Another month, another update to my alternative income. Last month, I had the biggest jump forward, a tremendous gain as I went from $71.49 to $237.33. That’s the type of gain that’s not likely to be duplicated every month. This month was no exception, but there were still some solid gains. As the month closed, I made $331.88 via alternative income streams.
How did I do it this month? My Prosper loans continue to grow, but not nearly as fast as I had originally hoped. When I started out $20 in gains from Prosper interest would be a tremendous accomplishment. It would be such a huge gain, percentage-wise. I’m at the point now, where those kind of gains don’t make the overall impact that they used to. Even worse, to make $20/month in interest, I’d have to invest nearly $2000. It’s hard to put that kind of money to work
The bulk of the money came from blog advertisements. My Google Adsense revenue has grown for the first time in three months. As great as this is, it could have been better if I had an updated Sitemap for Google. For those unfamiliar with what a Sitemap is, it’s basically a guide for Google to understand your site. At the end of the month, I realized that I hadn’t kept it updated. This means that Google didn’t have a very good idea of what was on my site. As soon as I made the change, I was able to find my articles a lot easier on Google. Only good can come from this.
I paid off $2000 of my HELOC which lowers my “necessary expenses” column by $20 a month. I’ve grown my monthly income by over $300 – which means that I have beat the goal I set here in half the time that I predicted. In addition, I’ve dropped my necessary expenses by $40. Unfortunately, we started to finally get water bills, so that’s an addition expense that didn’t exist before. I have about 10K left of HELOC to pay off, at which time my necessary expenses should drop about $100.
Rather than cut and paste the whole chart here, I’ve decided to create a page with all my Alternative Income Stream progress.
Mine is a little stagnant right now. I have a couple sources of alternative income, and they definitely pay for themselves. Now if I could just get mine to increase also!
-Zachary