May 2016 Money Report
The MoneyAhoy.com May 2016 Monthly Money report is ready for your personal enjoyment. It was a pretty good month overall, so hop on in and take a look! You may find an idea or two to make more money or save yourself some extra cash!
To view any previous monthly money reports, check these monthly money reports. Let’s start with a review of our goals for May 2016 to see how we did:
Actions Plans for May 2016
Here is a review of how we did with our goals for the month of May:
Key: Complete/Some Progress/No Progress
- Publish 8 posts for MoneyAhoy.com
- COMPLETE – I had a total of 10 posts for the month of May.
- Publish 2 posts for HealthierDay.com
- COMPLETE – My wife and I knocked out 3 posts for the month of May! She usually writes the “meat” of the articles and I tidy things up a bit from an editing/SEO standpoint and publish them. It usually works out pretty well – we make a good team :-).
- Create comments on 30 other blogs to build link juice to MoneyAhoy
- COMPLETE – got this one done.
- Create comments on 30 other blogs to build link juice to HealthierDay
- COMPLETE – got this one done as well.
- Create 2 YouTube videos for MoneyAhoy/HealtherDay
- NO PROGRESS – I didn’t hit the goal here. I was planning to make a video to go with the article: Create Your Own Money Saving Plan Using Pareto Charts, but I didn’t get around to it just yet :-(.
- Exercise at least 10 minutes every day
- COMPLETE – was able to make this happen. Now I just need to watch my portion sizes a bit more to get trimmed up for the beach :-).
- Put in 5+ hours a week on the new computer game I am developing (more to come on this down the road)
- COMPLETE – I was able to find the time to hit this goal. I will post a screen shot below. It isn’t much to look at, but I am slowly learning my way around the programming language.
I completed 6 out of 7 goals for the month of May. That’s pretty good I think. I am especially happy that I was able to work so much on my new computer game. Hopefully that will turn into something awesome down the road if I continue to work on it! Right now I’m just learning the Game Maker software for the most part.
Here’s how we did money-wise for the month of May:
May 2016 – Money Report
Notes on Making Money for May 2016
Our “routine” income for the month was a bit lower than normal for two reasons:
- my wife got sick and missed a couple days of work. Stuff happens I guess. She’s all better now, so that’s good.
- with preparing for the kids last day of school and the upcoming Memorial Day holiday, she worked a bit less hours.
For the “extra” income category, we came in at a total side income of $1,400 for the month. This was comprised of $342 in dividends and ~$1,058 in side hustle income! My goal for 2016 is to try and earn enough through dividends and MoneyAhoy.com to pay the mortgage each and every month. Five months down and seven more to go in that regard as we’ve hit this goal each month so far in 2016!
Our overall total income for the month hit an 11-month low, but that’s for the two main reasons described above. Luckily, or savings was pretty good for the month, so it all worked out OK in the end :-).
Here’s are the details of our side-hustles and dividend income for May 2016:
- Sponsored Articles – $450
- Start Your LLC Today – $388
- Monthly Dividends – $342 (JNK)
- Sold wife’s old spinning bike to friend – $150
- Youtube – $31
- Ad in sidebar – $25
- Google Adsense – $6
- Stock Market Investing for Newbies
book – $5
- Sponsored Facebook Post – $4
- HealthierDay.com Adsense/Youtube- <$1
- TOTAL = $1,400
I have a couple longer term sidebar ad deals on the table that I hope go through. If they do, this would be an extra $50 a month of passive income. We’ll see how that goes…
I still am continuing to reinvest all dividends and profits to make our side income stream sustainable for the long term. You gotta love the power of compound interest!
Notes on Money Saving for May 2016
Total monthly expenses were lower than last month and below the six-month moving average. This is good, but they are still a bit higher than I would like.
With summer daycare kicking in and our higher payment towards home escrow (to catch up our property taxes), our routine expenses were a little on the high side, but not bad.
For non-routine expenses, we had three big-hitters:
- $405 – in medical bills for my daughters heart evaluation with a pediatric cardiologist. A walk-in doctor noticed our daughter had a heart murmur and we had it checked out. Turned out that everything is OK there in that department :-). The total cost was >$2,000! – we paid $1,600 from our health savings account and ~$400 by credit card. That’s a ton of money, but at least we have peace of mind she’s OK from that standpoint…
- $250 – We pre-paid for a weekend home in Myrtle Beach through AirBnb and are splitting the cost with some friends ($500 total for the weekend, so our portion to pay is $250).
- $124 – We went to Stone Mountain Park for the Memorial Day weekend and spend $124 for two-day passes to the park for the family. It was a fun time and we stayed late one night to see the 1980’s-esque laser show.
One other interesting thing we decided to start this month was saving $1,000 each month towards a new van for my wife. Her van currently has 204,000+ miles, and it is showing signs of age. We know we don’t need one right away, so we are trying to save a bit each month towards one. If I could have it my way, we would run that sucker into the ground! Our deal/compromise was we would start by saving $1,000 each month towards a new van. The plan would be that we could take that money whenever the time seemed right to buy a new-used van. I think the sweet spot will be right around $12,000 – $15,000. The longer we wait, the more savings we will accumulate and the newer the van she will be able to get. We’ll see how the plan goes…
For the month of May, our overall savings rate was 50%. So, we did pretty good for the month!
Notes on Investing for May 2016
For the month of May, I bought 115 shares of VEA for a total of ~$4,200. VEA is a passively managed index fund that tracks the developed markets index (think Europe, Australia, Japan,, etc.). This ETF currently pays a 2.9% annual dividend. It is important to ensure you do not put all your eggs in one basket from an asset allocation standpoint and only invest in US stocks. VEA helps me to do this in a simple way.
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 June 2016
Below are my goals for the upcoming month of June. I will be on vacation for a couple weeks in June, so I am keeping the goals a bit easier for this month:
- Publish 6 posts for MoneyAhoy.com
- Publish 1 posts for HealthierDay.com
- Create comments on 15 other blogs to build link juice to MoneyAhoy
- Create comments on 15 other blogs to build link juice to HealthierDay
- Create 1 YouTube videos for MoneyAhoy/HealtherDay
- Exercise at least 10 minutes every day
- Put in 4+ hours a week on the new computer game I am developing (more to come on this down the road)
Other Points of Interest
Here’s a simple screenshot of the computer game I am prototyping in Game Maker Studio. All the graphics are just placeholders for now until I can get the programming pretty well taken care of. It’s been challenging and a lot of fun so far! It’s basically going to be a game where you control various tanks and kill robots. Very original I know :-)…
Tank Game Where you Kill Robots
Here are all the great MoneyAhoy.com posts for May if you happened to miss any:
- How to Cool Down Your Air Conditioning Costs
- 4 Reasons to Search Available Domains on a Regular Basis
- April 2016 Money Report
- How to Choose the Best Money Management Company
- How to Childproof Your Home on a Budget
- How Personal Productivity Helps with Personal Finance
- Create Your Own Money Saving Plan Using Pareto Charts
- What is Energy Deregulation and What Does It Mean For You?
- Five Retirement Expenses That Will Cost You Big Time
- How to Celebrate Memorial Day on a Budget
