Quarterly Reports | Fat Wallet Refugee

I was checking the dates on another series, WordAds quarterly, and realized I had spaced out the eBay reports.

My last report for eBay was Q4 of 2024.

Early Difficulties

It had been a decidedly slow year for me with my sales prior to the start of the fourth quarter. I also made a $280 blunder along the way, that didn’t help my bottom line by any measure.

I had given some though to looking for other employment after considering my auto insurance bills. I’m keeping that on the table for the time being.

I of course did try to get work after graduating, but found I couldn’t pass the background checks, which led me to self employment.

June and September were my worst months, bringing in under 100 dollars. March through May were excellent by comparison averaging 433 dollars per month.

Estate Sale

In January, I attended my first estate sale. I bought a biker jacket that turned out to be not what I was expecting, but it was actually worth quite a bit. I managed to sell all the items I got there and made a nice profit.

Resourcing

I continued to purchase new inventory at the Treasure Hunt store and Goodwill for a time, but eventually gave up on the Goodwill. Earlier in the year they had stopped accepting American Express at my local Goodwill store and so I stopped going.

I think I went back a couple of times and used my Altitude Go card, but for the most part I got hooked on dollar day at the bin store.

I lost my head at one point and ransacked the bins for all of these swimsuits.

In all I bought 67 swimsuits that I will likely never be able to sell.

Treasures Found

But I have picked up some good items.

I have a large collection of Target brands including Wild Fable, Shade & Shore, and Future Collective now listed on LaFemme1st. I have received deposits of $379 from sales on LaFemme1st so far this year.

The majority of items from the mentioned brands have been swim wear, so these sales are mostly seasonal. But I have had some holiday sales, so I remain hopeful. All of the items are new with tags attached.

I am keeping a list of my Target brand sales included in the eBay Style Code Catalog post. I hope this post will become a resource for other sellers.

Bin Purchases and Pricing Legend (Jan-Oct)

After the recent trip to Washington, I decided to halt purchasing new stock for my shops. I have been good so far and have not visited either the Goodwill or the Treasure Hunt bin store this month.

Wednesday makes up the vast majority of purchases for me at the bin store. I did decide to stop buying air and water filters. There is just too much competition for them on eBay.

Filters also take up a large amount of space and they are heavy. The bag I have them in is a real killer to move about the room.

I’ll see about returning to the store next year in January to see if all the swimwear is gone. I hope to find more dresses and tops. Maybe some jeans if I am lucky.

Personal Health

I’ve also made some changes in my life beyond reselling. I have removed milk, candy, and coffee, from my diet. I am making this change now rather than wait for further bad news from my doctor.

I remain on medication for cholesterol, but I expect my numbers will improve soon. Cutting out candy will reduce my chances of developing type 2 diabetes and eliminating coffee will improve my sleeping habits.

I’ll be turning 40 in nine days. I’m not where I had planned to be, but I am still alive, so I will count that as a boon.

So once again, I am a bit late in reporting the figures. Maybe it’s the ADD speaking, but I find it really easy to forget something I only do 4 times a year.

In my last WordAds Experience post, I reported on the Q3-4 period of 2024. That year, I had upgraded my account to one that supports WordAds and revenue sharing in March of 2024. By December, I had earned $51.77. That’s how much I got for 280,588 Ads Served at a $0.18 CPM.

Now, here we are in 2025, and I have seen a marked increase in site traffic. I did recently have a setback, possibly, but I am working to make up for the loss.

YouTube

Just last week, my YouTube account was shut down, quite unfortunately. I was disappointed, to say the least, but I was kind of expecting it after all the restrictions my content was generating. Some of these mobile games are more than a little risque. It’s just the nature of the beast.

I took it as a sign and decided to focus on this website alone. It wasn’t exactly a hard decision once I started thinking about my journey overall. After 3 years, the YouTube account wasn’t anywhere near the necessary watch hours for monetization. Even if I did get those hours, the content wasn’t really suitable for advertising revenue.

I have since closed my other social media accounts. It was nice having other sources of incoming traffic, but the effort to keep the other accounts updated meant that I was spending less time here on the site writing up content.

First Quarter

Got a little sidetracked there. For the first quarter (Jan-Mar), I earned $20.05 from WordAds.

Date	Earnings	Ads Served
January	5.58	98,167
February	5.67	81,765
March	8.08	137,929

Visitors and Views for the above period are as follows,

Date	Visitors	Views
January	10,870	22,998
February	9,009	23,768
March	13,104	56,844

You can see there was a considerable bump once we hit March. I believe that was from making several supporting pages and posts for one of the game wikis I host on the site. I’m thinking the internal links to the new dedicated pages kept visitors on the site longer.

Second Quarter

Since my social accounts only recently went away, I don’t think I’ll have any data points I can provide on traffic losses. Actually, my Reddit traffic increased by 120 visitors, and YouTube visitors dropped by 10 visitors under the previous period.

I don’t understand why there was a 50% drop in ads served for June. Site traffic was only off by 1.5k visitors. Maybe those 1.5k I missed were the prolific types who click on every picture and page?

Date	Earning	Ads Served
April	$10.88	166,178
May	$11.01	148,706
June	$6.07	70,747

I only published 5 posts during June, and although I published 5 Pages, those don’t get the same visibility as a post.

Posts will at least show up in the WordPress Reader under Discover. Pages need to be found by search engines, by accident, or by placing a button on the navigation bar.

Date	Visitors	Views
April	14,970	90,314
May	14,783	83,595
June	13,297	73,843

My total earnings for Q2 are $27.96, adding last quarter to the total brings us to $48.01. Now, looking at the chart, I can see the math is off. It may be that the calculation for June that I am seeing is not the full value. It would be nice if that were the case.

I am almost to the $100 threshold required to request a cashout on my ad revenue. The cost of operating the site was calculated based on the sale pricing I received when I upgraded my plan.

That cost was $66 per year for 3 years. If I can manage $198 by the end of December 2026, then I can say it all worked out.

We’ll call it a close here, I think.

Sales on eBay continue apace, social media is all gone, and the game wikis continue to flourish.

Thanks for reading. See you next quarter (hopefully).