Hey yall! 

This month was very interesting on the beermoney front. I made A LOT of money on Swagbucks this month and honestly that is not normal for me. Other people consistently earn from Swagbucks like that but I am just not as dedicated as they are, but this month I put in some work on it and got really lucky with one game I played. I don't feel like I put near as much time into Prolific this month but I still made a decent chunk of change. I finally got to cash out my Evidation earnings so that is awesome. One of the big things I noticed this month that I am kind of frustrated with is that I only got roughly 50 cents each from Pixelpoint and Lootup. To be honest though, I basically only login and get the daily reward from them and I don't even do that every day so I guess I can't be too upset about it. I would not add these into your rotation if you aren't already doing them just to be honest. I also didn't notice honestly until I started filling in this table that I didn't earn a single point on Crowdtap. I obviously didn't devote any time whatsoever to that. So maybe I just need to get to where I can cashout the points I have and then delete that and move on from it. It just seems like its such a slow earner. It is very hard to track how much I spend out of the Google Opinion Rewards app because it doesn't have a good ledger that shows how much money I redeem with each purpose so honestly that one is kind of an estimate. I earned roughly a dollar on Zogo this month but I think I barely checked in to it and I know I should spend more time there. 

So this month I started a job at CVS as a cashier part time. This is not the money that we really need but it is something and anything helps right now to get us where we need to go. I tried this month to stay more consistent with the beermoney stuff which maybe you could tell from that post. I also tried to really work Amazon as much as possible, but this was also a really hard month for me mental health wise. I had a really hard time at the beginning of the month where I could barely eat and shower let alone work and function. I bounced back. I'm okay now, but that was the reality. I need to focus on myself and my health before I can focus on money. Money is nothing without my mental state. SOOOO that is where we are at. This month took a bit of a toll but that is okay. Things aren't always perfect. Give yourself grace when you need to. Be understanding with yourself. 

Gig work has become extremely popular over the last few years especially. I have tried a good chunk of them over the years. I started by driving with Uber Eats because there was practically no wait period to get started and I was waiting to get into Doordash. Uber Eats sucked! It was so bad. I got basically no tips. There was this pin number system where you had to ask people their pin numbers for them to get their food, and some people didn't know their pins. It was terrible. I hated it. After trying Uber Eats several times I gave up and almost didn't even want to try Doordash, but someone I was dating at the time did it and I rode with him one day and it was way more money than Uber and it was a lot easier because all of them were just porch drops and you didn't have to interact with the people. I started Doordashing on my own after that. I also learned from him what orders were worth it and what to decline and all the rules basically. I am not a top dasher because my acceptance rate is too low. I generally don't accept orders less than a dollar a mile or at least close to it. In my neighborhood Doordash isn't great, but I do live super close to a downtown area and you get better tips and money there and they run better promos there as well. The problem is trying to park to run into restaurants or apartments when there is no street parking basically, so if I want to Doordash downtown I take my husband with me so he can circle the block or find nearby parking lots to wait for me in and that kind of thing. When its all said and done from the notes I have so far this year I'm averaging $0.87 a mile for Doordash which is pretty good overall I think when I can write off 67 cents a mile on taxes. 

I'm sure you have heard a million commercials for this app and it can be helpful. I think that anything that saves a little money or makes a little money is a good thing and worthwhile. This app is not one that I am a big fan of. After the first fill up where you get 25 cents off a gallon the saving gets significantly smaller. It gets so much smaller that I basically get better rewards just by going to Speedway and getting 5 cents off anyway and at Walmart I get 10 cents off a gallon for being a Walmart plus member. After the introduction period the rewards on Upside just aren't high enough. I kept it installed though and after a while they sent me another promo that said I could get another 20 cents off the next fill up. When they do rewards like that it makes it worth it. I have made a total of $9.64 in the matter of two and a half months. While I'm grateful for any money made or saved it just isn't very much. 

February was rough. This is not something I was excited to write about as we had a major setback, but here it is. My husband still wasn't working full weeks, we had several large expenses come up, including $400 in glasses for me because the dog knocked my only pair off my face and we lost them in the slow lmfao. We did not make any progress this month...we actually spent more than we paid so that wasn't great. We also got a couple new cards this month. We got a joint Forum credit card and used it to balance transfer my Discover card and his Quicksilver card. The Forum card has an intro 3% interest rate for a year and then after that it goes up to 11% which is tremendously better than the 20+% we were paying on the other cards. It sucks that we got set so far back this month it feels like, but we are early in the journey and this takes time. Give yourself grace...I'm trying to do that for myself. 

So if you have been reading my posts thus far you probably know my favorite financial podcast overall as I've mentioned it several times. "Bigger Pockets Money" is by far my favorite podcast. I have listened to literally hundreds of the episodes and several of them over and over again. I believe that the advice and guidance given on the podcast is very solid and (mostly) safe bets. They believe overall in the lazy investing style of low cost index funds and that time IN the market will almost always beat TIMING the market. If you are interested in real estate investing this is also a great show for you as they are almost all invested in real estate and do very well at it. They've all had bad investments and they've all done really well in other aspects so they have pretty well rounded advice based on experience. 

I did not do as much on my beermoney sites this month as I wanted to. I had a lot of problems this month and even moved out of the house for a while. It was a whole thing. I did make good money on Swagbucks this month though. I basically brought in another $62 bucks in points which is pretty damn good I think. I did try to log in to Evidation every day but I know I missed several and same with Zogo. I will definitely be able to redeem 10 bucks from Zogo next month and I should be able to redeem $20 from OnePulse as well, so that will be cool. I am also closing out the end of the month with a pretty severe cold so I have been sleeping a lot the last few days. I'm exhausted. The beginning of my financial journey is not starting off the way I wanted, but hopefully it improves in the coming months with my husband getting more overtime and me hopefully getting a better more consistent job.

Bigger Pockets is an awesome financial resource, especially if you are interested in real estate investing. They have so much collective real estate knowledge and are pretty good overall at explaining the concepts to people. I love the podcast especially, as I have referenced many times in my posts. The "money" podcast is honestly what gives me all the hope that I can and will make it through this financial journey. They also have a real estate podcast that has an immense amount of valuable information. I highly recommend them for anyone on this journey.