Monthly Report: Income, Debt, Rewards, and Traffic for August 2018

Welcome to my monthly report! This is where I’ll talk about my extra income earned, progress on paying off my debt, earning reward points for travel, and blog traffic for the month of August 2018.

1. Background

Why did I even start Pilgrim for Less in the first place?

In a nutshell, I’ve been blessed with opportunities to chaperone some major pilgrimages to the March for Life in Washington, DC and the international World Youth Days in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil (2013) and Krakow, Poland (2016). Starting in 2015, I started traveling to Japan on a monthly basis for work culminating in a six-month assignment in 2017.

Sprinkled throughout those years from 2013 until now, I’ve gone on many other smaller trips.

I noticed a common thread in all my travels, regardless of intention or purpose–

Pilgrimages.

Wherever I travel, I always make an effort to visit churches and attend Mass no matter where I am in the world traveling for whatever reason. Work? Visit family? Trying to fly a lot in order maintain elite flyer status? Yes, all of the above. Most of my trips included a pilgrimage portion.

And I would share about these pilgrimages on social media.

And some people would ask me questions. And I didn’t have good answers.

Therefore, I started Pilgrim for Less as a way to chronicle the pilgrimages I go on and to help others go on more pilgrimages too.

The other half of it is the money issue. Going on trips and pilgrimages requires moolah. Lots of it! And I don’t have a whole lot of extra money to burn traveling the world (anymore). See my pilgrimage problem in 2018.

After surveying some friends, I saw that most people’s obstacles to going on more pilgrimages are not having enough time and money. Hence, Pilgrim for Less–more pilgrimages for less time and less money.

Why am I doing these monthly reports?

First and foremost, I’m putting into practice something I’ve learned through engineering, project management, and self-help type stuff I’ve read.

You cannot change what you can’t measure. #Metrics

These monthly reports will help me keep track of my personal progress on reducing debt, increasing income, and growing a community of pilgrims who pilgrimage for less.

Secondly, I hope you find these reports to be inspiring. Yes, I may be an engineer, but I’m not swimming in excess cash monies. I hope that through my example, despite me carrying lots of debt and loans, you can see that it is possible to travel more. More importantly that it is, indeed, possible to go on more pilgrimages.

Thirdly, legitness. The numbers I present to you below are real. I want to be transparent with you.

And lastly, these monthly reports are a fun way to lightheartedly take all these things seriously.

Currency Probz

When I sent out my initial survey before I launched Pilgrim for Less, one of my questions was “what are your biggest obstacles to going on more pilgrimages?”.

“Not enough money” was the most frequent answer at 81.8% of my survey takers.

Therefore, I think a large focus of Pilgrim for Less will be on the money side of things. Primarily because you need money to pay for the logistic aspects of a pilgrimage. And for charity, too.

2. Income

In this section, I am not going to talk about my actual salary. I feel like that it is best practice not to share that publicly anyway… But, we can assume that my salary is enough for 1) all expenses, 2) investments, and 3) and savings for budgeted and fun things. And with all that, I have barely any extra leftover.

Instead, I will share with you side income. In other words, this is income that I make in addition to my salary. These will include side hustles and this blog.

Also, I should mention here that part of my hope with Pilgrim for Less is for it to be a means to generate income with the goal of it being self-sustaining. Running a blog does have its own expenses, so I’ll be exploring ways to monetize it in order to cover those expenses.

Amazon Seller – $15.73

At the end of 2017, I started pursuing ways to earn more money and to get a better handle on my finances. Somewhere in that, I learned how to sell things effectively on Amazon.

I gave it a try from January through February of this year, but ultimately decided that it took me too much time for too little profit on something I wasn’t able to give full attention to. Why wasn’t I able to give full attention? Uh, grad school…

However, I still have unsold inventory that sells occasionally from time to time even though I stopped actively pursuing this.

Back in July, I sold a card game. However, since it sold right before the end of the month, and Amazon pays every two weeks, I finally saw the payout in August. $15.73 for the win!

Google Ads – $0.00

I turned off ads on the blog for now. Last month I was able to make a whopping 3 cents!

But now I just want to focus on making sure my blog has quality content. Who knows when I’ll turn the ads back on.

Amazon Affiliates – $0.00

Another way to help earn money through the use of the blog is through affiliates. Basically, affiliate income is earning commission for driving sales at a website. In this case, I’m with Amazon. I also wanted to test this out as a proof of concept.

If you see me share links on posts or reviews that go to Amazon, that’s what this is about.

I made $0 this month.

3. Debt

Whew. I feel like this is going to be an awkward section because the numbers are so much higher, and the numbers are also real. Like, this feels personal, but that’s okay. I’ll get over it. Bear with me. I will split this up into two different sections: loans and credit cards.

Loans: -$1935.47 ($163,404.40 left / 1.17 % decrease from July)

Loans are the major debts that will take me a long time to pay back.

Auto: -$296.68 ($10,217.83 left / 3% decrease from July)

Back in 2016, my brother’s car at the time was on its way out. It was a crappy, used Mazda 6 that ended up needing a lot of work. He had long commutes between home, work, and school so his car wasn’t going to survive for much longer. Seeing this need, I decided to give him my 2010 Honda Civic, which had already been paid off, and since I’ve been the only owner and kept it well-maintained, I figured it would be better for him to take my car versus him putting in the time and money buying another potentially crappy used car.

Because of the extra cash flow I had from work trips to Japan, I was able to put in a very substantial down payment on a new 2016 Honda Civic. For personal finance bloggers, that’s potentially a huge sin I committed buying a new car, but then…I’m not a straight-up personal finance blogger. So there.

Since reevaluating my finances at the start of 2018, I’ve been making minimum payments on the car. Since I was able to land a low interest rate for this auto loan, I’ve been paying minimal payments and prioritizing paying more on my student loans, which have higher interest rates.

Mortgage: -$1305.01 ($147,872.83 left / 0.87% decrease from July)

Again, I probably committed another grave personal finance sin by buying a new house. Like, it had to be built. But, I’m glad I did because it’s now worth tens of thousands of dollars more than what I bought it for because values have rocketed since I’ve moved in.

I also make minimum payments on my 30-year mortgage because of a pretty low interest rate.

Student Loans: -$333.78 ($5313.74 left / 5.8% decrease from July)

First, a disclaimer. I’m only considering my undergrad student loans for my bachelor’s degree. My current graduate degree is paid for (or reimbursed, rather) by my company, and I won’t be counting those loans.

Ah, student loans. Honestly, I feel like I should have paid these off a long time ago. The reason why I haven’t was because of unexpected major expenses and those World Youth Day pilgrimages that cost me thousands of dollars. And then it doesn’t help that I took on another new car AND a mortgage since 2015.

I was able to pay off one loan back in July so I’ve now added that payment to augment the payment of one of my other student loans in order to pay it off faster.

Credit Cards: -$458.54 ($3204.67 left / 12.5% decrease from July)

Just so you know, I have 5 credit cards:

• American Express Hilton Surpass
• Capital One Quicksilver
• Chase Freedom
• Chase Freedom Unlimited
• Chase Sapphire Reserve

I won’t get into why I have that many credit cards at this time. I also won’t break down the debt for each card since they’re all in constant flux. The balances will be different tomorrow.

In August, I dipped into my various savings accounts to knock down much of my credit card debt. The only reason why I still have a fairly large overall balance is that I used a credit card to pay the tuition for my upcoming grad school class. Thankfully, I have the savings to immediately pay that back off and so I did, but as of the time of this writing, it has not been posted to my credit card account.

I paid the tuition with a credit card because I didn’t want my grad school loans to stack up more. I need to do some accounting, but I think I’m either lacking some refunds or I maybe forgot to repay loans with refunds I received. Yikes.

Also, by paying with a credit card, I earn points. 🙂

4. Rewards

Miles and points can be used to pay for travel expenses, especially for airline tickets and hotel stays. Therefore, I’m enrolled in various travel and credit card loyalty programs.

I have he following:

• Airlines
  • American Airlines AAdvantage
    • +5692 / 97029 total miles (6.23% increase from July)
  • Delta Skymiles
    • +0 / 8110 total miles
  • United MileagePlus
    • +0 / 1874
    • Chase UR points are transferable
  • Singapore Airlines KrisFlyer
    • +0 / 0 total miles
    • Chase UR points are transferable
• Credit Cards
  • Capital One Quicksilver
    • $1.01 / $9.74 total cash back (11.57% increase from July)
  • Chase Ultimate Rewards
    • +4279 / 43450 total points, combined all three Chase cards (9.84% increase from July)
• Hotels
  • Hilton Honors
    • +2352 / 659,991 total points (0.36% increase from July)
• Rental Cars
  • Hertz Gold Plus
    • +140 / 844 total points (20.57% increase from July)

Recall that I traveled to Japan. A LOT. From 2015-2017. And I traveled to faraway places in addition to that. That’s why I have a lot (!) of AAdvantage miles and Hilton Honors points. And also why I am currently AAdvantage Executive Platinum and Hilton Honors Diamond, respectively.

It’s actually all this frequent travel and earning of points of miles that also gave me the concept of using miles and points in order to reduce pilgrimage costs. But more on that later.

These days, my points and miles earning also correlate to my credit card spending. For example, since I use my Chase credit cards the most, you’ll see the biggest earn this month for Ultimate Rewards.

At the end of August, I flew to Phoenix, AZ for a pilgrimage. You can read that report here. Because of that, I was able to earn more AAdvantage miles for the round trip ticket to Phoenix as well as Hilton points. For the Hilton Garden Inn reservation I had for this pilgrimage, I actually spent both cash and 17,000 points, but the portion I paid in cash earned me points. Because of promos and my Diamond status, I basically got 3x points. I also rented a car from Hertz, and that earned me some points as well.

5. Traffic

One of my goals for Pilgrim for Less is to build a community of Christian and Catholic pilgrims who go on more pilgrimages without having to spend lots of time and money. I think one way to track that is to track who all is visiting the site and who all is subscribing to email and following the social medias.

Blog Traffic

• New Users: 206 (90.7% increase from July)
• Sessions: 243 (31.4% increase from July)
• Pageviews: 335 (2.4% increase from July)

Email and Social Media

• Email Subscribers: 32 (+3 from July)
• Facebook Page Likes: 15 (+3 from July)
• Twitter Followers: 1 (but it’s just me…lol)
• Instagram Followers: 7 (+1 from July)

I experimented with a few methods to drive traffic to my blog, and it looked like that worked. Out of that, I was able to increase my Facebook Likes and email subscribers a little bit. Just a little bit…

6. Cool Things

For August, I was able to go on one pilgrimage. I went “into the desert” in Phoenix, AZ for a grand tour of visiting churches and shrines in the area. The trip initially started out as a “oh hey, I found cheap airfare” kind of trip, but due to current circumstances, I made it more intentional as a pilgrimage and personal retreat. Check out that pilgrimage report here.

My good friend Jason launched his YouTube channel, Light and Heavy, covering pilgrimages. He and I are in collaborations for content and consultation so expect to see us promoting each other’s stuff!

The most popular post in August was 3 Ways to Fly Cheap, but that was the post I was doing experiments on for driving traffic. Had I not done that, the most popular post then was July’s monthly report.

7. Goals

Last month, I made it a goal to increase my email subscribers to 40 by the beginning of September. I didn’t make it to 40 since I only got up to 32. No problem as it’s not about the numbers. I have another tweak or experiment in mind to gain a few more email subscribers. Since I have a fairly great network of people I know through my parish and elsewhere, I think I’ll try to personally reach out to people this month in order to have them subscribe to Pilgrim for Less.

For August, I also set a goal of making 3 affiliate sales. I didn’t make any Amazon sales. Again, no problem since it’s not about the sales. I won’t set a sales goal for Amazon for September since I want to focus on content and traffic.

Currently, I don’t have any pilgrimage plans for September, but that may change as this month goes on. I am gone on a international trip for a week, but the primary purpose of that trip is to visit family. Knowing how I roll, I’ll likely visit churches while out and about on that trip. Stay tuned!

My spending was a little more in control in August, but I know I can still do better and minimize costs.

September will be a challenging month for me since I’ll back in grad school. I’m not sure what kind of work load my class will have so the key will be for me to find good blog/life/work/volunteer balance.

Boom! Another monthly report in the books. Thanks for reading!

Check out last month’s monthly report here.