Extra Income Archives - Page 47 of 48

Goals and Extra Monthly Income Update

February 29, 2012 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 42 Comments

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

I hope everyone's having a great week so far. Seems to be going by relatively fast. Before we know it, I'll be on vacation! Whooo hooo! Technically, my February goals update is a day early, but I doubt anything will happen today which will absolutely terribly wreck it.

Overall February was a good month, but we spent A LOT of money on food. We definitely need to watch our food spending. March probably won't be any better since we're going on vacation, but we have all of that budgeted.

You can find my February goals list here, and my 2012 goals update here.

February Goals Update

Save an extra $10 a day for my DSLR fund. PASS. But I haven't been keeping too well of track of this amount.
Reassess our budget and cut out $25. PASS. We didn't cut out too much, but with the mild weather and the fact that I was able to elminate the $6 satellite insurance, I'm sure we greatly surpassed the $25 goal.
Start and finish homework before it's due. PASS. I've been doing pretty well with this.
Post about my side income. PASS. See here. I received a lot of feedback on this from all of you. Lots of emails, if you have any more questions, just let me know!
Workout at least 2 times a week. FAIL. I think I've only worked out ONCE this whole new year so far.
Sell my stuff on eBay. FAIL. I think I'm just going to bring the rest of my stuff to a local consignment shop. I'm honestly just too lazy to list everything on eBay.
Make an extra $500 this month. FAIL, but I'm still happy. I didn't make a ton this month. I made around $400. I would've surpassed this $500, but I accidentally forgot to do 2 sponsored posts which would've made me an extra $120. I thought the expiration was longer, but it wasn't. My survey income would've been bigger, but I was feeling lazy as well. See below for my income breakout.
Watch our spending this month. EHHH. We've been watching our spending very closely, but with the costs of the new (old) Jeep, our spending definitely increased.
FINISH MY CLOSET. FAIL. Haven't worked on it at all. I think we built one bookshelf for my shoes, and that's it.

March Goals

Finally pay off my car. I've had this cash just sitting in my checking account. Not sure why. I've just been lazy, but laziness is costing me money. I need to do this immediately.
Save an extra $10 a day. I want to keep saving for this. I'm not sure if I'll be buying a camera anytime soon though.
Reassess our budget and cut out $25. This is on my goals pretty much every month. There's always something that we can cut. I'm going to try and bundle some of our bills to see if we can get a discount.
Start and finish homework before it's due. Midterms are this month and before you know it, it'll be finals in the first week of May. Need to start studying!
Workout at least 3 times a week. I upped this, yes I know that's probably not good. My working out has been a mega fail obviously.
Sell my stuff to a consignment shop. My closet is still super packed and I can get rid of a lot. I'm too lazy to sell it online.
Take a picture of my insane closet for you all. Once you see the picture, you will want to come over and help me clean it.
Make an extra $500 this month. I didn't pass my goal in February, but I'm hoping to this month. My Alexa score is gradually going down and sometimes I wish I wouldn't have bought my own domain recently (so that my score wouldn't have reset), but it's going down pretty fast. This should help me get more advertising offers.
Move shoes to my new closet. Obviously I need to start making smaller goals.
Don't spend any more money on clothes than what I sell. So if I sell $200, then I would like to buy less than that. Very attainable.
Get my front windshield fixed. I've been putting this off for over a year. But, now my inspection so that I can renew my plates is in April, so I need to get this done.
Have loads of fun while on vacation!

Extra Monthly Income

Ad link on my blog -$103
Sponsored posts -$60
Surveys -$18
Mystery Shopping -$200

So I actually made around $381 extra last month!

How'd you do in February? Any extra income?

I’ve paid off over $25,000 in credit card debt

February 28, 2012 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 61 Comments

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

Find out how I've paid off $25,000 in credit card debt.

The title is true, well kind of…

While, I've never had a balance on any of my credit cards, I still make charges on them and incur “debt” even though it's paid off completely every month. So technically I have had that large amount in “credit card debt” in the past few years. I got my first credit card at 18, and I was purely using it to gain credit for a long time. It definitely helped my score, and I was able to learn how to control my spending at a young age.

Yes, I've paid that much in credit card debt. Probably over that amount. Just recently, after our December credit card bill came, the balance for all 3 of our cards was around $1,500. Yes that's a lot for one month, but of course other months will be smaller.

Also, I've seen a couple of other bloggers do this (not recently, so I can't remember who did it, so let me know if you remember!) and I thought it was interesting to see where others come in on the credit card debate. I'd love to link-up.

Some prefer to be mostly cash based, whereas I would be lucky if I was caught with $1. [Read more…]

Ways that we could continue to cut our budget

February 17, 2012 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 40 Comments

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

I'm starting to feel better, but still not the greatest. It's Mardi Gras weekend so I need to start feeling better so that I can celebrate. If it gives you any clue as to where I live (some of you already know), but where I live we have the second largest Mardi Gras in the U.S. (besides New Orleans of course). So everyone goes out and has fun, but I don't know if I feel like spending a ton of money (heated tents with unlimited beer and food is $100 a person) and freezing to death outside.

Anyways, recently I talked about how much we've cut our budget. I also said that I would post about other ways we could cut back, and it took a little longer than I thought, but here's the post! I know you all were hurting while waiting for this (I'm joking of course). These aren't all things that I would do, but it's nice to see the value of everything. And also if we ever had financial problems, then we could easily cut these things. [Read more…]

My Extra Monthly Income

February 8, 2012 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 46 Comments

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

Today is Wednesday, finally! Anyways, I thought I'd finally give you the details on my extra monthly income.

In my January Goals update, I said:

“Make an extra $500 this month. PASS. I made over $600 from blog income and surveys!”

After I posted that, I was literally flooded with e-mails from you guys!

I've told you guys in this post, my February Goals, and in my goal update post that I would tell you more information about my monthly income. I'm not going to lie, I have been pushing this off because I'm not too entirely sure what to say and I thought this post would be extremely boring. But then I reminded myself that before I was making this extra income, I LOVED (and I still do love) reading about others and how they made their extra income. It's nice to find out about new opportunities that you may not have thought about. [Read more…]

A little info about the BF and how we handle the cash money

January 19, 2012 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 50 Comments

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

I don't talk too much about the BF on my blog, but I'd like to. A lot of you said that you don't mind that I blog anonymously, but that you'd love it if I shared more information about my life. I've never really said too much about the BF, I just tend to throw those letters around, but none of you really know anything about him. So you guys are lucky, today you will learn about him and how we handle our money.

A little information about the BF:

The picture above is of him when we went to San Juan last year
He'll be 23 in about 2 weeks (does anyone have any present ideas for him?)
He has a new habit pretty much everyday. And he's obsessive about them. Whether it's cars, guns, motorcycles, he goes absolutely insane and will read everything about it until I want to run away
Before last year, he had NEVER been on an airplane, but I definitely changed that last year once I had time for vacations
He comes from a GREAT family, and his family is the best thing ever
He's very clean
He's a workout maniac
He loves to drink tons of milk and it makes me want to barf
I tend to talk in my sleep (and it tends to scare him) and he will have long conversations with me because he thinks it's hilarious
He eventually wants to graduate and have a career with something involving the environment and scientific sustainability research
Hmmm I'm obviously horrible at describing him so now I will resort to the physical (since I obviously don't show pictures yet, I will describe him). He's around 6'1″, blonde hair, blue eyes (can't tell in the picture of course).

Now for some information about our relationship. We've been together almost 6 years, and we've lived together for almost 5 years. Yes, that means that we moved in together right after high school. We've lived in a total of 4 places (I think, I might be forgetting) and we bought our house at the age of 20.

Most would say that we're crazy. But it worked for us. We also have joint accounts (nothing is separate). This doesn't bother me though. After all of the problems that money brought in my family, I guess that caused me to not to get upset about money and relationships. And yes, most people will say that we are crazy since we live like this and are not married, but it doesn't bother me (mainly because I don't see how being married or not really affects us). This mainly has to do with the way I saw my parent's marriage shrivel up as I grew up. I hope I don't offend anyone with my thoughts above.

I've made a post on this before, but how does everyone else handle their finances? Joint accounts, separate, separate and joint? What do you think would work best for you? Tell me!

This leads me to the next little fact about us: Our lives are kind of similar to Erika's. I also have a bigger salary than the BF, and because of the field I'm in, I most likely always will. I don't see anything wrong with this. And I don't understand why some people do think there is something wrong with this. We actually have had some people criticize him/us for that. Do you make more than your significant other? What do you think?

We are not married, we're not in a rush for that and don't want to go into debt for a wedding. We do plan on doing that soon (I know, not romantic since we've talked about it). Now don't get me wrong, I definitely want to get married, but with school and work, I don't have time to plan a wedding. I actually cannot wait until I can plan my own wedding. I'm having a blast planning my friends wedding. She similar to me and my BF. They've been together for 12 years (since they were 14, and yes they are high school sweethearts too), but because of schooling, she has her PhD from an Ivy League school, and so does he, so they never had time until now to get married. Looks like we'll be on the same path as them 🙂

We're high school sweethearts (Awwww right?) and I love him a whole lot of course. He's very wonderful and we have a blast together. He's someone that I can complain to (even though I know he's not always listening), he listens about problems with my mom, he is actually nice to my mom, he was there for me when my dad passed, he's my best friend!

Well, that's all I can think of for now. Do you have any questions for me?

Work at Home and Online Scams

December 20, 2011 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 20 Comments

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

There are many scams out there. I don't know if any of you watch the 16 and Pregnant or Teen Mom episodes, but a girl on the show fell for a Western Union scam. She ended up losing $3,000 by cashing the check she was given and giving the guy back the change. Did anyone else hit their head on the wall when she was doing this? Yes I know this episode is from around a year ago, but I still think of how much she was an idiot for that.

The many many types of scams:

Nigeria. Someone from another country needs YOUR help and only you can help. They need help transferring millions and millions of dollars. Easy huh?
- What you should do: Ignore this, don't even open it.
Check cashing. They will buy something from you on Craiglist or something and give you a check. This check will be for an amount MUCH higher then the item that you bought and then they will ask you to cash the check and give them back the change. By time you give them the money, the bank will most likely notice a couple of days later that the check was fradulent and you will most likely have to pay.
- What you should do: Don't FALL FOR THIS! So many people fall for this every time. Why would anyone write you a check for more than the item is worth?
900 numbers. You'll usually sit on the line and rack up tons of charges by waiting.
- What you should do: Don't call 900 numbers. I'm not positive, but don't they all rack up charges?
Lottery winning. Congrats! You won millions of dollars and you didn't even have to enter anything and you don't even know how you won this.
- What you should do: Don't open this either!
You have a lost friend who desperately needs your help. They will pretend to be a friend of yours and say they are stuck in another country and that they really need your help. The only way you can help is if you fork over your credit card and some money (well a lot of money).
- What you should do: If you truly think that this might be a friend of yours, then try calling your friend first and see how they are doing.

Fess up, have you ever fallen for a work at home, online, or phone scam?

Extra Monthly Income Update

December 2, 2011 BY Michelle Schroeder-Gardner - 14 Comments

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

I'm doing an update on the extra monthly income that I talked about in How I plan on increasing my income and therefore my saving and also here.

Back in August and again in October, me and the BF were trying to find ways to add around an extra $1,000 to our monthly income, so that we can pay down our debt faster. Here are the steps that we were talking about doing.

1. “Do more secret shops.” I don't really do these too much anymore, but I am still making around $150 a month. Since I've been doing this for a couple of months, I am now able to do easier and better cash making assignments. I've gotten tons of free Estee Lauder stuff lately!
2. “Continuing with my online surveys.” I still don't do this a ton. I really only do this so that I can be on a research panel. The other day I had cash mailed in an envelope, and that was nice! I make probably around $20-$30 a month from this but I also get lots of free stuff.
3. “We have a friend moving in with us.” I don't think this person is moving in anymore. She hasn't talked about it in forever. Me and the BF aren't upset though at all because we like having our space. We could lean either way though, oh well. We're still happy.
4. “Also, hopefully I can convince the BF to get a second part-time job.” He's been getting more hours recently because of the holiday season and will be making around $500 extra a week until around mid-January. This is nice! And he also gets a raise in January and again in June, so that is nice also.
5. “And then I plan on maybe getting a side job also.” Hahahah I bet you guys are all laughing at this. I still haven't put any effort whatsoever in this. Maybe one day I will try.
6. I've also slowed down with earning Swagbucks but I'm still making a decent amount. Of course this doesn't count towards income but it's nice to buy things for free on Amazon. Check out my other easy ways to make money.

So, for the month of and December we will have about $2,500 in extra income but along with my Christmas bonus and the fact that I get paid 3 times in December and the BF gets paid 5 times in December, we will definitely be waaaay over this $2,500 amount. If only December was EVERY month 🙂

In normal months though, we will only be making around $500 extra a month. That is until this summer when I get a raise and all of my designations from my ASA and MBA.

What have you been doing to make extra income?

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