Blogging Income Report & Spending (August 2013)

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It’s time for the first article in what will hopefully become a series here at Romania Experience: an income report and spending review, all in one place.

Since this blog is as much about personal finance and being smart with your money as it is about living in Romania, I think that mixing my online income (remember, I live exclusively off this income!) with a spending report will paint a better picture of how things look like for me.

So, in terms of income, things were pretty bad – at least apparently. Let’s see the scary low numbers and we’ll discuss why it’s not as bad as it looks like:

Blog advertising: $996.15
Affiliate sales: $82.64
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TOTAL: $1078.79

Although this income report would probably give anyone the chills, I am pretty relaxed about it. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t like to see these numbers, but I don’t consider them too scary yet. Back in July I sold my money making website for a pretty nice sum and I expected earnings to drop drastically.

It’s a 90% drop after all and even though it’s worse than last month, I am not ready to lose my mind. I know that building solid income with blogs is a time consuming task and right now I am in the building phase with most of my blogs. I won’t lie, I was hoping that they will pick up faster now that I have the experience, but it’s not always as easy as you would expect it to be.

Actually, I am pretty confident that we’ll be able to use the money wisely this month and hopefully keep our hands off the fund I put away from the sale for covering monthly living expenses. We don’t have ANY debt (yep, one of the advantages of living in Romania, probably will write more about this in another article), so it’s all going to go for living expenses.

I am encouraged also by our August spending sheet which looked like this:

1. Food: $244.87
2. Utilities: $180.74
3. Fun & Entertainment: $36.49
4. Health: $168.33
5. Baby Romanian: $129.77
6. Misc: $180.61
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TOTAL: $940.81

Wohooo! Sounds incredible again, right? Well, again, I have to say that this is one of the advantages of living in Romania (and the reason I am not too worried about the huge drop in earnings).

However, these great numbers won’t be similar this month because in July we kind of leeched over in my wife’s hometown, where she gave birth. We lived at her mom’s place to make sure that Baby Romanian is close to premium hospital care if needed and since my wife’s mother is such a great person, many of our costs were covered, like some of the food, misc. expenses and utilities.

Also, since it was our second month with Baby Romanian, we didn’t go out much for entertainment other than long walks in the park, so we spent very little there and I doubt things will change a lot in the near future. And since we’re pretty much covered in terms of clothing for Baby Romanian and the only thing we have to spend on is his daily formula and supplements, costs are expected to remain low.

So even though our earnings were pretty low, so are the monthly expenses here in Romania and I’m sure we’ll turn things around pretty soon and add another zero to the end of my monthly income report.

How was your August? Just as crappy as ours was in terms of income or did you do better than ever?

Calin
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13 thoughts on “Blogging Income Report & Spending (August 2013)”

  3. Your August wasn’t too bad if you count the sale of the site. My August…like yours, we didn’t spend too much on entertainment as we were entertained by the baby! But my wife wasn’t working the last two months so that was a little hit.

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