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Well, 2008 is really flying by.  Now we are in the first day of July I think it’s time for a mid year review of my goals for 2008 which I set on 12/31/2007.

Personal Goals

1. Get more involved in volunteering - I am still looking into this, but I think the biggest obstacle is my weird working schedule.  I work from 11am to 7 or 8pm on most days.  Maybe I can find things I can do at home or before I go to work.

2. Get more than 1000 visitors to this blog daily – When I set down this goal I was only writing The Baglady.  In January I was invited to write for Wise Bread and then I started San Mateo Home Sellers in Trouble in March.  So combining all three blogs now I get on average 2000 pageviews  a day. This is a huge improvement.  So I think I will have to revise this goal to getting 4000 pageviews a day on average by the end of the year.

3. Lose a little bit of weight – Well, since getting the Wii Fit and getting some motivation from my family I have been exercising with the hubby almost everyday.  So far I lost about 2 lbs, but I feel that I gained a little bit of  muscle and my thighs are more toned. So I guess we will carry on and see what happens.

4. Help out around the house a bit more – I am working on this, really.  I try to listen to the hubby when he tells me to clean certain rooms.  This weekend he said that my bathroom is above average in cleanliness.

5. Be awesome at my job – I have been at my job for almost 8 months now and I have pretty much settled in.  I learned quite a bit of new things so now my job isn’t that difficult once again.

Financial Goals

1. $100k+ in Income - I received a  small raise at work a couple months ago.  Since I was a new employee and had only been working there for four months they prorated my raise so it was about 3.5%.  I think after taxes I am earning about $100 more a month. It’s almost enough money for gas! Anyway,  I was pretty happy about it since I was expecting nothing.  My manager actually told me it was a special raise since pretty much all the other people who worked at the company for less than six months got no raise.  I believe him since in my last company all the people that has been at the company for less than nine months didn’t get a raise.  I guess it makes sense.    Anyway, my salary isn’t 100k, yet, but my blog income has grown quite a bit.  So it’s quite possible to break $100k in income this year.

2. Increase Networth by 40% - Well, we’re actually progressing nicely towards this goal.  Our networth has gone up 21% since 12/31/2007 despite the recent stock market drop. So I think we’re definitely on track for 40% by the end of the year.

3. Turn blogging into a business – I think with the income my blogging is pulling in I would have to file taxes as a business at the end of the year so I can write off some of the expenses I have incurred.  I would have to pay income taxes anyway so I might as well deduct some of the valid expenses I had such as hosting and software.

So all things considered, 2008 is turning out to be a good year.  I think writing down my goals really helped me in working towards them. Now I just have to stay the course for the second half of the year!

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Well, I haven’t blogged for four days, and it feels like an eternity, seriously. This weekend I was down in Southern California for a wedding and that involved about 14 hours of driving between my husband and I. On Monday I was swamped with work and I kept on wanting to sleep so I didn’t blog at all, but at least this article I wrote for the Money Blog Network went up on Wise Bread, check it out!

Anyway, before I left I checked out the site of a commenter named Erica. Her story is pretty inspiring in that she is a young woman in the Silicon Valley who built up a business and recently sold it for more than a million dollars. Now she is semi-retired and writing. Recently she bought an established website on Sitepoint to run as a new business and she is only a year older than me. So this led me to browse the Sitepoint marketplace and learn about buying established websites.

So far, I haven’t made a purchase because just like any investment, it takes a lot of research to find a profitable business worth buying. A lot of the cheaper websites that cost under $1000 have less traffic than my sites or just aren’t very interesting. I see most sites in the following categories:

• Forums
• Scraper sites that steal content
• Directories
• Blogs
• Established e-commerce sites
• E-books
• Spam sites full of ads with a good domain name
• Proxy sites

There are also some unique sites with custom software, but those are very very expensive. I think if I buy a site, the only category of sites I am interested in buying is a good forum because those have user generated content that I wouldn’t have to worry too much about. As long as a community is there it would be fine. I don’t want another blog because blogs takes time to create new content for and oftentimes readers are loyal to the original writer of the blog that made it popular so once you buy it a lot of its value is lost. I also don’t want a spammy site full of butts. Anyway, it seems that people price their sites at a multiple of their monthly revenue, so anything that’s pulling a decent income becomes very expensive. However, there are gems in the rough. For example, there are sites that webmasters have not monetized at all because all they created a site as a hobby, but want to get rid of it due to it being too much work. So this creates another segment of entrepreneurs who buy a site on the cheap, slap on some ads, and then flip it for a profit. I think that’s a pretty interesting business on its own, but it takes time to research and find the best “fixer-upper”.

Anyway, as I have said to many people. I only need about 10 to 20 times my current blog income across my three blogs to quit my job and work on this full time. There is definitely potential for my blogs to grow. Currently my San Mateo Home Sellers in Trouble site is growing quite healthily and could even surpass The Baglady in traffic with minimal promotion. It is already on the blogroll of Redfin, my favorite real estate site. I guess people just browse that site page after page looking at the home prices falling by 200k to 300k like they are watching a train wreck. So if I concentrate on my current blogs and make them grow to their fullest potential I don’t have to buy any more sites. It may take a longer time, but it would be all mine. If I do buy a established site, I will need to spend time to integrate it onto my webserver and learn about running the new site and that may neglect my current ventures a little bit.

Anyway, I will probably still look out for good sites to purchase, but those are very rare and people snap them up very quickly. I am more of a cautious investor and I never buy anything without a lot of research so I probably won’t be buying something within 30 minutes of the listing so I might miss out on some good ones, but I should be able to avoid a lot of bad ones. Looking at some of the better sites for sale, I am amazed at what some of these very young people have done in terms of online income. The biggest sites with millions of page views a day are basically another full time job and cost a lot for bandwidth so I probably don’t want those. I would be happy with 25000 page views a day and enough money to cover my living expenses after taxes. Maybe next year?

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Well, it’s another milestone at The Baglady!  This is the 200th post, and all of you kind readers have made over 1100 comments!  In my 2008 goals post I briefly mentioned that I would like over 1000 visitors to this blog daily by the end of the year, and now I am up to 300 to 400 per day so it seems highly likely I could reach my goal.  Since then,   I also  joined a great community blog named Wise Bread and started a new blog about San Mateo Home Sellers in Trouble.  Between the three blogs now my writing gets over 2000 views per day.  That’s a huge improvement from just 100 to 200 visitors daily 5 months ago!

In terms of blog income, I have gone from  $161 in January to nearly $600 this month.  All of the money I collect from blogging is currently donated to various charities.  It makes me happy when I see my articles earning money every day now, even when I am not writing.

With the growth of my blogs, I finally wrote  a Press page to showcase all the mentions my writing have gotten on top blogs and other press.  Check it out for some of the most amusing and useful articles I’ve written.

I want to say thank you all for reading my writing.  It really makes my day when I hear that my random thoughts have helped you or made you laugh.  I know that I piss people off, too, but getting any kind of reaction means that I made someone read and think a little bit and that is also rewarding.

The more I write the more I think that my writing could be the best legacy I could leave.  I would love for my future descendants to read my stories and my parents’ stories to get a glimpse of how we lived.  I know I love to hear my mom’s stories about  my grandmother’s family. So hopefully I will can preserve this blog for those that come after me.  I also think it is amazing that the internet allows this rapid sharing of ideas and lives.

With that, I leave you with some great Blog Carnivals in the recent weeks:

Carnival of Debt Reduction at Debt Free Revolution

Carnival of Personal Finance  at Alpha Consumer – I didn’t really submit to this carnival but they included my article under Four Pillar’s name.  Sorry Mike, I don’t know what happened there.

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Wow, spring is almost upon us, and there are more San Mateo Home Sellers in Trouble, too. This is the most distressed properties I have ever seen in a 4 week period. 135 properties is almost 30% of all the listings in our small county.

Total Count of San Mateo Home Sellers in Trouble for 2/11/2008 to 3/09/2008: 135

Average Time from Last Sale Date: 1.65 Years

Average Annualized Loss: 19.1%

Average Absolute Percentage Loss: 15.76%

Average Size of Home: 1228

Average Price Per Square Foot: $467.47

Biggest Losers : 330 Wisteria Dr in East Palo Alto with an annualized loss of 99% and 2568 Illinois Ave in East Palo Alto with an absolute loss of 48.35%

I have decided that I may start a different blog and update it more frequently to record these properties. The blog would be a good service to my community and it would be easier to navigate than these spreadsheets. Each home will have its own post and I can categorize the homes much better via blog categories!

Anyway, today I read a really good article by a teenage girl about the foreclosure situation: Teen columnist: For adults, foreclosure is payback time. I am glad to see there is still hope for the younger generation!

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