May 2017 Money Report
The May 2017 MoneyAhoy Money Report is here – better late than never! Read on to learn more about how I successfully make over $250/hour blogging in my spare time. I also discuss out money making, money saving, and investing performance for the month. The money report is chock full of helpful tips on how you can start your own business and start making extra money! Let’s jump right in, but first if you’d like to view any previous monthly money reports go here: monthly money reports. Let’s start with a review of our goals for May 2017 to see how we did:
Actions Plans for May 2017
Here is a quick review of how we did with our goals for the month:
Key: Complete/Some Progress/No Progress
- Publish 8 posts for MoneyAhoy.com
- Some Progress – We had 7 posts for the month instead of the goal of 8. Close but no cigar 🙂
- Publish 1 post for HealthierDay.com
- No Progress – we did not get around to making a post this month.
- Create 2 YouTube videos for MoneyAhoy
- No Progress – did not take the time to produce and videos for the month
- Exercise at least 15 minutes every day
- Some Progress – we took a couple days off and I lazily slacked on my exercise a bit.
- Get to 3,500 Pinterest followers
- Complete – was able to hit this goal
- Make over $1,200 / month in side-income (blog + dividend income)
- Complete – we were able to make $1,683 in side-income for the month
As you can see, it was a pretty terrible month in terms of achieving the goals we set forth for the month. May was super busy at work for me, and I had to put in a lot of extra hours. As a result, I did not have much energy left at the end of the day to hit some of these goals. Better luck next month I hope 🙂
Now let’s get onto the money discussion!
May 2017 -Money Report
Notes on Making Money for May 2017
We had another average month for total income in May. My wife worked quite a bit, but dividends and MoneyAhoy.com income was a bit on the lower side.
Total side-income for May came in at $1,683. This is a bit on the low side, but is still welcomed none the less 🙂 As you can see on the above graph, the month ran a bit below the 6-month moving average. MoneyAhoy.com income was also right at the 6-month moving average. The split between MoneyAhoy.com income and dividends was:
- $1,302 – MoneyAhoy.com income
- $381 – dividends
For the MoneyAhoy.com income for the month, all this money was made in the month with less than 5 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 start a WordPress blog with Bluehost yourself? Check out my article linked there to get started on your money making journey all for less than $4 a month!
My new income goal for 2017 is to make over $1,000 each month of side-income (MoneyAhoy.com blog income plus dividends). You can see that we are averaging more than this if we can continue our money-making momentum, but I’d like to try and make $1,000 each and every month (even in the light dividend months) just to prove I can do it. Hitting this monthly goal went well for May as we had plenty of room to spare.
Here’s a detailed breakdown of the total $1,683 in side-income for the month of May. I have included links as much as I can to help you learn and see how I am incorporating affiliate programs into this blog to generate side-income:
- Sponsored Posts – $550 (read how to get sponsored posts on your blog for more info)
- How to Start Your Own Company with an LLC – $507
- Monthly Investment Dividends – $381 (JNK, HYG)
- Youtube – $83
- Advertisements in sidebar – $75
- SeedingUp Digital Content Marketing– $42
- MyFinance end of post ads – $20
- Amazon Affiliates – $14
- Google Adsense – $11
- Stock Market Investing for Newbies
book – $0
- Start a WordPress Blog – $0
- TOTAL = $1,683
I take all of the stock market investment dividends and reinvest them to put the power of compounding interest to good work. I also use the money made here with the MoneyAhoy.com blog and reinvest it back into the blog (see How to Pay Yourself from your LLC) or invest the profits into the stock market.
Did you notice that monthly dividend graph slowly increasing? That’s because we are continually investing each and every month! If you’d like to learn more about investing, read my FREE book: Stock Market Investing for Newbies.
Notes on Money Saving for May 2017
We did OK on our savings for the month considering we had a HUGE expenditure which I will get to in a bit. I removed this huge expense so it would not totally throw all of the graphs out of whack – hopefully this makes sense and doesn’t seem like “cheating.”
Routine expenses were pretty much in line for the month other than the kids’ daycare started to kick in now that we are in the summer. This is a couple hundred bucks a month for either their daycare or summer camps.
Non-routine expenses included a couple of smaller travel expenses and were otherwise low. Besides the travel, we had a couple of odds and ends expenditures, but nothing over $100:
- $513 – AirBnB – beach trip for wife, kids, and her parents for 4 days at Sarasota
- $275 – AirBnB – weekend trip for family plus
- $72 – Mother’s Day present
For the HUGE expense I was talking about, this came in at about $5,200! What is it you ask? Because we have been doing such a great job saving money over the past several years, we decided to do something really special as a family. We dipped into our cash reserves and planned a family trip to Ireland for two weeks in July. As you can imagine, this is hugely expensive 🙂 We are trying our best to keep this travel as frugal as possible where we can. Here’s the breakdown of what we have spent so far:
- Flight for family of four to Dublin: $2,857
- Hotels and Airbnb.com accommodations for two weeks: $1,790
- Rental car for two weeks: $555
The main expense for this Ireland trip that will kick in that isn’t shown above is food. Eating out for two solid weeks is going to cost a bit, but again we will try and save as much as we can through meal sharing.
We now have a total of $13,600 in our 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. We have been saving for a bit over a year now, so we are getting close. Her van has 225,000 miles on it right now, and it is still going strong! In just a couple more months, we should be able to have enough set aside for a pretty decent one. If we decide to continue holding out longer and continuing to save, we’ll just be able to afford one that is much nicer. Basically, it is just a question of “when to cash in the chips.”
Our overall savings rate for the month was just 37%. This low savings rate is due to our planned two-week trip to Ireland. We hope that our savings rate will ratchet back up in June 🙂
Notes on Investing for May 2017
In April, I performed a large reallocation of all of our investments. Now that this was out of the way, I was ready to begin investing on our normal plan. For the month of May, I purchased 19 shares of SPY for a total of $4,634. SPY is the SPDR S&P-500 exchange traded fund (ETF). It tracks the Standard and Poor’s 500 index. This ETF is currently paying an annual dividend yield of 1.91%.
You won’t find me engaging in any crazy day trading or investing in single stocks like GoPro or anything. Investing for the long-term is pretty boring overall, but that’s what long-term investing is supposed to be! If it is too exciting, then you are probably doing it wrong :-).
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 2017
June is going to be another crazy month at my job as we try to close out the second quarter successfully. As a result, it will probably be a lot of long hours during the week and maybe even some weekend work! So, I will keep my June goals super light to reflect this.
Here’s what I am thinking:
June 2017 Goals
- Publish 6 posts for MoneyAhoy.com
- Read the book: Manifest $10,000 by Cassie Parks
- Exercise at least 15 minutes every day
- Get to 3,600 Pinterest followers
- Make over $1,200 / month in side-income (blog + dividend income)
Other Points of Interest
MoneyAhoy.com turned four years old recently! I cannot believe it’s been so long 🙂 Anyhow, you can read a bit more about the past four years for progress here: MoneyAhoy.com is Four Years Old! I am looking forward to many more years to great money making, saving, and investing articles to share with you!
Here are all the great MoneyAhoy.com posts for May if you happened to miss any:
- How to Know If a Reverse Mortgage is Right for You
- Common Sense Tips to Building a Solid Investment Portfolio
- How to Get the Financing You Need to Start a Business
- Become a Millionaire By 30
- April 2017 Money Report
- 4 Important Tips on Saving for Retirement
- How to Get a 1800 Toll Free Phone Number in Less Than 5 Minutes
You Can Make Money Online Too!
Are you interested in making over $250/hour by running a simple blog?!? I thought you might be! I truly believe that anyone can make money online if they are willing to put in the a bit of time and effort to make it a success. There are just a couple of simple things you need to do to start on your journey toward online success:
- Start your own online business – You can start your own business online in just a matter of minutes. Check out my guide on how to start and setup your own LLC online. I show you how, in less than 6 minutes, to form your own business as an LLC! This article will teach you all the benefits of owning your own LLC for your business versus just skipping ahead to step #2.
- Start your own Blog – The next step is to start your own blog. Whether you will be blogging or running some other type of online business, you will need to setup a blog for your business. I show you step by step how to start a WordPress blog on your own with Bluehost! If you have never run a blog before or don’t fancy yourself a writer, don’t worry. It is really simple, and the learning curve is very friendly.
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 $30K and my monthly blog income continues to grow and grow – just check out the blue portion of the income chart above! I have also saved over $57K with all the research and tips this blog has helped me to implement! Starting your own blog can truly be a life changing experience!
If you have ever thought about starting your own business or blog, then now is the time to get started! Don’t wait until you have everything figured out, or you will never start :-). You can get started with your online business or blog with just a few hours a week and build it up from there. The sky is really the limit with your business and/or blog income. With a little bit of elbow grease, you’ll be on your way to making thousands of dollars a month in no time! Click here to form your own LLC and click here to start your own blog and get started making money today!
