Happy November! With Halloween behind us and Thanksgiving just around the corner, life is pretty fun right now. The weather here in North Carolina is beautiful this time of year with generally cool nights and pleasant days. And the leaves on the trees grow more vibrant each day.
We did a modified Halloween this year without trick or treating for the kids. However, we did manage to walk a couple of miles around the neighborhood looking at decorations while handing out our own candy to our kids. Plus our neighborhood organized a Halloween parade where the candy-givers drove around tossing candy to all the kids dressed up for Halloween! Next up for us is improvising a Thanksgiving dinner outside with family in two weeks.
October was a good month overall in financial terms. Our net worth dipped by $4,000 to end the month at $2,162,000. Spending was relatively modest at $1,624 while our income was phenomenal at $5,968 for the month of October.
Let’s jump into the details from last month.
Income
Investment income totaled $1,592 in October. Our equity index funds and ETFs pay dividends quarterly at the end of March, June, September, and December with some payments arriving at the beginning of the next month. Here’s more on our dividend investments.
Blog income totaled $1,496 for the month which was a bit higher than the $1,402 earned in September.
My early retirement lifestyle consulting income (“consulting”) was $625 for the month of October which represents four and a half hours of consulting sessions including some repeat clients.
The “deposit income” totaled $870 in October. The largest bit of deposit income came from a $525 cash back sign up bonus offer on the US Bank Business Cash credit card.
The State of North Carolina gave us $335 in stimulus money to “help with kid-related expenses” related to the pandemic. We have spent a bit gearing up for virtual schooling and this probably covers all of those expenses and then some.
The final $10 in deposit income came from cash back and incentive bonuses from the Ebates.com and Mrrebates.com online shopping portals (some of which was earned from you readers signing up through these links).
If you sign up for Ebates/Rakuten through this link and make a qualifying $40 purchase through Ebates/Rakuten, you’ll get a $40 sign up bonus (limited time only; normal bonus is $10 after a $25 purchase).
I decided to create a few new income categories in Personal Capital to track my smaller side hustle streams of income.
I sold a couple more old computer games and electronics on eBay and made $54 net of sales fees and shipping costs.
I split out our Youtube Google Adsense earnings from my blog income since the blog is independent of my personal youtube channel. Youtube earnings totaled $304 for last month. This income mostly comes from a couple of DIY home improvement videos that Mrs. Root of Good filmed and edited (starring me!).
The final bit of income for October was a new source of income to me. It’s called “tradeline sales” and is a bit controversial. I earned $1,025 for what amounts to lending my good credit lines to others to help them improve their credit scores.
In a nutshell, tradeline sales work like this:
- I add an authorized user to a credit card of mine
- The authorized user never gets the actual credit card and doesn’t even know who I am
- The new authorized user has my line of credit reported on their credit report (without my name)
- Their credit history looks really good after that
- I get paid by a company that buys and sells these tradelines (the “middleman”)
This is my first time trying out tradeline sales so I’ll reserve my thoughts on it until I’m more familiar with it. Maybe I’ll do a big write up and share some links, tips, and tricks in the future.
The biggest risk is that a credit card company decides they don’t like me any more and they close one or all of my credit cards issued by them. That would be inconvenient but not life-altering. And in the meantime I expect to earn a few thousand dollars per year for what amounts to a few hours of clerical work of adding and removing authorized users every 3-4 months.
If you’re interested in tracking your income and expenses like I do, then check out Personal Capital (it’s free!). All of our savings and spending accounts (including checking, money market, and five credit cards) are all linked and updated in real time through Personal Capital. We have accounts all over the place, and Personal Capital makes it really easy to check on everything at one time.
Personal Capital is also a solid tool for investment management. Keeping track of our entire investment portfolio takes two clicks. If you haven’t signed up for the free Personal Capital service, check it out today (review here).
Tracking spending was one of the critical steps I took that allowed me to retire at 33. And it’s now easier than ever with Personal Capital.
Expenses
Now let’s take a look at October expenses:
In total, we spent $1,624 during October which is about $1,700 less than our regularly budgeted $3,333 per month (or $40,000 per year). Groceries and healthcare topped the spending categories for the month.
Detailed breakdown of spending:
Groceries – $484:
Grocery expenses were fairly average at $484 for the month. We tend to spend around $500-550 per month.
This month, our grocery spending was slightly reduced due to obtaining 100+ persimmons for free from my mother in law’s garden. This offset $10-20 worth of spending on fresh fruits for the month.
I’m still using Walmart Grocery pick up service several times per month along with visits to Aldi, Lidl, and Food Lion.
The Walmart grocery pickers put together your order for you and you just drive up and click a button on the Walmart app to get them to bring the order out to you. The best part is you pay the same low prices as they offer in-store to all their customers and there is no delivery fee.
If you want to try Walmart Grocery, you can take $10 off your first $50+ order with my referral link. Enjoy!
Ibotta
I just signed up for another “deal” app called Ibotta. It works well with Walmart Grocery online orders. You link your Walmart Grocery account through the Ibotta app. Then you click the Ibotta offers you want through their app to add to your Ibotta account (that’s the critical part). Shop like you normally would on the Walmart Grocery app (or Walmart Grocery website with Ibotta browser extension installed). Once you check out and pick up your Walmart order, the Ibotta app automatically gives you cash back based on the qualifying items bought in your Walmart Grocery order.
Some of the offers are ridiculously easy to qualify for like “complete any shopping trip for $0.50”, “buy a banana $0.25”, “buy cheese $0.25” and it’s really that simple. Other offers are for a “free item” like $1.25 off a 2 liter Pepsi Zero Sugar that costs $1.25.
They also offer the deals with a half dozen other online grocery providers. Or link your grocery store loyalty card to their app and they will automatically credit the cash back from offers that way. For those stores that don’t have a loyalty card like Aldi, you can scan the receipt into the Ibotta app after you get home.
Right now they are giving away a full Thanksgiving meal worth about $20 at Walmart. If you want to sign up and try out the app, then feel free to use my Ibotta referral link and we will both get a small benefit. I’m at $40 worth of cash back after about 2 weeks and it’s on products that I would normally buy anyway.
Healthcare/Medical/Dental – $358:
Our 2020 healthcare premiums are $123 per month thanks to very generous Affordable Care Act subsidies that we receive due to our low ~$40,000 per year Adjusted Gross Income. The benefit of being “poor” on our tax return.
During October, Mrs. Root of Good visited the doctor for her annual checkup and had copays and coinsurance totaling $171.
Both of the adults in our household bought dental insurance since the premiums are anticipated to be much less than the actual dental care we receive during 2020. The premiums total $64 per month for the two of us.
Taxes – $291:
I bought another $300 Visa prepaid debit card to pay my annual property taxes. The prepaid card came with a $9 discount after factoring in purchase fees, so the total was only $291. I’ve already paid $600 of our $1,900 annual property tax bill using discounted Visa debit cards.
Utilities – $229:
In October I paid $151 for the city water, sewer, and trash bill.
The natural gas bill for hot water was $0 since we got a $150 rebate in the form of a bill credit when we installed our new tankless water heater in May. I still have over $50 in credit balance on the natural gas account which should last until the winter heating bills start to arrive in another two months.
Our electricity bill was $78 for October. We only needed to use the air conditioning a little during the October billing period, so the bill dropped by half versus the September bill.
General Merchandise – $162:
We bought a bunch of small things during October including:
- an office chair like this one but only $50 at Walmart
- a computer mouse
- 2 sacks of fire ant killer bait for the yard
- a toaster oven
- a bunch of craft supplies and miscellany at Dollar Tree
Gifts – $41:
Super duper top secret Christmas gifts for our kids. The super duper top secret classification is required in case they read this blog post.
Cable/Satellite – $36:
We pay $18 per month for a local reduced rate package due to having a lower income and having kids. 30 mbit/s download, 4 mbit/s upload.
I paid for two months of service during October.
Restaurants – $15:
Another month of spending almost nothing at restaurants. In October, the only “dining out” we did was grabbing a baker’s dozen of assorted pastries and donuts from Baker’s Dozen donuts. Quite a steal at only $15 for the whole batch. The apple fritters and bear claws on the left are each bigger than my hand!
Travel – $10:
I bought Hilton Honors hotel points for $10. The deal was really good. Purchase 1,000 points for $10 and they double it. Plus another 5,000 points for free with any purchase. So in total, I bought 7,000 Hilton points for $10. In really cheap parts of the world, you only need 10,000 points for a free night at a ~$50 per night hotel.
In other travel news, I broke into my stockpile of Chase Ultimate Rewards points and booked two cruises for free using their travel portal combined with the 25% bonus redemption option from my Chase Ink Preferred card.
The first cruise sails in June 2021 out of Miami. Our tentative plan is to “stop by Miami for a week before we head to the west coast on our road trip” in summer of 2021. Obviously we won’t know what cruising and traveling will look like in June, but at least we have something to look forward to if it works out.
The second cruise is just for me and Mrs. Root of Good in October of 2021. We found a fabulous deal on a balcony room aboard the relatively new MSC Meraviglia. The total cost in dollar terms was under $900 for the two of us. That fare includes basically all of our on board gratuities thanks to a $200 on board credit for past guests. That translates to 70,000 Chase Ultimate Reward points. I feel pretty confident this October cruise will actually happen!
If you want to score free travel or big cash back from credit cards, there are several cards currently offering 50,000 points or more. These points can be redeemed for $500 cash or $500+ in free flights or hotel stays. Compare travel and cash back credit card deals.
Gasoline – $0:
We didn’t need to buy gas in October but I did refill half a tank in early November just in case we had a hurricane, civil insurrection, or snow storm. So far, we haven’t had any of those so far but “better safe than sorry”, right?
We are driving about 100 miles per month for 2020 so far. The family hasn’t taken any big trips and our kids are in virtual school. I ride my bike to run a lot of errands around town, so there isn’t much of a demand for driving right now.
Total Spending for 2020 – Year to Date
Our spending totals $25,179 for the first ten months of the year. This is about $8,000 less than the $33,333 we budgeted for ten months of our $40,000 annual early retirement budget.
The spending numbers make it look like we don’t do anything. But in reality, we’ve been busy little consumers most of the year. Our travel spending has been pretty low in 2020 in dollar terms, but we just got a couple thousand dollars worth of cruises for free using reward points. And we’ll be ramping up travel spending as travel gets easier in the spring and summer time frame (hopefully).
We did have a couple of big, lumpy multi-thousand dollar expenses this year. Mrs. Root of Good’s root canal was almost $2,000 even after factoring in the insurance reimbursement. And we spent a net of $3,250 on a new water heater.
The good news is that we budget for these big expenses every year, so it’s no big deal to pay for these “unexpected” costs. We expect them to occur on a fairly regular basis over the several decades of our early retirement.
Monthly Expense Summary for 2020:
- January – $2,682
- February – $2,618
- March – $1,600
- April – $1,324
- May – $4,692
- June – $2,311
- July – $3,035
- August – $3,468
- September – $1,830
- October – $1,624
Summary of annual spending from all years of early retirement:
- 2014 – $34,352
- 2015 – $23,802
- 2016 – $38,991
- 2017 – $31,708
- 2018 – $29,058
- 2019 – $25,630
- 2020 (year to date) – $25,179
Net Worth: $2,162,000 (-$4,000)
October was a roller coaster of a month! Our net worth shot up more than $100,000 by the middle of the month then came crashing back down to earth at the end of the month. We only lost $4,000 by month end, but the path to get there was full of bumps.
As I write this, the stock market is sitting significantly higher than it was at the end of October. November numbers will be mind-blowingly good if the market stays where it is right now.
We got a nice fat post-election bump. I guess the stock market approves of our new president elect? Or the market loves the good news about an upcoming vaccine? Something is making the stock market happy and it makes my investment portfolio smile too.
I’m still at roughly 90% equities and 10% bonds and don’t plan on doing much until the end of the year when I’ll move around some money for tax purposes.
Life update
It’s been more business as usual here in the Root of Good household. We have been eagerly awaiting some news of a vaccine approval so that we can gain clarity for our planned summer travels. It’s looking more realistic at this point!
The good news is that our summer road trip doesn’t really require a ton of advanced planning. And we can focus on booking refundable lodging options in case we need to alter our route or cancel our trip altogether. We will start researching and planning the trip in more detail in the new year.
Until then, we are staying put and not worrying about travel. Fortunately all of our family live here in the Raleigh area so we don’t need to travel far to visit our families for the holidays.
How are your Thanksgiving and Christmas plans shaping up? Will these holidays look different for you this year?
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Hi Justin!
Another great post and solid numbers once again! Thanks for sharing what “tradeline sales” are. This seems like an interesting way of generating income but we will be waiting on your feedback in the month to get a good “risk assessment” on this 🙂
As for travel, we are grateful to be in Taiwan and have met a lot of people tired of being stuck in the USA moving here. Since the borders are still close to foreigners, the only way is to get residency, which actually isn’t that difficult by applying through the Taiwan Gold Card (which we did) as long as you earn a US salary. If you or your audience are interested, we wrote a detailed post on the step we follow to get a one-way ticket into Taiwan and enjoy everything this beautiful country has to offer (read: https://www.nomadnumbers.com/taiwan-employment-gold-card-application-guide/).
Cheers
Taiwan sounds nice! I know Go Curry Cracker enjoys it there.
Ooohhh, that Tradeline Sales sounds like the sketchiest “legit” thing I’ve heard of in quite some time. I’d be surprised if that doesn’t get shut down somehow in the future. I’m a big fan of gaming the system, but if I understand it right this seems…well, morally sketchy. Keep us updated!
Sketchiest legit thing 🙂 Yes, that’s a good description. It’s been a thing for a loooong time apparently so I don’t know that shutting it down will necessarily happen any time soon. I’m just slow and cautious so I have waited a loooong time to dip my toes in the water.
Please do keep us posted on your tradeline journey. I’ve been tempted by it for a year or so but haven’t mustered the courage to try it out.
I recommend avoiding it. I can’t get into specifics, but I’ve been involved in some investigations against companies that do this and they are almost 100% shady. Though my role has been looking at it from the person they’re “helping” but often get taken advantage of.
I can’t really argue with that since I don’t know what companies you have experience with. I’ll say that I have researched it a bit and there are a lot of shady players. There are two companies I am somewhat familiar with that do a relatively good job of screening candidates so as to avoid shutdowns for us cardholders, plus the potential for being involved in shady business. That said, I’m going to wait and see how this experiment goes before I dive too deep!
What an amazing persimmon bounty! Curious, what did you guys do with all that fresh fruit? Did you make any baked goods or preserves, or just eat fresh?
Great post, thanks for sharing.
Just ate them fresh (after peeling them). They last for several weeks on the counter.
“Plus our neighborhood organized a Halloween parade where the candy-givers drove around tossing candy to all the kids dressed up for Halloween!”
Wow, that’s very creative! Glad your neighbourhood came up with a creative way for kids to still safely celebrate Halloween.
Congrats on a great October. We are staying put until next year, when hopefully travel will be able to resume again. Hopefully your cruising plans works out too. Must be really tough to be a cruise line right now. They’re probably praying hard for a vaccine.
Yes – cruise lines are ready to get that vaccine going and get back to sailing I’m sure. And we’re right there next to them waiting for everything to get back to normal too!
Another great post!!! Love it!!
Thanks!
You are an inspiration. Keep up the good work (keeping expenses down).
Thank you!
What fully-refundable lodging are you planning/considering to reserve? It sounds more like hotel rooms, because whenever I look at Airbnb or vrbo, they have all kinds of stipulations or feels for cancellations that make no sense reserving unless I know I’ll show up there. Hotels have been easier.
If you could share sites that have easy and free cancelations for houses/apartments/condos, I’m all ears.
TY
Some hotels, some airbnb, some nothing! We could book stuff last minute once we’re on the road. As far as airbnbs, some offer flexible refund policies. However in my experience cancelling those from our busted summer 2020 trip, I think airbnb only lets you cancel 3 “fully refundable” bookings before they decide to keep your airbnb service fees.
What a beautiful photo of that heron!
Glad to hear you are enjoying things. Be well, everyone.
Yeah these herons are awesome. So huge!
Thanks for another great post Justin. Question on the Youtube earning, was the $304 one month worth of earning or accumulated and deposited this month ? Also super curious on how the earning was made up of ~ thanks !
That’s per month. 🙂
We got really lucky as 1 particular video took off and has 1+ million views now.
Breakdown of earnings – not sure what you mean. I guess the regular youtube ads are it? It’s really just a ton of views on 2 main videos that produce 95% of youtube revenues.
Justin,
Great monthly update. It’s been 1 year since I had my consultation with you – that information solidified my retirement plans (at age 50, little order than some folks here) last January and it has been right on track ever since.
I was not familiar with Tradeline Sales – looking forward to a future deep dive.
Good to hear from you Tim! I hope to have some more info on the tradeline sales in the future once I have a chance to try it myself and see if I hit any problems as it’s not entirely without risk.
Been looking into trade lines too. What website are you using?
BoostCredit101 was the company I have most of them with right now. I don’t think they are taking new customers at the moment though.
Great post Justin,
I’m also interested in the YouTube earnings, I thought YouTube had made a rule where you can’t monetise videos until you have 50k subscribers but I see you’re a bit short of that (It just increased by 1 just now though!).
Have I got it wrong?
Cheers
You need a combination of 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours over the last 12 months for your channel to be monetized.
Sounds about right. I was fortunate to have those stats when they implemented the monetization rules so I could still monetize what we already have posted.
How did you choose which card(s) to use for the tradeline sales? Did you take any precautions to make sure the person that you’re adding doesn’t have a way to get the card or anything like that?
I put all my old cards with high limits up for sale.
As for security, the credit card company only sends the authorized user cards to me. The only thing the authorized user knows is that they have been added to a credit card at the particular bank and what the credit limit is. They don’t know my name, where I live, or anything else about me. If they call up to request a duplicate card, they won’t be able to access the account because they have no clue who is the primary cardholder, nor what the credit card number is, or anything else to access the account over the phone or online.
I’m wondering about Christmas this year. Normally, I go home to visit my family (I live abroad) but this year may be the first year I’m having to celebrate alone
Oh no! Thank goodness for video chatting so at least you can keep in touch. 🙂
Regarding Thanksgiving plans – our adult son lives in town, so we will get together for Thanksgiving somehow – even if we have to eat outside! Our daughter lives in New York, so we won’t be able to get together for Thanksgiving this year – except maybe on Zoom.
Numbers got bad here so we ended up cancelling the big 28 person gathering a couple days before Thanksgiving 🙁 Still swapped some food around between families’ households but kept our distance for the most part.
There is a mega tradelines thread on the Mr. Money Moustache forum: https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/share-your-badassity/selling-tradelines-piggybacking-part-ii-$1000hr-20-40kyr-side-gig/
Good thread. I’ve been following it for several years now.
We are desperately awaiting vaccine news. We have the travel bug. Want to do some exploring with the kids while they are little. Still waiting to see if we are going to fly next year or do some more road trips.
Love that blue heron. Our kids love them and are always looking out for them on our hikes.
We’re all there patiently awaiting the vaccine news too! It keeps getting better and better so hopefully in 3-6 months things will look radically different (or at least much better days will be imminent).
Fantastic month! I have never heard of tradeline sales before. That is a new concept to me. Don’t know if I would do it yet; however, I’m excited to see if it works out for you and if it is worth exploring further.
Bert
Fingers crossed. I’ll report back if it continues to run smoothly for me.
I’ve dug pretty deep into tradelines twice before (that MMM thread). I’ll be interested to see what you have to say about it down the line. Seemed like a fun experiment to me!
Glad to hear you’re on the Ibotta train! We’ve pulled over $1K out of it in the past few years. Great system. Of course, you’re giving away your shopping data—but seems worthwhile at least for how the system works today. We still only send in the camera images of paper receipts—more work, but feels more private.
That Hilton points deal is crazy! I missed the boat! I hope they don’t devalue too heavily with the pandemic.
We spent some time a year or two ago in Merida, Mexico. The Hilton deals in Mexico are (were?) crazy good. Several 5,000 point/night spots there. Great!
Fun update Justin! Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours.
Ibotta feels a little too much like “couponing” to me to be worthwhile but I’ll keep an eye on it for now. Fun way to make some free $ on stuff we’re already buying.
Yeah the Hilton deal was pretty slick. I think there are still some decent 10k redemption options out there but they may have largely replaced the 5k points/night in Merida and elsewhere. I can’t recall but I figure $10 for 7k points was probably a great value.
Justin,
I am amazed at how you continue to keep your expenses so low. I have some work to do 😊 Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.
Brian
Happy Thanksgiving to you, too!
Amazing results as usual. You really have the essence of the FIRE movement, not like GCC and others who are just burning cash in luxurious clubs, cars and bragging around. Congratulations for the living and keeping the FIRE spirit alive in all of us still pursuing in the middle of all this craziness out there.
GoCurryCracker has it, why not spend it? A $10,000 club membership isn’t what I would personally spend the $ on, but then again he has a lot more cash than me 🙂 That said, I am glad to still be regarded as a somewhat “frugal” FIRE blogger 🙂
With spending so low, I was wondering if you do traditional IRA to Roth IRA conversions or some other way to essentially take advantage of the extra room in the lower tax brackets. I don’t think I could get down as low as you are, I simply spend more money outside the house, but thinking in the future I could fit inside the 12% maybe even the 10%. Curious if your strategy would be at least use all the 10%, all 10% and 12% or just let it ride for now.
Yes, I definitely use up some of the 10% or 12% bracket every year with Roth conversions since it doesn’t increase my taxes by much at all.
Justin – do you have any updates on the trade line side hustle? Looking into getting into one myself.
Hello Justin. What trade line company do you use? Do you have recommendation for the best cards to sell your trade lines on? if you get a referral can you send over a link. I have thought about selling a trade line for a little extra money.
copy/paste from my July 2021 Early Retirement update article:
Boost Credit 101 takes credit cards issued by Barclays, Discover, TD Bank (Redcard/Target Card only), Citibank, Huntington Bank, Synch (Care Credit only), US Bank, Elan, Amex (Amex-branded only and no charge cards), Capital one, PNC, NFCU, and Chase.
I’ve used Boost Credit 101 for almost a year and from my research and personal experience they are the best and most reputable tradeline selling company.
If interested in selling tradelines, please email investorsupport at boostcredit101.com and make sure to mention that “Root of Good” sent you their way if you want me to get a little referral bonus from them (or don’t mention me if you don’t want to!).
Include this info when you email Boost Credit 101:
Lender and card type: (e.g. Discover It or Citibank Double Cash) It can’t just be “Citibank Visa”
Opening date: (month and year)
Credit limit
The statement date: (aka closing date, this is not the same date as your payment due date)
Good luck with tradeline sales if you go that route. And thank you if you mention that “Root of Good” referred you to Boost Credit 101!