August Wins and September Plans

I love months where there are 5 weeks because it usually means an opportunity to earn more. Since most of my clients are in Upwork, this means rejoicing that there is 1 more Wednesday on top of the regular 4 Wednesdays each month.

August has been a crazy ride despite my continued laziness and procrastination. In fact, I earned around $2,700 gross income this month — the second highest for 2019 so far.

This brings my average income for the year to around $2,200 gross.

Expenses

I still haven’t made any changes to my expenses regardless. But I am hoping not to add any more to it, business-wise. Well, okay, that may not be entirely true as I may be venturing into another form of business which I will explain later in the post.

So far, my business and personal expenses combined is still around Php100k, which is the average money we spend. Wowza. That’s a lot, no? For August, I shelled out almost Php30,000 for Q2 taxes. I didn’t tell the partner about it, of course.

Other remaining expenses I want to tackle this September include:

• Personal loan (mom): 20,000
• Personal loan (friend): 10,000
• Last credit card: 30,000 — hope to negotiate to lower this down
• Home renovations: 35,000 — we made a partial loan for this one
• Dentist visit: 3,000

Adding new sources of income

Now that I have some sort of stable income from my freelancing (let’s keep it at $2,000), I am aiming to reach $5,000/month by December.

I am currently sitting at a 50% profit margin and my one-year goal would be to reach $10,000/month. This has been my forever goal, it looks like.

My plan includes:

Venturing into local dropshipping/e-commerce. I just sort of signed up for this one and classes start Sept 16. My dad actually initially enrolled a few months ago but didn’t get to continue because he thinks it has a steep learning curve for him. So I asked the course owner if she could have me join the FB group for the next batch and just use my dad’s login details. She gave it to me for free! I expect to shell around 5,000–10,000 on this for the second half of the month.

Working on my affiliate income. I have several sites I just renewed domains and have one-year hosting with, and plan to add a few more in the coming months, perhaps focus on creating Amazon niche sites in the process. For now, I will start with my existing sites and use whatever free resources and current courses I already have. I also don’t plan on shelling out more money on this yet except for the email service, and that means having to write the articles on my own. I really need to commit and double down on this area if I want this to work.

• HMA — This is my travel blog which is somewhat doing well in terms of traffic and rankings. The plan would be to clean up and delete old, irrelevant articles, update the ones with the best traffic, create at least 5 money posts for the month and plan the overall layout of the content.
• TCS — This is for my freelance business and targets two types of customers: my clients and aspiring virtual assistants. I already have topics for both types of visitors but just need the time to focus on writing them, planning social media (doing FB lives or creating YouTube tutorials), and creating money posts as well.
• MMB — This is a site I plan to grow as more of a make money online site. I know it’s much like all the other sites out there so my angle would be tech help for *mom* bloggers. This would help those who want to work from home whether as a freelancer or as a blogger, and I can tie this with the content/course I plan on creating in TCS.
• BH — This is more a passion project for now, tackling personal finance topic. I will probably make this targeted towards the Filipino audience since it would be difficult for me to write about finance for US readers. There will certainly be more general topics that foreign readers can relate to, but for now, that’s the plan. Thus, this will hopefully evolve into something more lifestyle-ish, like Lifehacker or The Budget Mom, for the Pinoy readers. The money posts will most likely be affiliate posts to Lazada, a personal finance ebook and a link to the course I’m offering over at TCS/MMB.

Courses. I’ve already sort of planned out the courses I want to offer, and thankfully, they circle around the topics that I already discuss in most of my sites. So…yes, they can all be used to direct students there.

The courses will be around funnels (for my clients; thus helping supplement my freelance income), a course for VAs and a membership site teaching tech (which will help VAs and bloggers alike).

Action Plan

Now that I have written all these things down, it might be easier to come up with a better plan on how to tackle this beast of a goal. My next action steps would be to:

1. Create a schedule. I currently have 2 retainer clients, several ad-hoc ones, 1 short-term project, and 2 long-term projects (at least a month).
2. Do a content audit for all sites. Thankfully, 3 of the sites have lesser than 10 posts in them and the biggest one is the travel blog.
3. Create a content calendar. This includes the posts I aim to write. Of course, I aim for impossible goals (lol and end up doing nothing). Right now, I’ll aim to do just 1 post a week for each of the sites but hopefully do up to 3.
4. Be more visible. My content plan for TCS will also include showing up more through videos on Facebook, and maybe on YouTube and possibly a podcast later down the road.
5. Start my office. We’re updating our AC at home, which I’m really excited about, and then installing new windows and a door as well. This makes me really excited and I’m hoping we could install a small table in the room that I can use as a temporary second office (because it’s too hot downstairs). I am also hoping to get the partner started on our crate bookshelf this month.

Future plans

I just wanted to write this here before I forget. I do have so many plans, especially those involving improvements in the home.

Last week, The International (DOTA championship) ended and I found out that next year’s will happen in Sweden. I let my mind wander (without telling the partner because he’ll shut me out again for losing focus haha) and checked out how to get there. I will probably mean preparing at least a million, or earning around Php3–4 million gross income in the next 9-12 months or so. I found out that goal isn’t so bad after all, because it just meant earning $5,000/month, which was my goal.

So anyway, I checked out flights, visas, and revisited my dream of doing the Trans-Siberian trail via train. I got really excited — we’d be starting in Malaysia and making our way up, passing through several other Southeast Asian countries which shouldn’t be much of a problem; then, China, Mongolia, and Russia; then fly off to Netherlands or direct to Sweden.

Let’s see where my plans take us next year?

See you!