Disclaimer: I don’t break down the actual amounts in my progress reports in fear of revealing too much online – my apologies! These posts are merely a way for me to track my progress.

Woohoo! I have finally hit a new passive income milestone…after 3 months… haha. It has been long since an increase but I’m still proud of my accomplishment. With the addition of my rental property passive income (which I don’t include in these reports), I feel I’m at a much more solid place and am super excited. HOWEVER – I am still acting with cautious optimism as though income has increased, I’ve learned that passive income is not as stable as people may think and shit can easily happen.

Regardless, I’m grateful. Before I left on my one year nomading trip I had maybe $50/month coming in passively, and I’ve been able to increase that almost 50x since I started. It’s hard work but it looks like it can be done!

Travel

I came back from Vancouver beginning of August, but besides that I did not do much traveling. September will have better travel updates as I am currently on a mini solo US trip 🙂

I didn’t catch any fish but it was a great day!

Feelings

From the beginning to middle of the month I think I was having sort of a quarter-life crisis. It would randomly hit me that my whole life is upside down from what it was about 1.5 years ago. Though I think I made the right decisions, it is hard not to worry about how my future is going to look like. The juxtaposition of my background of strict Asian parents and high expectations and my current life of digital nomading brings constant mental conflicts. The disparity of what I want and what I should want is vague so I realize I don’t completely know what I want for my future. I guess I’m still in the process of learning to accept the uncertainties of my life.

With these confusing feelings, I wrote down all my current goals and what I need to do month-to-month to achieve these goals. So rather than focus on things that are up in the air, I’m focusing on my current plans and milestones, and it has given me more purpose and direction.

I’ve also started scheduling my days more meticulously where I not only put down the tasks I want to accomplish but also the times I would work on them. In the past I felt too much time on my hands and a flexible schedule made it hard for me to concentrate or figure out what I needed to get done for the day. With this more rigid schedule, my thoughts don’t wander as much and I can focus without having action paralysis.

Here’s an example of how I schedule my day

Lastly I’ve implemented a morning routine that entails waking up earlier, making my bed, meditating, showering, and writing out my schedule.

These new developments actually make me feel a lot better every day!

Passive Income

My goal is still $10k/month before I work on bigger passion projects so I’m trying to go all out and work towards this. I have put down numeric goals for each month of what I want to achieve.

Etsy

I have finally started to work on Etsy after 4 months. My earnings have dropped a bit once again, so towards the end of month I began optimizing and adding new listings. I plan on hitting specific numeric goals for Etsy in September.

If you’d like to open your own Etsy shop, you can use my link here which gives you a free 40 listings (and provides me with 40 free listings as well).

Merch by Amazon

I was impressed at how much you can actually make with Merch by Amazon. I have increased sales since last month by about 9x. With shirts (and a lot of other things) however, you make 80% of your income with 20% of your products. Therefore, in order to hit new income goals I will need to find new winners. We’ll see if it works out! I’ve now reached tier 500 so I’ve been hiring out designers. As I’ve achieved a higher limit of designs I can put up daily, I plan to upload 10 designs a day to take advantage of this limit.

I also am going to try and expand to have my designs on Redbubble and Teepublic as well. It shouldn’t generate as many sales but I might as well diversify onto different platforms.

Amazon FBA

In August I had issues with Amazon FBA being unable to locate and unpack my products which caused a lot of stress. Initially they told me they couldn’t find it and would reimburse me, then later they told me they found it which was frustrating. I lost the opportunity to sell those products in August and it sucked that I missed out on profits.

Kindle

I’ve decided to try and put out 1-2 books a month for Kindle. Now that I’ve published books not only as kindles but as audiobooks and paperbacks as well, I’ve gotten more sales than any other month in the past.

Dropshipping

Not much progress in dropshipping yet :(. I find that one of the difficulties in working on a project with someone else is that your motivation can be quite dependent on each other’s work ethic. This is the same for my travel blog. Hopefully we will start mapping out our goals and milestones so we can get more done on the site!

Conclusion

I’m pretty happy about my progress in August – with passive income, my scheduling and routines, my mental health, and more. For September I plan to work mostly on Etsy, Merch, and Kindle. I feel optimistic for the month!