First month of 2017 is in the books and we are off to a fast start! Boy are things off to a blazing start with our goals and focus of creating passive income streams to payoff my mortgage and exit into debt freedom. I'm excited about what the year holds in store for generating passive incomes!
Specifically I'm excited to about generating residual income through our blog with Adsense, YouTube content, and affiliates. Secondly, I'm excited to see where our journey goes in renting a house through AirBnB. Ultimately I'm looking towards the day when we can yell “FREEDOM”! It is after this point that I know a lot of doors will be opened up.
This past month I've daily been reviewing my monthly and yearly goals to stay focused on my spiritual, educational, relational, and financial goals. It is through this daily reminder of what I'm focusing on that it is helping me stay away from the daily distractions.
Over the past month I took small measurable steps to produce my first two YouTube videos, which were on, “How to lower your electric bill” and “How to lower your DirecTV bill and review“. I know these weren't necessarily the best videos, but I'm continuing to understand how to produce content on YouTube and slowly improve my quality. I really think there is a fundamental shift in how and why we consume media from traditional TV and the movement is more towards real people on YouTube. I hope to slowly evolve our content to our readers and viewers to things that are helpful in saving money and creating passive income streams.
On another note, I've been on a big kick of watching BiggerPockets podcasts and really researching the possibility of investing in real estate after our house is paid off. They produce a lot of great content, and give you a lot of details on how to get into rental properties yourself. I mentioned this to my good buddy/accountability partner this past week and he told me he had listened to all 211 podcasts. WOH!!! My buddy had bought a south Omaha house in Oct 2016 for $20k, and revamped it with $15k of improvements and ton of good old sweat equity! He is a proud dad of five girls, and has some health problems. His dad was forced to quit working at age 45 due to a similar type illness, and he looked me in the eye and said, “I'm going to produce something now while I can. Our family was forced to live off disability, and we had a hard life. I'm going to leave my family with something more, if this illness gets the better of me.” He went on to say he watched his 35 year old co-worker be forced to medically retire due to diabetes. He said, that is the point when he realized he needed to act now. Act while he had a strong back, and some good old fashion passion for producing some sweat equity.
Boy! Talk about a friend with some passion! It is refreshing to hear a good friend want to produce something with his hands and leave a legacy. In my own life I'm continuing to work hard on leaving my own legacy. A legacy that is rid of all debt. Here is a breakdown of my progress from the past month:
Mortgage Pay Off Countdown
Balance: $44,491
Paid last month: $5,118
Extra Money That Was Applied: $3,825
Goal of Pay Off Date: August 2018
This past month was a three paycheck month (I get paid bi-weekly), so I was able to utilize my $1800 from my fixed expense automatic deposit and two checking account system. Plus I got a big referral bonus at my new job for referring a former co-worker. I'll blog more about this next week. All of these actions helped us make huge strides in paying off $5118 of our mortgage! I can see debt freedom soon approaching! I can feel it.
Here is a breakdown of my passive income streams from this past month and how we are doing it:
2017 Goals
- Pension – [2017 Goal $1308] – didn't lift a finger this past month to cash in on my previous employers pension and collected $109. Sweet!
- Blog Income – [2017 Goal – $7500] – [made $456] – this past month our blog income was a little smaller than last year, so I'm a little behind on this goal. We made $111 through Adsense, and had one of our best months for Amazon affiliate marketing. Our YouTube videos made us $12, which is a small step. Finally, the rest of our income came from FlexOffers and two other affiliate sponsorships. Not bad for the first month of the year.
- AirBnB – [2017 Goal $2500] – due to some job priorities we weren't able to do any AirBnB business in January, and we won't be able to do any in February and March. We've already got some business booked for May and I'm sure the summer will be extremely busy. I'm still confident we make this number this year, but the first few months will be slow.
- Sell Stuff – [2017 Goal $2500] – [made $54] – I sold two of my Morgan silver dollars on eBay and made $54. I applied this extra to my mortgage to continue to pay it off and accelerate our debt freedom.
- Peer-to-Peer Lending – [2017 Goal $25] – [made $2.86] – pretty average month in terms of cash flow from this investment. I haven't put any money into this investment since May 2016.
- YouTube Channel – [2017 Goal $25] – earned $12 last month! Wow! Going to continue to develop this income stream! Lot of possibilities here through generating good content that brings value to people.
- Schwab Monthly Income Fund – [2017 Goal $10] – [made $0.77] – slow and steady income stream that I don't have a lot invested in, because I pause this passive investment stream until after the house is paid off.
That is the update for the past month on my passive incomes. Slowly making progress, so hopefully we can get this mortgage paid off and move onto bigger and better things.
2 Comments
That is one awesome mortgage payoff plan!! Congrats on getting it so low. :) We’re tackling our student loans currently but the mortgage is next on our “To Destroy” list.
Ugh, I keep meaning to create a YouTube channel so I can capitalize the ads there as well. Videos are quite challenging to do well, so you really need to plan them out to succeed. Kudos to you guys for doing videos. :)
I don’t really have passive income streams, unless you count the blog and retirement accounts. I reinvest the dividends from the retirement account (IRA), so that doesn’t generate actual cash right now.
For the blog, I think I raked in under $200–that’ll be $350 once some affiliate income processes. It was probably the most profitable month yet for the blog. I use Adsense as well (earn $50/month from it), but I’m trying to get away from it since it interferes with reader speed and experience. So that means the focus needs to shift towards affiliates to support the site costs. I have work to do. :)
I know it’s incredibly tough to make money and it requires a lot of work, so you guys are doing great!
Great work Picky Pincher! It is really tough to get into blogging now and making money. That is why having Aaron as my partner takes off some of the load. It is really hard to generate enough content for just one person, and keep up with all the social media. It has been a long seven years for Aaron and I, but the blog has taught us a lot and provided a lot for our families.