I have been criminally negligent in keeping this blog up to date. I haven’t been keeping up with changes in my net worth and I haven’t even been keeping tabs on my expense tracking. All my regular financial activities have slowly gone the way of the humble buffalo.
The good thing is I haven’t been wasting away my days playing Team Fortress 2 or the incredibly addicting Company of Heroes. I haven’t been watching hours of Law & Order even though it appears to be on the coveted cable television 24 hour rotation – just like Friends, Seinfeld, and America’s Funniest Home Videos.
So if I haven’t been spending my days obsessing over my financial minutia or burning them away in useless and frivolous activities what have I been up to?
I have been busy trying out a new strategy to earn additional income. As I mentioned before, $73 a day is my goal. This amounts to a little less than $27,000 a year. If we figure in taxes and such I figure that I will need to earn approximately $33,000 with a 20% tax rate. That raises my daily income needs to $90 a day.
To put that $90 a day into perspective, I currently make about $95 a day before taxes, benefits, and retirement contributions are taken out of it.
My additional income plan is essentially to double my income.
Luckily, I have been making some steady progress toward my goal. In June, the first month of my concerted efforts to earn additional, passive income, I saw revenue of $8.44. In July I destroyed that number – bringing in $34.26. August grew as well with total additional income rising to $81.69. These numbers are not very large, but they do represent some progress. I am about 3.5% of the way toward my $73 goal!
I am hoping to reach my goal in one years time, so I have 9 months left to turn my little additional income into an avalanche of earnings. I am hard at work, so if posting here on My Family’s Money is a little sparse please bear with me. My goal is to post at least once a week something that is either helpful, humorous, or keeps me transparent with my financial life. Once a week isn’t too much to ask … I hope.
Wish me luck on my journey to earning more to save more to change the world more!
I am currently in my third week of bike commuting and, sore tush aside, I am pretty happy with this experiment in frugality. I can make the 12 mile commute home in just about 45 minutes, which gets me home faster than riding the bus. In fact, I like to think of myself as racing the bus home. Up to a certain point we take the exact same track toward my home before it turns down a major street to connect on the freeway. In all my rides I have either “tied” the bus or beaten it to that point.
The benefits are more than just time though. Instead of standing around on the bus waiting for a seat to open up I can now improve my overall fitness and increase my mental toughness. I am essentially trading standing up and not being able to do anything on a bus to being able to exercise on my bike. I think that that is a pretty good trade.
So right now I am two for three in terms of the things that I was thinking biking would do for me. The third, which is save money, has yet to fully materialize. The main reason for this is that I bought a bus pass for the month of August, effectively preventing me from realizing any savings this month. In fact, I have done nothing but spend more money to get my bike in shape for me to ride it. Here is the skinny on the money that I have spent so far:
Bike – $160 US
Helmet – Free
Biking Clothes – Free
Tires (2) – $31.18 US
Tubes (3) – $10.57 US
Pumps (2) – $26.88 US
All told I have spent $228.64 US on bike related expenses since I started this human powered transportation adventure. If I don’t spend another penny until my savings equal the amount invested it would take 4 months for me to start seeing a positive impact on my expenses. Once that is done I could spend up to $64 US a month on bike transportation and still be breaking even with the added time and exercise benefits. I probably won’t be spending $64 a month.
I don’t know how much I should be spending a month on stuff, but I have heard Jacob from Early Retirement Extreme recommend a $5 a month transportation budget in his post about how to retire early. If I could get by spending $5 a month on recurring bike related expenses (including bike maintenance in general) I would be pretty excited. I would be saving at least $708 a year at that rate – and that could turn into something big down the line in terms of future personal assets or world infrastructure.
What a great idea! If you run a blog then consider taking a part in this years Blog Action Day. By raising awareness of the local and worldwide issue concerning poverty and social justice maybe we can turn some of our (i.e. Western Civilization’s) massive amounts of private wealth toward more fruitful and beneficial causes than buying lattes, watching movies, and burning gasoline. We could focus on how to improve the condition of the estimated 1.1 billion living in extreme poverty (less than $1 a day).
Just imagine if the ~301,000,000 people living in America were to universally divert $1 a day from their own pockets to improve economic infrastructure and food production capabilities in the communities of these 1.1 billion. What type of impact could we make in 1 year? In five? In ten? I can’t even imagine what 1,098,650,000,000 (1 trillion, 98 billion, 650 million) could do for the poorest of the poor in terms of equipping them thrive in a world economy – but my guess it could do a whole heck of a lot.
I hope that this is what the Blog Action Day 2008 will turn into – a day where we raise our collective awareness of how using our financial power thoughtfully can make a significant impact the world around us.
A special thanks need to go out to Gather Little By Little for bringing this to my attention.
Life is all about maximizing happiness. My Family's Money is about exploring how money fits in to making the world a happier place through humor, financial transparency, wartime living, and looking at life's major events through the money lens. There is so much more to life than money, so it’s high time we made money work for us so we can really get down to living instead of working.