Money Tips Network

One quarter gone. How did I do this month?

This year I'm publishing side income reports each month for accountability.

Public accountability is a motivator to keep things moving forward. Reporting on the good / bad / ugly keeps things real and allows for reflection.

Which sources I'm reporting and which I'm not

I'm not posting anonymously so income from my primary and part-time jobs and my main investments won't be reported here.

Everything else, though, is fair game. Some income will be reported when I cash out, and others when I earn it.

Also, I'm reporting income, not profit. I'm in the red overall and still will be for a while.

With that, let's go!

Google AdSense income: $21.49 (+$2.70)

This past month showed a modest uptick in my Google AdSense income.

How many do you have? Does this keep you up at night?

Over the past few months I've found myself talking a fair bit on how many bullets I have.

Although I have fired a gun a few times, I'm not talking about those kinds of bullets.

I picked up this term from Brad Owen, a pro poker player with his own YouTube channel. He sometimes goes to play with an extra buy-in for a table. That's his “second bullet” in case he loses all of his chips.

For me, a bullet is a purchase somewhere in the high-four or low-five figures, such as:

• A quality used car
• A family cruise
• A home improvement project
• A new central heating/cooling system

A vacation property is too much, and a new refrigerator is too little. Somewhere in between.

Every teacher has a favorite student, even if they won't admit it

Grocery receipt apps let you turn your grocery receipts into a small amount of cash. (Information about purchasing habits is valuable to marketing companies and companies that sell consumer goods.)

The process is little more than this:

• Download the app and sign on
• Learn what kinds of purchases you can get credit for
• Select what you're buying
• Snap a picture of the receipt
• $ PROFIT! $

I currently scan some of my grocery receipts with six different apps:

Maybe you can relate?

“I need to keep going until the mortgage is paid off.”

Those were the words of an admin I worked with a few years ago. I remember her as a delightful person and a talented graphical designer to boot. (We still use her material in presentations years later.)

When she said this, she and her husband were making double payments on the mortgage.

She also had a chronic cough that would have put too much out of pocket to get fixed for good. That didn't noticeably dampen her spirits but I'm sure it weighed on her efforts to knock that mortgage down.

I started publishing articles on Medium this month. Once I repost it, this will be my seventh article on Medium. (Wanna check it out?)

Yesterday I opened my stats and found that I'd earned nearly $4 on a single article that day. (It also marked my first article that earned over $5 total.)

I get that four bucks in one day, in the grand scheme, isn't much. It's a Starbucks.

A quick calculation, though, made this $4 a lot more exciting.

Money goes out All. The. Time.

We all have expenses. Most of us have jobs that pay the bills.

On average, American households spend just north of $6,000 per month.

Members of Generation X currently spend the most on average, followed by Millennials, each over $7,000 per month.

Cashback web sites make your online shopping sweeter by giving you a kickback on your online purchases just for clicking through their site.

You know that there are great deals to be had just about everywhere you look. Cashback sites are pretty darn easy. The more you buy from merchants on their site, the more they pay you.

How can cashback web sites hand out free money?

Now, they're not just being nice guys in giving you free money, of course. They get paid for closing the sale and pay you part of it, and keep the difference.

But regardless of how they can get the money to you, it's yours for the taking if you want it!

Here are a few sites I enjoy that give you cash back as you shop for your rebating pleasure.

Purchases from Goodwill stores are usually decent deals if you know what to look for.

Goodwill stores, the chain of secondhand stores that are the public-facing arm of the American nonprofit corporation, accept donations of most items and resell them either in-store or online.

Goodwill has a close eye on donations (most of the time)

Goodwill overall pays very close attention to the donations that come into their doors. The truly valuable items are sold online rather than in the stores. They rarely make it out of the back room. Housewares, games, well-loved clothes, inexpensive furniture, etc., get sold in the stores.

Over the past year, my wife and I have gotten some side jobs completely on referrals.

There are many ways to make extra money. Broadly, there are two kinds of ways: active and passive. Active income involves trading time for money, whether it's going to a second job or performing a service. Passive income is residual income that comes with much less effort, like interest income, royalties, affiliate income, and so forth.

Active income is typically a faster way to get money into your pocket. Do a job, and get paid (once). Passive income takes longer, and there is typically a lot of up-front work or investment before the money really starts to flow.

Word-of-mouth advertising drives my wife's sewing income

For people who provide services, though, there can be a residual, almost passive component to it: word-of-mouth advertising.

My wife did a Costco run after an appointment this morning. After she was done she lamented that it was going to be a big bill because meat (chicken in particular) wasn't cheap.

I said, “Nothing is anymore,” and she agreed.

How to keep on budget, then, if prices keep going up?

A recent jump in the Consumer Price Index

Prices have risen sharply recently due to inflation. The Consumer Price Index has increased by 18% over the past three years (September 2020 to September 2023). In contrast, it increased only 11% during the previous seven years.

On the ground, this means that the increase in the prices of things has been a bit more noticeable recently than it was in the mid-2010s.

Big and little price surprises

The price of things catches you by surprise here and there.

Soft drinks. Candy bars. Eggs. Toilet paper.