Markets continue to be green and the portfolio is looking strong.

As the portfolio nears $100k, I’m spending less time on “hustles” and more time on researching stocks.

Earning an extra $200 here and there is still helpful, but from this point, the best chance for escape velocity is to pick good investments and let them compound.

Turning $10k into $20k with stocks is much less work than doing it via flipping, surveys, niche sites or anything else.

When I first started this challenge, the idea was to use side hustles to build up some capital to invest. I’ve done that pretty well over the last three years and now the challenge is maintaining the capital and investing well.

Coaching

One thing I started offering this month is 1-on-1 coaching.

It’s actually something several people have asked me about, and after watching a Netflix series of a financial coach I thought it might be a pretty fun thing to do.

I pitched to my email list and got several leads, and one client signed up right away.

We had a great coaching call that lasted around 2.5 hours, where we talked about her vision for a financially-free life, and then a specific action plan to get here there.

We discussed everything from:

• Optimising her and her husband’s taxes
• Inheritance plans
• Broke down each of her stock investments one-by-one
• Reducing her ETF fees
• Her bond investments and some alternatives
• Spending habits
• Kiwisaver
• Cashback cards

I think it was extremely valuable and I’m sure our discussion and specific changes will be worth many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands over the next decade or so.

You can get everything you need to know about my coaching here.

Niche Sites

This one site (Niche Site C) I’ve been trying to get to the next level is refusing to get to the next level!

It made around $190 USD in commissions in July, which is about a 30% drop from last month.

As you can see at the mid-month mark it finally got what looked like the start of a “traffic boner” but quickly fell back to earth, much to my disappointment.

I’m doing everything that Google wants me to do, but it’s not translating into rankings.

I’m kind of at a loss of what to do with the site now – I could keep plugging away and investing hours into it, or just let it sit and work on something more exciting.

In better news, my site from my first case study (Niche Site A) still plugging along and making around $200 USD without me doing anything at all. Passive income is great!

Portfolio Breakdown

💥 BOOM weekly savings: $4,124
⠀⠀
🚮 Decluttering: $7,202
⠀⠀
💸 Matched betting: $47,847
⠀⠀
📦 Flipping: $2,676 ⠀
⠀⠀
📝 Surveys: $150⠀⠀
⠀⠀
🖥️ Simple Courses sales: $9,249

🏋️‍♀️ 1-on-1 coaching: $390
⠀⠀
🎉 Sharesies bonuses: $140⠀⠀
⠀⠀
🧧Leftovers from Chinese New Year Instagram giveaway because people didn’t want free money: $90⠀⠀

🎁Leftovers from 500 follower Instagram giveaway because people didn’t want free money: $300
⠀⠀
💰 Personal dividends: $2,014

🖱️ Niche Site A (Home Remedies): $7,376
⠀
🖱️ Niche Site B (Fitness): $2,619
⠀
🖱️ Niche Site C (Superfoods): $2,551

🖱️ moneybren.com (affiliate commissions): $2,236

💵 Interest: $61
⠀
💹 Sharemarket gainz: $6,903

💹 Crypto gainz: $1,559⠀

Top 10 Holdings

Few things shuffled this month.

I had two US positions in Activision Blizzard and StoneCo, which were around $4k in total.

StoneCo is something I hold in my personal portfolio, but it’s very speculative and I’d like the moneybren portfolio to be more value-oriented as it is a teaching portfolio first and foremost.

Activision Blizzard’s takeover offer is now all but approved by the FTC, so price jumped around 20% and I felt it was a good time to cash it in.

That capital got moved into Markel and VWO, which is why they’ve jumped on the Top 10 holdings.

I’ve also sold some MCK.NZ and moved it into Arvida and Sky, which I think have slightly more upside.

The result is a slightly better-balanced portfolio – I like this setup a lot. Let’s so how it fares over the next few months 🙂

You can view all previous portfolio updates here.

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