Man did it feel like March was a whirlwind or was it just me? As you read last week my world has been crazy! With the whole home buying experience. I feel like all the commotion of buying an acreage just continued to add to the craziness. But I didn't let that deter me from my goals of continuing to grow my passive income streams.
Over the past month I found it really easy to veer off course and utilize my income sources to help re-coop some of my earnest money deposit. It was really a test of staying focused with my goals and being purposeful with my money. Dave Ramsey's quote of, “80% of personal finance is about behavior modification, and only 20% head knowledge” really resignated with me this past month.
With how much time the acreage problem created for our family I was still able to make a decent of amount of passive income, because a lot of my streams are set on autopilot and require very little maintenance. That is one of the great beauties of passive income streams is that you put in a little bit of work up front, and reap the benefits going forward with little maintenance.
Overall in March, I was able to make $1290.66 even despite having a significant drop in my blog income. Here is a complete play-by-play of what my passive income streams looked like in March:
- Pension – [2016 Goal – $1308 – made $327 thus far] – the pension is completely on autopilot! Love a income stream that requires absolutely no work! All passive income streams should be pensions!
- Peer-to-Peer Lending – [2016 Goal make $100 – made $5.46 thus far] – LendingClub.com is continuing to be an excellent source of income and I continue to feed more of my passive income streams into it. This past month I put in $24 (from selling eggs) and $39 (from selling some silver coins). My plan is to continue to feed Lendingclub and really grow this investment over the next year.
- Egg Sales – [2016 Goal – $360 – made $74 thus far] – work has been really stressful over the last month, so I haven't been able to focus on selling my chickens eggs as much. I've lowered my price to $3/dozen, so with that said I sold $24 worth of eggs this month to feed lending club.
- Blog Income – [2016 Goal – $6000 – made $2208 thus far] – made $466 this past month, which wasn't a bad month with all things considered. Aaron and I are planning on putting more money back into the business in the coming months, and hoping to see a good return on investment. Since starting ThreeThriftyGuys we haven't done much to put money back in, but in order to grow this long term we need to keep adding value. More to come on this in the coming months.
- Two Checking Account System – [2016 Goal – $500 – made $200 thus far] – our launch of the two checking account system for the past two months have been very successful. I am way ahead of my goal for the year and our hits are to 1900 views on YouTube.
- Schwab Monthly Income Fund – [2016 Goal – invest $1200 and make $100] – continued investing another $100 automatically from the proceeds I had in the previous month of selling some gold/silver. Slowly the dividend checks are increasing as I continue to feed this passive income stream. In February I made a measly 29 cents and March brought in 44 cents of revenue. For each dollar that I put in I get about 4 cents back per month. This is essentially creating my own real-time pension that I can continue to watch grow as I feed it.
So now that I've got the home buying fiasco behind me in March I'm hoping to find a new income source. My big dilemma is that I don't want it to take too much of my time and keep a family/work/life balance. That is a real easy trap to fall into. I recently heard that most people only have about 20% of extra time in there life to “make adjustments”. The big question is what adjustments are you making to affect your life? If my life has only about 20% wiggle room, then I need to be real intentional about how I'm going to use that. Am I going to surf the internet, check out Facebook statuses, or am I going to spend some quality time with my kids.
3 Comments
Great article again Charlie. My favorite part was the 20% of extra time to make adjustments. Sounds like wise advice!
Laura – great question! I know a lot of people are wondering what to do with their gold or silver inheritance. I think I’ll write a post on this for next week, so stay tuned! :)
The selling gold/silver link leads a “Personal Capital” page. I’d like to know a little more about this income stream. I’m still scratching my head on what to do with some gold coins I received as part of an inheritance. Thanks!