November 2016 Progress Report – $600/month Passive Income Reached!

I apologize for the lack of posts lately. As you can see from the article title, my passive income has almost doubled since last month! YAY! Essentially, I was using November to really work on achieving higher gains since October. Once I saw Etsy working, I went into overdrive and became slightly obsessed with increasing my passive income exponentially and reaching this “financial freedom” objective. Because of this, I found myself neglecting things like my blog(s)! Crap.

Currently I’m in Hong Kong with my family. It is easy to get super comfortable here. Though Hong Kong is a fast-paced city, staying with family has made my lifestyle much slower (and restricted?) in a way.

I want to get back into writing again. I have lots to talk about and it feels crappy to have not posted in a few weeks. Whoever said writing is like building a muscle is totally right. I’m already finding it harder to get back into writing. It’s been difficult for me to tell myself “okay let’s sit down, and write a blog post” or “let’s reply to e-mails”. Instead, I’ve been so focused on increasing my immediate passive income dollar amount that Etsy has been my main priority so far.

Anyway let me get into how I’ve been doing below:

Goals

I’ve set some goals for both 2016 and 2017. Writing down goals always helps push me in the right direction, even if they constantly change or aren’t met.

By the end of the year – I want to have opened multiple Etsy stores and profited on each. I also wanted to open up some successful Fiverr gigs, which I haven’t really gotten down before.

Once I get Etsy completely locked down, I want to focus on Fiverr for the rest of December. My reasoning is that I can’t put all my eggs in one basket. If something were to happen to the Etsy platform, I would be screwed. I need to diversify. I also want to test each income stream so I can report my findings on my blog.

By mid-October of 2017 – I want to achieve a $10,000/month passive income goal. Sounds crazy? Well yeah it does, I know. I made these goals with someone I met in October, and we’re holding each other accountable and giving each other incentives to meet them. The accountability and support helps so much. We initially shot for $3,500/month, to which we decided “let’s shoot for the stars… cause worst case scenario, we’ll land on the moon”.

Recently, however, I spoke with Sharon Gourlay and she told me it is not a ridiculous goal, and that she believes she accomplished this within a year. And when you break down the numbers, it is definitely possible and just requires smart thinking.

So yeah. Let’s do it!

Etsy

As you can tell, most of my profits are generated from Etsy digital downloads. I’m happy to say my profits have been exponentially increasing. The secret? Just keep doing it. Keep adding new listings. And I’m excited because opening more stores will help with this.

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). 

Kindle

Minimal gains from Kindle! I still plan to work on this channel a bit more, or at least report how to attempt it.

Feelings

This month was kind of a roller coaster. Lots of wonderful feelings, but also some negative feelings I put on myself.

I’m used to being very in control of my life. I like when I know A = B. If I do this, this other thing will happen. I guess that was how my life was always like in the past…I work hard in school, I’ll get good grades…I work hard at my job, I’ll get rewarded. And I did things with little risk.

Now, life has tons of unknowns. Long story short, the universe is teaching me a lot about life and love. I’m learning more and more that A does not always = B. That’s why overanalyzing does not work in scenarios that you can’t control. Instead I have to trust the present.

So yeah, I’m trying to embrace the unknown even if it gives me a lot of anxiety. For someone like me, this is all easier said than done. Not only has my recent anxiety been rooted by unknowns, my mind/heart has been reacting in uncontrollable ways. It’s weird to explain, but this happened once before, months ago, where I kept thinking about a heart stress I was having. I couldn’t remove my thoughts around the physical stress itself. Every time I told myself to “stop thinking about my heart”, I would think about it and its clenching feeling. You know the nervous feeling you get before you deliver a speech? Imagine that feeling persisting for 3-days nonstop. I was freaking out, almost about to see a psychiatrist (family friend), but I removed the issue before I had to do so.

Now it’s back again.

This time, I’m starting to learn how to accept the issue and forgive myself when I get frustrated about it. I am learning how to cope with anxiety and say “hey, I acknowledge this is anxiety but it’s okay, it happens.” I’m also consciously telling myself that recovery will be gradual rather than an immediate fix.

So yeah, this has been what I’ve been dealing with so far.

Other than that, I’ve been having a lot of fun in Hong Kong.

It’s quite nice to be around family after 5 months of nomading around. To be honest, I don’t think I could have done it for 1 year without any familiar faces.

Another cool thing is my friends from Bucharest are back!  Even though I’ve mostly had to spend family time these past few weeks, I’m super happy they’re with me here in Hong Kong. We are going to Disneyland tomorrow :). At the same time, I’m also kind of ready to go to Thailand – which is happening in January! It’s become too comfortable again where I think I need to start challenging myself more and getting shit done.

Anyway those are my updates. What are your goals for the end of year/next year? Let me know in the comments!