2014 End of Year Update

This is the third 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.

End of Year Update: Financials

 

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

 

Our 6 months of expenses emergency fund is fully funded. Our Hills and Valley fund barely got off the ground this season, but is slowly being replenished thanks to a new job I got working as a buildings and grounds supervisor for snow removal at my local nuclear plant.

House Pay Off: [wppb progress=26.5 option=green percent=after]

 

We originally put down 20% and are contributing an extra $100 every month. The original plan for the year was to put any extra cash at the end of the year onto the house. Unfortunately due to a cut in a project that is normally a very lucrative project for me, which set us back around $5K, I will not be putting a large lump sum on the house this year.  The goal for 2015 is to be able to go back to putting $200 per month extra on the house and hopefully a few thousand extra at the end of the year.

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=36 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=4 option=green percent=after]

 

Currently we are 4% of the way to F/I. We only started throwing money at this 18 months ago. 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 for the year was to hit 4% and we did it!

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. For 2015 I would like to hit 7.5%

Overall 2014 was a really good year, despite our income being down almost 15% from last year.  We were able to save 25% of our gross income! (Although I would have rather saved 25% of an income that was 15% higher lol).  The goal for next year is to increase our income by 10% and hit a 33% savings rate.

 

End of Year Update: Action Economics

Action Economics has been limping along the last couple months.  I think a good chunk of this has to do with my absence in September/October when I was working 6 12s.  I continued to post articles I had written previously, but commenting on other blogs and promoting my articles took a back seat.

 

End Of Year Update

 

Alexa Ranking: This has back pedalled quite a bit, which isn’t unexpected,   I think my Alexa rank was inflated the last couple checks due to a higher volume of bloggers with the Alexa toolbar visiting my site.

Google Analytics:

Search Traffic levelled off and even took a bit of a dip.  I still find it interesting to see which articles pop up in search the best.

  • March: 2
  • April: 9
  • May: 40
  • June: 96
  • July: 333
  • August: 351
  • September: 472
  • October: 355
  • November: 355
  • December: 430

My best performing article in search is Building A Cheap Tree House: My $300 Tree Fort, with a total of 94 views from search this month. I would like to see search traffic break 1,000 a month in 2015. Another aspect that I find important is the number of different articles that are being found through search.  For December 74 different articles have been found in search.

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:   On Twitter Action Econ is just about to break into the triple digits with 95 followers.

Articles on Site: Since I have kept up with the pace of 2-3 articles a week I now have 116 articles published, for a total of over 100,000 words!

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 $30 from adsense, none of it realized though, since you need a balance of $100 before they cut a check. I have also made a few bucks from the sale of my financial planning spreadsheets.

Overall:  I’ve had a very successful year with Action Economics, especially due to the competing demands for my time. Don’t let anyone tell you blogging is easy! Trying to come up with high quality, original content that I find interesting, and publishing it twice a week is by no means a light task while having two young kids and a job.  I know thousands of people do it, but it is certainly a challenge for me at times.  I love being able to write and share my thoughts, and hopefully others find the information here useful.

A good chunk of my traffic for the year has been from Rockstar Finance, which shared my articles; Budgeting: Maximize Delta To Build Wealth, The $70 Million Paycheck, How Lucky We Are, The Neglected 20 Year Mortgage, and The Legacy Drawer.

End of Year Update: My 10 Favorite Articles I Have Written This Year

End of Year Update: Life

Kid 1 and Kid 2 are getting through 5th grade and Kindergarten respectively.

Mrs. C. switched jobs in October to take a lower stress position in a better environment.  She doesn’t have to deal with some personality conflicts or the added stress of being in management anymore, so that is a major plus.

Although I had my major project, working on the ice condenser cut down this past fall, overall I had a great year for my career. The machine used to make the ice to put in our ice baskets was original plant equipment from the 70s and was due for an upgrade.  The new machine was supposed to be online for the outage, but the crew working on it was not able to get it dialed in on time.  I still made some money there, but due to this issue I made about 33% less than I normally would make.

I started working as a supplemental supervisor for the facilities department at the same plant this month.  Although this is a temporary position, it may be possible to reprise this role in future winters. This would be huge for us because it is work at home, at a decent rate during the winter months, which I usually have very few, if any jobs. This along with working a bit on the side cleaning out septic tanks in the summer, will help keep the income fluctuations down.

We started out 2014 with the loss of a close family member who left way too soon.  I’d like to say that we have adapted to this new reality, but that is far from true. This will certainly be a difficult road.

I’m looking forward to an exciting 2015.  There is a lot to be thankful for as well as many challenges ahead, it will be interesting to see where life takes us in the upcoming 12 months.

 

How has 2014 been for 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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *