Extra Income Archives - Page 47 of 56

Tips For Beginner Bloggers Part 1 – The Basics

March 26, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 143 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 month, I published my post on How To Start a Blog – Tips for a Beginner. Don’t get the titles confused, they are extremely similar because I lack any creativity. My other post was mainly about how to get going with your blog, and what companies to use to use to actually create your blog (domain, hosting, WordPress, etc.). But what about after you already create your blog and want to get going? What tips should beginner bloggers know about?

I haven’t been blogging for a very long time, and this August will be two years. I’m not sure if that’s a long or short time in blog-land, but I’ll take it. I have definitely made a ton of mistakes (maybe I should make a post about all of the blog mistakes that I made) and I have learned a lot.

EDIT July, 2016: I recommend checking out my online course for bloggers, Making Sense of Affiliate Marketing. I earn over $50,000 a month through affiliate marketing and I share my exact strategy and tips in this very informative online course. If you’re a blogger (even if you’re a new blogger!), then you NEED this course.

Lately I have been receiving many e-mails asking for blog tips. I’m going to guess that a lot of it is because many think that they will get rich blogging, but I’ll save that for a whale post in the future. I will definitely say that I am not an expert, and that I still don’t understand everything. [Read more…]

Our New 2013 Camaro 2SS and $1,713 in Extra Income

March 25, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 89 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.

Yup, this is our new car.

Happy Monday everyone! To the left you can see our awesome new car. We bought a 2013 Camaro 2SS just in case any of you were interested 😉

This past weekend was nice and fun. And that is great because work is so busy right now that I feel like I’m running around with my head chopped off. Can’t wait until the summer and this is all over hopefully. This past weekend went by too quickly, but oh well.

We got a TON of snow yesterday. On Saturday, I had the windows open and it was nice outside. Then of course we get over 15 inches of snow and it’s supposed to just keep snowing. This really stinks because we just bought the Camaro and of course it can’t drive in this. Snow in the spring time? NO!

Today, we’ll just be sharing the Jeep but that is a hassle since we don’t work at the same time nor work anywhere near each other. I am definitely not looking forward to driving to work, then back home to take W to work, then going back to work and then going home and then picking him back up 4 hours after that. AHHHH!

Also, I have a really awesome guest post about a fellow blogger and her significant other who quit their jobs around 6 months ago to travel the world. They have been all over and her guest post about it goes live on Friday. I know all of us dream about this happening one day, so why not live through her in the meantime? Be sure to come back on Friday!

A lot of you asked for a photo of how our living room looks now

Spending

Definitely a lot of spending in the past week. We bought a new car so that is expected! We are happy about one thing though, we thought it would be around $200 per month (at the minimum) for the Camaro’s car insurance, but it turns out that our insurance actually LOWERED and now we are only paying $100 per month for both of us on both the Camaro and the Jeep. That is crazy to think about. I even emailed our insurance company to make sure that was correct, and they said it was.

Everyone told us that we were crazy for getting the Camaro because our insurance should have gone through the roof. For some reason we got lucky so I’m definitely not going to complain. It is sad to see that my old car is no longer in the driveway, especially since my dad help me pick it out just one week before he passed away. Weird memory, I know, but it is still something that I think about. He LOVED Camaros though and had one for nearly half his life, so I’m sure he is super happy that we have a Camaro 🙂

Extra Income (does not include income from our main jobs)

I received approximately $1,713 in payments in the past week. A good week of course. I do feel like I’ve stalled with my extra income, but I am fine with that. I’d definitely rather have it be stable and having only the slightest increases than be decreasing.

Anyways, I’m still at a great level! How are you doing with your extra income? What are your goals with it? Eventually leave your job and do only extra income efforts? Pay off all of your debt? Tell me all about it! I am really interested.

Posts from my blog:

Link Love

How do We Define Success on the Internet? Frugal Portland
Best Credit Card Sign Up Bonuses – March 2013 Money Life and More
Wait, Are We Poor? Our Freaking Budget

Food

We’ve been doing really good with our food budget. I still will never say how much we were spending before, because usually jaws hit the floor. Our fridge is super packed with food though and we need to start eating more of it before it all goes bad. I do have a question though, how much do you all spend on food per month? How about per person per month?

Being healthy

I am doing AWESOME with working out. I run at least a couple of miles a day, have been lifting and eating more healthy. It does really help to have our gym in our basement. Do you prefer to work out at a gym or at home? How much do you spend per month of being fit (whether it be gym memberships, a personal trainer, organic food, etc)?

Yes, the upfront cost of buying weights (we spent over $300 in weights alone, plus $300 for the olympic bar), a “cage” to put the olympic bar on (that was another $500 plus $50 for the seat) and around $800 for the treadmill (got it at a MAJOR discount). We paid for it all upfront with extra money so it’s not as though we even noticed it. Saving up and paying for it immediately is awesome! And now we don’t have to waste gas driving to our gym which was 20 miles round trip. AND we can spend that extra time that we would have been driving and just work out instead.

Have you been doing well with your extra income, spending and being healthy?

How to Transition Back into the Workforce After a Long Period of Unemployment

March 22, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 16 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.

Recently, a reader said that while my blog is helpful, that she would rather me have more tips and posts on those who have had a long period of unemployment. Then all of a sudden I received an e-mail from One Smart Dollar who said that they wanted to guest post and had some general ideas for a topic. What was one of those topics? It was THIS ONE! What great timing right?

This is a guest post from Scott Sery, a freelance writer, who writes for One Smart Dollar. When not talking about money he enjoys passing on his knowledge of the back country in Montana and how to live sustainably. Follow them on Twitter at @OneSmartDollar.

At least one time during most people’s working career they will find themselves unemployed. Whether it’s due to company cutbacks and workers layoffs, or due to the employee being fired, these normally hard working people find themselves forced into job hunting.

While there are plenty of jobs out there, not every job is suited to every person. So, rather than settle for something that is beneath their skill level, or a menial job that would do more damage to their self esteem than it is worth, they collect unemployment. They do this as they keep looking for the job for which they are trained. Many times that looking period is long; often lasting a year or more. When something finally does come along, they often find that the transition from unemployed to working is a lot harder than the transition from working to unemployed. [Read more…]

No New House For Now and $2,323 in Extra Income

March 18, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 67 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! I hope you all had a great weekend and enjoyed St. Patty’s Day. I’ve decided to start combining my Saturday and Monday life posts together. I figure most of you probably don’t want to hear about my life twice a week. And I’m not that interesting… 😛 Anyways, it was a pretty relaxing and boring weekend, especially since W was sick the entire time.

I think we’ve decided to wait until next year to buy our next house. We’re not ready to sell just yet, and honestly, we still love our house. Getting rid of it so soon, especially when we haven’t found anything that we liked more to justify the cost, just seems stupid. Unless something 100% perfect comes along, then I don’t think we plan on buying this year at all. We really don’t want to buy something that we only kind of like and then end up buying another house quickly after again.

Next year is not out of the question though. It will most likely be next year when we buy, so hopefully something perfect comes up by then. I’m sure it will, but for now we’re just going to continue enjoying where we live. Lifestyle inflation has definitely been catching up with me, but we should be trying to save so that maybe we can buy the next house with cash or at least a majority of it with cash.

What made you decide to buy your second house? Was it lifestyle inflation, or you just grew out of your current house? For us it’s a mixture of both. Something with a bigger yard would be nice, and so would more than just a 1-car garage (check out my “Spending” section below for an idea about why).

For everyone who is switching over to Bloglovin after the whole Google Reader death, please click on this button if you would like to follow me via Bloglovin.

Spending

Hmmm some major spending in the past week, that is for another post though. Lets just say we bought a new car but it hasn’t been delivered yet…

Target also had almost its WHOLE Home section on sale at two Targets near my house. Lets just say that I went to Target a total of 3 times this weekend and spent a little over $300 redoing the home decor in our living and dining room. I bought tons of things and love it all! Now I just need a new side table in the living room and I think we’ll be done (except for the fact that we still need to install carpet in the living room).

As most of you know, me and W have lived together for nearly 6 years and up until recently, never really decorated our house. Yes we have furniture and things on the wall, but nothing matches and it just looks like a disaster. Now that we have time (and more money to spend), we have decided to start decorating more. There are TONS of things that we still want to do, and I have a whole post dedicated to that and it will be published in the near future.

Extra Income (does not include income from our main jobs)

I received approximately $2,323 in payments in the past week. It was a good week and I would love it if it just stayed this way forever. As most of you know, extra income does not include any salary or income that we make from our jobs (I’m an analyst and he’s a car salesman). A lot of you have wondered about my schedule and how I make time for everything. Were there any specifics you wanted to know or maybe I should just make a whole post on it? Such as with my daily schedule, everything that I do, etc. Please let me know if this sounds really boring or like something you would read.

Affiliate income is still going great and I’m glad I started working on this. I do have bigger plans for this and hope to see this area of my extra income to continually increase. I’m also starting to think more about passive income. What do you do for passive income?

Me and my friend are still stuck on a name for our business. Some of you said to just think of something and change it later, but with what we want to do, the name is an important part of the business. We can’t really do much else until we start thinking of our “brand” and the name.

[Read more…]

$1,358 in Extra Income and Awesome Life Updates

March 11, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 46 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.

Breakfast I made the other day…

Happy Monday everyone! I hope you all had a great weekend. I had a lot to do this weekend. Went bridesmaid dress shopping for my friend’s wedding and that was a lot of fun. We also spent time with friends and started planning our New Orleans couples’ vacation for August. Anyone have any tips on what hotel we should stay at and places we MUST visit?

We haven’t really thought about houses this past week. Our house definitely isn’t ready to be put up for sale yet, and we are not in a rush to buy anytime soon for many reasons. We still like our current house and have other things we want to do with our money for the time being. But if that perfect house does come up for sale, then we are jumping on it since we are starting to think that it’s going to be difficult to find our perfect house.

We are thinking about possibly buying a house on a lake too. Any negatives for that? I’m sure there’s something that we just can’t think of…

I plan on doing an update post for my student loan payoff plan that I some months ago. We most likely won’t completely pay off my student loans this month. I calculated my payoff plan and if I paid off my student loans this month, then I don’t think I would be as comfortable with my emergency fund as it would take a larger chunk from that. I’m going to estimate that there is a 99% chance that I will have my student loans completely paid off by the end of April though.

Spending

I don’t think we did too much spending this past weekend, as I can’t even think of anything. We do plan on going shopping for new clothes for W, as lately he’s only been buying work clothes and doesn’t have much for Spring (or so he says…). I’m not sure how much we will spend but I estimate it’ll be somewhere around $200 to $300.

Also, have you ever heard of Save1? Here’s an excerpt from their website:

Save1 The company offers coupons and deals. Whenever you use one of their coupons or their deals, then your purchase also provides a meal to a child who needs it. Isn’t that awesome? I saw some other blogs talk about this company as well and I had to look further into it because it just seemed very interesting. Save1 offer many coupons and deals to a ton of retailers (most likely a retailer that you use a lot), so why not search through their website so that you can help someone else at the same time?

But how does this work? It says on their website that when they receive a commission for you using a coupon or deal through their website, that they in turn take a portion of this commission and donate it. So you save money and help others at the same time. AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME. Check them out now!

Extra Income (does not include salary from our jobs)

I received approximately $1,033 in payments so far for March. I also received $325 in rent from my sister for a total of $1,358 for the first 9 days of March. It’s kind of a slow start but I’m waiting on payments from several people still (and for a lo I get paid on a net-45 or net-60 basis) so that should bring March back up to where it normally is.

Affiliate income is still going really great and I’m glad I started working on this. I do have bigger plans for this and hope to see this area of my extra income to continually increase. It does stink that I have to wait so long for affiliate payments but I am fine with waiting 45 to 60 days 🙂 How have you been doing with your affiliate income? Are you trying to grow this?

Me and my friend are still working on our business plan but are stuck on a name for the business. We have been trying to think of a name for what seems like forever and I don’t know if we will ever think of one that we love!

Posts from last week

Food

Another meal plan this week! We’ve been doing AWESOME with eating in and have been loving it. We went out to eat the other day but had a gift card (thanks to my wonderful sister!) so it was essentially free. We also went out for drinks with friends over the weekend but that was surprisingly under $75 so we were pretty happy with that too. How are you doing with your food budget?! If you have any tasty looking recipes from last week, please share your blog post in the comments so that I can add it to my meal plan for future weeks 🙂

Monday: Greek mac and cheese with breaded chicken
Tuesday: Fajitas
Wednesday: Hawaiian bread sandwiches with potato salad and salad.
Thursday: Out to eat
Friday: Creamy Spring Pasta
Saturday: Out to eat
Sunday: Steak and Jalapeño popper bites

Wedding

Haven’t made any wedding plans lately. Haha I’m horrible with this! We really need to sit down with W’s family and start doing this. However, when I went bridesmaid dress shopping it really made me want to start planning things because I definitely fell in love with a couple of wedding dresses when we were looking around.

Being healthy

I have been doing great with being more healthy. As you can see in the first picture in this post, I am working on eating more fruits and vegetables. For snacks, I am working on eliminating all unhealthy foods (well, as much as I can. I love donuts and chocolate covered pretzels) and switching to plates of blueberries, strawberries and the like. I went to Aldi the other day and was able to get 12 kiwis, 2 boxes of cherry tomatoes, 2 boxes of blueberries, bananas and apples all for LESS THAN $10. Talk about awesome, right?!

I have also been running a lot lately and run at least a couple of miles everyday. The weather is starting to get nicer so I plan on running outside with my dog more also. I’m really wanting to become more healthy and honestly to look like my normal self. Need to lose probably 10 pounds of fat and gain a ton of muscle!

Have you been doing well with your extra income, spending and being healthy?

Is a Business Degree a Waste?

March 6, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 68 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.

Is a Business Degree a Waste? Is a business management degree worth it? I keep hearing people/news outlets arguing at opposite ends of what seems to be a common question. Short answer – NO! I don’t think a business degree is anywhere near being a waste. A business degree is worth it in many cases.

EDIT: Please read my post about how I paid off $40,000 worth of student loans shortly after I turned 24.

Recently, I read an interesting article about whether a business degree is a waste or a good decision.

I read the article multiple times (and unless I missed it), I’m pretty sure it means business schools as a whole (and the various degrees that are offered), and not just specifically a “business degree.”

So when they say business degree, I’m assuming this includes Finance, Economics, Accounting, etc. [Read more…]

$5,983 in February Extra Income and Goals

March 4, 2013 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 101 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! It’s already March and I still can’t believe that 2013 is flying by so quickly. Life is still great and I feel like it gets better every single day. Also, good luck to whoever reads this super lengthy post, it’s definitely a whale of a post.

In February, I made $5,983 in extra income, after 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 (my job has nothing to do with personal finance just as an FYI). 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 February and after fees and expenses (expenses were a little over $1,000 and include payments for staff writing on my blog and on FITnancials, PayPal fees, deposit on a new blog design, etc.) being taken out. February’s number above includes rent.

February was yet another great month. No, I did not beat the $6,523 I made in January, but it’s mainly because I’ve been focusing more on affiliate income, and I don’t get paid for my affiliate income until either March or the middle of April (there’s a 45-60 day wait on most of my affiliate payments). I don’t count extra income unless I actually receive the payment. Also, I had a decent amount of expenses in February for my blog and this ate up some of my income. I’ve come a long way from the just last year when I was ecstatic about $50 in extra income in a month.

If there were no expenses, then I would have made $7,000 in extra income in February!

[Read more…]

Spending

Extra Income (does not include income from our main jobs)

Posts from my blog:

Link Love

Food

Being healthy

Have you been doing well with your extra income, spending and being healthy?

Extra Income (does not include income from our main jobs)

Spending

Extra Income (does not include salary from our jobs)

Posts from last week

Food

Wedding

Being healthy

Have you been doing well with your extra income, spending and being healthy?

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