Stop Milking Me! - Cow’s Journey To Financial Freedom

It has been a month since I formally launched FreeTheCow project to achieve financial freedom. How did I do in my first month? Without knowing the progress, it would be hard to make improvements and set goals. So I’ve included montly performance report as part of the project to track my progress on saving, spending, investing and money making activities.

Savings:
Thanks to my 2005 bonus payout, I put away $5000 total in the last 30 days.

Non-Retirement Investment
After giving alway a big chunk of my non-retirement investments, I started this project with just a little over $25000. Although I have not invested anything in those accounts, the dividend and market appreciation have kept the total return in the green. Although my company stock holdings dropped a bit, with the healthy returns from my stock funds, I have managed to maintain a positive gain overall.

Spending
I went over my budget by nearly $600, mainly because of the 3 personal trips I took in the last 30 days. Comparing with my co-workers who make the same amount of money and buy Mercedes, Bimmers and $500K homes, I live way under my means. So if I need to go over my usual budget to do something necessary, then so be it.

eBay Sales
I am still in the “Testing the Water” mode, so I have only closed 5 sales in the last month. After deducting the fees, I have made $51 from those 5 transactions. Although making money is a sweet thing, I am more thrilled to be able to learn a few lessons about eBay and Sales in general. I plan on writing a post about the lessons learned in the next a few days.

WebSite earnings
With my friend cyco miko’s help, we modified the Gallery PHP code and added Google Ads and tuned the placement. The good news is that ever since we moved the Ads a bit closer to the pictures, I have seen clicks coming in everyday. The bad news? Those clicks don’t generate any meaningful amount of revenue. So far, the entire site including FreeTheCow, Gallery and PhotoBlog have pulled in $30.18.

Current Total Bottom Line
My total non-retirement bottom line has increased from $26400 to $32929 in 30 days, including $81 net income I have made from the side gigs. I know.. I know.. The number is pathetic comparing with my 6 figure paycheck. But hey! This is the money I made from somewhere else! And there is much greater potential in the future.

Next Month Goals
I’d like to increase the sales on eBay by selling some larger items with higher prices the next month (so I can buy a few bras..hehehe.. ). I have been studying our kitchen store’s inventory these days and there is a massive amount of work to be done before a formal online store can be set up. But knowing that there is a great potential to make money online is good enough to keep me going.

Besides the online store, I’d like to tune the keywords a bit on my photo sites to pull in more Ads revenue.

I didn’t forget about the house flipping project. I will need to find a broker the next month and start looking at the potential homes. After doing some local research, I realized that I will have to bump up the price a bit to get what I want in the desirable location. So I have increased the project required funding size from $46000 to $50000. I should have no problems to accomplish that figure.

I have made $15.37 since I setup Google Adsense program about 22 days ago. I don’t really remember when was the last time I’ve ever made any money outside of my regular paycheck. Although the number is not significant at all, I am very happy to see some extra “income” coming through the pipe. Hey! It’s more than one week worth of the coffee fund!

I know most of the veteran Adsensers will tell me that I did a great job to pull in double digits in the first month. Most of the sites barely made a dollar in a month. But if you look at my total number of page views vs the dollars I made, I did a terrible job.

After realizing that my PhotoBlog and Gallery sites are getting 130,000 page views per month, I put Ads on both of them a few days ago to find out if the large amount of traffic will translate to cash flow. Well, the result has been dissapointing. Since I can’t disclose the detail statistics (thanks to Erik’s warning), let’s just say that I made a pityful amount of money with my 130K pageview per month.

When I set up my PhotoBlog and my personal photo sites, I have never thought that these pictures will draw so much search engine traffic. Since I never intend to use my personal site Yuna’s Village to make money, I didn’t care for keywords, which is the most significant way to attract the Ads I want. So after I put up Goolge Adsense Ads on my photo sites, none of the Ads are really related to the images. Plus, I haven’t done a good job to optimize the location of the Ads, no wonder nobody is clicking on them.

But making money on the site is still the second priority. I have always had fun blogging, whether it was on Yuna’s Village or the Cow site. Although I will spend some time (or asking my friend to wave his magic wand to fix my site), my focus is to write about the things I love. Maybe one day, passion will turn into profits, as we all hope.