How I Achieved the $1,000,000 Mark

Many of you loyal readers are used to seeing my voyeuristic monthly net income reports. Last month I achieved my highest month ever of over $98,000 in earnings! I used to routinely post my net worth updates, but realized there was little interest and not much had changed month over month. In fact, it’s been nearly 2 years since I posted an update, and at that time I had a net worth of $465,000. I considered that a huge achievement since it was only about 7 years ago that I had a net worth of negative $30,000. My online business has been doing well and increasing steadily over the past 7 years, and I have seen double digit (as a %) increases in top line revenue growth as well as bottom line earnings. While I have been religiously investing quite a bit back into my business in the form of an expanding web property portfolio, I have also been determined when it comes to saving and investing my money in real estate, equities, and paying down any outstanding debts that I have.

I wanted to announce that I finally achieved the $1,000,000 mark! When I say that, I mean I have achieved over a $1,000,000 net worth which I will detail below, and I have achieved over $1,000,000 in total earnings from my side business. Actually, to be more specific, I have earned over $1,500,000 since I started my online endeavors and am even on track to hit the $1,000,000 mark in earnings in 2017 alone. So you can see the growth have been increasingly exponential. I am going to request to be listed on the Rockstar Finance Net Worth tracker since I have hit the mark as a millionaire blogger. It was a goal I have spent a long time, and a lot of hard work, trying to achieve. Below is breakdown of assets, liabilities, and overall net worth as it stands today.

The first question you might be asking is, “if you have made $1,500,000 then how do you only have a $1,100,000 net worth?”…Did I have a lot of discretionary spending? The $1.5m is before taxes, which at a 40% business tax rate (yes it’s really that high) the $1.5m is actually $900k take-home pay. Likewise, I left off the value of the several dozen websites I own as well. I probably have about $150,000 worth of websites in my current portfolio, and I spent quite a bit of my earnings purchasing those sites. I decided not to list those as they are hard to value specifically. I figure I can generate $100,000 annually off of the websites I own, which is a very solid return on investment for a $150,000 portfolio. The catch is that I can only value a website to the extent to which I can sell it, or what someone else is willing to pay for them. Unlike a bond or equity, someone off the street can’t buy one of my sites and monetize it as easily or effectively as I can. That’s why I often buy and keep the sites indefinitely, as I can make more money off of “using” the sites than somebody else.

Path Forward

So the question is, where do I go from here? I am still actively buying up websites and building and branding my digital media business. I estimate that over the next 12 months I can achieve a $2,000,000 net worth and that’s when I believe my investments will really start to gain traction and grow exponentially. I am very serious about buying more real estate and building up my dividend stock portfolio as an income replacement going into what I hope is early retirement. What I don’t know yet is when “retirement” from my day job will actually happen.

How it All Began and How You Can Replicate My Results

The title of this article states “How Did I Achieve the $1,000,000 mark”, and as promised here is the answer… Start your own blog! First and foremost, check out my tutorial on the 4 easy steps to create your first website, it’s far easier than you might think and you could literally have one up and running in the time it took to read this post. I own a lot of websites now, but I made a pretty solid online income from when I owned my first site only. All it takes is 30 minutes a day of writing down your thoughts online and posting them up for the world to see. Eventually the search engines start crawling your site and random people will start finding you online and interacting with you. Then comes the inevitable slew of advertisers that want to reach your target audience. It took me nearly 6 months of blogging to receive my first $80 payment and from there the money started to flow in. After a full year of running my site I was amazed at how someone with zero technical knowledge (still that way now), average literary and grammar skills, but with a ton of drive was able to pay his monthly mortgage payment with just a side business that I run entirely from a Dell laptop in my free time.

Give it shot! It’s probably the lowest monetary investment someone can make with the biggest payoff potential if you are driven enough. If you have any questions or help along the way I am here with advice as well, just hit my contact form and shoot me a message, I’m online about 20 hours of every day.