April expenses and Adsense income

 Not a bad month, but once again the “ miscellaneous” expenses were higher than we like them to be. On the website income side of things,  our Adsense revenue once again had a pretty good month.

We only had to put $100 worth of fuel in Sherman during the month of April, however he is currently sitting here close to empty so we’ll be putting more in when we leave here on Tuesday. But we had to put $225 worth in our little car mostly because I drove the 1,627 kms (1,008 miles) from Ottawa to here in the middle of the month. So we spent $325 on gasoline for the month, which is lower than our $529 average. The next few months should be fairly low as well, despite the fact that we are paying $1.36 per litre ($5.00 a gallon) here.

But propane was another story! We spent $183 trying to stay warm last month. This far eclipses any other month in this category which goes to show how much time we have spent in the cold over the last three and a half years. But we also ended the month with nearly a full tank, and things are warming up a bit. Hopefully it will stay that way!

Grocery wasn’t bad, coming in at $407 for the month. Average is $361, but that figure is expected to creep up due to expensive food in Nova Scotia. Have we mentioned that a gallon of milk is around $7.00?! 

Spent $282 on alcohol but $112 of that was for a batch of 23 litres of wine that was incurred towards the end of the month. Booze is also very expensive in Nova Scotia. Our average month is $150 and we are cutting consumption to live a little closer to that average.

Miscellaneous was $785. Our average is around $476. We spent $210 on our mailbox rental for the year, and $166 on the new mi-fi and the first month of internet useage. Also, another $111 at the vet. What else is in there? Well, new running shoes at $41, a new pair of jeans at $19 and a host of small items ranging from laundry to a birthday gift for a nephew.

Entertainment was again low, at $24. With other expenses being high out here, this is one discretionary expense that we are prepared to pretty much give up. There won’t be any meals out while we’re here, and we’ll keep ourselves busy with free things like hiking and biking. Our average is around $90 a month.

Overnight costs were zero. Having said that, if there were any RV parks open, we would probably have stayed at one during the cold month of April. Then, we would have used our little electric heater and therefore a lot less propane expense, but at the cost of a whole lot more overnight expense. Our average is $149 a month. This average will drop over the next few months because it is easy to boondock and couchsurf in Nova Scotia.

Sherman was a good boy, and we didn’t incur any vehicle or maintenance expenses during April for either him or the little car.

So we spent $2,007 for the month, where our average is $2,044.

Adsense income was decent again, for the second month in a row. Our faithful readers earned us $141.00 for the month, which is our second best month ever coming in just behind March which was $152.57.

Adsense is such a simple program. The ads just sit there, and when a reader sees something interesting, they visit the advertisers site. All ads are prescreened by Google so there’s no chance of a virus or any problems. Sometimes, we change the colors of the ads, just to be different. The interesting thing is when we do a post that is related to one subject, the ads that show up on that page are also related to that subject. The ads you see today while reading this are probably going to be related to budgets, expenses, or maybe advertising. We think Adsense is a pretty neat program!