Financial Update 2014 Quarter 3

Financial updateThis is the second quarterly installment of my financial updates. As I have stated in the past I am not comfortable revealing actual dollar amounts at this point of time, so all of the information presented here will be in the form of percentages.

 

 

Emergency Fund: [wppb progress=100 option=green percent=after]

 

Our 6 months of expenses emergency fund is fully funded. Our Hills and Valley fund is nearing depletion, which is okay because I returned to work this month.

House Pay Off:  [wppb progress=25.0 option=green percent=after]

 

We originally put down 20% and are contributing an extra $100 every month. After putting 20% into tax advantaged retirement accounts, any extra at the end of the year above our emergency fund will be added to the house balance. Originally we were paying an extra $200 per month and planned to start throwing several thousand dollars at the end of the year at the house, however this season I had a major project get its scope cut (hence less income) and thus far have failed to get a replacement project to fill in that void. Being that paying off the house early is the lowest priority for budget overages, it is the first thing to be cut.

Goal: Pay off the house in 8 years, by December 2021. 10 years, by December 2023. I think extending this out to 10 years will be much less stressful on our budget and is still an aggressive goal.

Rental House Payoff: [wppb progress=33.7 option=green percent=after]

 

This is calculated off of our original purchase price. We refinanced earlier this year to a 10 year loan and do not plan on putting any extra money towards paying it down early. In total we owe about a quarter on this property as we do on our primary residence.

To Financial Independence:[wppb progress=3.5 option=green percent=after]

 

Currently we are 3.5% of the way to F/I. We only started throwing money at this in the past year. Last year we were at under 1%. I am basing our amount for financial independence off of our budget after the house is paid off and kids are grown.  We are also basing it off of a 4% withdrawal rate.  Most likely we will continue to work for several years after hitting F/I.  My goal is to at the year end hit 4%.

Goal: Hit F/I in 18 years at Age 45.  This is a very long term goal, It may be achieved much quicker if our income increases.

 

Action Economics:

Action Economics is now 1 year old!!! In May I started the Yakezie Challenge and made a baseline of tracking statistics. Here is a comparison between then and now.

2014 Quarter 3 Update

 

 

Alexa Ranking: This has remained fairly steady for the last month, hovering around 150,000. I passed the 200,000 mark in mid June, thus passing the benchmark for the Yakezie challenge.  The lower the Alexa ranking gets the more difficult it is to increase, based on the last couple months, I wouldn’t be surprised if it takes another year for me to break 100,000.

Google Analytics:

Search Traffic has increased considerably and is on a steady climb.  Below is a monthly breakdown.

  • March: 2
  • April: 9
  • May: 40
  • June: 96
  • July: 333
  • August: 351
  • September: 472

My best performing article in search is Building A Cheap Tree House: My $300 Tree Fort, with a total of 142 views from search this month.

Moz Rankings: I check these stats using check-domains.com.  Both the DA and PA numbers have been on a steady climb. I do not have a google page rank assigned yet, since they apparently are very infrequent with their updates.  According to check-domains, I should have a PR of 3. They estimate this using some sort of method that I don’t know or understand, so I don’t really give much weight to this, but I thought I would include it in the stats.

Social Media:   I stopped messing with Facebook, because it was growing very slowly and I had troubles integrating the Facebook page. On Twitter Action Econ has over 80 followers. Twitter is a better social media platform for my site in general.

Articles on Site: During the summer I was able to keep up with my target of 8 – 12 posts per month, the total articles on site is approaching 100.

Money: This is still a young site, and has not started earning any real money yet. I don’t expect to make any significant earnings until at least year 3.  Currently I have made around $25 from adsense, none of it realized though, since you need a balance of $100 before they cut a check.

How has the third quarter of 2014 treated you?

John C. started Action Economics in 2013 as a way to gain more knowledge on personal financial planning and to share that knowledge with others. Action Economics focuses on paying off the house, reducing taxes, and building wealth. John is the author of the book For My Children's Children: A Practical Guide For Building Generational Wealth.

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