treasury direct – One Dollar Allowance

2025 Extra Income

April 9, 2026January 19, 2026mrsonedollarallowanceLeave a comment

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about the credit cards we have and how we manage using them. I seem to be caught in multiple conversations around me lately about how people feel credit cards are bad, so they use debit cards. I understand that some people have a bad history where they weren’t disciplined enough, but don’t you think after several years, you’re older and wiser and could likely teach yourself discipline? My last post was about how you could make $500 in a year just by putting an expense on a credit card and paying it off each month if you have 2% cash back. So let’s dive in to what we made in 2025. There is one caveat: we have a lot of credit cards and we put a lot of effort into using the categories; I fully understand this is more effort than nearly anyone else is willing to put in. But hopefully you can take just one thing away from this teaching and information.

You need to find your why. Your why is your driving factor on everything. Put things in perspective of “if I hadn’t spent $10 on that coffee, what could that have gone towards to provide me with longer term satisfaction?” I admit that I’ll go to Starbucks for a drink, but I buy about 5 of those $6 drinks (I get a very basic thing) in a year.

INTEREST EARNED: $1,191.42

The easiest way to make your money work for you is through interest on a bank balance. Currently, savings rates are hovering around 3.25%. I’ll just jump right into it: compound interest. Even if you have $500 extra, put this money in a savings account. At this interest rate, you’re earning $16 in a year, but that’s $16 more than you had at the beginning of the year. The mentality that $16 isn’t “worth it” is the type of thought process you need to move away from. If that balance was $5000 instead of $500, then that’s $162 in passive income.

TREASURY DIRECT: $2,098.14

This is more advanced interest income. You can create an account here and invest your money in short term securities (think CD type things at a bank). The rate is currently about 6.25%. You’re tying your money up for a period of time (4 weeks through 30 years), and the rate is tied to the term of investment, but we are actively managing our investments in 4-8 weeks segments, earning about $50 at a time.

CREDIT CARD REWARDS: $1,947.75

We have several credit cards. Some are a flat percentage for all purchases, and some have categories that earn an additional percentage back. The amount that I have here is only related to what we cashed out. More was earned, but we keep some in our Chase account balance so that we can get a bonus if we book travel through their portal.

If you don’t want to manage categories, go for the Citi Double Cash card. It gives you 1% on a purchase and 1% on a payment. The key here is that you can’t claim a statement credit because that doesn’t count as a payment, meaning you don’t get your 1% on that amount.

Without giving too much away on the cards we have, here’s a snapshot that I keep in my phone to remind myself what card to use for each purchase. The 5% category there changes quarterly. Usually, if I can’t use my Citi card, then I’m checking this graphic to see what the next best percent back for “everyday purchases” would be.

SUMMARY

This is “passive” income we’ve made. We had other avenues that brought in other income, but this is where we basically just spent money or kept money in certain accounts and brought in an extra $5,237.31. That’s a big number, and I’m sure that type of money can make a difference in your life or pay for a trip you want to go on.

Additional Annual Income

January 9, 2025December 31, 2024mrsonedollarallowanceLeave a comment

Every year, I like to look back at ways we earned income outside of a W-2 or our rental properties. These things include interest earned, dividends paid, and bonuses received on credit cards.

CREDIT CARDS

We opened a new credit card to give ourselves a 0% interest loan when we purchased the hot tub. I’m a broken record on this, but I’ll keep pointing out the availability of this option. Yes, we made this purchase because we could pay for the item outright, but it would be nice to pay for the hot tub over time while letting our money earn more money in other accounts. A sign-on bonus for that credit card and the immediate high purchase led us to $489 earned for doing nothing expect spending money and opening that new card.

Outside of that credit card reward, we deposited almost $1,200 worth of rewards from other cards into our checking accounts. Then we have some cards that earn points instead of cash. These are kept in that credit card’s “bank” of points because they can be worth more if they’re used within the rewards portal (e.g., booking a hotel). Essentially, 100 points equates to a dollar, but it’s not always that because of the bonuses available. With that said: we earned 18,683 points between 3 cards and $73 on another card.

INTEREST & INVESTMENTS

We have two accounts that pay out dividends in December of each year. This year that totaled over $4k. Between two savings accounts, we earned $2,500 of interest payments.

Mr. ODA invests in Treasury bonds. Instead of withdrawing the money after each 4-6 week period, he rolls it over and the interest earned gets deposited into our account. That’s paid us $2k this year.

ODD JOBS & RANDOM INCOME

On top of the things I can project like interest earned and rewards, I also do a few odd jobs throughout the year. Between a part time substitute teacher position, doing surveys, and selling kids clothing and toys to second hand shops, I brought in another $1600. I use this concept as an ‘offset’ in my mind to cover gift giving throughout the year. Mr. ODA brought in nearly $1,000 doing mystery shopper activities for restaurants. Betting on games and doing fantasy football brought in another $700.

SUMMARY

So with minimal effort, we brought in about an additional $14,000 in the past year! That more than pays for our hot tub purchase. It more than pays for our Christmas gifts, and even birthday gifts paid for through the year.

When I consign, it takes several hours to prepare. But I do those items that way because I can earn more money with less stress. For consignment, I’m preparing my items, logging them, printing labels, and then dropping off. Once I drop off, all I do is watch my sales. If I try to sell these items on mom-to-mom type forums, then I have to manage each individual item, follow up on people who need to pay/pick up, and then set out my items and wait for them to actually follow through. It’s just a lot more mental energy even if it may be less physical hours of work.

Outside of the consignment effort and my very part-time job, everything else was fairly passive. We earned a lot of money just by buying other things. We earned a lot of money by just having a savings account with a decent yield. We earned a lot by Mr. ODA investing in Treasury bonds, which takes a few clicks every few months.

The first step should be to ensure your money that’s not in use is in a saving account and earning interest. After that, a credit card with rewards earned should be used. Teach yourself discipline to count your credit card swipes the same as swiping that debit card in your checking account. You’d be amazed at how much those small bits add up.

October Financial Update

October 12, 2023mrsonedollarallowanceLeave a comment

Our net worth took a hit this month, over $96k less than last month. I updated the value of each house we own. I don’t do this regularly anymore because it doesn’t change significantly month-to-month and it’s very time consuming. The market is cooling from the multiple-bid market we were in over the last few years, so home values are starting to come down ever so slightly. They’re still much higher than what they were 3 years ago (and I have tax assessments to prove the pain of that), but it does affect our net worth this month since it’s lower than it had been.

Also affecting our net worth is the market itself. It’s down, which it does around this time every year (confirmed through the history of my financial update posts). Our investment accounts are slightly down, our cash is significantly down because I paid off a large credit card balance and because Mr. ODA has transferred to a Treasury account for some of it, and our investment property values are down.

We opened a new credit card this month because we have purchased new carpet for our house (our entire second floor except 2 bathrooms, the stairs, and the living room all add up very quickly). As I’ve shared numerous times, when we’re about to have a large purchase, we look to open a new credit card that we can use as a loan. Sure, we have the cash available to pay this immediately, but wouldn’t it be nice to earn interest on your cash balance for 12-15 months and get some sort of sign-on bonus from the company?

I paid off our last 0% interest credit card at the end of September. But our credit card balance is still slightly higher than I’d expect because I haven’t paid last month’s statement on one, which is almost $3,000. I used to try to pay off all balances before doing a net worth update so that it was the most accurate, but now that we’re keeping Mr. ODA’s paycheck separate and trying to capitalize on interest to earn, credit cards aren’t paid until the last minute. We’re also still carrying about $30k worth of insurance money that we can’t seem to spend because State Farm is doing their hardest to drag their feet and restart our claims process each week.

I have a house that hasn’t paid a penny towards rent this month. She did let us know that it’ll be paid in October some time (no date or expectation given to me is infuriating). If she doesn’t pay something tomorrow (assuming we’re two Fridays into the month for pay checks), I’ll give a warning about the notice of default being given.