. In my last post, I looked at the details of my 2013 expenses, which totaled $37,807.
Now I'll look at my income.
The grand total is much higher than I thought it would be, but after working no less than three contract jobs, one part-time job, doing my freelance work and all the smaller miscellaneous money-makers, it was hard to keep track of.
My total gross income was: $48,761 and my net after taxes, which is what I actually lived on, was about $40,000.
Net wages from the five jobs mentioned above, plus partial unemployment when I worked part-time, came out to about $35,000, while the rest of my income was earned from many and varied sources, including:
Credit card rewards: $1324 (This doesn't include another $94 in earned in credit card gift cards).
Focus groups, product testing: $340
Manufacturers' rebates, promos: $191
Online surveys and forums: $117 (This doesn't include $519 in mostly Amazon gift cards I earned throughout the year.)
Garage sale: $101
We the Savers blog contest: $100 (I got paid for this today, but the blog won't post til next month, I'm told.)
Housecleaning chores done for family and friends: $384
So, all told, looks like I saved about $2,665 for the year. Not bad, considering I worked full-time for only 3.5 months of the year.
So of my net $40,000, about $5,500 of that was non-wage, unconventional income. So when I think about how hard it would have been to live on $34,500 without that extra $5,500, it helps motivate me to keep up all of the little diddly things I did to earn a hundred here or $50 there. At a higher income in the 70s or 80s, that little bit of extra money probably wouldn't matter so much, but at this income level it made a huge difference in livability and comfort.
The credit card rewards, I can clearly see, were the most lucrative among these things and took very little work, other than tracking my spending. Each time I think I've pretty much gotten to the end of bonus reward credit cards I can exploit, I come across a new one.
A look at my 2013 income
December 28th, 2013 at 12:26 am
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December 28th, 2013 at 05:58 pm 1388253528