Interest Based Income - part one

 Interest Based Income

What I mean by this is earning enough money from your interest based savings account with a bank. I'm going to be tossing around a lot of numbers but the base interest I'll be using will be 3%. It's not the current interest rate but it's the one I'm going to use.

The thing I will not be getting into is going to be the taxes. If you earn $10 you will get a 1099-INT and you will just file that when doing your taxes. File your taxes. It will effect you yearly return. Thats all i have to say on taxes.

The basic amounts that I will be working with are going to be as follows:

$100

$1,000

$10,000

$100,000

$1,000,000

These are the big break points when talking about interest. When you have the small amounts it feels like it's not doing anything but that can carry over to the larger amounts also. The most common way people talk about earned interest is as yearly amounts.

Per Year

$100 = $3

$1,000 = $30

$10,000 = $300

$100,000 = $3,000

$1,000,000 = $30,000

Where I'm from, $30,000 is a full time minimum wage job. 

What you also want to focus on is the per month interest because this is what you will be able to budget with like an additional paycheck. This means that you will want a savings account that will pay you per month and when they pay you will be at the end of that month.

Per Month

$100 = $0.25

$1,000 = $2.50

$10,000 = $25.00

$100,000 = $250.00

$1,000,000 = $2,500.00

The monthly breakdown is how you can see when it makes a difference. $25 doesn't feel like it can do much but that $300 at the end of the year could be a nice cushion or treat.

But $250 a month? That's a bill. It could be an extra payment on a credit card. It could be a car payment. It could be a persons grocery bill. It is a small amount but it is a small amount that will make a difference. If you are able to save it then that extra $3,000 a year is definitely a good amount to have saved up for emergencies or fun.

Will it fix everything? No, but I have had a surprise car repair bill (thanks to chipmunks making a nest in my car and eating the wires) and it was just over $3,000 to fix. I would have been much better off it i had been able to just pay it off with cash instead of using a credit card. The interest I was paying on the credit card was insane.

This is what people mean by wanting their money to work for them.

This is why my ultimate personal goal is going to be to try and get $500,000 because that will be $15,000 per year or $1,250 per month. Which doesn't sound like a lot but it is. For me it would cover my mortgage and car payments. At my current spending it would very much fix everything for me.

I'll be going over my personal reasons in part two.

 I will close with saying that if I had $2,000,000 in the bank I could very easily live off of the estimated $5,000 a month interest. Even if I was paying for my own health insurance.

To be honest I would probably keep my day job just so I wouldn't have to deal with tracking down my own health insurance and then I could keep my 401k. But thats going to be a part three I think.

 Part two was about some personal math.