• Tweet

• Tweet

Well its the end of another month and time to run all the reports and stats to see where I am and how I did. Each month I post how I made my secondary income, as well as how I spent, saved and reduced my debt.

Photography Business

This month was right on the money with 16 sessions (plus a toddler halloween photo party) and made it above the comfy mark income wise. Ending the month with still about 6 orders to fulfill, keeps getting harder to catch up. Would really like to get to the point that order comes in and is completed shortly afterwards. Gonna do it next month if I have to put in some late nights.

AdSense

Adsense has been trucking along the second half of the month. Had my highest day ever breaking my $5 in a day goal and the month ended up the highest month ever as well. Still have aways to make the next milestone of $50 in a month but at this rate it will be payday every 4 months speaking of which I passed the threshold and should be receiving a google check soon. Now to invest it or get my fishy tank, that is the question.

Amazon

Amazon as I thought was a bit lower as my personal inventory is gone and its all on what I pick up at the sales. Hopefully Ill get better and faster at finding books, so far I only pickup about a half doz at each sale and most only have $2-5 profit on it. Couple times I have found a book with $10 plus profit on it, just gotta get better at that.

Other Affiliates

As mentioned in the post Monetize your website: InfoLinks I have removed InfoLinks from all sites but one during this past month. The one site still trickles some change in but may even remove it from that one soon. On a good note one of the ebook affiliates I have on a site made its first sale. Also got a couple more sponsored tweets, hey every little bit helps!

Portfolio

On the investment side I continue to add to the buy and hold account. Got my first dividends from Sempra and GE and those were of course reinvested right back into them. The Waddell IRA just flows with the market but I completed on of my goals of researching moving it and will be doing so this week most likely to Vanguard.

Savings wise I opened an ING account and as soon as my 30 days is up I will connect my personal bank account to it as well and move all but 5k from the money market to the ING to get that increased interest rate. Also set up automatic transfer of $125 a week from the business to a sub ING account for income taxes.

Oct 2011 Report

Income

Passive Income

Amazon	$119.34
Adsense	$27.30
Merchant Accounts	$5.15
Info Links	$2.04
Sponsored Tweets	$2.44
Hosting/Wordpress Setups	$140.00
Other Affiliates (clickbank, e-junkie,Linkshare)	$14.50
Studio Rental	$100.00
Total	$410.77

Portfolio Income

All Savings	$2.67
Waddell (old SIMPLE IRA)	$0.00
buy and hold	$8.16
Total	$10.83

Spending

Had lots of orders to process so business expenses were up a bit this month. Whats not reflected here, because I wait till the last possible min, is Oct was Sales tax month as well. It will show on next months report but it was paid on time late last night.

Assets vs Debt

Assets

Well the estimate with mint has my house dropping a little bit in value last month, but it was a good month for investments and savings.

Debts

Working on the $1,000 a month min to the Visa, off to a great start.

Net Worth

I left last months snapshot to show that I did have an uptick of $2,357.47 which is a 3.3% increase for the net worth. Any increase is a good month Ill be updating The Path to a Million page a bit later today to reflect all current balances as well.

What I learned, Goals and milestones achieved

Since creating sub accounts for holding funds for things such as property tax, sales tax and income taxes, I’m not going to be including those for the purpose of reporting cash saving goals. Those accounts are reflected in my net worth though. Been taking a closer look at the whole picture as I have been tracking everything and I can see better the inflows and outflows. These next two months I really want to see where I can cut back and where i can gain more income as it looks to close each month. If I have a bad month or two photography wise it can really hurt. Overall though it has been a good month and so far a good year, not sure if I’ll top last year but any time you come out ahead its good.

Goals met this month:

1. Have $11,000 in cash savings Completed 10/12/11
2. Reduce visa to under $9,000 Completed 10/31/2011
3. Alexa below #500,000 Completed 10/4/11
4. Alexa below #400,000 Completed 10/21/11
5. Investment portfolio over $18,000 Completed 10/17/11
6. Investment portfolio over $19,000 Completed 10/24/11

Whats next and Goals

Whats next? Well finally got the wife set up on her own mint.com account as well so we will both be tracking spending and the focus of Nov is cutting back. Started it by logging into ATT and finding they have a family package for unlimited text now so we switched to that and are saving $10 a month right there. Some others will be canceling my Constant Contact since I haven’t sent a newsletter in a year (save $15 a month) I hear their are some free ones ill look into. Going to look hard at cable, don’t think I can cancel out right but going to see how I can trim it down. Also going to look at wife’s insurance carrier and see if I can move my car over or maybe even car and house to see if there is savings there.

Also mentioned that after researching IRA’s that I will be moving from Waddell to most likely Vanguard and then hope to be putting about a $100 a week to the IRA.

Well thats my month in a nutshell, looking forward to a continued improvement in Nov!

How did you do in Oct? Setting goals for Nov (my Nov goals coming this week)?