Update on My $1,500 Project
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It’s been a while since I gave a full update on my $1,500 Project. My goal is to increase my income or decrease my expenses in order to create $1,500 of free cash flow per month. This amount corresponds to my wife’s net income. In fact, we are both trying to find a solution so she can stay home with our two angels. As she is officially scheduled to go back to work at the end of August, we have about eight months left. |
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Even though we might be running out of time, I am still confident that we will be able to change our financial situation over the current year.
I recently restructured my debts through my property. I knew that my house increased in value and I wanted to benefit from the equity sleeping in it. With the recent increase of my HELOC, I was able to pay off my personal loan and a small computer loan.
By doing so, I was aware that I was now amortizing my debts over 25 years instead of the 48 months remaining on my previous financial obligations. Therefore, the smart thing to do was to increase my monthly payment on my HELOC in order to pay off my entire debt before the prescribed 25 years that we usually do for a mortgage. So I increased my payment in order to pay off my property in 18 years. Technically, my Smith Manoeuvre investments should compensate for the total amount owing on my property way before that.
We actually hired a housecleaning lady that comes once a month for $50. While this does not help us at all to achieve our $1,500 project, it helps giving us more time an energy to spend in family or even to work on different projects (like blogging 
).
In the end, we were able to create $209 since we started this project in September. I am pretty happy about the results as I had to include the extra expense related to the house cleaning lady ($50). We are now down to find another $1,291 in order to achieve our goal. While this is still a big chunk of money, we have other ideas in mind. I am fairly confident that we should be able to go over $500 in cash flow by the end of April. I just need to get some stuff done before I can write about the good news J. Let’s just say for now that my internet project seems to pick-up.
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January 10th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Have you thought about selling options as another way to increase your cash flow? If you don’t want to get into it big you can always sell covered calls far out-of-the-money to take premiums and have a lessened chance of being forced to sell your stocks.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:54 am
Alex, I know how options works but I am still uncomfortable to try them for the moment. I think I might practice over a virtual portfolio…
Thx for the idea!
January 14th, 2008 at 6:05 am
[…] Financial blogger from The Financial Blogger presents Update on my $1,500 project, and says, “My goal is to increase my income or decrease my expenses in order to create […]
January 15th, 2008 at 10:57 am
What is your monthly grocery budget? One of the things we did when I wanted to stay home with my kids was to cut our grocery budget drastically. This saved us almost $450 a month! (Yes, we were way overspending on groceries!) We are able to keep our grocery budget very low by cooking from scratch, keeping a price book, combining sales and coupons, and buying in bulk. Good luck! It is sooo worth it to be home with the kids!
January 16th, 2008 at 12:44 am
Jennifer,
). Unfortunately, I don’t have the patience to look at any kind of coupons… I’m to busy writing this blog ! lol!
You bring a good point by cutting down in the grocery expenses. However, my budget is already at $670 a month for a family of 4 (trust me, William might be young, but he is starting to eat like a teenager
We are trying to cut down on “dinning out” expenses as well. We are down to $250 per month. Hopefully we could drop it down to $225.
March 27th, 2008 at 7:00 am
[…] my quest to find $1,500 per month, I spoke with a lot of people in order to find out about innovative ways to create cash flow, […]
April 5th, 2008 at 6:36 am
[…] bit more than $500 the first year, so $41,17 a month. I will not consider this saving into my $1,500 project as I will not change my payment structure. However, this will allow me to pay my mortgage much […]
July 3rd, 2008 at 6:00 am
[…] my last update in January, I was missing roughly $1,200 to get to my goal of $1,500. While not being impressive, that $300 […]