Blog - Making Sense Of Cents

Reaching Early Retirement Through Dividend Growth Investing

September 22, 2017 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 6 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Hello! Dividend investing is a very interesting topic. Today, I have an expert who has appeared on Forbes, Motley Fool, MSN Money, TheStreet, and more, and he is going to share tons of great information on this subject. You may remember him from his previous contribution How I Became A Successful Dividend Growth Investor. This is a guest contribution by Ben Reynolds. Ben is the CEO of Sure Dividend. Sure Dividend helps people build high quality dividend growth portfolios for the long run.

Early retirement is the financial state of being where you don’t have to work. You only work if you want to.

Early retirement is reached when your passive income exceeds your expenses. The average retirement age in the United States is 63.

Retiring at any age is an accomplishment, but I think you will agree with me when I say that the earlier you retire, the better.

There are 6 key factors that determine how long it will take for you to reach retirement:

Your income (how much money you make)
Your savings rate (the percentage of your income you save)
Your expenses (how much money you spend)
The size of your investment account (how much you already have saved)
Your investment returns (how fast your investments are growing)
The yield on your investment portfolio (how much your investments pay you)

[Read more…]

My Complete List of Monthly Expenses for a Multi Million Dollar Blog

September 20, 2017 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 58 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

In all of my monthly blogging income reports, I share not only my income but also my monthly expenses. I usually don't dive too far into my business expenses, as they don’t vary much month to month.

I earn over $100,000 a month through my blogging business, as you can read from my monthly blogging income reports. Here's a detailed report of my expenses. But, today, I am going to go deeper into my monthly business expenses so that you can see exactly what it takes to run my blog each month.

Now to run a successful blogging or online business, your expenses may be different than mine. And, you definitely don't need to spend a lot of money with a new blog – I certainly wasn’t in the beginning.

I created Making Sense of Cents six years ago, and since then, I have earned over $1,500,000 with my blog and around $979,000 in just 2016 alone.

When I first started my blog, I spent almost NOTHING on blogging expenses. In fact, I probably went a few years where I was only spending about 1%-2% of my revenues on blogging expenses.

The funny thing is that I created my blog on a whim after reading about a personal finance website in a magazine. At first, it was just a hobby to track my own personal finance progress. And, when I started in 2011, not only did I spend very little on my blogging expenses, I honestly didn’t even know that people could make money blogging! [Read more…]

Make Extra Income By Playing Games On Your Phone ($100 gift card giveaway ends Oct.3rd)

September 19, 2017 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 2 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

The following is a sponsored post about appKarma, and written by me (Michelle).

I recently heard about appKarma, and it's something I think that you, my readers, should learn about too. After all, we are always looking for ways to earn extra income, and this looks like an easy one!

To put it simply, appKarma is a company that pays you to try out different apps and games on your cell phone. You can then turn the points you earn towards PayPal cash and gift cards like Amazon, iTunes, and many more.

AppKarma will be giving away $100 worth of gift cards. See below for details. [Read more…]

Does Confusion Lead To People Saving Less?

September 19, 2017 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 4 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

As I talked about in the article 56% Of Americans Have Less Than $10,000 Saved For Retirement, 56% of Americans have less than an average of $10,000 in retirement savings and 33% have no retirement savings at all.

This is a very scary statistic, especially considering how important saving for retirement and investing both are!

Even though prioritizing your future is important, the average person is behind when it comes to saving for retirement.

Saving for retirement now is important for many reasons, such as:

It can help make sure you aren't working for the rest of your life.
You can retire sooner rather than later.
You can lead a good life well after you finish working.
Compound interest means the earlier you save the more you earn.

[Read more…]

Create a Life You Don’t Need To Escape From

September 18, 2017 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 23 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” – Seth Godin

To make life better, create a better life you don't need to escape from. Do you constantly dread going to work or some other task? Here are ways to make your life better. I know this quote will stir up some feelings. However, I want you to dig deeper and think about the true meaning of it, which I’ll get to in a second.

First, though, dreaming about vacations isn't a bad thing – we all do it.

Honestly, I'm always looking forward to the next destination (after all, I do travel full-time). But, if you aren’t traveling full-time, vacations do allow you to explore new places, relax, have fun, and more. And, because of all of that, they really can make life better.

When thinking of the quote, though, I think it’s saying – you should create a life that you don't hate. Honestly, it’s possible that taking vacations are causing you unhappiness, especially if you are taking on more debt to travel.

However, the life this quote mentions is one where you don't have to purchase things to make you happy, a life where you don't dread every single day, a life where you actually look forward to things, and are positive. [Read more…]

Thinking You Can’t Do Something And Making Excuses

September 15, 2017 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 3 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

A year from now you may wish you had started today. ~ Karen Lamb

Excuses are what holds a person back. I know this because I hear excuses nearly every single day, and I have made many of my own as well.

I've made excuses for why I couldn't leave my day job, why I can't stop eating junk food, why I'm too busy to do something, why I don't have the experience to do certain things, how it's unfair that some people have certain privileges, and so on.

See, after my father passed away when I was only 18, I felt especially vulnerable and made lots of excuses for things. It felt like everything was very unfair since the person I loved the most had passed away.

I made excuses to skip classes, for why I had no time to do anything, why I was upset, why I shouldn't look for ways to make extra money, and so on. I told myself that other people have help with everything and that I was all alone – and for some reason I thought it was okay to make these excuses since my dad had passed away.

This went on for several years. When things were good, I was happy. But, when things were bad, I would just blame it all on how my life was difficult and that I didn't have a parent to help me get through it.

Please head on over to FITnancials.com to read my guest post How To Take Control of Your Life and Stop Making Excuses.

Oh yeah, quick note: We are currently hosting Our Favorite Books and Kindle Giveaway. You can enter here.

How I Made $135,110 In August 2017 Blogging

September 13, 2017 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 55 Comments

This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure for more info.

Welcome to August 2017's business income report where I show you how I made money online last month. It's time to look at this month's update and see how I did.

If you're new to Making Sense of Cents, you may be wondering why I would want to publish my income report each month. You can simply skip to the next section if you're not new here.

This all started out as my extra income report because in the beginning, it was all about the money I was earning from my side jobs. In my side income reports from the beginning, I included all of the income I made except for what I made at my day job.

However, I left my day job as a financial analyst in October of 2013 and now my monthly income reports consist of the many ways I earn a living.

Many have asked why I would ever want to publicly post my income each month. Some think I'm crazy, whereas some are glad I'm open about what I'm doing. Whatever you think, I enjoy publishing my monthly online income reports and I share them publicly for three main reasons: [Read more…]

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