Extra Income Archives - Page 45 of 51

So You Want to Be a Freelance Writer?

January 15, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 132 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.

Last week I finally started my Ways to Earn Extra Income. A lot of you have questions, and today I figured I would continue my Extra Income series with how to become a freelance writer or a staff writer. A lot of you seem very interested in this. For the sake of this post, a staff writer = freelance writer, just to make this all easy.

Before September, I never thought I would be staff writing, and I never even thought about it. But once I began, I really started to enjoy it. I really love to write (yes, I do realize that I'm not the best and I probably should proofread more, but I do like to talk), and writing for different blogs was fun for me.

And I'm not going to lie, the money is nice also. Being able to write about topics that I enjoy, from the comfort of my home is great. I try (yes, try) to throw all of my extra money towards student loans, since I do have a $38,000 student loan payoff plan that I am working on.

I believe I started freelance writing in September of 2012. I DID make mistakes though. I signed up for way too much, and as a result, my own blog suffered. I feel like the content on my blog wasn't the greatest when I had signed up for so many staff writing assignments. Luckily, that did not last long as some of the assignments were only short-term.

Then I ended up stopping a couple of others and right now I am at my perfect amount. Taking on too many writing assignments at one time was definitely a mistake that I made.

So You Want to Be a Freelance Writer?

My tips on how to become a freelance writer:

[Read more…]

$940 in Extra Income, Life Updates and 2013 Goals

January 14, 2013 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.

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.

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?

Ways to Earn Extra Income Part 1

January 9, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 92 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.

Oh extra income…

Whenever I publish any of my extra income posts, I usually receive e-mails like crazy. I mean multiple e-mails every hour, and probably over 20 in one day.

I love all of your questions and many of you have reasons for why you want extra income. Not all of you have a blog but today I'll be talking about the different ways I make extra money. In future posts, I will be talking about more of a variety as well.

Currently, before taxes and expenses, I am making around $5,000 in EXTRA income per month. I am on track to make around that this month as well. I'm using my extra income mainly to pay down my $38,000 student loan debt as quickly as I can, and after April of this year, I will probably throw most of it towards savings.

I can only dream of where that might go one day. Just last year I was making a couple hundred per month in extra income – and I was ECSTATIC at that time with that. Now my goals keep increasing.

I am big on diversifying how you make your money, whether it be your extra income or your main form of income. This way, if anything does happen, you are more prepared. Also, try not to use your extra income as a way to Keep up with the Joneses! Use it for what you truly what to do with it.

There are many things that you can do to earn extra income. However, there are also many factors to think about:

How much time do you have? Do you have 1 hour each day or 5 hours each day? Maybe you're only free on the weekends?
How much are you trying to earn? Is your goal $50 a month or $5,000 a month?
Can you do this and also work at the same time? Will your work be sacrificed and therefore you might lose your main source of income?
Do you want to also have fun while making your extra income?

Below are some possible ways for you to earn extra income. This will be a multiple series post as of course there are TONS of things that can be done to make extra income. I plan on making more in-depth posts on these individual methods soon, so watch out for those also 🙂 :

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$1,193 in Extra Income, Life and Picture Updates

January 7, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 50 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.

Happy Monday everyone! Another Weekly Update post here so I hope you all enjoy. I don't think I've had one of these in a couple of weeks so I hope you're ready for me to ramble on.

I loved all of the holiday celebrations and we had a great time on Christmas, Christmas with W's family and on New Year's Eve. Probably spent too much money but who honestly doesn't spend too much money on the holidays?!

I've been meaning to post this but keep forgetting. Thank you to everyone who actually reads my blog. I hope you all continue to enjoy reading what I write in 2013!

My weekly update posts were extremely popular in 2012, mainly because of my extra income updates within them I am assuming. My Extra Income tab was also popular, and I really need to continue working on it. My travel posts were also well received. Click on my TRAVEL tab above (I just made it yesterday and is currently a major work in progress, so keep that in mind).

Below are my most popular posts in 2012 according to page views (in no particular order). This is a long list because I also wanted to share so many of these again with you:

Here are some Instagram pictures from our trip to St. Thomas and St. John. And the balcony picture below was actually OUR VIEW from our room!

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$5,770 in Extra Income in December

January 3, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 54 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.

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

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.
Workout at least 4 times a week and lose 3 pounds. FAIL. No words…
Make an extra $2,500 this month. PASS. See above and below! 🙂
Start decorating the dining room and GET CARPET MICHELLE. FAIL. Haha this is a joke. This will be on my list forever.
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.
Read 2 books. FAIL. I almost finished the final Hunger Games book but that is all.

January Goals

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.
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?
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.
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?

$4,273 in Extra Income and Life Updates…

December 26, 2012 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 50 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.

Happy Wednesday everyone!

I switched up my Weekly Update post this week to today because Monday was of course Christmas Eve. I have work today (does anyone else!?). I didn't make a post last week so this is a combined post.

I wanted to thank everyone for all the wonderful guest posts that you all supplied for me for when I was on vacation. And of course we had a great time since W finally PROPOSED.

I am a crazy planner and pretty much already have a lot of things decided haha. My wedding Pinterest board is filled up with stuff. I already know that I want an semi-formal outdoorsy wedding and have pretty much narrowed down where I want it.

And be honest, will any of you hate my wedding posts? I don't plan on making a TON, but I know that there will be at least some. This blog is about my life so my manly readers might need to watch out 🙂

Our vacation went great and I still plan on making a post on that soon! Above is another picture. St. Thomas and St. John are wonderful, so if you haven't gone, then GO!

My work Christmas party was on Friday and I got a HUGE bonus, an iPad and a gift card. WOOHOO! With this bonus and the extra income this month, I will most likely be putting around $15,000 towards my student loans and saving/spending the rest.

My updates:

Spending:

We did OKAY with spending. We still have some Christmas shopping to do (W's family's Christmas is this Sunday). We will probably still spend around $200 on Christmas presents for his immediate family but that should be it.

And we bought my sister an iPad. This was an unexpected purchase as we were only going to get her an Kindle (not the touch screen, just the paper white version). It was around $450 with taxes included and while it was expensive, I do think it was worth it.

She has been super happy since. I've made a decent amount of extra income this month (and I'm still waiting on payment from some past work) so this month definitely surpassed my goal and helped with the cost of her present.

W did buy a North Face coat as well, and it was $200. I was iffy at first but then we remembered that he made some extra bonus money this month (they put it on a direct deposit checking card) and it covered the coat completely. It's nice to spend money that you forgot you even had!

I also spent $130 on two New Years Eve tickets for us. All of our friends are going to an open bar and it'll be fun! We were going to go to a place that would have been $200 altogether, but then there would have been a $100 taxi ride as well, which just did not seem worth it. And, I have searched what seems like everywhere for a NYE dress and I can't find anything. Have you found one? FROM WHERE? Send me the link!

Extra Income (this is on top of my salary from my job):

I made $4,273 in the past two weeks. This is definitely more than what I thought I would make in this whole month, mainly because I thought that December would be super slow because of the holidays.

I am definitely happy with this amount and I just hope that each month keeps getting better and better! Also, thanks to everyone who recently has signed up for my Ebates referral link, appreciated!

Food:

I made a meal plan this week, check out my Sunday Meal Plan. We are really working on eating in more and since we are now back from vacation, we will succeed! The fact that it's the holidays make it easier because we will be going to lots of holiday parties.

Being healthy:

HORRIBLE here. No comment! haha

Well I didn't gain any weight, but I have been eating everything and anything, and I don't even remember the last time I worked out. It's hard to even care about being toned when it's freezing outside and I won't be wearing a swimsuit for around 5 month.

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

Ways I’ve Made Money

December 20, 2012 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 27 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.

Hey everyone! I am currently in St. Thomas (WOOHOO!) and have some wonderful posts lined up for while I'm gone. I always love finding new blogs, so I hope you enjoy these great writers who were actually willing to guest post for me 😛 Don't forget to read Sunday's guest post on Why She Loves Her Budget, Monday's post on New York City travel tips, and yesterday's post on Money Saving Tips For Your Vacation.

This is a guest post from eemusings, a writer from Auckland, New Zealand. Visit her blog NZ Muse for straight talk about all things personal finance and lifestyle (career, relationships, food, travel); she also tweets as @eemusings.

I've gotten to grips, sort of, with the fact I'll probably never feel properly financially secure. It's never enough, and I know how easily things can go pear-shaped.

Since I moved out at age 17, I've always cultivated multiple income sources. It's hard for me to sit still when I could be side hustling and padding the bank account a little more – money gives you choices, and the more options you have in life, the better, IMO!

I've eased off on this recently (I wanted more free time) but now I'm getting back into it with an eye to reaching some hairy savings goals next year.

Here are some of the random ways I've brought in extra money (aside from my main job) over the years:

[Read more…]

My tips on how to become a freelance writer:

2013 GOALS

1. Pay off ALL of my student loans.

2. Get super fit.

3. Save for a decent sized down payment.

4. Plan an awesome wedding!

Spending:

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

Food:

Being healthy:

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

December Goals Update

January Goals

Blog Goals

Extra Monthly Income in December

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

How did you do in December? Any extra income?

My updates:

Spending:

Extra Income (this is on top of my salary from my job):

Food:

Being healthy:

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

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