Our Goals for January Were:
- Increase our monthly earnings to: $2,305
- Increase our share of earnings from equities by 1% (for a new total of $276)
- Our total income goal (both active and passive) for January is then: $2,581 or an hourly rate of $143 per hour
Online Earnings
Online Earnings for January: $4,340!
Well… sort of. It’s not as great as it seems. Amazon usually sends us two checks per month (every 14 days). But the second check from December got caught up in the bank holidays and didn’t hit our account until after the new year.
In short: Much of that $4,000 is due to timing rather than unusual levels of profit.
Boo.
That being said, January was an above-average month. I think I had mentioned before that January tends to be better for us than December (we chalk that up to gift card spending) and that proved to be the case this year as well.
So even if we ignore the weird end-of-year timing, we still beat our goal (by about 25%)!
This makes setting a goal tricky, but I’m going to pretend we just barely met our goal this month. That will still give us the required trajectory to meet our 15% year-over-year earnings growth.
Hours Worked
We ordered an enormous amount of inventory in January. I’m not certain (I’d have to dig out past invoices) but I believe January was the largest purchasing month we’ve ever had.
We ordered what we estimate to be about 5 months of inventory.
Why did we buy five months’ worth?
We’re back in school now. It’s just easier on us to spend a weekend packing now and not worry about it again for awhile. It might not be the most cost-efficient (we’ll have increased storage costs from Amazon) but the store is more or less on autopilot now until May (end of the school year).
I kept on doing my thing for the blog and product research.
Altogether, I logged about 12 hours and Leslie logged about 10.
This was a comfortable amount to work and we’ll aim for about the same next month
Passive Income From Investments
Our share of earnings from stocks we own: $276
Nothing to report here. We met our goal (yay). None of the few individual companies we own reported earnings, and neither did Standard and Poors (that’s where we get our earnings numbers for these reports)… So yeah. Boring.
We invested about an average amount this month (average for us, at least)
Total Online And Passive Income
We earned $4,340 from our businesses
Our share of earnings from the stocks we own was $276
Altogether we earned $4,616
We worked for 22 hours. Therefore we earned $209 per hour!
(But remember it’s actually a good deal lower than this. Bank holidays and whatnot. My back-of-the-envelope math puts it around $153 per hour)
Our Goals For Next Month
- Increase our monthly earnings to: $2,650
- Increase our share of earnings from equities by 1% (for a new total of $279)
- Work no more than 22 hours
- Our total income goal (both active and passive) for February is then: $2,929 or an hourly rate of $133 per hour
Further Reading
To see how we set up our business, check out our Guide to Starting a Home-Based Business.
To see how we invest our earnings for passive income, see Our Guide to Investing.
To see how we manage our business to minimize the hours we work, see our Productivity Guide.
Or to see how our income has changed over time, see our main Income Reports page.
Books Read This Month
We believe reading is absolutely essential to running a successful business. You should read as widely as possible. To that end, here are the books we finished this month.
- The Alchemist (Reread; the first book I read each year)
- Predictably Irrational
- The Moment of Lift
- Clash of Cultures
- Underland
- The War of Art (Reread for the fourth time)
- Guards Guards
- A Mind at Play (Claude Shannon is my new hero)
- A Random Walk Down Wall Street
- Something Deeply Hidden
- The Serpent of Venice
