One of my goals is to have multiple sources of income including passive income. My first action has been to review my current situation so I have a baseline and to aid in decision making.
Definition of my income
- I will exclude my husband’s income, however I will half any joint income we have e.g. saving accounts
- I will not include ‘theoretical’ money such as share value increases, I will only count money that I can access
- I will not include my daughter’s money, so for example, I will ignore the child benefit I receive
Current sources of income
I currently have three sources of income, my salary (or statutory maternity pay at the moment), interest on bank accounts and income from my blog – well it happened once! Each month I get a cash rebate from my credit card company, however I am excluding this because it is a percentage of my bill, so the way to increase the rebate is to spend more and that is not an action I want to encourage.
How I will measure progress
I currently include all my money transactions in MS Money so I have customised a report to show income that meets the above three points. I will put these figures into a spreadsheet I’ve developed to show how my income compares to the baseline and the proportion of income from each source. The spreadsheet runs for 6 months, excluding the baseline and looks like this
The baseline
I set my first baseline at the end of April 2009
Income | Baseline |
Salary/Benefit | 92.9% |
Interest | 7.1% |
Blog | 0% |
Income 1 |
0% |
Income 2 |
0% |
Looking forward
The two simplest methods to grow my income are to increase interest payments by saving more money and finding accounts with higher interest rates, and from my blog. In the two years I’ve had this blog I’ve received one payment from Google, but I could make more effort by finishing my theme redesign to make the site more appealing to advertisers, and of course continue writing posts.
It may be difficult for me to find other ways of making money at the moment as the majority of my time is spent looking after my daughter and I need to comply with the requirements of statutory maternity pay. However I plan to review my existing skills and interests and see if they can be adapted to produce an income (or reduce outgoings), and also look into training courses I can do from home which could help with income generation in the future. I want to build reliable streams of income so I’m not looking for get rich quick schemes.
What do you think? Have you analysed your income streams? How have you increased them?
Well, it’s not a good time to be relying on investment income, is it? On the upside though, at least mortgage payments have come right down.
I have a similar goal to you, in creating multiple (preferably residual) income streams. I believe there’s a lot of potential in Adsense, but the secret is to be very focussed and choose keywords carefully based on search volume, advertiser competition and average CPC.
No its not a good time to be relying on investment income, but could be a good time to start making investments. We have benefited from the reduction in mortgage payments as we are on a tracker and it couldn’t have come at a better time as I am currently on statutory maternity pay and will start unpaid leave in August.
Good luck with generating your income streams.