Welcome to my August 2018 Income Report where I share how much I made as a work at home mom from my online businesses!

Why do I share how much I make? While a lot of people find this information truly personal, I really don’t mind talking money. Especially when it comes to something like working from home as an entrepreneur. I want to be able to not only track my progress as my businesses grow, but also show others that you can make money from home.

If you’d rather watch a video break down click here.

Disclaimer: This post contains some affiliate links which pay me a small commission if you click or buy. There is never any obligation to do so, but I appreciate your support if you do decide to.

Now let’s get to the good stuff…

IN AUGUST 2018 I WAS ABLE TO EARN $4,434.86 WORKING FROM HOME!

Before we get to numbers I wanted to talk a little bit about how things have been going. First off, working from home with my husband has been amazing AND a challenge. I’ve been the one home for years so to be able to let go of some of my responsibilities and not hover over everything has been HARD. Trusting that he can deal with things without me is HARD. Knowing that it’s all on me to make sure we can pay our bills is HARD. We are working on working together without overlapping. Efficiency for us is for one person to be working and one person to be tending to the kids. Up until this point whenever my husband was home it was family time so I still gravitate towards us doing everything together. It’s a work in progress!

In July I picked up a Kindle Paperwhite (which I LOVE by the way) and have read two books already. Compare that to probably not reading two books in the last year and it’s pretty impressive. One I HIGHLY recommend for you if you’re an entrepreneur, whether it’s full time or just extra money, is Profit First. It has really changed the way I’m running my business and I’m excited to implement it moving forward. I’ll probably share a post of my favorite business books soon, but I just couldn’t wait to share. You need to read it. Seriously.

Over the next few months we head into fourth quarter which is ALWAYS the time when we make the most sales so we’re hoping to hit fourth quarter hard. Double, scratch that, triple our current sales is the goal. And I’m also spending a couple of days a week working on taking this blog a little more seriously as well as creating a few new digital designs for Etsy. My main focus is still reselling, but now that it’s our main hustle I have a few side streams of income I’m working on. I’m never one to put all of my eggs in one basket.

Oh! And in real estate news we sold our first home! It was the first home we bought back in 2011 and the first home we’ve sold. I will definitely do a post about that house soon because it has brought us so much as far as opportunity and profit. We now have a nice sum sitting in the bank waiting for our next real estate investment and to use as padding until our business is 100% covering everything. We now own just one rental property and it’s officially rented out as of September 1st. It sat vacant for about 2 months because we had to do some work due to a plumbing issue in the kitchen, but now it’s rented out and we can stop paying that mortgage out of our own pocket! For a while we were paying mortgages on both of our homes and it was a little scary. We’re happy to be free of those payments each month!

Now that I got all of that covered let’s talk numbers!

How did I earn $4,434 from home?

This total includes a variety of different income streams which I will happily break down for you real quick.

Disclaimer: This post contains some affiliate links which pay me a small commission if you click or buy. There is never any obligation to do so, but I appreciate your support if you do decide to.

Ebay: Ebay is my main source of income and my main focus. I resell items that I find mostly at thrift stores, but also yard sales, retail stores, etc. If I can make a good profit on it, I flip it! You can sign up for eBay here if you don’t already have an account. I started with just items around the house and reinvested the money I made.

Poshmark: For selling trendier, younger and more designer clothing items I love using Poshmark. It’s an app (and a website) that I’m really starting to put more focus on. Sign up at Poshmark.com or download their app and use my code AILEENBARKER for $5 off your first purchase.

Mercari: It’s another app that you can sell pretty much anything on and my favorite part is how low the fees (10%) and shipping are. Anything heavy I like to list on Mercari because the pricing for shipping heavy items is more reasonable than anywhere else. If you want to check it out you can sign up for Mercari (or download the app) and use my code MZASRJ to get a $10 credit for your first purchase.

Etsy: Most people know Etsy for handmade items, but that’s not what I sell on there. I actually have two stores: one focuses on vintage items (the same items I have on eBay, I just post them to Etsy as well) and the other is digital downloads (like printables).

Affiliates: This include income through different affiliate programs such as Amazon Affiliates, etc. There are a ton out there, but I mainly use Amazon at the moment.

Youtube: I do make a little bit of money on YouTube and it’s been steadily growing which is fun after all the hard work I’ve been putting into it. The money from YouTube comes from ads that play on my videos.

Freelance: Even though this is something I don’t do as much as I used to, I do some freelance work. Mostly virtual assistant type work focusing on design and technical tasks like website or graphic design, setting up email lists, etc. This is something I do plan on taking on more of as time goes on. I love that there is practically no overhead and no inventory to manage.
(above screenshot taken from my GoDaddy Bookkeeping account)

BREAKDOWN OF AUGUST 2018 ONLINE BUSINESS INCOME

INCOME: $4,434.86

EXPENSES: $4,521.40

NET PROFIT: -$86.54

Note: I run a business that sells products so my expenses are much higher than most other online businesses that are service or digital product based.

August sales were GREAT in comparison to previous months. Sales are definitely picking up and all of our hard work is coming together.

I want to explain that just because I’m down $86 doesn’t mean I’m losing money on the items I’m selling. The calculations above are money in (sales) and money out (expenses) for the month. If an item I purchased in January sells, that is included in the income, but not the expenses (because it was in the expenses for January).

If I purchase 100 items this month, the cost for all of those items will be reflected as expenses, but because they will sell over time it doesn’t show the profit I will make.

As we build up our inventory we’ve been spending a lot more than I have intended, but moving forward we will be cutting them dramatically.

Below shows you a break down of my income and expenses by category.

EBAY INCOME BREAKDOWN

Since eBay is my main income I thought I would take a moment to break down my month on eBay so that I can compare each month. I didn’t do a report for July so I’ll be comparing to June numbers.

# of items sold on Ebay: 141 (up from 119 in June)

Total sales: $3,612.75 (up from $2,224.00 in June)

Selling Costs: $1,151.54 (31.8%) (from $930.85 / 41.9% in June)

Average Sale Price (including shipping): $26.28 (up from $18.68 in June)

One big jump on several of our stats in August is that (thanks to my sister) we found out about some limited edition Vans shoes. We ended up buying 9 pairs at $65 each and selling them for $150. So that definitely bumped up our income quite a bit. That situation is pretty rare, though I wish we could replicate that every month, so we’ll see if we can at least match or beat this income in September without that bump from high dollar sales.

Even in spite of those 9 high dollar sales our sales are steadily going up. We’ve been listing an average of 50-75 new items each week and are generally selling around 35 items each week. So while we’ve been trying to get our active listings up, it’s been hard because we’re selling half or more the number of items we’re listing each week! I’m hoping to increase our sell through rate even more moving forward.

July Goal Results

Get new office set up to work – DONE!
Hit $2,000 in Ebay sales – DONE! (though it was in August instead of July)

SEPTEMBER GOALS

Less than $2,000 in expenses

Our expenses, mostly from sourcing, are a bit out of control and we really need to focus on cutting them so that we have more of a profit each month. It wasn’t a big deal when it was a side gig and we just used the money to pad our savings and pay for fun family stuff, but now that it’s supposed to support our family we need to cut expenses. This means sourcing smart and low.

Our biggest expenses each month are: Ebay Fees, Cost of Goods and Shipping. If I can cut cost of goods and trim our other unnecessary expenses we should be in a much better place. Sales are going up, but I need to spend less rather than spending more as we make more.

Stick to $250 sourcing budget

I don’t want to spend more than $250 on cost of goods this month. We have a nice little backlog of items we can work with and I will just spend more time finding better profit items rather than picking up anything that will bring a profit.

Again, if you’d like to see a video break down you can click here.

So that’s it for this month!

If there’s anything that I missed the you’d like me to go over in my next report or if you have any questions at all please comment below!