absolute best way to earn money now, and build a passive income stream for the future.

I managed to push out almost 30 articles the last few weeks, and my daily income went from about 15 cents to almost $3 a day. I’ll get a payout next month of about $30 bucks, and I expect to end next month in the $100 dollar range.

By my estimate, I need to get my article income to about $400 a month to be able to pay my bills (earnings + unemployment), I figure, with maximum effort I should be able to hit that mark by March.

So, to sum up, my immediate goal is to get my article earnings into the $400 dollar range, then, I can concentrate on other income streams.

Needless to say there is no budget for December, I am trying to spend an absolute minimum on everything without exception, i’ll do the same for January and February in an attempt to get some credit cards paid off.

Once, the dust settles so to speak I can continue forward with my ultimate goal, which is to be debt free ASAP while building many passive income streams.

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My online activities to make money – Preview

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:28:10 +0000

Over the last few weeks i’ve been engaged in a few online activities to make some money. Everything from domanin embarking, parking, online stores, MLM affiliate marketing, article writing, and a real online job or sorts.

Starting next week i’ll begin reviewing these endeavors and letting you all know how it’s going and whether it’s worth my time.

I’ll post up my total earnings for each activity, and, a little bit different than other sites, i’ll post up how much time I spent on each. I’ll try to calculate my estimated earnings per hour.

Armed with these numbers I should be able to refine my online activities in December to make even more money.

Anyone out there having some success at online money making? If so let us know!

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My bill schedule

admin — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:38:47 +0000

I went through all my bills, my accounts. and records and sorted out my bills by day of the month and amount. I then paid everything due the rest of this month (minimums) and set up some automatic payments through my bank account.

Unfortunately while I was going through my records I noticed I missed a payment! Hopefully my new system will prevent that from happening again.

I set all bills due to be paid before the 16thto be paid the first week of the monthautomatically (using the last paycheck of the previous month) all the remaining bills get paid withthe first paycheck of the month.

The good think is I now know what my checking account balance needs to be on every day of the month so I can safely move money into my savings account now. Oh, btw, I snagged one of those $25 dollar referral codes and opened an ING account yesterday, it was already credited withthe 25 dollar bonus so I made some easy money there. I’ll post up that deal tomorrow, and, I already received some referral codes of my own! I’ll post those up too with details.

So I now know what I owe and when I owe it. Time to go through the income numbers.

I’ve been reading a lot about Mint.com budgeting software (it’s an online program and it’s free) I’ll be downloading that in the next day or so and trying it out. I’ll post up a review of that.

I’m almost done with this prep work, hopefully, starting next week I’ll have my budget and payment plan setup. Then I can get started with some real money making endeavors!

I already feel like i’m getting something done here! i’m motivated and excited!

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Where does my money go?

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:16:14 +0000

I really need to get a handle on exactly where my money goes and just as important, when it’s coming out of my account. I’m constantly surprised when I check my checking account and see a new charge… gotta get a handle on this. Tomorrow i’ll go through my records and get a day to day list of where my $$ are going and when it’s going there.

There are two reasons for this:

Late and missed payments, once I have the info I can setup my billpayer to auto submit payments.
Once I know when the cash is coming out I can move money into my savings account and leave enough to cover the bills. Right now I get direct deposit into my checking account and just leave it there. I expect to earn a few dollars a month in interest soon. Not much, but at this point every penny counts.

I’ll post up my outgoing amounts tomorrow.

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Where I stand..

admin — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 01:08:43 +0000

I spent some time today going through what I owe and to whom. It was a bit annoying looking at a few credit card accounts and realizing that the balances aren’t really going down that much each month. I know a few sites say you should pay off the smallest CC first, then roll those payments into the next one on the list. I have one CC with a balance of $1900 and a ridiculous interest rate of 20%, I really need to pay this one off first.

Heres what I owe:

Nautilus $1900 @ 20%
Discover $2600 @ 9%
Geico CC $1645 @ 12%
Sears $833 @ 8%
Circuit City @ $931 12%
Motorcycle Loan @ $7095 @ 5%
Car Loan $28,325 @ 8%

Total debt is $43,314

Wow, I need to make a dent in that %20 one fast, it’s killing me. I was going to pay off the Sears card this week but I think that money should go towards Nautilus. I’ll do minimum on everything paying off the cards in this order; Nautilus, Circuit City, Geico, Discover then Sears.

Good Idea? If anyone has a suggestion I would love to hear it.

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