I was thinking lately about the challenge Sam put for himself to get $200,000 in online income or go back to work. My challenge is not that ambitious but similar, I have decided that for the last six months of 2013, July to December, I will live solely off blogging income.
The rules I have set are as follow
- Payments received after July 1st for deals closed before July 1st will not count.
- I may not use that exact money since it is in US$ on a Paypal account so will apply a 2% exchange rate and a 2% transfer fee on all cleared Paypal balances.
- Income from freelance travel writing does not count.
- The only blogging income that is considered is proceeding from Reach Financial Independence, Make Money Your Way, and any other website I may develop during those months.
- Income from my ad referral network (contact me if you want in!) will count since it is linked to RFI and MMYW.
- At the end of the year I need to have “saved” from that income $3,000 for a vacation in late 2013 or early 2014, if the vacation is taken in 2013 the cost will have to be covered by blogging income and deduced from the $3,000 savings goal.
- My lifestyle will not change because of the challenge. It will just be a FAIL if I go over budget. I will not stop traveling, eating well or spending on things I want to spend on for the sake of staying within budget. As a matter of fact BF does not know about that challenge so it is completely business as usual regarding our spending.
- Money spent to INVEST ON ASSETS will not count. We have two ledgers here, one is called “house and land investments” that include building a new room, paying contractors, lawyers, and so on, that will not count. The other one is “life investments” which should not be called like that since it is more liabilities than anything else, that is a car, a boat, bed sheets (even if we plan on opening a B&B so far only we have slept on them), cutlery.. that will be included in the spending.
I have set three tiers of income
$1,000/month should about cover basic daily expenses and not make it for the holiday savings goal.
$2,000/month should allow for emergency spending (like a laptop replacement, I know mine is dying) and the holiday savings goal.
$5,000 is the amount I have said makes me feel safe as passive income, since it allows me to live well by my standards and to have enough to keep investing and building more wealth. If I had no other sources of income but blogging, like I am going to pretend for 6 months, this is what I would like to achieve, so this is going to be my real goal.
Where we stand at the moment
I have kind of plateaued at the $2-$3K mark, June was slightly under $3,000 and not my best month. Summer is supposed to be really slow. RFI started making good money after 6 months and MMYW is just a few days old so I don’t expect much from it, although I shall not lose the two months I lost blogging in the dark on RFI at first.
As I will disclose my blogging income on Make Money Your Way for both sites, I will see you over there for the results month by month!
What does your online/freelance/side hustle income cover? Living expenses or your blogging costs?
This post was featured on the Money Bulldog, Outlier Model, Your Daily Finance, thank you!
Wow – that’s going to take some doing! I look forward to seeing what the results are, Pauline!
Thanks Matt!
Best of luck in the challenge, Pauline! I think you can do it! I would love to live off of online income, but at this point I am just trying to increase the income from my blog as much as I can month-over-month, and have started to re-invest some money. I might hire another staff writer to write 1x/week. Having even one less post a week freed up my time to look into advertising more and spend time building links/improving my site. I might have to take a similar challenge in 2014, tho 😉
Again, best of luck and can’t wait to hear about your progress!
I prefer to keep my content but having a VA has been a great help.
I need some more ambitious goals for my online earnings. My goal was to get one ad and that isn’t working but I will modify it so that my online costs are covered for 2014.
I have no doubts about your ability to achieve your goal.
Thank you Jane. I am going to document the progress on MMYW if you want some ideas.
Amazing! Look forward to reading about your progress.
Awesome idea Pauline. We have to challenge ourselves from time to time to really accomplish something great. Good luck growing mmyw!
Thanks Ross!
Very cool! Looking forward to seeing how this experiment works out. So far my blogging income is $0, so it covers nothing. My first goal is to make enough to cover expenses and allow me to spend on something like design help.
Covering your internet bill and design would be a great first step, good luck!
Hey Pauline I am in to join the challenge with you if you want some company/competition. LOL you have the leg up with already having a site that is producing income but hey I love a challenge and it helps keep me focused. I am going for an average of $1500 from August to December from my YDF and though I am in the processing of developing other sites those will not count. Only income I am counting will be YDF. Lets get it going.
Sure, welcome! Pretty ambitious goal, best of luck.
I love this post! My extra income covers our expenses. I hope to grow that further though because taxes are so much!
A good problem to have!
That’s awesome. Where did you learn about how to monetize your blog?
Mainly reading other blogs and their progress, or people who do it for a living, like Pat Flynn.
Good luck, Pauline! I have great confidence that you’ll achieve your goal. =).
What kinds of taxes do you have to pay on your online income? Guatemalan? French?
I get taxed in France and the UK as that is where my paypal accounts are. You can’t have a Guatemalan paypal, well not to wire payments to a Guatemalan bank account at least.
Good luck! It is an interesting experiment to say the least.
Thank you Brian!
Sounds like a great challenge! You seem to accomplish everything you tackle, so I’m sure you’ll hit your goals. Shannon and I definitely want to increase the earnings at The Heavy Purse too and are trying to figure out the best way to do it.
good luck to you too ladies! It really depends on what you want to give your readers. Some people give free content but put ads, other sell ebooks with no ads. I’d rather do the former.
That sounds like an awesome goal. At this point, my online income would barely cover a meal out every month, so I would really need to up that in order to do anything similar. I hope to up my blog income over the next 6 months, but I’d be surprised if I even make $1,000 over that time period. Good luck with your challenge!
Thank you Jake, a meal out is better than nothing! Don’t check the hourly rate though…
Awesome challenge Pauline, good luck! I can’t even cover my hosting costs at the moment. 🙂
I’m in the same boat as Nick.
Pauline, you are an inspiration. I look forward to reading about your successes.
Thank you Michael.
lol it was really slow for the first few months too and suddenly it started to happen. I guess from the next PR update you’ll see it.
Wow that is certainly a challenge! Given my blog makes nothing at all, it’s astronomical to me to think you can live off yours! Shows me what’s possible!
haha you’ll need to go self hosted first! more on that on a post soon.
Wow this sounds like a really exciting challenge. I hope you will be updating us along the way. Good luck!
Thanks Liz!
Best of luck, and I bet you succeed. Blogging income for me would cover food,electricity, and maybe the water bill in a good month, which would do me no good if I can’t pay the mortgage! All the more reason to get the house paid off I guess.
I hope it does increase all the way to pay the mortgage, the trips, and everything else!
Very exciting!! My goal too is to get to a point where my blog covers my basic living expenses. I’m nowhere near that yet, so I have min-goals to keep me focused and motivated. Last year was the first year I made a decent amount of money from my blog, so my goal this year is to double it and I am ahead of schedule. I will keep this goal going until I get to the ultimate goal of covering my basic living expenses.
Doubling is already ambitious! good luck with your goal.
Good Luck… very interested to see how you get on with this challenge Pauline 🙂
Great project Pauline….Thanks for sharing your ideas. Wish you succes and post your results.
Thank you Mark.
Such a good idea! Good luck with this!
Good for your Pauline! I look forward to seeing where this takes you, stumbles if any along the way and what you learn from them. I think this is a great way to learn about how far we can challenge ourselves, just like I do with the grocery game. Cheers mate
Best of luck to you, Pauline! I love the idea of this challenge, and I will be trying to do one like it myself. 🙂 Of course, I first have to make some money online… hmm!
Thank you Alexandra! I takes some time but once it takes off you’re good.
Now this is a challenge I hope to one day be able to try myself. Best of luck in your adventures!
Thank you Adam!
Looking forward to reading up on how this goes! Seems like a plan you’ve thought through and are ready to tackle.
Looking forward to hearing more about the challenge and any challenges and successes. Right now my side hustle doesn’t pay for much, but I’m incredibly thankful for each extra gig. I’m still under $500 a month, but every little bit helps. So far the side hustle has been paying our condo fees.
nice! It is still something to be thankful for.
Big, audacious challenge Pauline. I dig it! Good luck with everything. I’ve already subscribed to your new blog and can’t wait to read along.
Thank you for your good wishes Amanda, and for subscribing!