Reviewing My Monthly Income Challenge (July 2016 Edition)

Last month, I challenged you to Take the Monthly Income Challenge with me. The idea was pretty simple, come up with some way to make more money in a month. It really doesn’t matter how much, the important thing was just to start and track it.

Because I’ve been making unusual income through websites, freelance work, and gig economy stuff (dog sitting mostly), it is a little easier for me. It’s a matter of just trying to get more work done.

Each month, I come out with some kind of plan for what I’m going to do to push forward for the next month. Last month wasn’t much of a plan, because the previous month of June was pretty slow with a lot of family stuff. I essentially went with “no plan” to add anything new and instead went with doing the work that I already had on my plate.

It turned out to be a good plan, but not for the reason I expected.

Last Month’s Monthly Income Challenge

I’m not sure how to report July’s earnings, but I’ll go with this format for now.

The Month’s Good

Dog sitting was off-the-charts successful. The July 4th holiday brought a lot of travel and a lot of dogs paying holiday rates. I actually made more from dog sitting than I did from my blog… which is hard for me to imagine.

The Month’s Bad

The blog income went down. This happens every year with he summer slowdown in Internet traffic as everyone takes vacations. Worse, we took a week vacation for a road-trip ourselves. This puts me in the position of trying to make a month’s income on 24 days. We got back to a big rush of dog sitting requests, so the blog took a back seat.

As you may be able to tell, I’m still trying to catch up as I’m writing this article on Friday afternoon… just in time for everyone to leave for the weekend to avoid reading it.

The Month’s Results

Let’s hear it for the dogs! The month’s income was up almost 10% from the previous month. It is still down from earlier in the year, but diversifying with dog sitting is really starting to pay off.

This Month’s Monthly Income Challenge Plan

I can feel myself already lining up the excuses.

It’s the fifth day of the month and I’m struggling to get a second article written this week for lack of time. The world seems out to get me. Today it was Cox’ cable outage. Yesterday it was spending hours on customer support chasing down a banking error. Earlier in the week, my wife was out of town for work and I was a single dad. Next week, I lose daycare for the Victory Day holiday that is probably noted by a few hundred thousand people in the United States. Oh and my wife is traveling again for work.

As a friend likes to say, “No one cares about your excuses!” He’s right, but there’s a Four Burners Theory at work as well. That says you have to divide your time up among family, friends, health, and work. Family seems to require a bulk of my gas. The gas I have left for work is limited, and it is divided across several different types of work whether it blog or dog sitting.

For this month, I’m going to stick with the same boring plan as last month. If looks like there’s enough work out there for me to grow my income again, I just need to get the time to put it all together.

I had hoped that this month would be the month would be where I could put together significant progress on the book I’ve always wanted to write. It’s looking like that might be more of a September project.

Your Turn

Let me know what’s working for you in the comments. I’m particularly interested in people who have some kind of side gig such as Fiverr, Uber, or anything like that to grow their income.