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$5,770 in Extra Income in December

Last Updated: BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 43 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.

Find out how I earned $5,770 blogging in December. This is a great list!Hey everyone! Yes, you read that correctly, I beat my goal that I made in November, and I made $5,770 in extra income in the month of December! I thought the goal that I set was pretty high since I made $5,514 in November, but I did again even though December is supposed to be a slow month because of the holidays.. Check out my Extra Income page that I have for my blog to check out my other extra income updates.

This is proof on my online income since some of you have asked. This is for the month of December and before fees and expenses (expenses were around $600, and my actual pre-tax income is reflected in the title of this blog post) being taken out. The other income categories that are listed below were mainly just cash I received from my sister for rent. $6,045 plus $325 in rent minus $800 in expenses equals $5,770.

As you can obviously see, December was another successful month with extra income. Our extra income is actually over $1,000 higher because of extra money that W made as well but I don’t ever include his extra income in with mine..

December was yet again another good month and we seem to be on a good roll with our incomes.

W and I have both increased our incomes by a substantial amount. For me it was because of my online side jobs that I have (my income from my actual job is salary and does not fluctuate), and for him it was because of his job that he was hired for back in September. He used to make a much smaller amount at his old job (he mainly worked there for the great benefits).

December was a great month. We went on an awesome vacation that we decided on at the last second. St. Thomas was wonderful and I also got engaged there. St. Thomas was wonderful and our dreams of traveling more are definitely on our minds all the time.

I also have a fitness/finance blog that will be ready this month. I’m doing the finishing touches and it should be ready to go soon. My sister will be running it as a way to keep track of her fitness (I believe she has lost around 40 pounds, she also already has a pretty large Instagram following of over 2,500 people). She also isn’t the greatest with her finances, so that is why I wanted her to have a fitness and finance mix so that she could learn more about finances. Hope you all enjoy it once it’s ready!

You can find my 2012 yearly goals update and 5 year plan here.

December Goals Update

  1. Keep our food budget down to $400. PASS. We did pretty good with this. I didn’t do a good job with tracking the amount that we spent, but I’m sure we were under this.
  2. Workout at least 4 times a week and lose 3 pounds. FAIL. No words…
  3. Make an extra $2,500 this month. PASS. See above and below! 🙂
  4. Start decorating the dining room and GET CARPET MICHELLE. FAIL. Haha this is a joke. This will be on my list forever.
  5. Have fun on vacation and spend no more than $1,500. We had a great time on vacation! I will definitely be posting more pictures soon. And we definitely did not spend more than $1,500. I believe we spent around $1,000 on the whole trip.
  6. Read 2 books. FAIL. I almost finished the final Hunger Games book but that is all.

January Goals

  1. Keep our food budget down to $400. This will always be on my goals list as this is something that we will always be working on. The months where we would spend thousands on food every month are long gone and I am very happy with that.
  2. Workout at least 3 times a week and lose 2 pounds. I lowered this by a little bit. Obviously increasing it last month was a FAIL. We plan on looking at home gym equipment this month and pricing it out. Do you have a home gym? How much was it?
  3. Make an extra $4,000 this month. I increased this by a lot compared to last month, but it is still lower than what I made last month and November. I do believe this is doable.
  4. Make sure the new blog starts off great! I’m doing a lot of things on the new blog that I did wrong with mine. Not having a newsletter, starting with a professional design on WordPress and so on.

Blog Goals

  • Twitter Followers: Goal was for 1,850 and I’m currently at 1,930. I’m hoping to get 2,050. PASS
  • Alexa rank: Goal was for 60,000. And I’m at this amount. However, I am not focused on this. A lot of the bigger bloggers are at around 100,000, so I know that Alexa doesn’t really mean anything. PASS
  • Guest post at least 2 times this month. Hahaha FAIL

 

Extra Monthly Income in December

  • Online Income (this includes staff writing, blog, virtual assistant tasks) – $5,645
  • Selling Clothes – $100
  • Miscellaneous – $300
  • Mystery Shopping – $0
  • Rent – $325

So I made $6,370 extra last month (before expenses, etc.)!

How did you do in December? Any extra income?

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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

  4. John S @ Frugal Rules says

    That's awesome Michelle! December was a good month for me, but nothing like yours. I agree with the Alexa ranking. Once it surpassed the 100k mark I really stopped tracking it and am focusing on other things.

    Reply

  11. mycanuckbuck says

    Ooh – can you send me the same email you sent Evencheap? I'm curious! And of course, congrats. You're amazing!
    My recent post Exercise on the cheap!

    Reply

  12. Bernie says

    Just a thought on the home gym. You really don't need "fitness equipment". I'm certain I'm older than many of your readers (49). When I was quite young back in the late 60's, there was a gentleman that had a morning fitness show. Perhaps you have heard of him – his name is Jack Lalanne. At no time during his show did he ever use equipment. He was all about using your body as your fitness gear…push ups, sit ups, jumping jacks, squat thrusts, leg lifts etc. I recently finished a round of P90X (purchased at full price – yes I know, I'm ashamed) and it hit me how similar the philosophy was to Jack's. I'm training for a 10 day trip to Peru in April. End Part 1

    Reply

  13. Bernie says

    Part 2 – As I live in northwest Ohio where the teraine is painfully flat, I considered my options – a gym membership, buy a stair stepper/eliptical OR put my pack on, lace up my hiking boots and climb the steps at the highschool football stadium. The gym will cost $30.00/month, a good eliptical will be $1000+ and the stadium? Well, that's free. I've met several people asking what I'm doing and now see them climbing the steps for fitness. I guess my point here is, you don't need to spend money to stay fit.

    Reply

  15. Ashlee says

    Congrats again Michelle 🙂 I'm so excited about reading you & your sister's new blog! Be expecting an email from me about the virtual assistant question like everyone else haha! Hope to be reading about your St. Thomas trip soon since I will be planning a honeymoon on the cheap!!

    Reply

  21. CMS says

    Maybe you could write a detailed post about your extra income and just send it out as a newsletter or something – since you can't post it on your blog. That way you don't have to send a million individual e-mails and we'll all get ALL the information. 🙂 We're dying to know your secrets!!

    Reply

  22. Anne - Unique Gifter says

    As always, astounded at your extra income! If you want to guest post, I'd be happy to have you 🙂
    I'm a wee bit surprised to not see any wedding-related goals for Jan, but that's only because I read you as a type-A organizer, hehe.

    Reply

  24. judy says

    Whoo you kicked ass! I have two side jobs going right now so that we can get rid of this debt plus my husband is working two jobs right now. Yes it will be a long year but we will get through it for the better

    Reply

  28. Jan says

    Wait, I'm just curious, how did you used to spend thousands on groceries? Were you just buying really nice, high quality food, or just eating out all the time?

    Reply

  29. Save Big Live Better says

    I love reading articles like this, definitely acts as motivation for those of us still growing and finding our path! Thanks so much for sharing, looking forward to reading more form you:)

    Reply

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