Extra Cash Challenge - April Results

Here are my results of my extra cash challenge from April 2012. I am pretty happy with my blogging results. The majority of the earnings still come from one blog. The second most popular blog dropped to $16.56. It was 26% of the earnings last month, and this month it is only about 8% of the earnings. On the plus side, I actually made a little money on this blog! Overall the extra cash challenge was a success since I got back up over $200 total. Here are the numbers:

(Very) part time job: $7.44
Advertising for my blogs: $197.48
Amazon affiliate: $8.85

Total made for April: $213.77

Last month: $188.06
Difference from last month: + $25.71

I'll have to try extra hard for May's extra cash challenge, because next week I'm going on vacation, and since I don't get paid time off, I'll be losing a whole week's worth of pay.  However, yesterday I got back one day's worth of salary by calling my local Internet provider.  Even though they advertise $19.99 per month Internet for new customers, they were charging us $60 a month.  I called them back in January to see what they could do for me. After they tried to get us to sign up for their phone service or any other extras they could come up with, they agreed to give us Internet for $39.99 a month.  The company is not know for their customer service, so not surprisingly, it didn't get updated on the next bill at the end of February.  I called them again and they said it would start the following month.  There was still no change in price on March's bill, but I really didn't feel like calling customer service, so put it on the back burner and waited for April's bill.  April's bill came and it was still $60, so I finally gave them a call.  At first they said they had no record, but the second person I talked to saw the new price on their records, so I wonder if the first one was lying or just looking in the wrong place.  Anyway, to make a long story short, I got them to back-date the new price, so I should (if they don't screw it up again) be getting an $80.04 credit on my account this next month.  And since $80 is one day's worth of work, now I feel like I'm only losing out on 4 day's worth of pay instead of 5. And if I consider I should be getting another eight months of Internet for about $20 less than they wanted to charge, that's like $160 in addition to that $80 - a total of $240 or 3 days pay just for one 20 minute phone call.