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To celebrate and recognize how our Minters are achieving their financial milestones, we reached out to everyday Mint users like you, to share their stories.
We connected with Becca, a 27 year old personal finance entrepreneur from New York to learn more about her journey with Mint! Check it out below.
I’ve always loved personal finance and recently created my own brand to help other women learn about finances as well. When it comes to my journey with Mint, I’ve been using it since 2015 to help set and maintain my budgets, and I check the app every day to categorize my new transactions. And that’s actually one of my favorite things about the Mint app — seeing my transactions automatically appear so I can quickly categorize them and see how they affect my budgets.
Usually when I wake up in the morning or before work, I’ll open Mint and look at my latest transactions to make sure they’re in the right categories and then see what that does to my budgets overall. This makes it quick and easy to always know where I stand. It also helps to be able to see all of my transactions from different accounts in one place so I can check to make sure there are no transactions that aren’t mine! You always need to check to make sure there isn’t fraud!
I also use Mint’s trends feature to see how my spending has changed over time. Lifestyle creep can affect all of us (when our income goes up we end up spending more instead of saving more). I like to look back and see how my spending has changed over time to identify any areas of lifestyle creep that I may want to reign in.
One of my financial goals is that I am constantly trying to grow my net worth so that I can have as many options as I want as I get older. If I want to retire early then I want to be able to have the financial freedom to do that. If I want to continue working and live a lavish lifestyle I want to have that option. I want to have as many options as I can, which means I need to be saving as much as I can now. Mint helps me make sure I keep my spending in check in order to make that happen.
Mint has constantly been helping me with this goal, and one of my milestones is that I recently hit a net worth of $300K! Without Mint helping me start my financial journey and keeping me on track to my budgets I could have never done this.
The post Working Toward Financial Freedom appeared first on MintLife Blog.
How can I make $1,000 more a month? — Briana Myricks (@brianamyricks)
One of my Twitter followers tweeted the message above last month. We had a great conversation where I told her how to accomplish just what she wanted, and now I’m going to tell you, too.
But first…what would an extra $1,000 a month do for your state of mind?
- If you owe $10,000 on a credit card at 15.38% interest, you could completely pay that card off in less than one year, if you paid $1,000 a month on it.
- If you save $1,000 a month in a 529 College Savings Plan starting the year your child is born, you’d have over $100,000 ready for their education by the time they turn 7 — with more than a decade left for that money to grow before they need it.
- If you put that $1,000 a month into a Roth IRA, you’d hit your annual contribution cap in less than six months. If you’re 30 years old, by the time you retire at age 65, you’ll have $1.4 MILLION dollars.
Sound good? You bet.
So how do you get that $1,000 a month? Here’s a simple formula.
1 billable hour per day x 30 days x $33.34 = $1000.20
Here’s what it means. If you can do one extra hour of work, billed at a rate of $33.34, and you do that work every single day for a month, you’ll have $1,000.
(Of course, we have to pay taxes on that income, so unless you’re putting that money into a pre-tax investment, you’ll want to raise your hourly rate a bit — say, around $38 per hour.)
If you’re working a minimum wage job, or even earning $12-15 an hour, the thought of billing someone $33-38 for an hour of your work can seem wildly out of reach.
It’s not.
Here’s some fields of work that can command those kinds of prices:
- Web design
- Graphic design
- App development
- Security consulting
- Social media consulting
- Private tutoring
- Foreign language translation
- Private music lessons
- Wedding or event photography
What’s even better? Most of these are fields where skill and experience is more valuable than a college degree — and skill and experience are usually free. Some fields, like app development or photography, may require specialized equipment, but if you have the skill and experience in those fields, there’s a good chance you already have the equipment anyway.
How I did it
Last month, I earned $1150 from two gigs.
The first was a web design job for a small local school. They already had a website, but it hadn’t been updated since 2007. For $550, I customized a free WordPress theme for them, consulted them on some Paypal issues, and added some new features they wanted for their website. In total, I earned $39 per hour, working roughly an hour a day for two weeks.
The second was a private social media consulting job. An individual wanted me to teach her how to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media sites, and to develop a professional social media strategy. I offered to do it for $600, and taught her through a three-week email course. I spent about an hour a night writing and composing my emails, earning a rate of about $28 per hour worked. Even better, this gig turned into a long-term retainership — my client is going to pay me a small monthly fee to consult on minor social media issues for the next six months to a year.
I have no formal training in web design or social media. I didn’t go to school to earn a degree in those fields. But I’ve spent years learning about web design and social media, experimenting with new tricks and tactics to find out what works. That gave me the skill. I’ve used that skill to build websites with established readerships through social media, and that gave me the experience.
With those two things, I have everything I need to earn $1,000 a month in just one hour a day.
So what can you do?
I’ve shown you how you can earn an extra $1,000 a month. I’ve shown you what you can do with that money, and I’ve shown you how I did it myself. Now it’s your turn. What can you do to earn $1,000 a month? Tell me about your idea in the comments!
Originally posted March 7, 2014.
