Our Goals For December Were:
- Maintain the monthly earnings of the businesses at $2,305
- Grow our share of earnings from equities to a new monthly total of $266 passive income
- Work no more than 18 hours.
- Our total income goal (both active and passive) for September is then: $2,571 or an hourly rate of $143 per hour
Online Earnings
December was a quiet (and profitable) month. Really, there’s not much to report, except for a mistake on our part that we are choosing to (mostly) ignore.
What was our mistake? We didn’t order enough inventory.
With few exceptions, we sold out of inventory within the first two weeks of December.
Isn’t that a good thing? Well yes, but we could have made even more than we did this month. We left that money sitting on the table.
So why are we choosing to ignore this mistake? Come on, it’s 2020. We knew there would be increased sales thanks to the pandemic. We did everything right, we just had no way of foreseeing how much extra sales volume we would see.
Oh well. We made a mistake. We’ll fix it next pandemic.
So did we meet our goal? Nope. We spent a lot. Part of this was because the year is ending and the expenses we record for 2020 will help cut down on what is certain to be a record tax bill for us.
We also invested a bunch of extra cash this month as well. We have bought all the inventory we care to buy (for the moment) and saw the opportunity to meet our 2020 goal of increasing our share of earnings from stocks by 15% (More on that in a moment.)
Our Online Earnings for December: $634
Hours Worked
We took it easy this month.
Like, real easy.
Seriously, I’m kind of embarrassed to put this out there. We worked 7 hours in December. Combined. Three for the store. Four for the Blog.
But in all seriousness. If there was ever a year to not work in December, this was it. Our daughter is seven this year and this was definitely one of the best Christmases ever. We are endlessly thankful that we got to be around for so much of it.
Passive Income From Investments
Our goal was to grow our share of earnings from the stocks we own to $266 dollars and…
We annihilated that goal!
We invested extra this month and brought our new monthly passive earnings to $273 per month!
This is a double victory. Not only did we meet this month’s goal, but we met this years’ goal and that’s something I had written off entirely.
Remember, the pandemic this year has destroyed the earnings of many, many businesses in the US. We watched our monthly share of earnings from stocks we own fall nearly $40 as Covid closed businesses nationwide.
So far, most of the increase we have seen from our low point (I think it was around $235 dollars per month) to our current $273 has been from our investment. We fully expect that number to rise on its own as earnings return to normal (whenever that will be, we have no idea.)
Total Online and Passive Income
We earned $634 from our online business
Our share of earnings from the stocks we own was $273
Altogether we earned $907
We worked for 7 hours. Therefore we earned $129 per hour!
What about our Yearly Goals?
We have a long-term goal of increasing the intrinsic value of our business by 15% per year. To meet that goal we must increase both the online earnings and our share of earnings from stocks by 15%
So how’d we do?
From January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020, the intrinsic value of our business increased 17%
Note for the nerds: We calculate this using the Discounted Cash Flow method. We reasonably expect 15% growth per year over the next five years, but assume no growth thereafter. We discount using an 8% interest rate. We believe this to give a conservative estimate of our intrinsic value.
Our Goals for January 2021
Let’s try this again: We’ll try to earn (after all costs and salaries) $2,305 in January
We’ll grow our share of earnings from stocks we own to $276
We don’t believe that we are ready to work so few hours and still make meaningful progress in our business. This month was a fluke, so our goal will stay the same: We work no more than 18 hours in January.
Our per-hour goal is then: ($2305+$276 = $2581 / 18 hours) $143 per hour
