November 2016 Money Report

The MoneyAhoy money report for November 2016 is ready to go.  Read on to find out how we did for the month.  In the money report I discuss our money making, money saving, and investing performance 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 November 2016 to see how we did:

Actions Plans for November 2016

Here is a quick review of how we did with our goals for the month of November:

Key: Complete/Some Progress/No Progress

• Publish 6 posts for MoneyAhoy.com
  • Some Progress – I only had 4 posts for the month 🙁  I was not very productive during the Thanksgiving break and spent extra time creating a mega-post for how to make money with a blog.
• Publish 1 post for HealthierDay.com
  • No Progress – my wife and I did not manage to get a post under our belt for HealthierDay.
• Create 1 YouTube video for MoneyAhoy
  • No Progress – I did not get any YouTube videos out for November.
• Exercise at least 15 minutes every day
  • COMPLETE – I started jogging for 15-20 mins in the morning each day.  That combined with lifting weights most nights and I am getting in some nice shape!
• Comment on over 100 blogs with links back to MoneyAhoy.com
  • COMPLETE – it’s a dirty job, but someone has got to do it…

As you can tell from the colors above, not so hot of a month in terms of achieving the monthly goals.  I worked on a real mega-post and did not have tons of free time for the month, so the blog suffered a bit.  I hope to pick things back up nicely in December to finish the year strong.  I also plan on focusing much more on marketing/social which will take some time away from creating posts.  Hopefully that will pay off in the long run with additional readers and increased traffic.

Now, without further ado, let’s get on to the money!

Notes on Making Money for November 2016

November was a pretty standard month for overall income.  You can see that we hit right on the 6-month monthly running average.  My wife worked a nice amount of extra hours, so it made up for our lower overall side income.

Total side income for the month of November came in at $959.  This was the lowest side income for the year, but it is still impressive to me that we were able to earn a spare $1,000 without too much trouble.  This total of $960 was made up of $351 in dividends and $608 in MoneyAhoy income.  Check out the detailed breakdown below for additional info.

I added a new graph which combines the dividends, MoneyAhoy, and all side-hustle income into one “side income” number.  It really helps with the visualization of how much we are making due to our extra efforts.  We are averaging about $1,800 a month of additional side income (black line) which is really going a long way towards helping improve our savings and reinvestment rate.

Our 2016 goal has been to earn enough side income each month to cover the mortgage payment (~$850).  We were able to hit this goal again for 11 months in a row now!  We are truly blessed and will have to develop a more challenging goal for 2017!

• Monthly Dividends – $351 (JNK)
• How to Create a LLC Online for Cheap!– $231
• Sponsored Posts – $150
• Youtube – $108
• Advertisements in sidebar – $98
• Google Adsense – $10
• Amazon Affiliates – $9
• Stock Market Investing for Newbies book – $3
• HealthierDay.com Adsense/Youtube- <$1
• TOTAL = $959

We continue to reinvest the profits from dividends and MoneyAhoy.com each and every month.  The plan is to let the power of compound interest do its thing month in and month out.  This is why you see the monthly dividend graph slowly increase month over month :-).  I wish it were increasing even faster, but hey I will take what I can get :-).

Notes on Money Saving for November 2016

November was a pretty bad month for total expenses with our total monthly expense over $5,000!  We did OK with our routine expenses, but as you can see in the chart above the non-routine expenses hit us pretty hard.  This was pretty much expected as we traveled a bit, arranged for more travel in December, and began to purchase some Christmas presents for friends, family, teachers, etc.

Here are some of the largest non-routine expenses we had for the month:

1. $660 – various assortment of Christmas presents for friends, neighbors, family, and teachers.
2. $413 – we are going to be out of town for some of Christmas, and this is the charge for the hotel we booked through Priceline.
3. $206 – I took my wife to Augusta, GA for her birthday after we freed up some time in our busy scheduled.  This was an extended weekend to check out the city.  It was pretty neat!  This is the amount we spent on the hotel (also booked through Priceline).
4. $67 – we had family Christmas pictures and greeting cards made to send out.

We now have a total of $7,600 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.  Another couple of months and we will be able to pay for a real decent one.

Our overall savings rate for the month was 61%.  This is pretty good all things considered.  We were helped by a nice income for the month even though our expenses were much higher than average.

Notes on Investing for November 2016

For the month of November, I purchased 48 shares of VNQ for about $3,900. 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 4.15% 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 December 2016

We will be out of town on the road for quite a bit in December, so I am trying to keep the goals pretty streamlined for the month.  I should be able to blog from the road albeit a bit more difficult to type on one of those mini laptop keyboards :-).

December 2016 Goals

• Publish 6 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 750 Pinterest followers

As I mentioned earlier, I am 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 November if you happened to miss any:

1. It’s Scholarship Submission Time – Check out these Weird Scholarship Ideas
2. How to Start a WordPress Blog with Bluehost
3. October 2016 Money Report
4. Protect Yourself from Online Card Fraud This Cyber Monday

You Can Make Money Online Too!

Are you interested in making a couple thousand extra dollars a month?  I thought so!  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:

1. 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.
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 $20K 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!

If you have ever thought about starting your own business, 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 with just a few hours a week and build it up from there.  The sky is really the limit with your 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!