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$940 in Extra Income, Life Updates and 2013 Goals

BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 39 Comments

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning I get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through my links, at no cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more info.

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Happy Monday everyone! Another Weekly Update post. I hope you all enjoyed my St. Thomas and St. John pictures in my weekly update post from last week. Also, don't forget to check out my sister's blog, FITnancials, that I am helping run (she is the writer).

I also have a $399 cash or tablet giveaway that will be up on my blog later today. Please come back and check that out!

Didn't do a whole ton this past weekend. Time flew by and we wasted a lot of time relaxing. Should have been more productive! Spent Saturday relaxing and at night watched Gangster Squad. It was good! Ryan Gosling definitely was just an added bonus in the movie 🙂

Then on Sunday spent about 5 hours looking for homy gym equipment, and then about 3 hours setting it all up.

2013 GOALS

I realized the other day that I didn't make 2013 goals yet. Yes, I made my 2012 and 5 Year Review – So many GOOD things post but I didn't actually list any goals for this year. So here we go:

1. Pay off ALL of my student loans.

My goal is to completely wipe out the $38,000 of student loans that I graduated with in August. I've been calculating it (yes, I do this all the time) and they are still on track to be completely gone by March or April of this year. April will be the latest and lets just hope that nothing changes and takes me off from this schedule.

2. Get super fit.

Now that we plan on having everything that we need to work out in our basement, we definitely should have no problem with working out and getting more toned. Me and W plan on making a workout schedule for ourselves and are super excited to see our results.

3. Save for a decent sized down payment.

We are about 75% positive that we want to buy a new house in 2014. I plan on making a new post on this soon. A lot of you have wondered why we want a new house and why we want to sell our current house. It's probably all lifestyle inflation and in my head but I still want one.

4. Plan an awesome wedding!

We are most likely thinking Spring of 2014 and last month I posted some wedding ideas. Of course there's a long list of things that need to be done, and I've done pretty much nothing 🙂

Spending:

We did spend some money in the past week, but some of it was from bonus money that W earned. He gets a bonus card from the car brand he sells, and it's all deposited on a debit card. Now, this is different from his monthly “salesman of the month” bonus that he's been earning (that is all direct deposited into our bank account).  It's all extra money so we decided to spend some money on ourselves and have some fun.

And we did spend a lot of other money, which you can see below in my “being healthy” section below.

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Extra Income (does not include salary from our jobs):

I did good last week, but I am expecting the next couple of weeks to be better. I'm waiting on a couple of payments and I have some things scheduled for the next couple of weeks. Lets just hope nothing falls through! I made $940 in extra income last week.

Food: 

No meal plan again for this week. We didn't do the greatest with eating in last week, mainly because of laziness. We do have a well stocked fridge, I just need to cook some dinners before everything goes bad!

Being healthy:

I haven't been doing the greatest with this. We did buy a home gym yesterday (pictured above), which was SUPER expensive. I did not realize how much everything would be just so that W could lift some weights. The olympic bar alone was $320 (tax included) and that doesn't include any of the weights which were super expensive too ($150 for the two 45 pound weights).

We are still looking for a treadmill. We saw a couple yesterday but I wanted to do a little research on them. It needs to be reliable and good for 3 people to use every day. What brand/type of treadmill do you have? Let me know!

How's your spending, working out and extra income going?

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About Michelle Schroeder-Gardner

Michelle is the founder of Making Sense of Cents, a blog about personal finance and traveling. She discusses how her business has evolved in her side income series. She paid off $40,000 in student loans by the age of 24 mainly due to her freelancing side hustles. Click here to learn more about starting a blog!

Comments

  1. John S @ Frugal Rules says

    January 14, 2013 at 6:53 am

    Great job again on the income! I had a fairly good week myself, which is good to see. The working out…not so much. 🙁

    Reply

  3. NoTrustfund says

    January 14, 2013 at 7:18 am

    Good idea to get the wedding planning out of the way early, it takes forever. And I'm so impressed with all the extra income. Looks like you'll have no problem reaching your 2013 goals. I would love to hear more about your workout goals. I found having a firm wedding date to be extremely motivating on that front!
    My recent post Manifesto

    Reply

  5. plantingourpennies says

    January 14, 2013 at 7:19 am

    I don't know if it's too late, but did you look at places like Play It Again Sports for gym equipment? The brand new stuff is definitely super expensive, but it's not like barbells wear out, so the used stuff is usually just as good.
    My recent post Equity Vs. Liquidation Value

    Reply

  6. Sam says

    January 14, 2013 at 7:19 am

    Awesome job, Michelle! Hopefully you will get lots of use out of the home gym! I sooo want to learn more in detail about your online income. How you get the staff writing jobs, etc. hope you do another post on it soon! Ps- loving your sisters blog so far! The setup looks great!
    My recent post Dining Room Transformation – 'Before'

    Reply

  9. DC@Young Adult Money says

    January 14, 2013 at 8:29 am

    "I also have a $399 cash or tablet giveaway that will be up on my blog later today" – Looking forward to this! My wife and I have been entering a lot of giveaways recently so we will definitely enter this one.

    Your home gym is freaking awesome. It's definitely a goal of mine to have one someday. I would love to have that weight setup that you have, as well as a treadmill. I have been working out 5x/week and using our cruise in February as a motivator.

    I hope you reach your goal of paying off your student loans. When we have more savings I will consider putting more towards our student loans….would be nice to get them down to a more manageable amount.
    My recent post How to Save Money on a Date

    Reply

  10. Jordann says

    January 14, 2013 at 9:16 am

    Totally jealous of your home gym! I'm very lucky that I have a treadmill at work plus my fiance's sister is letting me use hers whenever I want, otherwise staying healthy would be tough! The extra income has sure taken a nose dive this month, I don't know what it is but I haven't been able to close ANY ad deals – even though my stats are better and my price is the same. Weird. Oh well though, I'm not going to fuss too much about it.

    Reply

  12. Budget & the Beach says

    January 14, 2013 at 9:40 am

    Good luck with your new home gym! I that most people buy those things and get excited about it, then it ends up sitting in a dusty garage or basement not being used. An idea is (because you said it was expensive), track your workouts as if you were going to an expensive gym. Each time you work out it "goes towards" what it cost to buy that that thing. That way it keeps you motivated because you know at least you are making that purchase worthwhile, and eventually the idea is you worked out so much, the thing paid for itself and then some because you actually used it! Make sense?
    My recent post Leaving There

    Reply

    • MakingSenseofCents says

      January 14, 2013 at 11:29 am

      Makes sense! I am pretty positive that we will use it though. The main reason why we stopped going to the gym was because it was too far. Spending an hour each day to commute to the gym wasn't worth it for us.

      Reply

  16. DebtsnTaxes says

    January 14, 2013 at 12:50 pm

    Awesome job on the extra income! I bought a Smith Machine a couple years back (on Black Friday) and got an awesome deal on it. I can't believe the weights you bought were that expensive though. I bought a set of 300 Lbs. including the bar for $150 brand new. We bought a treadmill this past weekend also. We bought a little heavier duty one that can hold 325 Lbs with a 2.5 continuous HP motor. I think it was the ProForm 790T. It had pretty good reviews and was relatively easy to put together.

    Reply

    • MakingSenseofCents says

      January 14, 2013 at 12:22 pm

      Yeah W wanted the best material and brands, and he wanted the weights to be rubber so that they wouldn't crack the floor. Ugh so expensive! It was the cheapest price we found for what we wanted though.

      And we were looking into the ProForm! How much did you spend?

      Reply

      • DebtsnTaxes says

        January 14, 2013 at 9:46 pm

        It was $699 for the one we got. So far I like it. Makes sense about the weights. I have those foam mats underneath all my exercise equipment so it doesn't matter if I drop them. They should last him the rest of his life though so its not a bad investment.

        Reply

  17. Jennifer Lynn says

    January 14, 2013 at 4:18 pm

    You are kicking some major tush with that extra income. That simply is awesome! Also I think it is great that you and W can motivate each other to tone up and stick to a vigorous workout routine together. And if the equipment is expensive, it will be well worth the investment if it is also well used!

    Reply

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