Financial Independence Update- October 2021

October was a HUGE month! I turned 33 years old on the 20th, and I also had the best month of my life both in terms of income and investment returns. It’s pretty cool to be breaking all time monthly income records considering it’s been almost three years since I last worked full time.

We finished up our six week road trip around the middle of October so we were able to make it back home right before my birthday. We used the rest of the month to do some more hiking and lifting, catch up with family, and get some overdue website related work done including some new articles and videos. October and November are always great times to be at home due to the leaves changing and beautiful weather in Southwest VA.

Income

Income from our websites (FifthWheelPT and Travel Therapy Mentor) was insane in October, and not only broke the all time high for monthly revenue, but almost doubled the prior high set in August. We had a big quarterly affiliate payout, along with a big payout for some sponsored content and ads, in addition to a higher than average month in terms of our normal referral revenue. It’s amazing to watch how our revenue has grown over time. The amount earned just in October was actually higher than the combined revenue of the entire first three years of this site!

Expenses

Expenses this month were moderate. The first couple weeks of the month on the road meant a little higher expenses; but even so, we did a pretty good job this year of keeping our expenses reasonable while on the road trip. My fixed expenses at home are pretty low as usual, and I didn’t have any big unexpected expenses during the month.

Investments

The S&P 500 was up about 6.9% in October. 6.9% is a massive increase for a month but it was nothing compared to how my cryptocurrency investments did in October. Bitcoin was up a whopping 40% on the month, and Ethereum along with some of the other alt coins were up even more than that. Both Bitcoin and Ethereum set new all time highs in October, which was a major relief to see after the big drop in May followed by the long summer lull. I took the opportunity with the quick jump in prices to take some profits on my crypto investments, and I plan to continue to take profits over the next few months since my exposure to crypto really got out of control this month. As of the end of October, my cryptocurrency investments make up just over 50% of my total assets, even after the profits I took, due to the massive gains over the past year. Ideally, I’d like to get that percentage closer to 30% with gradual selling throughout Q4 and Q1 of 2022.

Financial Independence Progress

My net assets increased by 19% in October! This is my highest month over month increase of all time by a large margin. Obviously this was mostly due to the rapid increase in crypto valuations, but the high income and moderate expenses also helped. This increase led to both my net assets and net worth jumping to new all time highs as well. At the end of October, my net assets equaled approximately 57.8 times my estimated future yearly expenses!

Next Month

After being home for a couple of weeks at the end of October, we decided to plan a quick 10-day road trip up to Upstate New York & Niagara Falls. We are planning to leave at the beginning of November to make it up there before it gets too cold and maybe catch the last bit of the leaves changing in Upstate New York as well. Besides the road trip, I’m planning to work a couple of days at my outpatient PRN job at home around the end of the month. It’s been almost a year since I last worked PRN in the clinic, so I’m excited to get my feet wet again in the PT world and work with some patients.

How was October for you financially? Let me know in the comments!