Pay the taxes challenge

Now that my job is currently not offering overtime, I've been trying to think of ways to make extra money. But then I realized I'm actually making some extra money already, but it's just not that much. I want to start a challenge to myself for the second half of the year starting July 1st: pay for our income taxes without using money from our "day jobs". My estimation of our taxes is $700.

Here are some of my other sources of income. This income varies a lot each month and some months I don't earn anything from them.

(Very) Part-time job:
A former employer has me do some work for them on an as-needed basis from home. It usually ranges between 0 and 2 hours a week (usually closer to 0 than 2) and they pay me $10.50/hr. It seems they are the busiest during the Spring, and the second half of the year is usually a little slower than the first half.

Babysitting:
My sister needs someone to babysit her daughter every once in a while. She pays me $5/hr. However, she recently moved about an hour's drive away, so she probably will not ask me to babysit nearly as often.

Blogging:
I have something like 6 or 7 blogs that I recently monetized with advertising and affiliate links to products from Amazon (I get paid a percentage of the money spent when people buy using my referral link). However, I'm really only making money on one of the blogs. It's not this one in case you're wondering, it's one that's been around for over 3 years. The rest of my blogs are all less than a year old and account for maybe 0.5% of the money I've made blogging.

Ebay:
Once in a while I sell items on Ebay. It's garage sale season, so I might be able to find some items for cheap that I could sell for a profit on Ebay.

So it will be a challenge to make $700 with just these.  I would like to find new ways to making money and while increasing the money I make on my current sources of income as well.

IRA Asset Allocation and Balance

My husband is doing better after having surgery on Monday and will probably be back to work full time next week (thankfully it's a desk job). Of course I still don't know how this will affect us financially, so for now I'm going continue my financial plans as I had planned. Since part of my plan is to stock pile cash, that should hopefully be enough to cover any medical expenses we can't cash flow.

For some reason I don't feel that same drive to put money in my IRA as I did with paying down the second mortgage. So I want to start measuring my progress. Here is my starting point:

It was over $19,000 not too long ago, but with the Dow Jones decreasing so much lately, it's not a big surprise it's in the $18,000's. It seems like I'm always saying "Dave Ramsey says" in this blog, but Dave Ramsey says to invest in a good Growth stock. As you can see only 17% of my IRA is in growth stock right now. So I will probably work towards increasing that percentage as I add more money into it.

When it rains it pours

As if my financial situation didn't look bleak as it is, I have even more bad news. My husband was complaining about back and stomach pains on Sunday night, so he went to the hospital to get it checked out and found out he has gallstones and will need to have his gallbladder removed. He went in for surgery yesterday afternoon, but the doctor was running behind and it didn't get started until 6:30PM. Usually it's an outpatient surgery, but because the surgery was so late in the day and my husband has sleep apnea they decided to have him spend the night in the hospital. I've heard horror stories that overnight hospital stays are more expensive than the nicest 5 star hotels. I really hope we have good insurance coverage! So sadly yet again, Murphy came and messed with my financial goals. I know we got through the payoff the second mortgage faster than planned despite all the unexpected expenses that we went through in the past six months, but this time we don't have as much savings, money set aside for vacation, or opportunities for overtime pay. As a matter of fact, I should be at work right now, but instead it looks like I'll be taking an unpaid day off while I wait for my husband to be discharged. The bad news is it'll take a couple months for the medial bills to arrive so I don't know how bad this will be for awhile. But the good news is it'll take a couple months for the medial bills to arrive because I don't have much cash yet since I just cleaned out most of it paying off the mortgage.