My income was dismal last week. I don’t mean in my professional life, I mean for this project. With the exception of one month, I think I’ve always hit my $50 dollar a week goal. Income outside my normal job. I started by doing surveys and tasks, then shifted more toward stock trading. However, as I suspected, my stock trading strategy is waning. Perhaps I will have to go back to doing surveys.
I’ve been considering using the windfall I earned from a temporary side hustle outside of my regular job back in November. I put about 60% of it in a CD. The other 40% in a high yield savings account. It’s not doing much. Just sitting there. And with a strong jobs report, it doesn’t look like interest rates are lowering. So, I have decided to use 20% of it toward this project. I feel it is still in the spirit of this project because I earned it outside of my regular job. I also don’t want to lose momentum and this will be a big psychological boost.
And in any case, I am in this for the long haul. I’m not trying to time the market, though it has been down or sideways since the election. I also thought about what I said in my last post – about protecting assets in this political climate. But the long term investor doesn’t care about the political climate (barring a black swan, world or nation-ending event). The long term investor picks good companies with good value that they would be happy holding for ten or more years. It’s easy to get swept up in the present, but it is precisely because of this that continuing to invest is the right answer for me. I hope to invest thoughtfully and manage risk.
I will also say that I flirted with the idea of rearranging my portfolio completely. I could easily hit $100 dollars a month and somewhat mitigate risk, but long term I don’t know that this would pay off. I don’t know where this project or portfolio goes after I hit my $100 dollar a month goal in passive income, but I do know I want it to last.