LIVING OFF DIVIDENDS & PASSIVE INCOME

I was so busy in May that I completely forgot to post April’s passive income summary. On the bright side, April was a been a record breaking month for me with total “passive” income amounting to $2,811.42. On the flip side, I’ve been so busy, I haven’t been paying attention to my sites and May’s income will probably be lower.

If you recall, the income for March 2008 was $2, 667.18, so this is $144 jump is a 5.4% increase. However, one of my stocks is a Japanese REIT, and it paid out a quarterly dividend amounting to about $230, so the $140 increase isn’t a real increase - it’s going to disappear for May. Besides, the jump from February to March’s passive income was 11.9%, so this isn’t as good. (In case your wondering why I’ve invested in a Japanese REIT, here’s a good posts on why Japan’s real estate is a good investment.)

But so long as I can sustain it over $2,500 per month, I’ll be happy. Especially since I’m going to pursue my MBA full-time and I won’t be able to work.

Here’s the breakdown:

• Online Income: $1655.32
  • Adsense: $203.67
  • Linkworth: $638.31
  • TLA: $132.96
  • Kontera: $49.44
  • Direct Ads: $265
  • Prosper Referrals: $175
  • Amazon: $93.93
  • Ebay Publisher Network: 33.44
• Savings Accounts: $128.87
• Real Estate Trust Deed: $0
• Direct Oil Drilling Investment: $260
• Dividends from Canroys: ~$600 (approximation)
  
• Other Dividends: ~$291.6
  

A new addition this month is the affiliate income I made from Ebay. In the past I’ve bought A LOT of gold coins on ebay. Since most of the gold coins are of a specific type, and I like to automate repetitive tasks, I used to have searches emailed to me on a regular basis. However, since I also like to try and monetize everything, I decided to set up a store to serve as both a place to aggregate my favorite searches and generate some affiliate income. Here’s my gold coin site, aptly called French Gold Coins. Check out the coins under the Recommended list - these are my favorite coins. The site is a .info site that I bought for $0.99 from GoDaddy and it was created using BANS. For a little more info, look at the 2nd half of this post. I also set up a site to aggregate news pertinent to Gold and Gold Coins, as another example of how to automate repetitive tasks.

Last month I mentioned that my Adsense revenue was dropping since I was being smart-priced. In an attempt to prevent that I modified the way Adsense shows up on the site - only search engine traffic sees Adsense now. Other traffic gets shown ADSAQ ads, which is helping compensate for Adsense’s lost revenue. February’s Adsense income was over $400 and has been dropping ever since. But I think I’ve figured out the issues and expect it to be pretty much constant at this level, or maybe slightly higher.

On the other hand, Linkworth has done really well on my sites. March’s income was almost double of February’s and as expected, April’s income was even higher. I’m very happy with their service and I strongly endorse it. It’s a good addition to Adsense, since it doesn’t conflict with their TOS (terms of service) and its always a good idea to have multiple streams of income. Incidentally, the only decent book EVER written by Robert G. Allen is Multiple Streams of Income: How to Generate a Lifetime of Unlimited Wealth!. All of his other books are crap, but surprisingly, this is one of my favorites!

Text-Link-Ads is also doing moderately okay although its taking more time than Linkworth. I think you may not allowed to use both of them on the same site, so see which one works better for you. Between the two, my favorite is currently Linkworth, for the obvious reason that it’s generating more revenue for me.

Amazon affiliate income has started to pick up and hopefully it will continue as I learn more about affiliate marketing and try out different techniques to boost it.

In March, I made $60 from Domain Embarking, a site that helps you earn money from parked domains. Since they only pay out quarterly, I didn’t make squat from them, but I’ve added a couple more sites and have had a couple of people sign up using the affiliate link so I expect to make a little bit more in the next cycle. I expect to make more than enough money to pay for the registration fees and my hosting for all my sites through the income generated through Domain Embarking.

Prosper is still handing out $25 signup bonuses to new lenders and that program generated $175 in April. My total proper account value is now $2995 of which $800 is cash. I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to invest that amount. I have my own criteria for investing in loans and it usually narrows my universe of investment-grade loans to under 20 at any given time. Of that half will ask loans for real estate projects which I don’t do and eventually they’re only 3 borrowers who I’ll think are worthy of lending money to. Here’s a good post on How Not To Bid On Prosper.

I also made around $1,151 from some oil investments and other dividends. Some of the stocks pay over 10% in annual dividends. Two of the oil investments are paying 15-18%. The third oil investment is currently barely producing, but that seems like it will improve over the next few months and boost that portion of my income too. Also, as the price of oil stays around $100 per barrel, the monthly payout (which is typically delayed by 3 months) will increase a little bit.

I also made about $128 in interest from savings and CDs. My gut feeling is that the Federal Reserve will probably keep the interest rates steady for the rest of the summer. However, even if they do drop the rates (I don’t think we’re going to see a rate hike for a year or two) it won’t make a very significant difference in my income. And I’ll probably be spending that money while I’m in college so I don’t have any expectations from it anyway.

I have some minimal expenses for domains and hosting. I pay about $119.40 for annual hosting on Dream Host. I had several periods of downtime last month and they did credit my account with an extra month. I like that they have one click installation for wordpress, php forum software, mysql databases and other stuff. I’ve used GoDaddy in the past and I didn’t like their interface at all, although I have heard it has improved. Dream Host is a lot easier to use in my opinion. If you use coupon code “PassiveIncome” you’ll get $19.40 off the annual fee or you can use “Dividends” to get free domain registration. I also pay around $60 for domain registrations which I usually register with 1 and 1. At $6.99, they’re pretty cheap. However I did go and register a bunch of domains for 99 cents so next year I’ll probably be paying close to $175. On a monthly basis, these costs will work out to roughly $25 (or they will once the domains go full price). GoDaddy currently has a promotion - .com domain transfers for only $6.99 and .info domains for only 99 cents.

As you can see, I have multiple streams of both online & offline income. My online income is generated from 10 different companies. The other income is produced from the dividends of about 10 different stocks and 3 oil investments. Having diversity is very important. Periodically, one of them will taper off (like adsense did), and not being too concentrated in it prevents your passive income totally disappearing.

Having any sort side income that sufficiently large to allow you to pay the rent and put food on the top is a great stress reliever. It also provides you F*** YOU money, in case you don’t see eye-to-eye with your boss or you feel that your job is sucking the life out of you! For stubborn and opinionated people, having F-U money is awesome!

I hope I’ve inspired all of you to try and boost your passive income or maybe add new sources to increase your current income streams.

Please let me know how you’re all doing.

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