I was thinking lately about the challenge Sam put for himself to get $200,000 in online income or go back to work. My challenge is not that ambitious but similar, I have decided that for the last six months of 2013, July to December, I will live solely off blogging income.

The rules I have set are as follow

Payments received after July 1st for deals closed before July 1st will not count.

I may not use that exact money since it is in US$ on a Paypal account so will apply a 2% exchange rate and a 2% transfer fee on all cleared Paypal balances.

Income from freelance travel writing does not count.

The only blogging income that is considered is proceeding from Reach Financial Independence, Make Money Your Way, and any other website I may develop during those months.

Income from my ad referral network (contact me if you want in!) will count since it is linked to RFI and MMYW.

At the end of the year I need to have “saved” from that income $3,000 for a vacation in late 2013 or early 2014, if the vacation is taken in 2013 the cost will have to be covered by blogging income and deduced from the $3,000 savings goal.

My lifestyle will not change because of the challenge. It will just be a FAIL if I go over budget. I will not stop traveling, eating well or spending on things I want to spend on for the sake of staying within budget. As a matter of fact BF does not know about that challenge so it is completely business as usual regarding our spending.

Money spent to INVEST ON ASSETS will not count. We have two ledgers here, one is called “house and land investments” that include building a new room, paying contractors, lawyers, and so on, that will not count. The other one is “life investments” which should not be called like that since it is more liabilities than anything else, that is a car, a boat, bed sheets (even if we plan on opening a B&B so far only we have slept on them), cutlery.. that will be included in the spending.

I have set three tiers of income

$1,000/month should about cover basic daily expenses and not make it for the holiday savings goal.

$2,000/month should allow for emergency spending (like a laptop replacement, I know mine is dying) and the holiday savings goal.

$5,000 is the amount I have said makes me feel safe as passive income, since it allows me to live well by my standards and to have enough to keep investing and building more wealth. If I had no other sources of income but blogging, like I am going to pretend for 6 months, this is what I would like to achieve, so this is going to be my real goal.

Where we stand at the moment

I have kind of plateaued at the $2-$3K mark, June was slightly under $3,000 and not my best month. Summer is supposed to be really slow. RFI started making good money after 6 months and MMYW is just a few days old so I don’t expect much from it, although I shall not lose the two months I lost blogging in the dark on RFI at first.

As I will disclose my blogging income on Make Money Your Way for both sites, I will see you over there for the results month by month!

What does your online/freelance/side hustle income cover? Living expenses or your blogging costs?

This post was featured on the Money Bulldog, Outlier Model, Your Daily Finance, thank you!