December 2016 Money Report
The MoneyAhoy money report for the month of December is here – better late than never! Read on to find out how I make more than $250 an hour by blogging! But that’s not all – in the money report I discuss our money making, money saving, and investing performance details for the month. I also give you some helpful pointers on how you can start your own side hustle and start bringing in the cash!
To view any previous monthly money reports, check these monthly money reports. Let’s start with a review of our goals for December 2016 to see how we did:
Actions Plans for December 2016
Here is a quick review of how we did with our goals for the month of December:
Key: Complete/Some Progress/No Progress
- Publish 6 posts for MoneyAhoy.com
- Some Progress – I was able to get to 5 posts for December – close!
- Publish 1 post for HealthierDay.com
- No Progress – neither my wife nor I got around to creating a post of our health and fitness blog.
- Create 2 YouTube videos for MoneyAhoy
- Complete – I made 3 videos in total. These all reviewed recent tech purchases for the company.
- Exercise at least 15 minutes every day
- Some Progress – we were on vacation, so I chose not to exercise each day 🙁
- Gain over 750 Pinterest followers
- Complete – I hit about 1,200 total Pinterest followers by the end of December, so this goal went well.
No so hot when I look back on it. I really should have taken a bit more time to work on MoneyAhoy, but I did enjoy the nice break during the holidays. I plan to come out of the gates strong in January, so we’ll see how that goes.
Now, without further ado, let’s get on to the money!
Notes on Making Money for December 2016
December was a great month for overall income! We were roughly $2,000 above the six-month moving average – a lot of things came together to make that happen including: my wife worked extra hours before the holidays, MoneyAhoy income was above average, and our dividends kicked into over-drive!
Total side-income broke a new record for the money of December coming in at $3,187! This total side-income was made up of:
- $940 of MoneyAhoy income
- $2,247 in dividends
For the MoneyAhoy income for the month, all this money was made in the month with less than 4-hours of total work spent on the blog. That means I am earning over $250/hour by running my own blog! If that sounds awesome to you, maybe you should consider starting your own WordPress blog with Bluehost? Check out my article linked there to get started on your money making journey for less than $4 a month!
Our 2016 monthly goal was to earn enough each month in side income to cover our monthly mortgage payment which is roughly $850/month. Now that December has come and gone, we can officially say that we were able to achieve this goal for every month of 2016! We are truly blessed and will have to develop a more challenging goal for 2017 to stretch our money making muscles ever harder!
Here’s a detailed breakdown of the total $3,187 in side-income for the month of December:
- Monthly Dividends – $2,247 (INTC, JNK, VEA, VWO, VBK, VNQ)
- Sponsored Posts – $400
- How to Setup Your Own LLC Quickly– $339
- Youtube – $91
- Advertisements in sidebar – $23
- Google Adsense – $11
- Amazon Affiliates – $11
- Stock Market Investing for Newbies
book – $0
- HealthierDay.com Adsense/Youtube- <$1
- TOTAL = $940
We are continuing to reinvest the profits from dividends and MoneyAhoy each and every month back into the business or the general stock market. Our plan remains to let compound interest work its magic month-over-month. Did you notice that monthly dividend graph slowly go up higher and higher? That’s because we are continually investing each and every month!
Notes on Money Saving for December 2016
December was a pretty good month for money saving. Our routine expenses were about $500 less than average, and we kept our non-routine expenses in pretty good check. We were close to setting a new low record, but we didn’t quite make it there. We also traveled up north for Christmas, so that brought some larger than normal transportation, lodging, and eating-out expenses.
Here are some of the largest non-routine expenses we had for December:
- $556 – more Christmas presents for friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family. It seems the total we spent on Christmas presents for 2016 is about $1,200. I’m not sure if that is a lot or pretty good. It seems a bit high to me, but I didn’t total it up for 2015 so I don’t really know…
- $216 – while in Philly, we spent a fun-filled day at the Franklin Museum and its various exhibits. We also watched Star Wars: Rogue One on the Imax theater there. Everyone had fun even though it was super expensive for just one day of fun :-).
- $99 – We finally broke down and subscribed to Amazon Prime. I think we are one of the last people on earth to sign up for Amazon Prime that use Amazon on a semi-routine basis. With all of the Christmas presents and such, I think it paid for itself with one or two orders!
We now have a total of $8,600 in the new van fund. We continue to put $1,000 a month away so that we will have enough to replace my wife’s van when the time comes. By mid-year 2017 we should be able to have enough set aside for a pretty decent one.
Our overall savings rate for the month was just 48%. Why so low (our average for 2016 not including December was 62%)? It’s because I maxed out my 401(k) and hit the $18,000 contribution limit part-way through December. So, for December only a fraction of money was put into the 401(k) to top it off. As a result, I had less matching funds from my work and had to pay more taxes :-(. It’s a nice problem to have I guess…
Notes on Investing for December 2016
For the month of December I was hard at work with my investments. I decided to lock in a couple of capital losses on some stock through tax loss harvesting. This allows you to sell stock and count the loss against gains (for me this would be dividends in 2016). As a result, I will be able to save ~$2,000 on my 2016 taxes I think.
I also purchased more shares of VNQ (37 at $81.33) for about $3,010. VNQ is the Vanguard Real Estate Investment Trust ETF fund. This is a ETF that invests in real estate assets that produce income (mostly commercial real estate leases and the like). This is a passively managed ETF and currently pays a 6.06% annual dividend. This dividend is not qualified, so the tax rate is a bit higher. We try to keep our main investments of REITs in tax advantaged accounts, but we were getting pretty under-allocated in this sector so I purchased it in our main investing account.
If you truly want to gain financial independence, then you need to learn more about investing to build your long-term wealth! Investing in the stock market is one way to build up your passive income stream. Check out my free stock market investing Ebook to get started on your own stock market investing journey now!
Actions Plans for January 2017
As you could see at the beginning of this post, we did not do all that well in terms of December goals. I plan to really hit the ground running in January, so I have a renewed confidence to set pretty ambitious goals for the month.
January 2017 Goals
- Publish 8 posts for MoneyAhoy.com
- Publish 1 post for HealthierDay.com
- Create 2 YouTube videos for MoneyAhoy
- Exercise at least 15 minutes every day
- Gain over 1,000 Pinterest followers
- Make over $1,000 / month in side-hustle income
I continue to plan on trading off a bit of time writing articles for MoneyAhoy to promote the blog through additional blog comments and Pinterest. It seems as though many bloggers have hit the gold mine through social interaction on Pinterest. I hope to so the same now that I’ve learned more about the ins and outs of Pinterest.
Other Points of Interest
Here are all the great MoneyAhoy.com posts for December if you happened to miss any:
- How to Make Money with a Blog
- How to Make Your Bad Credit Problems Go Away
- What Kind of Car Insurance Coverage Do I Need?
- November 2016 Money Report
- Christmas Gifts Don’t Have to Be Expensive
You Can Make Money Online Too!
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I started MoneyAhoy.com just over three years ago without knowing the first thing about blogging. In that amount of time, I’ve made over $25K and my monthly blog income continues to grow and grow. I have also saved over $50K with all the research and tips this blog has helped me to implement!
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