David Makes Cents .com

I am finally starting to make some progress toward my goal. Now that I am out for summer, I am able to work a lot more so I can start saving a lot more of it. Hopefully I can keep up this good progress for the rest of the summer.

I am up 3.75% for the month!

Increasing my net worth by nearly 4% is a pretty big deal to me. If I could keep this progress up I’m sure I could make it to my goal fairly easy. The only problem is that it will be easier to get this rate of return now, but once I have say 90k, it will me much harder to get 3.75% monthly yield on my money. Without further ado, lets take a look at where I made my money this month.

Sources of Income:

Job: ~$700

Prosper: $24.00

Advertisements(on this blog): $6.28

Gold: $66

Ebay: $170

I earned around $700 this month from my job. Next month this will probably go up to around $800. This month was lower because I didn’t get out of school until about a week into the month.

I actually have two late loans on prosper. I am not very happy about this. They still have time to pay, but as time goes on I think it keeps becoming less and less likely that they will pay up. I will post the negative return if they ever go into collections. Right now I just hoping they pay up soon!

My advertising income went way down from last month. This is no real big deal. I understood that this would happen. I stopped working on this blog for a while at the beginning of the month and had very little traffic. It is starting to pick back up again now and I am hoping next month will be much better.

Gold went up a lot during the middle of the month. I probably should have sold. Near the end of the month it tanked again. I still think it is only headed upward, so I am going to keep holding on to it.

I have also been selling my college books online. So far I have sold three (I think) and I made back $170. I still have plenty more to sell, so I hope I get a lot more out of them.

Accounts

Bank: $8807

Retirement: $8668

Prosper: $2078

Gold: $5307

These are all pretty self explanatory. Hmm I think I have a lot of money in the bank. Maybe I should try to find something else to invest in. I do have to pay for next semester of college soon but, I don’t think that will be too much. I hate to have my money sitting idle and losing money to inflation. I’ll look into it in the coming month.

Filed under: Monthly Goal Update, Uncategorized | 1 Comment →

The whole point of this blog is to start new income producing businesses. You may have read my other post about my online arcade. While the site has been doing ok and I hope it does well in the future, I am going to continue working on it and continue to look for new ways to make money.

Today I went fishing. It was a complete failure, I didn’t catch a thing. I tried to make my own bait out of dough and that was a sticky mess. So I went to the local bait shop to buy some worms and they were out. I did notice however, that they were charging $2.50 for only 12 worms. This seemed pretty expensive to me. This gave me the idea for my next business: starting a worm farm and selling the worms to a bait shop.

I had thought about the idea before and had read up about it online. Worms are fairly low maintenance, there are few start-up costs, and there is a good market for them in summer months. I had recently decided to take up fishing, so even if I never get to sell any of the worms, because it doesn’t work out for some reason, I will be able to get my bait for free.

What I will need to start:

- Large metal tub

- Starter worms

- Organic Food Sources

- Water

The worms do all the work. All you have to do is feed them and make sure that they don’t get too hot or too cold and are living in a moist environment. They reproduce quickly, so you don’t need too many to start with. I will do a little research to figure out where to get my startup worms from either online or from a local bait shop or distributor.

How much I expect to make:

I don’t have a lot of space to start a worm farm, so I doubt that it will ever become huge. This is just meant to be a side business with some potential for growth if it is fun and easy. If I ever wanted the business to become real successful I would need to buy more land since my yard is too small to raise enough worms to become very profitable. For now I am just going to farm the worms in a tub, learning the ins and outs of the business and see if its right for me.

The exit plan:

In case the business doesn’t take, off like I am hoping it will, I have an exit strategy that will allow me to make full use of the resources acquired during the startup stage of this business. As I said earlier, I plan on fishing a lot, so I will be able to use the worms as bait for myself. Also the worms create very fertile soil that I can use for potted plants or in my parents garden. Initially this will be a very small operation, just to see how it works out. I will be sure to give you guys an update on how its going in the coming weeks.

Filed under: Frugal, business | 3 Comments →

I have officially made every day a “Bring your lunch to work day”. I am trying to save more of my paycheck. It is small enough as it is, I don’t need to spend all my money on food. I only make about $60 a day and easily spend $7 a day on food. This should really help me save more money and reach my goals.

What I Bring:

I actually leave my food in the car while I’m at work. We have been having 90 degree weather down here in the south and my food has been kept nice and cool. I use a mini cooler and two ice packs to keep it cool. It has worked great so far.

For lunch I usually make myself a turkey and cheese sandwich. I also bring and apple, pack of pb crackers, Oreos, and a water. I actually enjoy it more than I do the fast food restaurants I usually go to. Plus I am not drinking any soda which I try to avoid but I can’t resist when I am eating lunch at work. So its pretty healthy and its saving me some good money.

How Much I Save:

I used to buy a sticky bun and a soda on my 15 min break and on my lunch I would usually go to either McDonald’s or Wendy’s. The sticky bun and soda cost $2 and the food for lunch probably averaged over $5. So that is $7 I save everyday. One of the many benefits of still living at home is that my parents buy me my food. So lunch is free. Apparently there are free lunches contrary to what people keep telling me.

How Much It Will Be Worth At Retirement:

“A penny saved is a penny earned” , Ben Frank was a wise man. I am saving/earning $7 a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Well not really 52 weeks a year because I will start going to school soon and stop working. But for simplicity’s sake, I will assume I am saving this every week. I will also assume that the lunch will be free for the next 47 years until retirement and that I can average 10% return on this saved/earned money.

Well 7*5=$35 bucks per week. Plug this, the 10% return, and the 47 years I have left until retirement into the calculator I found on CNN money and viola. I have saved/earned $1,977,657.88. That looks like its almost enough to retire on by itself, but in 47 years that will probably be peanuts. At least it will be a real good start. The main thing I have on my side is time.

Filed under: Frugal, How to Save, Retirement | 15 Comments →