A mid-June Update

Well well.  June has been a great month so far and I don’t mind if I say it.

I’ve almost broken even on my Amazon Arbitrage, ( for more info see here) and I have a feeling that once September rolls around I’ll be on my way to making a little profit.

I have had one wonderful guest at my house already on Airbnb and am getting ready for another one to check in tomorrow!  That means I’ll clear around $800 from this gig so far… not too shabby!

I have also found out there is a home sharing group inside Airbnb between members and get this, I’m already setting up a swap for June or July of next year for a lovely little apartment in Switzerland!  I know it’s a ways from my original destination, but the goal here is to get out and travel and this is a great start!  We will see if this solidifies or not.

I have been thoroughly enjoying my job at Nanna’s Tea Shop. It’s a lot of fun to drink tea, socialize with customers, and help out a great woman, all the while making a little extra cash.  As you know this money will go towards the Roth IRA so I will hopefully be set up for my yearly contribution when the time comes.

Writing has proven elusive but I am getting back into the swing of things and have decided to begin a 250 goal.  250 words every day.  It sounds paltry to me, who when I do sit down can knock out 2k at a time.  The issue is sitting down every day.  Sitting down when I just want to sleep.  Sitting down when all I want to do is drink a beer and watch the telly.  Every day write.  That’s a page a day.  Hopefully I’ll write more but 250 words every day.

Finally I may have sourced a great price for a cheap ticket to London, which means I’ll save my mileage points for something else.  We are talking $300 from Vegas to Manchester.  The same day on BA.com and United.com tickets from Vegas to Manchester are going for around $1300! I will reveal my source once I get my ticket.

So with that I am going to sign-off and get back to the busy work day before my busy evening of sourcing product for Amazon and getting the house ready for the next airbnb guest.

Oh!  And writing 250 words.  Yes this post is writing but it’s not getting my books any farther along…

Cheers for now!

Kim

 

I’m up on AirBnB and Guest to Guest

I wasn’t kidding when I said I was going to get myself in gear this month.  I’ve edited all the pictures I took, written descriptions and put myself out there on the World Wide Web!  Well, my house at least.  Check out my listing at AirBnB!  Here is my favorite picture:

My patio at sunset, with a nice bottle of bubbly ready to go.  (Not to mention the nice view of the fire men period firehouse across the street.)

I also found a free home exchange site, Guest to Guest, and went ahead and threw the Loft on there as well.  It’s looking interesting so far and I love that it’s truly free.  They have groups you can join to help you find other travelers with your interests tastes, etc.  They also have a points system.  In fact, if you decide to join through this affiliate link here, I will get some serious points!  A win win for everyone.  If you do decide to join, find me and friend me on the site!

I will let you know my thoughts and feelings on these sites coming up but for now, here is another sweet shot of my home with the newly painted wall I tackled last weekend:

If you are a design type of person what do you think I should put in my fabulous frame:  A Jackson Pollack like black and white paint splatter picture, or perhaps a photo of an orchid I took?  I’ve had a lot of people suggest a black and white photo of the orchid.  Your thoughts?

Until next time!

-Kim Kennedy

 

An Adjusted Plan and May Re-cap

So I finally sat down and did some serious number crunching, graph making, excelling, etc. and came up with the following expense chart.

You may notice I added a possibility of going to Ireland as well.  I love Ireland, want to retire there, and wish I could buy my parents a retirement house there right now.  Its on the side of the world I want to be on, and finally, it tends to be a heck of a lot cheaper than London.

I also broke out the costs based on 2, 2,5 and 3 month intervals, just to see how long I might be able to get away.

FInally I added the expected money I will have saved up by the time next May rolls around.  I took two examples the cheapest and the most expensive and came up with how much extra money I need to try and find between now and then.

Total for 3 months in London with everything else included, see above; 22k and change.

(Now at this point, my practical mind, with just a hint of AccountDad pops up and says, Holy cow kiddo!  You could take that money and invest it into a rental property!  What are you doing blowing this on a 3 month vacation?  The answer: I am not blowing it.  I am investing into a once in a life time experience that might never come around again.  More money can be earned but opportunities like these might only come around once in a lifetime.)

Total for 2 months, one in London and one in Ireland: 16k and change.  8k a month!?  Seriously?  Looks like it!

Now let’s look at the good news; I think I can have saved $13,500.

So money left to raise to get to London for 3 months? $8,500.

Money left to raise to get to our combo 2 month jaunt? $2,500.

When you look at it like that, it doesn’t look so daunting.  Once I get part the additional $2,500 saved in the next 11 months, I am cleared for takeoff.

Back to some sobering news.  This is after all my current money making schemes including a part-time job I got at a tea shop and my FBA projected earnings.

So I’ve got to find another way to hustle some money in a relatively comfortable and legal way.

Sadly, my writing is out.  It is not making any money.  In fact it is costing a lot of money.  More than I ever imagined it would, but I will post more on that later.

So I’m going to need to get going with this AirBnB.

Good news is, I got my photos of my house taken.  Which means I got it clean enough to take photos so yea! me.

I will want to get going on this by July.

More good news: I can use those photos to join housing exchange Networks, which means that I might be able to swap houses while in England thus saving me the cost of lodging.  I will be doing a review of these sites soon.

I am also getting ready to get my sales on, as in Craigs listing and Amazoning the crap out of my house.  I’m going to be ruthless.  Anything worth something that I am not absolutely in love with, is going out the door!

Now more bad news.  (I’m just up and down and all over the place today, aren’t I?)  This is going to be hell month for me at work.  Not only is it year end, we are also transitioning to a new state wide software system that is not going smoothly, to put it lightly.  This whole thing is reminding me more than anything that I am just not cut out for this cubicle crap!

I also need to buckle down with my writing so that when I head to these signings in August, I have something for people to get signed by me.  There is a concept.

Now for more good news! I took a look at my spending from May, please see below.

Yikes!  Looks scary, especially as you take into consideration the fact that I only take home 3300 a month, before taxes and other stuff is pulled out.  Yea, so I am going to need to reign in the spending.  But I have a wonderful new budget set and with all this work and writing, I’m not going to be able to spend a whole lot of time out and  tempted to spend money.  There must always be a silver lining to any cloud.

So there we have it, the goal set, and adjusted, and priced.  Now it’s time to get running!

Cheers!

Kim Kennedy

 

 

 

 

 

 

FBA Update!

Hello all!  I am back from Cancun and I am feeling so refreshed and happy despite the fact that I went from this…

 

 

 

 

 

 

To this…

what work looked like this morning!

 

 

 

 

 

 

In less than 5 hours!  Ah the fun of International travel.

I will have a wonderful post all things Cancun but for now I would finally like to get to a post I have been promising for awhile now, and that is an update to my online selling through FBA!!!

Now for those of you who have absolutely no idea what I am talking about here and all this sounds like a foreign language, may I suggest the following gurus to straighten you out:

Online Selling Experiment – Ryan Grant.

This guy left his job at 24 (only 8 months ago) and began selling things online, aka FBA and Ebay full-time.  So far he has been killing it!  Now I can tell this guy puts some back-breaking work into this thing but he does prove that it can be done.  You must check out everyone of his posts if you want to get started on this, I did.

Jessica Larrew

Another huge success story in the FBA selling arena.  This gal and her hubby left full-time jobs awhile ago to do this PART TIME or around 40 hrs a week, split between them, and they still manage to put away over 100k a year.  Yeah pretty sweet.  She has some tools and products, I’ll be reviewing them later but certainly check out all her free goodies and posts, she was the gal that really got me into this.

 

There are plenty more but for now those two will get you started.

So I have been at this about six weeks now and I have to say that I think this could become a successful thing!  Which means that I have not yet broken a profit but I am on my way!  So let’s look at the numbers so far:

In my time thus far I have made through FBA $135.03.  I have sold a total of ten items; which means that I am averaging $13.50 an item.  Now this is what I have made after all the Amazon fees were taken out, including shipping the items to Amazon.  Not too shabby.

Now we must look at the expenses otherwise incurred.

I have paid out an additional $56.00 for various other Amazon fees.  These were charged to my card because I hadn’t sold enough products to cover them, namely, the pro subscription fee of $40 and the premium I pay to only send one box of items to one distribution center verses spreading out my stock.  (Less work for me.)

My initial stock that I have bought so far cost me 130.00.  Ah!  I am at the break even point on my stock fees verses profit.  From here on out I earn money on anything else sold.  With this 130.00 I purchased 35 items which means that those items 3.71 each.  As my average selling price is 13.50 you can quickly see how fast this money could stack up!

Finally I had to invest in some initial items for the company; tape, boxes, bubble wrap, scanning software etc.  This came to  55.00.

So my total debits for this venture comes to $241.36.

My total profit so far, after taking out all Amazon fees is $135.03.

Therefore I am roughly $100 bucks in the hole.  For a 6 week old venture, this isn’t too bad, especially when you consider I put in an initial investment of under $300.

A few things that will help me out more.

Buying more product to counter act the pro seller fee.  Amazon charges a buck to list things on their site.  Or you can pay $40/month to list as much as you want.  So it makes sense to list at least 40 items a month.  I need to up my stock.  It also gets cheaper the more you send in.

Shipping is less with more items in one box and if I have enough in several boxes, I will send the boxes to various warehouses instead of paying $1 each to send the items all to one warehouse.  It was just getting expensive to pay for packing material and boxes for just a few items, so putting all the items going to one spot made more sense.  Now, if I send in more at one time, I can send in boxes where Amazon wants them, thus avoiding the buck fee.  Margins people!

Challenges I have faced. Sourcing items to sell!  Yeah, this is the kicker!  This is hard and takes time so I suggest a few things:

Do this while you are shopping for other items.  I had things to purchase for vacation at Target, so I sourced while shopping for my items.  Keep the receipts separate for tax time! I didn’t do this.  Bad Kim.  I will now.

Hit more than one store at a time.  I headed over to Target and Tuesday Morning all in the same shopping trip.  They are in the same strip mall.

Check out the Thrift Stores!  I found several books that were going for a whole lot more on Amazon than what I paid for them.  Best of all, the books were brand new!  Like still had receipts and book marks from the independent book store in them.  Not a scratch on them.  Wild!  Now I can’t say these have sold yet, or will, as these things tend to be long-range items, aka they take awhile to sell, but I know of a few women who are super successful at this from just selling Thrift and garage sale items.

Don’t be afraid to buy multiples.  Almost everything of mine that sold one of something on Amazon, sold out the rest as well.  Don’t go bonkers here and buy 100 soaps and maxing out your credit card, but I bought 14 of something on clearance and they are all sold out.  Further more this is great for multi-packs but this is something for later.

So tomorrow, after work, I plan on hitting up Target and Tuesday Morning again.  Here’s to hoping for lots of goodies!

 

I will update you all in a month or so to let you know what is happening with my Amazon business as this is a blog about making and saving money to just go, but I don’t plan on this being the main thing I talk about.

So for right now, chao my friends, until next time!

-Kim Kennedy

 

 

March Re-cap!

Well it’s been another stunner of a month on book sales with a total of 6 books sold for around $12 in royalties.  Not exactly the amount I was looking for at the beginning of my journey so I could be in trouble.

Now for the good news!  I found out I had almost enough frequent flier miles to head to London round trip on United so that takes my amount to save down by $2,000!  Now this cuts out that great layover in Iceland but perhaps I can work something out there.  Or just head over during my time with Ryan or Easy Jet.

I am working on getting the rest of the miles but even if I have to purchase the rest this will only cost around $160.  I can handle that.

I have also found out that as a member of WAGGGS or World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, I can stay at Pax lodge in London for the first few weeks for a very nice low price, cutting down on my costs a bit more.

I also began a little experiment with this amazing Fulfilled By Amazon and just sent in my first shipment, so we will see how this goes.  I will post more later, but if this takes off, I might be able to do this instead of a part-time job.  Even at my slowest time, which is now as I learn the system, I am making about $10 and hour which is what I would make at any part-time job.  Once this starts to go up I might be really bringing in some cash.

I also managed to stick an extra $100 towards the Credit card debt.  Once the April payment goes through I will have only 3121.51 to pay off, which, if I keep at $700/month, can be paid off by mid August or, if I add one hundred in to pay $800/ month, I could have it paid off by the beginning of August, so that would be $5,600 saved up by the time I left for London.

Without the airfare cost and a savings of around $300 on hostels I am well on my way to having half saved up.

This month I am going to work hard on getting my place up for rent on Airbnb, since I will be gone at the beginning of May, more on that in a second, get three new books out, and work on trying for two more shipments to Amazon, which will make an additional estimated $200 total.

Busy lady here!

Three books Kim!?  Are you crazy!  Not really… I have two that are over half way finished and edited, and one that is all done, save it’s cover, which is being polished off by a pro as we speak!

The loft is almost ready to receive guests, just needs some privacy curtains and a fresh coat of paint, and then walla I’ll list that on AirBNB.

Finally the Amazon Shipments will hopefully get easier as I continue to practice so I feel I’ll be able to accomplish these in 15 hours total instead of 10 hours each, as the last one took, bringing my hourly wage up by a bit.

I am also taking part in Camp Nanowrimo and have vowed to get the first episode of Her Holiday written so that will be ready for edits at the beginning of May before I head off to vacation.

Hold on Kim, vacation!  You are trying to save money for next year!!!

I know but this was too good to pass up.  Mom and Dad have a time share in Cancun, Mexico and they also had air miles expiring so they bought me a round trip ticket!  I’m spoiled, what can I say?  They will also pay for most food and activities, read super spoiled, so I am having a lovely vacation almost free of charge.  I see those middle fingers sticking up people!

So, next time I will highlight how I began my journey of this FBA through Amazon and then perhaps talk about getting the loft ready for guests!

Chow for now!

Kim Kennedy

Finding new ways to make money!

So I took a peek at my monthly book sales today, and let me tell you, it’s not a pretty picture.

But the good news is, I’ve been sick!

I know it doesn’t sound like good news but in truth when ever I get sick I start researching or reading, and this haul brought me some real gold!

I don’t know if you were one of the millions of Americans who watched the Dateline interview with Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com’s head hancho, but I certainly was.  And while everyone else got excited about the drone deliveries, (and yes I did too) I really got excited about something else he mentioned.

FBA or Fulfilled by Amazon, was a little system where you, as a seller, could send things off to Amazon, and they would store it, ship it, take care of customer service, and send you money!  (Note this is over simplified, but go with me on this.)

As a degree holding merchandising and buying professional this was like music to my ears.  Here you could plug into the largest retailer in the world and they would sell your items and take care of all the dirty work.  All you had to do was find the items that would sell.

Fast forward to this weekend’s coughing and hunting extravaganza, research style!  I first found Smart Passive Income, with Pat Flynn and fell in love with the blog.  I will certainly speak more on this guy, but for now I want to focus on an interview he gave that brought me right back to FBA.

He had a couple on who spend around 20 hours a week, both of them now, selling items on FBA.  They grossed around $100,000 last year!  That’s money they made shopping!  You can find them here.

I’ll show them consumer confidence!

Hold your horses kids, I could actually make money from doing the thing I thought I was going to get to do with my degree!?  What people think I do when I say I buy for a living?  Oh yes it was possible and it sounded like the perfect fit for that part-time job I was looking to get into!

Now remember, I have a goal, to be able to leave my day job in May of 2014, so that I can make my living online from wherever I am.  Here was a way to do this!

I must also give a shout out to Online Selling Experiment, a great blog about a guy just getting into this game full-time.  I’ll be following Ryan closely.

Further more it sounded like the perfect additional experiment for this blog.  So who’s with me?  Let’s give this thing a whirl…right after I get over this cold.  (Probably didn’t help I was up all night, I was so excited about this new possible venture, but I digress.)

Cheers!

Kim