The goal of this route was to make a fair bit of cash but spread it out over the month. Everything we did in this route could have been done at least one week faster, probably as many as 10 days sooner. Feel free to ask questions if you'd like. You can make a good amount of money being a route shopper =)

[docs.google.com]

You drove interstates, you drove toll roads, you drove in big cities -- and evidently, if I'm reading it right, you flew somewhere?

None of which I can or would do.

I'll just keep on my back roads, rural routes: expenses are lower, traffic is not nearly as bad, and (possibly) the people are nicer. Not as sophisticated, maybe; not as sharp, maybe, but nicer.



However, I appreciate the spirit in which you shared this, and I'm sure there's a lot there that newbies (even some not-so-new) can learn.

But Blue Bloods is on, so I gotta go -- and my drunk sister is trash talking me on the phone, so gotta go. And I'm in the middle of my taxes, so gotta go.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/25/2020 03:35AM by ceasesmith.

I like the spirit of this, but I find this incredibly hard to read. Maybe I am overthinking it. I lay my spreadsheet out with the following columns: Company, Location, Date, Reimbursement, Actual cost, and payment. Obviously, I can not share that, because of our ICA. I'm just confused by what I'm looking at on yours. Also, stay out of my neighborhood. I'll take some of those shops. (All in good fun, obviously.)

Thanks for sharing.

Was this for two people? There are two names listed and some shops list men's or women's.

Those locations were just identifiers. I went with my girlfriend and when possible, we split up. This allows us to do the same route next quarter and then flip which locations we do. A single shopper could do this entire route though.

@ceasesmith wrote:

You drove interstates, you drove toll roads, you drove in big cities -- and evidently, if I'm reading it right, you flew somewhere?

None of which I can or would do.

I'll just keep on my back roads, rural routes: expenses are lower, traffic is not nearly as bad, and (possibly) the people are nicer. Not as sophisticated, maybe; not as sharp, maybe, but nicer.



However, I appreciate the spirit in which you shared this, and I'm sure there's a lot there that newbies (even some not-so-new) can learn.

But Blue Bloods is on, so I gotta go -- and my drunk sister is trash talking me on the phone, so gotta go. And I'm in the middle of my taxes, so gotta go.

The flights were more of a bonus. I snagged a luxury hotel with a company who covered flights. It was originally going to be a 4 day vacation and turned into a 9 day trip with 3 days of work but for a luxury hotel, totally worth it.

But yes, lots of driving! Trip could have been condensed by a week to a week and a half easy for someone focused only on work. We do a lot of bsing around and visiting people and places so it takes longer.

@nolimitem wrote:

I like the spirit of this, but I find this incredibly hard to read. Maybe I am overthinking it. I lay my spreadsheet out with the following columns: Company, Location, Date, Reimbursement, Actual cost, and payment. Obviously, I can not share that, because of our ICA. I'm just confused by what I'm looking at on yours. Also, stay out of my neighborhood. I'll take some of those shops. (All in good fun, obviously.)

I'm happy to share. I'm not protective of my work and in 10 years it's never stopped me from earning. Ask any questions you want to understand.

This is a pretty messy spreadsheet for me but it gets the job done :p I make sure I dont label things with too many identifiers so client and company wont be named as I share this in some other groups too. There are people out there who make this much doing a much different system and way of doing it too. I hope sharing it inspires others to figure out systems that work for them too!

So first column is the date and it also goes straight through the shops that we did on each day and in what order. Then we put the price after that. The two columns "joe and alex" is a list of what we spent personally out of what we made so we can make sure we dont overspend on personal stuff. We splurge a little when we do some high end clothing places because they are on sale in January . I also put in any expenses we have. Since I do this route two times every year, we like to track what we did so we can make a better route on the next time through.

The two green highlighted areas are the running profit after expenses, and the toll profit or loss after expenses. Enterprise sells a daily charge Ipass for 7.99. Since we have several areas with high tolls it makes sense to pay for that sometimes. We picked it up after doing all of our nothern and western shops and only had to go to the east coast and canada. This made it very profitable to get the pass. We also got a ford fusion hybrid rental and as of now we had between 10 and 15% of our several thousand mile trip be free electric miles. This helped keep gas costs to a tank a day max.

Some meals youll see on here are because if we stay at a friends house, we always offer to go out to dinner. We'd normally budget 100 bucks for a hotel, so instead we spend half of that on food for us and our friends and we still come out ahead.

Oh, oh, oh!!! You are so bringing out the CPA in me!!! My creative accounting gene is doing high kicks and splits!!!!

Perhaps incorrectly, I'm assuming at this income level, you have a tax professional.

Do yourself a favor and ask him/her about the Federal "per diem".

Um....how to put this on an open forum....let me just suppose I spent 8 nights away from home last year, 100% MSing. I was more than 300 miles away from home each of those nights. Therefore, I can deduct 8 nights of hotel and 9 days of "per diem" meals at the Federal's stated rate. I don't have to mess around with receipts for them -- just the supporting receipts/paperwork showing I was actually more than 300 miles from home when I stopped for the night. The one printed page I keep of each shop is more than adequate proof of that.

The government per diem is EXTREMELY generous (not in the cities; but they actually have a table that gives different rates for city/suburban/rural).



And the real beauty (assuming you each file tax separately; i.e., you're not joint filing) you may EACH of you deduct the Federal per diem allowance. No "Hey, Alex, you paid for this, so you take the deduction, but I paid for the car, so I'll deduct all that."
" No, Joe, that's not fair. I need to take those hotel deductions, even though you put them on your credit card."

Filing jointly, horse of a different color, a different barrel of fish.

As always, consult your tax professional.

ESPECIALLY before accepting tax advice from an open forum.

Edited to add: Applicable to sole proprietorships, using Schedule C. Super simplified, but if the business is a corporation, you should be submitting expense reports to the business, being reimbursed in full for all allowable expenses, and the corporation then deducts the expense reports as expense. A GROSS over simplification!

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/25/2020 01:45PM by ceasesmith.

@ceasesmith wrote:

Oh, oh, oh!!! You are so bringing out the CPA in me!!! My creative accounting gene is doing high kicks and splits!!!!

Perhaps incorrectly, I'm assuming at this income level, you have a tax professional.

Do yourself a favor and ask him/her about the Federal "per diem".

Um....how to put this on an open forum....let me just suppose I spent 8 nights away from home last year, 100% MSing. I was more than 300 miles away from home each of those nights. Therefore, I can deduct 8 nights of hotel and 9 days of "per diem" meals at the Federal's stated rate. I don't have to mess around with receipts for them -- just the supporting receipts/paperwork showing I was actually more than 300 miles from home when I stopped for the night. The one printed page I keep of each shop is more than adequate proof of that.

The government per diem is EXTREMELY generous (not in the cities; but they actually have a table that gives different rates for city/suburban/rural).



And the real beauty (assuming you each file tax separately; i.e., you're not joint filing) you may EACH of you deduct the Federal per diem allowance. No "Hey, Alex, you paid for this, so you take the deduction, but I paid for the car, so I'll deduct all that."
" No, Joe, that's not fair. I need to take those hotel deductions, even though you put them on your credit card."

Filing jointly, horse of a different color, a different barrel of fish.

As always, consult your tax professional.

ESPECIALLY before accepting tax advice from an open forum.

Edited to add: Applicable to sole proprietorships, using Schedule C. Super simplified, but if the business is a corporation, you should be submitting expense reports to the business, being reimbursed in full for all allowable expenses, and the corporation then deducts the expense reports as expense. A GROSS over simplification!

Good info here! Thanks for your comment.

At $4700/ month profit, having 2 days off per month, that is not appealing to me.
$4700 x 12 = $56,400 / year. So, for two people you made a profit of $4700?

You pay higher taxes being self-employed, have less time off than a "regular" job and have no benefits such as sick time, pension, retirement, vacation, holidays, etc.

I'm glad that you are happy with it, but it's far less than I would need to make to live in CA.

@SoCalMama wrote:

At $4700/ month profit, having 2 days off per month, that is not appealing to me.
$4700 x 12 = $56,400 / year. So, for two people you made a profit of $4700?

You pay higher taxes being self-employed, have less time off than a "regular" job and have no benefits such as sick time, pension, retirement, vacation, holidays, etc.

I'm glad that you are happy with it, but it's far less than I would need to make to live in CA.

Youre misunderstanding a few things.

We choose to travel together. Its not required to do this route with the exception of a couple of the new homes. A female could have done solo, but those they would not have allowed a solo male. This route is not at all dependent on having two people. Its something we choose to do so we can spend more time together and due to the fact we use this to see the country.

I dont end up having to pay higher taxes. All of my income has a bunch of deductions. My accountant handles it, but we do enough traveling in our PoV and our Airbnb has thousands a year that can be deducted that we dont generally end up owing fed or state. Social security i pay more than a standard job, but that's fine by me and not at all a big deal.

It would help if you took into context that we were not rushing and that this route could have been done in at least 30% faster time by a single person. As I stated above. Taking this at face value and applying it directly to you or anyone else wouldn't be a fair comparison because our goal isn't just making money and thats the comparison youre looking at.

Had it been done in a purely profit motive it would have been between 2 and 3 weeks long and higher profit for that time.

I already make all of my living expenses off of one of my other businesses. These routes are designed to bring in some bullshit spending money, while taking plenty of time off for us to see things in different areas. We added 4 days to do a ski resort shop, we added 2 days to mess around in Indianapolis with friends, and we cut short every Monday and Thursday so we could play video games at the hotel at night. We added an additional day to visit a friend in Canada and another day for Vermont, and took off half days for the NFL Playoffs. Someone focused on profit wouldn't waste all of that extra time where we did.

That would have eliminated about 500 to 700 dollars for hotels, about 100 in gas, and shaved off about 250 off the rental cost all of which would have been moved to the profit column. Or conversely, would have allowed someone to schedule more shops. Ive done this similar route with extra work added in and pulled in 8k profit solo for 4 weeks in the past on more than one occasion. 8k is definitely enough money to live in CA. Or even 5.5 to 6k profit in 2-3 weeks.


Context matters. If you were simply trying to make profit, this spreadsheet would look a whole lot different.

There's also several tangible benefits that Ill be getting from this. We just did an 85 day europe trip where 75 of our nights were booked with hotel points earned soley in a year and a half of mystery shopping. Our car rentals were covered by mystery shops (14 days or so over that time). our flights were paid for in full with credit card points earned with our credit cards while mystery shopping and I had an extra 700 leftover for spending cash while there.

These are things that we definitely find valuable, and could convert to profit if that was something we were focused on.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 01/25/2020 08:01PM by jrossetti.

My only question because once I figured out your name was Jo/e and you were not spending megabucks each day on coffee, it seemed pretty straightforward to me is did you arrange all those retail shops at $60 each with the same company and then built the other shops around those? I do not do route shopping and anywhere near to me retail pays $8-20 each, no bonuses or $2. Your lifestyle sounds like work and a lot of fun thrown in. I like it.

@sandyf wrote:

My only question because once I figured out your name was Jo/e and you were not spending megabucks each day on coffee, it seemed pretty straightforward to me is did you arrange all those retail shops at $60 each with the same company and then built the other shops around those? I do not do route shopping and anywhere near to me retail pays $8-20 each, no bonuses or $2. Your lifestyle sounds like work and a lot of fun thrown in. I like it.

Exactly! Good eye!

We used the retail shops as a backbone That got us a solid route through the midwest and northeast down to NYC. THey are okay profit, but nothing crazy. Then I fill in with whatever else I can scoop up that fits our goals. The ski lodge was literally a last minute add in after we had already done a few days of our planned route. It was an audible we both agreed was worth calling even though there was little profit to be made. That was done purely for the experience and we had a lot of fun with that.

The new home shops were also a last minute addition that we saw pop up when we were a week away from there.

We are no longer in a position where we are doing this just to pay the bills, so we spend a lot of time bullshitting around and doing fun stuff too. We maintain a national parks pass and often stop at places along the route that we get in for free with the pass (100 bucks yearly) and due to a lot of online gaming I have friends and people to visit around the country.

YOu could absolutely gear this more towards just money making and youd definitely make more profit than we did. One year we did 16k in work over 2 months, and spent all 16k by the time we were done with the route lol. But we redid most of our wardrobe, went to disney, ate out and spent 50 to 100 every single night, got fancy hotels. No money for profit at the end at all, but the experiences and memories we made during that time made it worthwhile for us. That's what I love about mystery shopping. You can tailor it to fit your goals at the time.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/25/2020 09:06PM by jrossetti.

Well, color me impressed, by both your total monthly profit and your ability to manage the scheduling and the travel!! I can’t travel more than about 100 miles from home, but you have my utmost respect for showing what can be done with prior skills and motivation,

Nicely set up. Thanks for sharing. You seem to have a good route of $60 shops. That's unusual here. Or, are they video?

Wishing my average shop was $60 ;-)

@iShop123 wrote:

Nicely set up. Thanks for sharing. You seem to have a good route of $60 shops. That's unusual here. Or, are they video?

Wishing my average shop was $60 ;-)

Where is here? Yes to video. Do you have gear? Unless youre in the dakotas or montana I think I can point you to some video work.

The only omission is that you did not do any gas shops, especially since you went to locations that you could get from 50-100 each.

With two people and a mobile hotspot, they could be entered from the vehicle as you drive. So missing a fuel stop is silly unless it is one that requires you to be alone when you stop.

@2stepps wrote:

With two people and a mobile hotspot, they could be entered from the vehicle as you drive. So missing a fuel stop is silly unless it is one that requires you to be alone when you stop.

When I drive by $$$ gas locations at the middle of nowhere that I picked up because we happened to be going in that direction I just have my companion(s) just wait by the side while I do the purchases and then drive the car outside the gas station and have them take the car to wait inside while I return to do the inspection/photos.

@KateH wrote:

The only omission is that you did not do any gas shops, especially since you went to locations that you could get from 50-100 each.

I apparently do need to check out Ipsos. This would be a good way to pad the route and gas is the third largest expense on a big route.

@2stepps wrote:

With two people and a mobile hotspot, they could be entered from the vehicle as you drive. So missing a fuel stop is silly unless it is one that requires you to be alone when you stop.

With two of us we always have one person be secretary @#$%& so this is definitely something we already do to keep up with things. I also have a virtual assistant that we can outsource parts of reports to.

I live in Ga. I can't get 5-6 60 dollar shops a day. That is impressive, what I can understand of it. But the cost of living up there is exorbitant I only pay 350 a month for rent, (cheap even for here). I live in a like a 750 square foot 1 bedroom house. There are only two of us here, better half and me, 2 dogs and 2 cats and a fish tank! I try to schedule a few 50 dollar shops and build around them. But since we lost our Team manager on Team 6, (yes the one your thinking of) I was only able to build two out of town routes for the last week of Jan. I had to pick up more OSI's since I couldn't do it the regular way. Fortunately, a few Scope F's popped up this month. But I still think we are going to be a little low this month.

@jrossetti wrote:

I also have a virtual assistant that we can outsource parts of reports to.

I'm curious what the MSCs' response to this was when you asked if it fit within the guidelines of the ICA. The few that I have actually read all the way through seemed to indicate the person the ICA was with had to complete all of the work themselves, including the report.

@bgriffin wrote:

@jrossetti wrote:

I also have a virtual assistant that we can outsource parts of reports to.

I'm curious what the MSCs' response to this was when you asked if it fit within the guidelines of the ICA. The few that I have actually read all the way through seemed to indicate the person the ICA was with had to complete all of the work themselves, including the report.

My company offers this as as service to people who need it, FYI. 100% has to be cleared by the specific MSP in writing though. We only offer it for video work.

The companies that I have done this with don't care as long as the work was accurate. I'm ultimately still responsible for all of the information being accurate. Primarily we use the VA to do rote data entry from video directly to report. No subjective sections, no narratives. It works great for reports that have lots of checkbox questions. Like did they do this, did they do that, were they in proper uniform,etc.

Far less useful for things that require comments on everything.

If I'm doing say 10 shops in a day, and doing a 10 minute report afterwards that means I'm spending around 2 hours doing reports when I could theoretically be doing more shops. If these are video and I can outsource 8 minutes of that report so I only need to do a single subjective section that allows me to do more actual shops. This decrease the amount of time I have to spend on the road, and increases overall efficiency and profit. Over the course of a week this could end up saving me an actual day of reporting, which means one less hotel is needed on the route. So I save 100 bucks there, and that more than pays for 8 hours of the VA doing reports. More efficient and more money coming back to my pocket.

I utilized a VA heavily for a rent to own project I was part of. She did hundreds of them for us as there was only one subjective question. In that case, I sent her the paragraph for that section and the video via email, she then did the report for us using the video and our paragraph.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/27/2020 01:13AM by jrossetti.

@F and L TeleComm wrote:

I live in Ga. I can't get 5-6 60 dollar shops a day. That is impressive, what I can understand of it. But the cost of living up there is exorbitant I only pay 350 a month for rent, (cheap even for here). I live in a like a 750 square foot 1 bedroom house. There are only two of us here, better half and me, 2 dogs and 2 cats and a fish tank! I try to schedule a few 50 dollar shops and build around them. But since we lost our Team manager on Team 6, (yes the one your thinking of) I was only able to build two out of town routes for the last week of Jan. I had to pick up more OSI's since I couldn't do it the regular way. Fortunately, a few Scope F's popped up this month. But I still think we are going to be a little low this month.

The only reason I have so many shops like this is I hop state to state and scoop em up. It would be difficult to do this in one state constantly, but it can be done for some projects.

You might wanna consider doing loop route swhere you go to an adjacent state and back in the same day. Or just overnights.

Also video. This is much much easier to do if you are doing video work. I know a few people who make as much or more than me doing primarily written, but it IS a lot more work. If any of you know Paul Bolin he's definitely worth taking the time to talk shop with. He actually crashes in his car a lot so he can make more profit Not an option for everyone, for sure. Tell him Joe sent you :p

"I had to pick up more OSI's since I couldn't do it the regular way. Fortunately, a few Scope F's popped up this month"

What is an OSI,and what is a Scope F?

@ceasesmith wrote:

"I had to pick up more OSI's since I couldn't do it the regular way. Fortunately, a few Scope F's popped up this month"

What is an OSI,and what is a Scope F?

I have the same question, lol. Those are new terms for me =)

Thanks; I was worried I was just an idiot. I feel better now that someone else admits to not knowing, too!

On site inspection. I believe scope F is a particular category of inspections for trendsource.

Of course!

I can't believe that didn't even produce a tickle in the back of my pea-pickin' lil ole brain!