This post is late.

I’m so, so sorry.

Let me share some updates that’ll help explain where my entrepreneur mind has been.

First, the January, 2019 Income Report

Every month I share these income reports to show how a few passive income streams I started, continue to generate money. This is awesome and I love them. I currently have 11 income streams that generated money in the month of January. Some of them are a lot, some just a few cents but they all add up and required ZERO work from me in the month of January.

Here is the break down with links to articles where I show how I started each of these. It’s really not hard and all incredibly worth it!

Sources of Income This Month – $268.49

$100 – Bluehost Affiliate Income
$47.53 – Cashback Credit Card
$38.84 – Dividends
$25 – Ebates
$13.02 – Stock Photography
$13.15 – Interest Checking/Savings Account
$9.93 – Epic Niche Site Affiliate Marketing
$8.78 – Wallet Squirrel AdSense
$4.52 – Seeking Alpha Articles
$4.24 – Robinhood App Affiliate Program
$3.48 – Lending Club

Where This Money Goes

Most of the money every month gets reinvested into my stock portfolio which is made up of dividend stocks that continue to make more money every month. I’m slowly growing that snowball.

The rest of the money every month pays for upkeep such as hosting costs, software subscriptions and such. A tiny bit has been used to help fund my latest startup.

My New Start Up

My original goal was to have my startup ready to go on January 20th. That was the goal. It didn’t happen.

See what I’m building is a financial technology company that’ll change the world. Big goals right. It’s really a simple concept I’ll get into later but it’s a big undertaking.

On my end, everything is about ready. I have the website designed and back end processes in place, however, there were two parts that are out of my control.

First I needed a bank that aligned with the business and not me personally, so I had to open a business checking account which was a HUGE hassle. My bank didn’t understand what I was building, so that took a lot of time explaining. However, once they understood, they loved the idea.

Then I also needed a brokerage account that was tied to the business and not me. This has taken the longest. The brokerage I went with first needed a lot more forms than I had, then they lost all my paperwork. Later the person helping me fill out the forms didn’t know much about a business brokerage account so we filled out the paperwork wrong and later had to resubmit. UGH. That’s where I’m at now, waiting for my brokerage to open my account. Then I’ll be ready!

That’s the short version, this is where my time has been focused but I can’t wait to share with you all when this is done. I love this new project and really believe it’ll change the world. Stay tuned!

I’ve slowed down. I know.

In the past I have written articles every week and shared my income reports with the world. While I’ve continued to share my Income Reports, I have slowed down writing weekly articles. This is because my start-up launching January 20th. It’s taken up my entire world of free time, but I think it’s worth it!

While I’ve slowed down, Wallet Squirrel continues to be an important part of me because it tells the story of my favorite thing, passive income. I haven’t done much with Wallet Squirrel lately (I’m sorry), but it shows that I continue to earn passive income from all the past experiments I’ve run on the side. Anyone can do any of these and maybe see the same results or better. I will continue to share these income reports because it’s a great reflection on the power of passive income.

Income Report – November, 2018

As the year winds down, these passive income sources continue to chug along.

Here is the breakdown with links to articles I’ve done on each of these passive income sources.

Sources of Income This Month – $298.90
$200 – Bluehost Affiliate Income
$21.88 – Wallet Squirrel AdSense
$20.40 – Cashback Credit Card
$16.62 – Stock Photography
$12.60 – Interest Checking/Savings Account
$9.81 – Epic Niche Site Affiliate Marketing
$8.01 – Dividends
$5.84 – Seeking Alpha Articles
$3.74 – Lending Club

What Do I Do With This Money Every Month?

It doesn’t take too much to run a website like this. Maybe $300 a year. So I first pay off my web servers and any fancy plugins I have. The rest of the money every month is transferred to my stock portfolio that earns dividends (or more passive income). This last month I continued to buy Intermountain Realty (IRM), 3 shares exactly at $30.87 per share. You may notice it’s come back up since then. While cool, all I care about is that dividend. However I think I’ve hit my max of IRM, so I’ll be buying something else in the future. =)

The Start-Up

As I mentioned before, I’m working on a wicked cool startup idea and I’m looking to launch January 20th. That is the soft launch date, I’ll share early access with family, friends and of course you! The hard launch (the rest of the world) will be late March. I really love the idea, but tempering my expectations in case failing miserably, (It won’t do that though lol). Who knows. All I know is I will continue to try to do awesome things in the world. Thanks for sharing this journey with me!

Every month I’m stoked to share these income reports. A journal of everything I make and how it works. My goal is to find new ways to make extra money on the side and create passive income streams to invest with. It’s a cool plan.

Here’s how September worked out

While it was awesome I had an affiliate sale for Bluehost, what was impressive was how the 10 additional income sources added up for over $116. It just goes to show that every little thing you do adds up!

Sad Fact: My second highest income for September was the 2% I get back from my cash back credit card. While it’s nice knowing I made back $30.96 from my purchases, it’s a little sad that I spent that much. Ugh.

Sources of Income This Month – $216.36

$100 – Bluehost Affiliate Income

$30.96 – Cashback Credit Card

$21.48 – Wallet Squirrel Affiliate Marketing

$15.11 – Wallet Squirrel AdSense

$12.75 – Stock Photography

$10.63 – Interest Checking/Savings Account

$8.94 – Dividends

$7.04 – Seeking Alpha Articles

$3.91 – Robinhood App Affiliate Program

$3.50 – Lending Club

$2.04 – Epic Niche Site Affiliate Marketing

What do I do with the income I make?

Every month I’m earning a couple hundred dollars which is awesome! That money goes to paying for the website including the website server, dotmain name and marketing tools. It adds up to about $71 per month to maintain Wallet Squirrel. Not including my time, but I’ve yet figured out how much my time is worth.

That extra money left over I use to buy dividend stocks (yay). This last month I bought 6 shares of Iron Mountain Realty (IRM) at $35.42 per share. It’s now at $33.89 per share so a better price so I continue to buy a few shares.

So with a 6.85% dividend, those 6 shares add $14.55 in additional yearly dividend income. Very cool!

What’s going on next month?

For those who are new, I’m working at creating a start-up. I’ve been fiddling with an idea for the last 2 years and decided I should just do it.

It’s kind of a long-term plan so I’ve developed a business plan (my first ever) and using all the free resources available to people including the Colorado Small Business Association and SCORE (Senior Core of Retired Executives) to help me fine tune my idea. This has included long nights at my desk, early morning in café’s working and even meeting at local Starbucks with consultants. It’s a lot of work.

Now that I’ve fine-tuned the business plan, I need to figure out some legal and tax things that I’ve never had to worry about before with the blog here. So I’ve been calling law firms that a nice enough to talk to me and scheduling consultations with a tax professional to hammer out my last “professional” needed questions.

When this is through (maybe next month!), I can finish building the new site for the start-up (part of it is done already!). It’s exciting to see this idea come to life and become more concrete every day but also a crazy headache seeing things move so slowly in comparison to starting a blog.

Baby steps…

Every month I enjoy sharing these income reports because it provides transparency and accountability to what I’m doing on Wallet Squirrel. Plus it’s a great reason for me to assess everything I make and where that money goes.

Wallet Squirrel is going through a change

Sadly, my best friend Adam who has been an awesome contributor to Wallet Squirrel has had to refocus efforts on his family and career so he is taking a break from the blog.

It’s tough because so many of you have come to expect articles every Monday and Thursday. I’ve read it in the comments and seen our web analytics jump on these days. To be honest, it makes me so happy when people realize we’ve mixed it up because you’re paying attention to what we do here on Wallet Squirrel!

So it’s back to me, Andrew, to take over Wallet Squirrel. I’ve learned so much and continue to plan to implement everything I’ve learned. However, it’s just me so I’m trying to figure out what the best publishing schedule is (maybe every Monday?) and make it work with my schedule and you, the audience.

One thing is always certain, I will ALWAYS publish these income reports. These are my favorite and I love them!

Income Report – July, 2018

It was a big month for Wallet Squirrel. I had my best month yet and this marks the first time my income from Wallet Squirrel broke $500! I knew it was possible, but it’s been a long road to get here. It’s still hard to think about when I write this, but here it is!

How cool is that! This breakdown is as follows, making my Bluehost affiliate the largest income this month.

Sources of Income This Month – $534.34

$300 – Bluehost Affiliate Income
$145.35 – Sponsored Link in Old Post
$31.89 – Cashback Credit Card
$20.11 – Dividends
$11.69 – Wallet Squirrel AdSense
$8.65 – Interest Checking/Savings Account
$5.20 – Seeking Alpha Articles
$4.96 – Stock Photography
$3.50 – Lending Club
$1.97 – Epic Niche Site Affiliate Marketing
$1.02 – Wallet Squirrel Affiliate Marketing

Where does this money go every month?

Every month I spend money on maintaining the website and marketing tools. Last month I spent roughly $100 on everything to maintain the site. Plus I bought 2 shares of stock for my dividend portfolio. One share of Microsoft at $108.64, yes I know it was high (ugh) and one share of Iron Mountain Realty at $34.84. These will slowly add to my list of dividends I receive every month. Wahoo!

What’s Next!

In addition to me getting used to run Wallet Squirrel on my own again. I have an idea for a start-up, I’ll share more details in upcoming posts, but I’m currently creating a business plan for this start-up so I can think through it fully and understand all the details before I jump into it or not.

PS. Writing a business plan tough work, lol.

Every month we report how much we made with all the different ways we try to earn money online. We strongly believe there are more ways to earn money rather than a typical 8-5 job, so we’re out to prove it’s possible. Here are all the different ways we’ve earned money in May.

As always, feel free to copy what we did and make it better. We’re all here to help each other.

What We Accomplished in May

• Andrew wrote some great articles in May including Get Paid to Write Articles: 20+ Websites That Pay You For Writing in 2018, Day 137 of the Epic Niche Site Battle, How my Affiliate Site is Doing, Stock Analysis of IRM, and 7 Good Reasons I Still Carry Cash.
• Adam also wrote some awesome articles in May including a Side Hustle Spotlight on How To Become a Virtual Assistant, April Round Up of our Favorite Income Bloggers, What I Learned From Starting A Business That Horribly Failed, and How You Can Save Money on Your Summer Adventures.
• We were super appreciative to be featured on two blogs this month including FITnancials and MoneyMaaster! Thank you so much Alexis and Jordan!
• We finally finished our How To Start A Blog free email course. Something we’ve been working on for a while now. We’re trying to add more depth to this post and give people a chance to ask us questions directly!
• We added a “disclosure” tag below all our blog post titles to make us more compliant (did you see it?). We went through Upwork and hired a Freelancer that turned out to be awesome. Let me know if you need any recommendations.
• Lastly, Wallet Squirrel increased our Domain Authority to 32. That’s pretty cool. Hopefully, Google likes us more now. =)

May Income Report

This was another down month, but it had some unexpected surprises that I’ll get into.

Where all my income is coming from

Cashback Credit Card  (66.30) – This is the highest my 2% cashback has ever paid me. In March, I had a car accident (that I’m still dealing with), but my insurance asked me if they should send me the money or if they should send it to the body shop to pay for the damage. I initially thought it would be easier for them to send it to the body shop, but quickly realized if they sent me the money. I could charge the damages to my 2% cashback card and then immediately pay it off with their money. That’s what I did and received an extra $40. Wahoo!

Dividends (25.67) – I regularly talk about how much I love dividend stocks and this month aligned with several companies paying out dividends. I essentially received $25.67 for doing nothing but owning a couple companies. True passive income.

Interest Checking/Savings Account (8.42) – Man am I glad I switched to Ally Bank from Wells Fargo. I now have an interest checking and a 1% Interest Savings Account. I usually keep about $4,000 in both my checking and savings account as a buffer and that pays decent interest every month. Currently, I have a bit more in my savings account since I’m saving up for a Prague trip in October. Luckily those Prague savings keep earning me more interest. Wahoo!

Seeking Alpha Articles ($7.78) – So Seeking Alpha is a finance website that analyses the stock market. I wrote 3 articles for them in July 2017 and their pay model pays me $0.01 for every page view and those three articles continue to bring in traffic. I love it! I should really write another article for them.

Wallet Squirrel AdSense ($6.73) – I purposely don’t include a lot of ads on this site because frankly, I hate ads. I have only one in the side bar and definitely no ads that follow you around the entire site. Maybe that reduces my ad revenue, but I’m ok with that. It still brings in a few dollars every month, but luckily that revenue keeps increasing as Wallet Squirrel continues to get more page views every month!

Stock Photography ($4.70) – Not a lot this month for our stock photography. I blame Adam (lol). No this regularly fluctuates but continues to motivate us to take more stock photos whenever we travel or hike. It’s another form of Passive Income that we really love.

Lending Club ($3.77) – Oh Lending Club. I invested $300 over 2 years ago and this continues to trickle in money. It’s not a lot, usually around 5%, but it’s a nice diversity from the stock market that I really like. Plus I just switched my account to “Auto” investing so that it’ll invest in loans that meet my certain criteria so I’m not manually choosing loans which takes time. I’m curious how this change will affect my future interest. Hopefully for the better. You can bet I’ll write about it.

Epic Niche Site Affiliate Marketing ($1.21) – This is purely from the Affiliate Site I created apart of the Epic Niche Site Battle. Honestly I haven’t given it much thought and really need to add a couple more blog posts. Especially since it’s proven to make money with the very limited traffic it currently gets.

Where does this money go?

After expenses (hosting/SEMrush/social media manager/etc.) Adam and I split the income each month to use that cash different ways.

I use that extra cash to invest in my dividend portfolio. Which this last month I’ve bought 4 shares so far of IRM which continues to see a rise in their stock price. Those four shares will produce $9.64 for me annually for doing nothing. That is pretty cool!

Adam uses his extra cash to help pay down his mortgage to reach a debt-free life. This is a great goal and, where most people agree, your extra money should go each month.

What’s next in June?

Adam and I are going to try to take some photos together for a refresh of the Wallet Squirrel homepage and to make our site more personalized. I’ve noticed that people relate better to blogs that have lots of photos of the author. Since we’re real people and the ones writing all the content. I figure we’ll try to look like real people. lol

Lastly, I’m going to try to reach outside of my comfort zone and pitch some larger news agencies on some awesome money saving tips I’ve picked up over the years. I’ve never pitched a major news website before so I don’t know what to expect. Any tips?