My September 2013 Money Making, Saving, and Investing Report

Welcome to the September 2013 Money Making, Saving, and Investing Report!

Let’s see if we were able to hit our stretch goal of saving 60% by September!

To view the previous month’s report, click here.

 

 

 

 

Why?

To read why I’m publishing these reports, check out the report page here.

 

Actions Plans for This Month (Set in August)

Key: Complete/Some Progress/No Progress

• Get 2000-2003 Corolla (something close to $500-$600 per year) – save ~$500+/year on gas
  • I finally completed this one!  You can read all about it here: Car Downsizing – How I Got a Free Corolla
• Read A Random Walk Down Wall Street
  • I finished this goal too – It was a great book that will change my financial life in a huge way.  Check out the review of it here: Book Review – A Random Walk Down Wallstreet
• Read The Millionaire Next Door
  • I did not get to this one yet.  I think I’m going to plan on reading this after a couple of other books that have been suggested to me.
• Eliminate wife’s Short-Term Disability Insurance – Save $830/year
  • Complete!  Read about it here: Life Insurance and Short Term Disability Insurance – Recap
• Reduce wife’s Life Insurance coverage – Save $150/year
  • Complete!  Read about it here: Life Insurance and Short Term Disability Insurance – Recap
• Try to reduce my Life Insurance coverage  – Save $150/year
  • Complete!  Read about it here: Life Insurance and Short Term Disability Insurance – Recap

Overall, I kicked ass on my goals for the month!  I hit five out of six – I’m especially glad that I finally got the Corolla.  Now, I just need to sell my old 1997 Camry for > $1,000 hopefully 🙂

 

Money Making (Income)

Salaries (after taxes) — $8,488.17
MoneyAhoy.com Income — $8.43 (estimated)

• Google AdSense Ads — $2.67 (estimated)
• YouTube Ads — $0.78 (estimated)
• Amazon —-  $4.98

Yard Sale Items resold on Ebay — $18.99

Dividend Income — $36.42 (PEP and JNK)

TOTAL MONTHLY INCOME = $ 8,551.92 

 

Money Saving (Expenses)

• Received a $9 credit (6%) on car insurance due to the SnapShot device through Progressive.
• Since school started, the kid’s daycare costs went down $249/month (yeah!)
• Spent $380 less on groceries this month (win!)
• Saving more than $100 /month after straightening out life insurance and dropping short term disability
• Paying $14 / month more in car insurance until I can sell my Camry
• Eating out was still super high this month at $235

Special expenses for the month:

• Birthday Presents – $127
• Hotel Room for Family Reunion – $99 (used Priceline.com to save a bunch)
• Medicine – $81 (hopefully no one else will get sick for at least one damn month 🙂 )

 Notes on special expenses:

• I got this really beautiful Sapphire Ring, a GPS mount (ended up not working at all 🙁 ), and baked a cake for my wife’s birthday.  I’ll have to figure out if we can take the GPS mount back and get her something else instead.
• Thank god for healthcare spending accounts – we’re spending a small fortune on medicine and doctors visits this year!

Because of the way I’m tracking expenses, I show them here when we incurred then in September, but the credit card bill from August was actually paid in September.  Because the expenses were so high for August, this really counted against us here.  As a result, our savings for the month was…… drum roll please……. only 41% 🙁

So, we did not hit our goal of 60% monthly savings by the end of the third quarter.  I’m really proud of how far we’ve come since I’ve started this blog, we’ve saved a ton of money each and every month.  I plan to do a post soon to tally up just how much we’ve saved ourselves this year by working to try and wring out all our routine monthly expenses.  With all of our newfound monthly savings, I will be really interested to see where things shake out for October.

TOTAL MONTHLY EXPENSES = $ 4,682.65 ( $1,352 less than last month) 

 

Investing

For the fourth time in a row, I went with a normal boring investment in a US market index fund this month.  See the post Investing In Market Index Funds is Best to understand why.  After reading the book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, I plan to begin buying some international market index funds to help improve my asset allocation for October.  You can read my recent review of this book – I highly recommend it.

I bought: 12 shares of SPY @ 167.46 (with $5 commission) — $ 2,009.52

• This is the S&P-500 Market Index Fund
• It pays a quarterly dividend that works out to be ~2% APR.
• The dividends are qualified, which means they are taxed as long term capital gains at the lower 15% rate.

 TOTAL MONTHLY INVESTING = $ 2,009.52

 

Actions Plans for October

• Sell my Camry for more than $1,000
• Read the book I Will Teach You To Be Rich
• Try to get eating out to less than $150 / month
• Try to make more than $50 profit flipping stuff from yard sales to ebay.  Something similar to this…
• Setup Roth IRA accounts for my wife and myself
• Setup and release a new theme layout for the website (I’ve already gotten started on this one)

 

Other Points of Interest

I update the Resources Page a bit to collect even more useful stuff all in one place to help you save, make, and invest your money.

Here is a list of the posts I created for the month of September.  Hopefully you’ll find at least one of these helpful in your journey.

1. Quit World of Warcraft Today
2. The Best Dividend Paying Stocks – August 2013 Recap
3. Yard Sale Deals – August 2013
4. Life Insurance and Short Term Disability Insurance – Recap
5. Yard Sale Arbitrage – Vera Bradley Purses
6. Car Downsizing – How I Got a Free Corolla

 

Also, MBA homework has been kicking my butt.  If you’re a normal reader, you’ve probably noticed a slowdown in the number of posts here.  I still have been exceeding my goal of one post per week, so I’m happy with that.

Check back next month to see how well we did with our action plans!  What are your money saving, money making, and investing plans for the month?