May 2019 Income

My total May 2019 income came out to $12,115. I’ll break the details down below and discuss any tax implications. I report my income every month. So if you’re interested in seeing how viable all of my shenanigans are, these are good reports to follow.

Since I’m an independent contractor, not all of the money I earn actually lands in my account the end of each month. In fact, my account has only seen $1,280 of this money.

May 2019 Income

Here are the different sources which made up my May 2019 income. All of the income is pre-tax. No more W2 income, thank god.

Healthcare Consulting – $5,000

My main healthcare consulting client pays me a $3,000 monthly retainer and I bill for any extra work I do on top of that. My income this month with them should be around $5,000. Based on my hours, it comes out to around $125/hour.

I had 3 new leads for other clients. This is the first month that my inbox has been so hot with income leads. So far, none of them have accepted my project proposals. I have one soft offer for a $1k/month retainer. I have one guy who is MIA and another who is waiting to see if his partners want to move forward with me.

I’m focusing on machine learning in my consulting work. I’ve written about the Chief Medical Officer role before and it’s really not something I have any interest in. The AI work is gratifying and I hope that I can have an impact with it.

JustAnswer – $5,300

I don’t know how many hours I spent – probably around 1.5 hours a day on average. I usually log in once in the morning for 45 minutes and another 30-45 minutes at night.

There is something neat about sitting at a cafe and answering questions from my phone. I walk out of the cafe paying €1.20 for my coffee, but earned $96 in the 15 minutes I was sitting there.

Rental Income – $1,100

I love my tenant. She deposits the money before I ever have to ask for it and she takes good care of my place. The price is fair since we are doing it week-to-week. I pay the utilities and HOA and all other housing expenses.

Once she’s gone I’ll rent the place out on AirBnb for a couple of months because I can pocket an easy $2,000/month during the summer season. After that, I’ll rent it out long-term or leave it empty. TBD.

Website – $685

I did 2 phone calls through clarity.fm/DrMo where I help other physicians with the same shit that I do. Each call was 3o minutes and I earned a little under $300 for each.

I sold one of my digital products from the shop. It has taken a lot more time for me to finish the last one which I’ll be adding soon. And I have lots of ideas for other products.

Telemedicine – $30

Oh, right, I’m a doctor! I forgot. I actually got paid for one patient I saw through DialCare. DC is cool with me seeing patients from overseas and they didn’t care about my medical board stuff.

They are slow but they are picking up. I appreciate them and it’s a good way for me to get some clinical work in.

Taxes

I’m trying to keep my income to under $100k this year. The first year I retired my income was $194,000 because I was doing so much telemedicine.

My income in 2017 was around $120,000. The 2017 taxes on that income was nice and low. And I earned a touch over $100k in 2018 and still had very low 2018 income taxes.

Now that I’m living in Spain and with income under $100k, my taxes should be even lower. We’ll see.

Looking Ahead – June 2019

I’ll have the same consulting income from my main client. I fired my other client and should get some pay from them in June. And hopefully I’ll be onboarding another consulting client from one of those 3 opportunities.

JA is still an easy income source. I’m planning on continuing to answer questions for them. If I ever give up my medical license and can’t do medical JA answers, I have 2 other categories that the moderators will allow me on. It pays to have skills … to pay da’ bills!

I don’t see the rental income stopping until the end of summer. After that I’ll reevaluate my options.

Net Worth

As I mentioned previously, I’m transitioning away from the net worth paradigm. I care more about having income coming in. An income stream of $2,000/month would matter more to me than a net worth of $1m. Since this is a new concept for me, it’ll take me some time to hone it.

From a high of $899,817, this month I’m down to $869,441. That’s normal. The higher your net worth, the wilder the fluctuations. A $30k loss one month could be a $24k gain the next month.

It’s all on a screen and so it doesn’t mean a whole lot. Because of the recent drops, I made some portfolio adjustments. Nothing outside of my investment plan; just rebalanced my asset allocation in order to benefit from the market decline.