Income Report – July, 2021
Hey Readers! We’ve finished off July and as August starts, we wanted to share our July Income Report.
These reports are a transparent look at all our income from blogging and our various side-hustles. It’s our opportunity to track progress and see what’s working and what needs to change. Our goal is to reach financial independence, so these monthly check-ins are a hard look at where we are.
However first, in July our big life event was a small get-together with close friends to watch the Olympic Opening Ceremony. Check out our first guest, Porter, in my tiny studio apartment!
One of my life goals is to reach financial freedom simply to do more of these fun events with friends and dogs!
What We Accomplished in July!
- Our love for houseplants came through in “6 Chinese Money Plant Benefits, Care and It’s Epic History“
- Our friend was selling their junk car, so it inspired our post “How Cash For Junk Cars Works! Most Pay $500 Average“
- Shared an awesome post on social security from a CPA friend of ours “How Much Security Does Social Security Provide?“
- We switched our SEO Plugin from SEO Yoast to Rank Math. We really loved how Rank Math had loads of extra features. We’ll let you know how it goes, but it’s caused a few headaches so far. I’m hoping we’ll get it all figured out.
- Featured on Motley Fool’s All-Star Money, Best of 2020 Roundup. That was pretty cool!
- We shared tons of cool jokes, infographics, and quotes on social media. Check out our Instagram!
Our July Website Traffic
Frankly, our traffic has dropped considerably. Well, about 12% by the looks of it. This is primarily due to a recent Google update that negatively impacted a lot of bloggers, along with a number of other factors.
Additionally, with our recent switch to Rank Math from SEO Yoast, it’s been a struggle.
I think our site wasn’t properly indexed before between our theme and our SEO plugin, so when we fixed it with Rank Math. Google was like “Wow, everything is different right now. Let’s take a moment to take this all in”. We’re making some moves to fix it, but dang it’s been frustrating.
All we want to do is write, and facing all these issues is hard. Blogging is definitely not easy and it’s no wonder why so many quit. We’re either crazy or highly motivated to have made it this far!
Income For July
We have been consistently hitting above $500 the past couple of months and July was no exception. We’ve hit a wonderful groove where our side-hustle income is making enough to cover our costs and even fund a few fun experiments.
In July we hit $624 for the month. Most of it came from ads placed on our site, a sponsored post, and the third biggest contributor was from our dividend portfolio!
These are all pretty incredible income generators and we’ve mentioned them before on the blog.
- Ezoic – we make money when people see or click (extra money) on website banner ads
- Affiliate Marketing – we earn a commission if someone buys a product through a link on your website
- Blue Host Affiliate – an affiliate link for website hosting we use.
- Online Surveys – we earn money from participating in online surveys like Swagbucks.
- Stock Photography – we earn money whenever one of our photos sells online.
- Sponsored Link – we are paid to add a link to companies we rigorously review and like.
- Interest Checking/Saving Account – we earn interest on the money in our checking and savings accounts.
- Cash Back Credit Card – we earn extra money via 2% cashback from using our credit card.
- Seeking Alpha – we earn recurring ad revenue from SeekingAlpha.com for some articles we wrote years ago.
- Lending Club – we earn interest from peer-to-peer lending.
- Dividends – we earn dividends from the stocks we own.
Monthly Expenses for Wallet Squirrel
The expression “It takes money to make money” is actually pretty accurate. As we learn new skills, we find new software and processes that help us make more money. However, they come with a cost for their convenience. Here is where our money went in July.
Monthly Expenses – $323 Total
- Bluehost[$36] – Hosting Service
- Sitelock [$8] – Extra security for our bluehost servers
- Domain [$2] – So we can keep the domain WalletSquirrel.com
- Bloom [$7] – Our email forms, but we’ll likely be getting rid of this soon.
- Money Mix Insiders [$166] – Great mastermind group if anyone is interested in discussing
- Grammarly [$12] – We can’t live without this amazing grammar tool
- The Noun Project [$4] – The best site for icons for our infographics.
- Ezoic Premium [$58] – Ezoic weirdly charges extra for their premium membership. We have feelings…
- Sendible [$30] – A social media scheduling platform. Adam seems to really enjoy it!
Everything leftover has been invested in my dividend portfolio.
- In July I’ve bought 2 shares of Apple ($APPL) because they have tremendous customer loyalty.
- I’ve purchased 2 shares of Vanguard High Dividend Yield ETF ($VYM) as a nice diversified fun of dividend stocks.
- Lastly, I’ve purchased 2 shares of Vanguard US REIT Fund ($VNQ) to get a diversified portfolio of REITs.
These last 2 vanguard funds are an easy place to invest extra cash quickly, without having to do a hard look at a specific company.
What’s Next For August
August should be another busy month. Adam has been doing an awesome job on social media and posting awesome graphics every day, you should follow us!
I’ll spend August wrapping up some changes I’ve done on our Affiliate Site and see if we can get Amazon approved. That’ll be a huge win and a nice bump to our monthly Income!
Lastly, I’m looking at what it’ll take to leave our Ezoic Ad Platform and move to something like Newor Media. I’m not sure yet, but it’ll be nice to get off the Ezoic Nameserver limitations. It’s been a weird process that I’m ok leaving. However, I need to do a bit more research. Does anyone have any tips?
Wallet Squirrel is a personal finance blog by best friends Andrew & Adam on how money works, building side-hustles, and the benefits of cleverly investing the profits. Featured on MSN Money, AOL Finance, and more!
