Happy Monday and happy April everyone! March was another awesome month. I made a lot of extra income with all of my side hustles, and mainly life has just been going great. We bought our new car and decided that we also don’t want to sell our house anytime this year. We are pretty positive that we are going to wait to do this. Also, today’s post is SUPER long. I am very sorry. Would you guys rather have me split this into multiple posts, or is one long post just fine?

I’m not sure if any of you remember, but me and W paid for a vacation for his parents to take. They left on Wednesday and will be coming home late tonight. I’m so happy that we were able to do this for them (because who doesn’t need an awesome Caribbean vacation?!) and without my extra income side hustles, I don’t know if it would have been possible. This is why I started doing all of the things that I do for extra income. Why not be super productive with my time after I leave the office?

In March, I made $7,862 in extra income, after most expenses. In case you are new to my blog, “Extra Income” consists of all income that I make that does not include my salaried job that I have in the financial services industry. Extra income also does not include any money that W makes, as he doesn’t do anything for extra income and is mostly commission at his work (so it fluctuates every month anyways).

I will say that this is not all super easy. None of it is. I spend enough time to make this a full-time job on top of my already full-time job. Luckily, I do enjoy what I’m doing so it’s not like I’m dreading anything. My goals that I have are also a great motivator. I just keep thinking about how badly I want my student loans gone, and also how badly we want a new house next year. Read further on my Extra Income page.

This is for the month of March and after most fees and expenses (expenses were a little over $900 and include payments for staff writing on my blog and work with FITnancials, PayPal fees, etc.) being taken out. March’s number above includes rent.

March was an AWESOME month and I hope everything only keeps increasing. Affiliate income has been going awesome and I’m glad that I started focusing on that more. Also, check out The Happy Homeowner’s blog if you want to read about how another blogger is being awesome and increasing her extra income by a lot.

I’ve come a long way from the just the beginning of last year when I was ecstatic about $50 in extra income in a month. Don’t get me wrong, $50 is still awesome, but I never thought that I would be to the point where I am today.

You can find my 2013 goals update here.

Blog

The new blog design here on Making Sense of Cents should hopefully be here this month! I’m excited to see how it turns out and what you all think of it. I’m sure it’ll look awesome. March was a busy month for the blog and I am really working on creating more awesome content. Also, a lot of you have been loving the debt payoff series lately. I do have a question though, is there a topic or guest post series that you would like me to start having? I always love hearing about personal experiences, so I always feel that hearing about how many different people accomplished a goal is important.

I also have a lot of post ideas for the month of April. I have the longest to do list in my phone and whenever I think of something, I write it down immediately.

Also, pretty much everyone knows about my blog now. It’s no longer a secret and now only a couple of people do not know. What a difference! I’m not sure how this will affect my blogging, but I might be switching to referring to our budget in percentages instead of actual dollar amounts. I have to have at least some privacy in our lives! Some people have asked why I don’t just fully become public, and well the main reason is because I OBVIOUSLY talk a lot about our lives and there are a LOT of personal things right here on this blog. Anyways, have you of you ever had to deal with everyone finding out about your blog? What did you decide to do differently after that?

Back in February, I made my post on How To Start A Blog – Tips for a Beginner and also my post on whether you should use Blogger or WordPress (and how to switch to WordPress)! Thanks to these two posts I was able to earn a decent amount in affiliate income, however that won’t be included until April’s income report (which will go live in the beginning of May). Anyways, thanks to all of you!

My sister’s blog is still going great. She’s not the greatest with a schedule but I guess that’s where I come into place. IT’s nice being able to share all of these “secrets” that I have with her so that she can make her blog more and more awesome!  Please subscribe to FITnancials if you haven’t yet.

Staff Writing

This is what I wrote last month and this section is still pretty much the same.

“I’m not doing as much staff writing as I used to. It has slowly dwindled down since the Fall (I started turning down some writing opportunities, while one was hit by the Page Rank issue recently). Thankfully this is something that has worked out for the best, as now I can focus my time on other things. Right now I only write for one personal finance website and one hotel’s travel blog.”

As you can see below, I made approximately $700 in staff writing last month. I am still slowing this down, and currently I seem to be at a good amount.

March Goals Update

1. Cook 5 days a week. PASS. We were doing really good with this up until around one week ago. We do need to eat in more!
2. Run 4 times a week and lose 3 pounds. PASS. I’ve been doing really good with working out more. However, I would like to start running in the morning before I go to work.
3. Make an extra $5,500 this month. PASS. I made over $2,000 over this goal.
4. Choose a wedding date. We need to talk to W’s family and come up with a date that will work since we will be using the family’s property. FAIL. We have talked a little more about the wedding, but don’t have a date. Oh well I’m fine with that.
5. Sell 25 items from my closet. FAIL. I didn’t even go through my closet. I completely forgot about this goal.
6. Come up with a name for the new business. FAIL. Haven’t done this yet! This new business is kind of at a halt since we don’t really have a lot of time due to it being the busy season.

Old picture from San Juan 2011

April Goals (I have a lot of the same goals as last month)

1. Cook 5 days a week. We spend way too much money on food As long as I have a interesting and tasty meal plan, I’m sure this is possible. This will probably stay on my goals list forever.
2. Run 4 times a week and lose 3 pounds. I still want to lose some more weight, plus gain muscle as well.
3. Make an extra $6,000 this month. I only slightly increased this from March’s goal number. I think this is a good goal for now, especially since I’m mainly working on affiliate income.
4. Choose a wedding date. We need to talk to W’s family and come up with a date that will work since we will be using the family’s property. This is something that we really need to do soon, as it’s hard to do anything else without a date in mind.
5. Sell 25 items from my closet. I have a TON of things in my closet, and our goal is to slowly declutter our house so that we will be ready to sell.
6. Come up with a name for the new business. We have a ton of things to do for me and my friend’s new business (nothing related to blogging). First thing though, we need a name. It’s hard to build a website or buy any product without a name and a legal entity. Then we need to apply for a lot of business items as well.
7. Go to Lowes or Home Depot and spend tons of money. Yup, this is a goal of mine. We really want to increase our landscaping and buy some plants for both inside and outside of the house.  There are also a lot of other things that we want to do such as switch all of the door knobs to a different color (right now they are a dirty gold color). Luckily, I have earned some gift cards from my credit card rewards points.

 

Extra Monthly Income in March

• Staff writing – $700
• Blog (consulting as well as advertising such as direct advertising and Adsense, but after all expenses) – $5,687
• Blog – Affiliate Income – $1,100
• Virtual Assistant tasks – $50
• Selling Clothes – $0
• Miscellaneous (not related to blogging and online income)- $0
• Mystery Shopping – $0
• Rent (I rent a room out to my sister) – $325

Comparisons and 2013 total

• Total income for March: $7,862
• Income in February: $5,983
• Difference: +$1,872
• Total so far in 2013: $20,368 (AWESOME!)

How did you do in March? What are your extra income goals?