MoneyAhoy.com is Two Years Old!
MoneyAhoy.com just turned two years old this past weekend! I can hardly believe I have been at it for two solid years! My goal for this blog was twofold: to help build the discipline I needed to take my personal finance to the next level and to help others save, make, and invest their money better! This blog has been awesome for me, and I hope that it has helped you in some way. Let’s look over the highlights of year two in MoneyAhoy’s history. If you are interested in year one, check out: year one in review.
Top-5 Posts
Here’s a listing of the top most popular posts for the past year in terms of traffic:
- How to Make Your Own Microphone Stand for Cheap – I made this post and video as I tried to save money by making my own microphone stand. Lots of folks from YouTube have thanked me for it 🙂
- Make Money on Craigslist with Flipping – This was a guest post from Thomas over at IneedMoneyASAP.com. It’s a great post and I suggest you check it out.
- How I Almost Bought an $80,000 Car – I shared a story of how I was inches away from buying an $80,000 BMW M3. I’m glad MoneyAhoy helped bring me to my senses!
- Yard Sale Arbitrage – Wii Games – This post covers simple ways to buy Wii games from yard sales and flip them for a profit on eBay.
- How My Wife and I Made $370,000 in One Day! – It’s true – this post details how my wife and I made $370,000 in one day? Sound too good to be true? You may be closer than you think to being able to achieve similar results!
Money Results
This blog continued to allow me to focus on saving more, making additional money, and getting disciplined about investing. Let’s look at each category to see what happened.
- Saving – Last year I stated that this blog was able to help me save ~$4,500. For year two, the savings are even better! When we moved to Georgia, we downsized our home considerably – we cut our square footage by half! That simply would not have happened without MoneyAhoy and the discipline this blog helps me to achieve when it comes to money. Our total savings for year two (compared to year one) is over $8,400! That’s a total savings over the past two years of >$17,400!
- Making – For year two of MoneyAhoy, I made a total of ~$6,900 in side hustle income! This includes the blog, eBay/Craigslist flipping and book sales. For the two years combined, MoneyAhoy has made nearly $8,700! That’s pretty nice!
- Investing – The biggest area where MoneyAhoy has helped me is with my investing. I really got burned in 2008 and 2009 by trying to trade the market instead of invest :-(. This caused me to be really gun-shy when it came to investing in the stock market. For year two of MoneyAhoy, this blog helped me to maintain the discipline to invest > $118,000 in our private investment account (this is above and beyond our 401K investments). With all that investment comes dividends – for year two I generated ~$2,600! That’s really got me excited! Rolling everything up, for the two years total of MoneyAhoy, I’ve invested $153,000 and received over $3,300 in dividends!
So, what’s the big picture? All said, over the past two years combined MoneyAhoy has directly led to our net-worth increase of approximately $33,000. This includes savings, money made, dividends, and capital appreciation of investments from my private investing account. That’s a pretty good deal for just running a small blog 🙂 Along the way I also became an author and published my own investing book: Stock Market Investing for Newbies. Crazy, right?
What’s Next for The Third Year?
I’ve got a number of things that I’m currently working on in the money saving, making, and investing arenas. Looking back on my goals for year two, I hit all of them including downsizing our house! Here are a couple of the major things I have planned for the next year:
- Continue to look for ways to save more, make more side hustle income, invest more money, and get closer to financial independence!
- Continue to crank out YouTube videos on saving, making, and investing money
- Create/purchase a second personal finance blog and get that up-and-running and generating some income
- Hit the goal of having a month where dividends are greater than our monthly house payment (currently ~$730/month)
I trust that you will stick with me this next year to see what type of progress I am able to make with the above items. I hope this blog has been as helpful to you as it has to me, and I look forward to many more great blogging year ahead. If you have suggestions on how I can make the blog even better, please comment here or send me an email!!
That is so exciting! I’ll be looking forward to reading about the hugely successful third year of Money Ahoy soon
Anum recently posted…10 Simple Rules of Personal Finance
Thanks Anum!!
That’s a great year two! Congrats and keep up the great blogging! Best of luck in year 3!
Femme @ femmefrugality recently posted…When Things Got Financially Real
Thanks Femme for the wishes of good luck!