I'm working towards financial independence, where I don't depend on a job to survive. At best I'll be able to quit work forever in the near future. At worst, I'll rely less and less on someone else to survive and have more options when it comes to "work".
To get there, I'm focusing on building up alternative income streams.
The more passive income I can generate, the less I'll rely on a regular job to cover my expenses. To track my progress, every month I'll share a passive income report and talk about how I did it.
October 2017
In October I continued to work on launching another blog project and earned my first blogging money (after nearly a year of blogging!).
The results:
| October 2017 | |
|---|---|
| Credit Card Rewards | $25.73 |
| Apps | $0.00 |
| Dividends | $18.12 |
| Blogging | $9.63 |
| Steemit | $0.76 |
| Other | $230.19 |
| Total | $284.43 |
Credit Card Rewards
I cashed out some rewards on my Chase Freedom. I still have about $40 in rewards on another card but the minimum to cash out is $50 so that may happen next month. I also have a huge American Express signup bonus that I haven't cashed out yet - I'm planning on doing gift cards and reselling them as Amex only gives you a 50% redemption rate on cash back. Note: I'm only counting credit card rewards when I redeem them.
Apps
I have about $30 combined sitting in multiple apps. I also looked into and downloaded Field Agent, Mobee, and Easy Shift - while I didn't do much with them this month, I plan to start using them in November. I'll only count app money when it hits my bank account.
Dividends
Monthly IRA dividends. Reinvested of course. Next quarterly payouts are in December.
Blogging
After nearly a year of running Finance Yo Self I finally made money from blogging! It was only $9, but my readership and following has been slowly growing. The money is nice, but it's definitely true that if you're only getting into blogging to make money then you're going to have a rough go of it.
Steemit
I started out the month doing great with being more interactive on Steemit...but have dropped off in the last couple of weeks. I'm slowly growing my following on here and am rededicating myself to posting and commenting more. To come up with the amount earned I'm just using the difference between this month and last month - I don't have any plans to withdrawal anything - so some of the lack of growth is from the price of Steem being down about 50% compared to this time last month.
Other
Most of this money came from getting paid for selling things in September - I sold some camera equipment, gift cards, and books.
Wrap Up and Plan For November
I had improvement from September to October which is encouraging. I know I got some easy wins out of the way early - selling things around the house and unused gift cards - but I'm excited about the reoccuring sources of income.
I'd never really tracked my dividends before, and I'm an index fund guy (not a dividend stock investor) so the dividends are nice little slices of extra income every so often. Of course, they get reinvested, but it's still money I didn't have to work for.
I still have a pending bank bonus and a lot of credit card rewards coming up, as well as more dividends in December. So I think my focus for next month will be simply on blogging - including trying out some new things and writing about it. I ended up working a decent amount of overtime in October - I'm expecting November to be a little lighter, so I'm really going to work on building some good habits when it comes to writing (and other side hustles).
Thanks for reading! I always find it motivating to read about how other people are making extra money and I hope the same goes for you with these reports!