InvestorBlogger

I’m failing to grab any traction on the online market. But somehow the money for blogging keeps coming in, albeit at a slower pace (nothing compared to what has happened to the Dividend Income!).

Having blogged at the same URL for over two years, I recently split the blogs into two primary threads (Blogging) and (Personal Finance). As a result I decided to split the income news. So this report is only part of my online success: online ONLY! The next few months should produce a lot of non-online income, as well.

The other change that is still making its effect felt is that I would rather not count money (some of which I may NEVER see) that is not actual income. This makes counting the income somewhat easier as I only have three or four places, and can simply add up the actual cash. The downside is I can’t count income I haven’t received yet, which includes a Google Ad Check, some cash from a client who’s expected to pay in December for work done in November, but I’m not changing the position: If it isn’t in my hand, it isn’t real!

So this is November’s results. Overall, it’s been not too bad a month considering. That makes a handy extra amount of cash, especially after spending so much money on travel this summer.

• Networking Ads – $109.08
• Private Ads – $138.57
• blogging – $126.51
  $374.16

I’ve had a lot of success with one of the blogging networks these past few months, and the number of assignments has kept up until late November. So earnings on that front have been fairly consistent. There was no income from consultation or hosting this month, though, and I’m not counting affiliate income either, since I haven’t seen any checks for that. If you would like to read more about my own money making philosophy, check out A Man and a Plan.

It’s time again for some blogging income news. As you know, I recently split the blogs into two primary threads (blogging) and (Personal Finance). As a result I decided to split the income news. So this report is only part of my online success: online ONLY!

One other change that is making itself felt is the change to cash accounting. Rather than count promised money (some of which I may NEVER see), I am now ONLY counting money that ends up in one of my CASH accounts, a Broker Account or Paypal. I still accept cash, too! I’m no longer counting airy-fairy money either. If it isn’t in my hand, it isn’t real!

So this is October’s results. Overall, it’s been not too bad a month!

• Networking Ads – $139.38
• Private Ads – $164.22
• blogging – $76.50
• Sales – $15.00
  $395.10

I’ve had a lot of success with one of the blogging networks this past few months, and the number of assignments has kept up. So earnings on that front have been fairly consistent. There was no income from consultation or hosting this month, though, and I’m not counting affiliate income either, since I haven’t seen any checks for that.

I’m slowly increasing blogging on some of my other sites as I learn how to manage the networks. They’re as a result seeing some growth in traffic. It’s a sobering thought that Darren Rowse at Problogger once said that he makes MORE money from his non-blogging blogs than from Problogger. That’s something I should strive for. If you would like to read more about my own money making philosophy, check out A Man and a Plan.

Well, the market is back up today (but with the poor performance of the economy, it’s going to be a couple of months before we know the after effects), and in the interests of ‘coming clean’, I’ve decided to reveal what my current stock holdings are. And when it was done, I was staggered how much the portfolio had gone down.

To view the entire sheet, just click on the image. What isn’t obvious from this chart, though, is the regular dividends that get paid into this account.

In 2007, they totalled $1031.53 and in 2008, they totalled $1078.24 with the prospect of another couple of months. In fact, the last couple of stock purchases had been made from the proceeds accumulating in the account. However, with the markets in turmoil, it’s likely that several or more of these dividends may be cut or axed altogether. Bank of America has already announced changes to its dividend as of this month. We also hold several thousand dollars in Mutual Funds via one of our insurance policies, but the details are quite old.

Since, 2001 I’ve focused more on investing for dividends as I believed that dividends do pay back some cash to the investor. Since purchasing my first dividend stocks, I’ve actually earned quite a lot over the years and managed to claw my stocks back to more than just par with 2001. But the last few weeks have eaten away approximately 45~50% of my portfolio’s nominal value. I had been underwater for a while (not including dividends).

The next few months are going to highlight how successful this process of choosing dividends has been, what volatility these dividends have, and whether dividends can actually bring some relief to the current mania. This is the next part of my gradual revelation of my personal assets, and once each part is out there, I will bring it together on a regular basis!

After the modest spending of the last few months, I was greeted by a mighty thwack with September’s Bill. The damage was nearly NT$80,000! So what happened? How could it be so high?

Actually, most credit card statements tell a story: this was no exception. It’s a story of three parts.

Part 1: The business

We’ve been on an energy economy drive for the past four or five months, and the benefits are slowly beginning to pay off in lower electricity bills and lower carbon emissions. It’s staggering how little changes in behavior can have such significant effects: lighting choices, replacing older equipment, changing usage patterns, etc.. I don’t have complete stats for 2008, but I was surprised at how we’ve saved nearly 10% of our annual electricity bill, and there is still one major bill to go. Stay tuned!

Replacing A/Cs is perhaps the most notable way to cut energy use. Our oldest A/Cs are nearly 8 years old, and due for replacement, if nothing else because more modern A/Cs are comparatively more efficient. So after replacing one, we bit the bullet and replaced the one in the office (likely the single heaviest use appliance in the entire school). This month we replaced one that had been malfunctioning in the classroom ever since there was a power outage. It had just been blowing warm air, and wasting our money.

• Damage: NT$48,800 plus installation NT$1450.

Was it worth it? Certainly. Will we save money in the long run? Likely enough to pay for the entire machine! Are our customers/staff happier? For sure.

Part 2: UK Trip

The second part of the story: my unexpected trip to the UK. It was late September when I decided to visit the UK to see my family and friends (an entirely social trip!) but long needed. Maintaining long distance relationships is at best very challenging, at worst almost impossible.

Though, this is the complete list of credit card expenses until September 19th, it was NOT the entire trip expenditure. Woops!

• Phone Bill: NT$1154 – including national and roaming charges;
• Nolita Restaurants: NT$6630 – a meal for my friends, Jane and Philip in Hatfield, which was surprisingly reasonable given the restaurant, but didn’t include much alcohol – one was exhausted and one was driving!
• Boots and Asda: NT$1244 – daily expenses (esp. when I couldn’t cash my traveler’s checks);

Part 3: Online Related Expenses

I finally bought a ‘puter that I could put in my bag. One of the ironies though was that I bought a machine that was made by a Taiwanese company in Shanghai shipped to England and sold cheaper than you could buy in Taiwan at the time.

Mine’s the blue one! Of course, not running Linpus. Sorry!

Enter the Acer AspireOne – Net Book. It’s proved very useful, and I’m seriously glad that I got it. I was able to make calls through SKYPE, surf the Net, listen to music and even do more than just rudimentary blogging on that little 8.9″ screen.

• Damage: NT$17,310. Of course, being an overseas customer, I may be able to reclaim part of my tax (approx. NT$1800) making the deal even better value for me!

I also paid a writer who is helping me co-author a series of posts on the Dow Jones Indexed Companies. I also paid Google an AdWords activation fee.

• Total cost for this: NT$1319.

And, finally, after earning points on the airconditioner purchases at Carrefour, bonus points on our credit card bonus points, we also earned a little cash back on some of my purchases: NT$-213.

• I’m still not exactly sure what purchases triggered this, but still every little helps to reduce the total damage: NT$79,694.

There were no interest or penalties added to this month’s credit cards, and my secondary card had no outstanding purchases at all. oh, and I nearly forgot the NT$2000 life insurance premium that was paid.

It’s funny how credit card expenses can highlight the unfolding stories that compromise our lives. Have a look through your credit card statement? Can you see a story developing there?

• Oh, and by the way: most frivolous expense trip – Hong Kong Airport Starbucks Americano and water bought with a credit card HK$39.00. Just silly.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the feed for this blog! Click here…

Well, it’s time for the blog income report. As I noted a few days, I’m now making several changes to how I report my blog income: First I’m separating it into two parts, and now I’m also counting only cash received.

A lot of companies promise to pay for work completed, but months later I’m still sitting on nearly $200 worth of outstanding receivables. For a short time, though, it may look like I have double-counted some income. For blogging income, this will be most obvious.

So here goes, my first blog only income report: taken straight from the cash in my account.

• blogging: $69.02
• Advertising: $153.88
• Total: $222.90

Naturally, this looks smaller than it should be because there are still outstanding payments to be made from some advertisers that amount to nearly $220.00. September was also a quieter month.

Stats, Traffic and more

Stats wise, I was building up nicely to over 2000 visitors this past month, with over 4000 page views in the month, until I went to the UK. On my travels, I was quite unable to keep up the usual speed of posting, and the recent crescendo of visitors fell apart somewhat, though attrition wasn’t as severe as during the summer. I have somehow retained about 60-80 visitors a day, a PR-2 ranking from Google, and improving visibility on IzeaRanks.

A Special Offer

I’ve also welcomed several advertisers, too on InvestorBlogger’s sidebar, and soon-to-be 125×125 ads. Keep your eyes peeled.

The new 125×125 ads are on special sale until September 30th December 31st – $12.00 per month for a square . Maximum of 3 out of 6 squares available with only one rotation per slot. So grab them now! There are four slots left!

updated: October 4th.

In previous issues of InvestorBlogger Dot Com, I published a combined income statement across all of my ‘businesses’. With the new channels, this became a little confusing as I wasn’t sure where to place certain categories of income.

From this month, I’ll be publishing separate accounts for each type of income. Also, I promised that I would work on a cash received basis. In fact, both accounts will be treated differently for obvious reasons.

• Dollar Traveler will publish income created from offline means: business, investing, bank interest, rental, etc.. Accounting will be cash received basis.
• Blogging Travails will focus on online sources of income that I have used: advertising services, blogging, online sales, hosting, etc.

If you want to monitor the totals, you will have to do a little detective work yourself as I may no longer publish the totals. However this money is accounted, I will still be focusing on the principles outlined in my post at the beginning of the year.

Each month for the past three years, I have been receiving regular dividends in my brokerage account. Previously, these were part of InvestorBlogger’s consolidated income. From this month I will be reporting these as separated income.

• Dividends = $111.19
• Interest Payments = $28.00*
• Other Income = $0.00
• Total = $139.19*

That’s pretty much it for this month. I will shortly detail my current holdings. Also, I terminated nearly NT$100K worth of CDs because the interest rate was so low at about 1.2%. I should be able to get nearly 2.6% by opening new accounts. Since most of my money is in CitiBank, I’ll also be looking to spread the risk a little by opening accounts in the Post Office (currently the highest interest rates on the Island).

*When I was in the UK, I stupidly entered the wrong PIN number (three times!) thinking it was the right number – it was the old 4 digit number, not the 6 digit number we regularly use in Taiwan. Account access frozen except by ATM machine, so I’m unable to figure out my exact details. It would have been $28, but I broke two CDs and turned them into spending cash. Oh, well. At least security is tight!

This amount has been rising for more than 2 years now, since I started focusing more on dividend income. Most of this money has been reinvested in stocks or in CDs as it comes around. The goal is that this money becomes considerably more, and the current market mess provides some good market opportunities for purchases.

I promised that I would be switching to cash accounting rather than counting each penny as I earned it. But then I realized that I’d be making the switch mid-year and in some cases I would be double counting some income, creating a false total.

Then in August, the changes that I had been planning for the blog for a while finally came together: InvestorBlogger became a multi-channel blog with separate and identifiable ‘channels’ on Finance and blogging. Those two are perhaps the strongest streams. Three additional channels were created for minor stuff, and so InvestorBlogger Dot Com has increased page views, readership, readers, RSS readers, page time and much more. Though each of the channels is still slowly building up steam, the benefits have been positive so far.

Since August 1st, I’ve published a number of great articles in both the primary channels, as well as the occasional piece in the others. I’ve worked hard on the SEO of each piece, including keywords, descriptions for both blogs and posts. I’ve added sitemaps for humans as well as search engines. I’m also extending advertising by joining new networks and working hard to promote the site on AdWords.

While I’ve been doing all of this, income to the blog has dropped somewhat to a less than spectacular $390.27 for August. This brings the total to a grand sum of $11,962.38. This is not bad for two years work and focus. I’ve really succeeded in making an extra $6000 or approx. $498.50 per month over 24 months.

So at this point, rather than switch to cash accounting. I will be ending these ‘consolidated’ accounts as I split the blog into two major parts. It’s quite difficult to know exactly where to put these reports. Rather than that, I’ll be splitting the reports into two: Online Income and Offline Income. Of course I’ll be keeping a track of the income myself, you’ll need to do a little detective work! Online Income will in future be posted in the Blogging Channel, while Offline Income will be posted in the Finance Channel.

So what did I learn? A number of things actually. I’ll be sharing them as the blog takes on these new directions.

One of the reasons I set up my blog on DollarTravels was to encourage me to put more effort into my financial life. While I’ve been very succesful as a blogger, and earned not a small amount of money!, I haven’t really posted any personal financial details on any of the blogs I write before. I do share my credit card spending from month to month, but I don’t share my expenses, my cashflow or my investment holdings at all.

I’ve already settled part of this discussion in my mind: I’m resolved to start posting my investment holdings at some point, but my own financial situation: somehow that seems like a whole new ballgame.

Privacy: is it that important?

Unlike Flexo who writes fairly anonymously, a lot of people in Taiwan actually know me, and they know where I live and work. So this would be highly personal reporting and attributable to some they know. I’m not yet convinced that this is a good thing. An article in Business Week that featured another Money blog actually has a source that is attributable, known and trackable. I don’t know if this is something I would like to be. Part of me urges caution, part of me wants to celebrate success and share failure with EVERYONE! I’m torn.

Breaking Taboos

Coming from Britain, where I grew up and with friends, personal financial details were rarely shared amongst even the closest relatives. We were brought up such that you didn’t talk about death, sex, politics, religion, health, and money! While some of these seem obviously inappropriate at certain times, such proscription seems so intolerable that it’s a wonder anyone was able to learn anything about any of these sensitive topics. So for me to discuss some aspects of our financial situation, it’s definitely running counter to my experience as a child or younger person.

The Power of the External

Having seen my blog help me focus my mind more on generation money through the number of routes that I choose, I can see how having an external pressure, a barometer, an audience, etc.. can help me keep on the straight and narrow. Perhaps it will stop me splurging on a third 28″ monitor or a brand new BMW when I can ill afford, perhaps not. Even the failures will provide a good lesson: I’m ever hopeful that our ‘shared experience’ online will help others develop their own self-discipline, goals and means, even when I have demonstrably failed.

So what should I do? Reveal ALL my personal financials, lift the veil on some of finances (e.g. Net Worth and Investments), or keep them away from prying eyes? Comment your answer if you dare. I’ll be making a decision by September 1st. I’d like to say that some from my audience helped me gain perspective whichever outcome I decide.

Well, it’s a real long time since I did a newspost for InvestorBlogger. But here it is… what’s going on with InvestorBlogger?

July Income Report: Changes Afoot

July was less than a stellar month on income for InvestorBlogger, bringing in an approx. $471.12. I’ll be including this but from July 1st I’ll be reporting on a strictly CASH basis. In other words, only money or cash that is received in my accounts will be recorded as an income. Affiliate income that is not paid out will be noted, but since different affiliate programs and advertising vendors have varying payout regulations, it will not be counted.

Only when I have the cash in one of my accounts, PayPal or Broker or Bank, will I record it in my cash received column. Unfortunately this will mean that some income will be double counted as I haven’t received it yet cash-wise, but counted it earlier as ‘income’. So I will keep an informal record towards the end of 2008, but from July 1st I will be releasing official results shortly!

• Bank Interest    $27.06
• Stockbroker    $122.50
• blogging    $97.50
• Advertising   $165.04
• Consulting    $59.02
• Total: $471.12

Google AdWords: Does it make Ad Sense?

One of the new things I’m trying is bringing traffic from AdWords. I finally signed up for a Google AdWords account; had my cards accepted and am now running ads for one of my pages. it’s pretty easy to set up, I was surprised. I’ve set up five different ads with different styles advertising my Make Money page. I’ve already had 6 clickthroughs already. I’m not expecting the campaign to yield any real traffic but so far the clicks are clicking away just as fast!

Perhaps the links on the page are too confusing or there are just too many links on that page. Anyway, at least I’m now learning the ropes of using AdWords type words. I am beginning to think up new ways to monetize this, but it’s all very new to me! Any tips? Any one?

I’ll be doing a post on this shortly once I have enough clicks to write a proper story about the whole thing!

Maxxing things out: The only way to go!

It’s true – I haven’t maximized the earnings on some fronts. In fact, I checked through my accounts and figured that I could be earning about $23 more per month, just by putting more of my ‘stagnant’ cash in better earning accounts. In fact, I just double checked my figures and found out that my savings are ‘less-’ optimized. With the money in the brokerage account, I figure I could earn about another $7 per month.

Here’s to maximizing the income! Anyway, next time you get your interest statement, make sure that your account is getting a decent rate! It’s easy to be too busy and overlook such ‘little’ things: truth is, you’re only cheating yourself if you do.

Best Wishes,
Kenneth