Archive for the 'Money' Category

We’re Not Doing It For The Money… We’re Doing It For A Shit Load Of Money!!!

Published
by
C.G.
on April 17, 2007
in Computers, Life and Money
. 1 Comment

Sorry about the long title but it’s needed.

See, I was strolling through some older posts at Lifehack.org on my newly Mac-ified Google Reader when I came across an article on how to start a blog and make $100 in the first month.  Suddenly it dawned on me… Most blogs are in it for the money.

No kidding!

I know, I know… the realization shouldn’t be so surprising but for me it is.   I guess in this day of social media/collaboration and open source software, I figured blogging - or creating a blog would be an extension of that.  I also feel that its different for companies because they invest heavily in IP, infrastructure, and the production of media/content and they need some justification.  Besides, that’s what businesses do… do something to make money.

But people… are they that hell bent on making money that they do what lifehack.org is suggesting they do to make an extra $100 a month?  I know I’m not.  Of course, I’m lucky enough to be comfortable in life - I’m not living in a Park Avenue penthouse or anything but I’m not in the slums either.  The prospect of even $500 a month doesn’t appeal to me.  I guess that’s my prerogative but what about everyone else?  How much money would you have to make on your blog before you thought it would be worth it?

Its a hard question to answer and its not as simple as some dollar amount.  It can’t be (in my mind) the same amount of money one would make in their “day job.” You could find that you might take less money if it was less work.  But if the point of having a blog was to make more more money, you can’t quit your job.  And if you do it part time, you can’t create much content to generate views, hits, and clicks.

But being creative and keeping people reading and clicking on ads can’t be easy; talk about pressure to perform all the time.  If you don’t write something meaningful a few times a day or so, you loose your audience and the ad revenue they bring.  Even if you regurgitate someone else’s content as many do, is still hard to do it day after day.  If there is anything people like about their music, movies, TV, and books its new content.  They don’t like the same style of beats, etc. to keep them entertained.  And because we tend to be fickle in what is hot and then not, it makes keeping audiences “tuned” to your blog even harder.

I suppose you can be sneaky about things and write a bunch of words in there that will gather lots of attention.  Words like, porn, fuck, adult entertainment, beer, and cars plastered all over every post might garner you some hits but is it really all you want to do get people to like your site?  Faking hits is fraud.  Hiding meta data is also a no-no.  None of those things, I think, will really get you the money that would make investing in a blog worth it.

Not that its really expensive.  Figure $7 for a domain - some are free with hosting plans.  Hosting plans average around $7 a month with many much less than that.  Ads could be costly but you’ve got to spend money to make money, right?  But what about the time?  Is your time valuable?  If so, you might not want to spend it earning $5 an hour.  If you already earn $5/hr, then it might be worth making that extra $100 but now you are talking about a heavy investment ($7 a month is 1.5 hours of your month and 7% of your expenses before ads you buy).

So why not do it for the experience?  Share your thoughts with the world and not care if it nets you a Ben Franklin.  I mean, that’s why I do it… to tell you what I am thinking as if you care and like what I have to say.   I mean, normally its a gift to hear what I have to say, anyway so…  The way I see it, you are all winners here.

:)

Google Calendar (Life) Hacks

Published
by
C.G.
on July 24, 2006
in Hacks, Life and Money
. 0 Comments

Although not much of a hack. I’ve been using Google Calendar to hack my life in positive ways. Not only am I putting everything on the calendar, I’m taking advantage of the near limitless calendars you can create in Google’s online PIM of AJAX-y goodness.

In addition to creating my own personal calendar, I made one for my wife. We share each other’s personal calendars and we share a “family” calendar that I set up too. The personal calendars are for those obviously personal appointments. I have my eye doctor visits, for example, of the my calendar and when she goes out ‘with the girls” she adds that on to her agenda; I do the same with my friends on the rare occasions I go out. When we have guests over (like we have this Wednesday) or when we are doing things together - say, going to a party - we put it on the calendar. That way, we know what each other has planned and what we have planned for each other.

Furthering the multiple calendar idea, I’ve created five additional calendars. The first calendar is for our pay days. The second is for the bills. The third calendar is for our meals. The fourth is my volunteer calendar and the fifth is actually an RSS feed of our local weather. To help distinguish one calendar from another, I use the color code system Google provides.

The pay day calendar obviously tracks when my wife and I get paid. We are on different pay cycles with my checks coming twice a month and hers every two weeks. I assigned a dull yellow color to that calendar because I wanted to be drawn to the events but not give a sense of utmost urgency.
The bill calendar is in red. That way, I’m alerted to when the bills are due. Reminders are set two days in advance so I can be prepared for the eventual drawing of funds. Eventually, I’m going to add - or create a new calendar - for the days that the bills arrive in the mailbox. Since snail-mail ends up in a pile in my office, I never pay attention to when the bills arrive. With the secondary bill calendar, I will only add an event when a bill arrives. Over time, I’ll be able to predict when the bills come in and understand the statement cycle of our payees.

The meal plan is mostly for my wife but I benefit greatly from it too. along with our Fresh Direct orders, we add the meals we plan to make that week. Today, I made buffalo burgers. Tomorrow, my wife is making turkey chili. And Wednesday, she is making salmon with potatoes and asparagus. Thursday is always pizza and beer nights for us so we never have problems remembering what’s for dinner but its always good to know its on its way. And like the pay day calendar and the bill pay calendar, the meal calendar gets its own color.

I am getting involved with a non-profit organization that promotes parks in my town. Don’t worry loyal fans, I’m not getting all granola. I want my property values to go up and parks are one way to do so - not the 1000s of condos they keep building. Anyway, I add the meetings, fund raisers, discussions, and my contributing work to that calendar with its own color so I can tell when I’ll be fulfilling those responsibilities.

The last calendar is just one that I added using Google’s RSS importer. That way I know what to wear for the day. I choose a dull gray color so I don’t get distracted with lesser important information (vs the bill payment calendar).

In the future, I’ll add my exercise routine to a new calendar so I know what workouts I’m scheduled to do on any given day. I’ve also started to train for bike races with my friend Paul and I’ll add our routes to the workout calendar or create a separate calendar for those days.

Since I now check my Google Calendar several times a day, I’m always on top of what needs to be done and what’s coming up in my life. I’m hopeful this life hack will help keep me organized. Give the multi-color, multi-calendar approach a try and see if works for you. If there are other Calendar hacks out there that have made someone else more productive and more organized, please pass them along.

Wish List

Published
by
C.G.
on July 23, 2006
in Hacks, Life and Money
. 0 Comments

So I was walking around with my wife in the city today after just saying good-bye to my two younger brothers who stayed with us for the weekend. While we walked all around the West Village, we talked about how we always seem to spend more than we should. Not that we get ourselves into trouble, mind you, its just that we always seem to not be able to do or get something we want because we spent too much the month before.

Most of what we spent money on was food. Even though we are careful to order groceries from Fresh Direct every week, we inevitably go out for dinner at least once. Add that to the lunches we buy and we are looking at lot of bought food. Almost all of the food we buy is healthy and there is a high price to pay to live low fat.

But in trying to figure out how we can pay of all our bills, save money, and still have fun, I came up with a solution I think will work well for us. I separated our expenditures into three categories: operating expenses, saving expenses, and fun expenses. Operating expenses are the mortgage, utility, transportation, grocery, and health club bills we must pay every month. Savings expenses are really just the auto-transfers into our savings account I already setup. Fun expenses would be movies, dinners, iTunes, and small miscellaneous expenses that just make us happy and keep us from quiting our otherwise unrewarding jobs.

To make sure that we stick to a soon-to-be defined monthly limit on “fun” items, I decided I would create a special checking account that we would use such purposes. Every month, we’d refill that account with the soon-to-be defined limit and if we ran out, we couldn’t do the things we wanted to do. It forces us to separate those monies from those we save and those we pay to get housed, heat, and health. The check card we get for this seperate account would be we would use to pay for purchases while on the go and we would still have our other cards around if we got into an emergency (like if we had a flat while on vacation or something).

But the fun things would be limited to small items and mundane purchases. We decided that special items like gifts, car rentals (that won’t be for vacations), most clothes, and medium-sized purchases for ourselves would be split between our fun money and our savings account. That way we don’t destroy either fund when getting things we think are needed (or deserved). Very large purchases like a new TV, car, computer, etc. will be purchased out of savings when we feel like the time is right. It means we have to work towards being good with our money in order to get the big-ticket items.

So we don’t sacrifice our mile-earning-abilities, we are going to look for a checking account provider which offers us that feature. No longer will our “fun” expenses go on a credit card that earns us miles; we will do it directly so we don’t loose track of what we spend and “surprise” ourselves the next month. With direct deposit and no minimum balance, the account is free and easy to maintain online. We think its a win-win situation.

And to help advance our goal of saving money, I decided to create a wish list on Ta-Da. This list will be separate from my other, more normal, to-do lists that I setup for the house. In the list, I write down what my wife and I want to buy with our savings and list the estimated price. That way, we can strive towards a goal that has tangible rewards vs some dollar amount written on a statement. We reward ourselves when we feel are good and where there is enough money in the account to support our purchase (making sure we don’t empty the account in the process).

I’m considering publishing this list so people can see two things: what is it that we strive for and how well we are doing in getting things off that list. Like the personal life goals I list, the list will not move quickly. In fact, with this list, I might have more items on there than I should. But the point is that they are there to motivate me into saving enough money to get them; they are my grapes to jump for. Only this time, I’m getting the bloody grapes!

Finance Tips

Published
by
C.G.
on July 20, 2006
in Life and Money
. 0 Comments

I’ve been look up new ways to better plan out my finances. I need to because I’ve got lots of goals that require cash to accomplish. Some things I am thinking about while doing this is (in no particular order):

  • Retire at Age 55
  • Purchase Summer/Winter “Get Away” Home(s)
  • Pay for Kids’ College
  • Pay for My MBA
  • Travel to Destinations Unknown (to Me or My Wife)
  • Buy/Lease a Car (LR3, hopefully)
  • Create “Rainy Day” Fund
  • Improve My Home(s)

So you can see that I have to plan for many all of them if I want to accomplish these tasks. In my quest to reinvent myself, I am trying to get focused and organized. I’m hoping that this leads to a happier life overall. And while I’m using resources out there that I should list in a blogroll or something, I need to find a way that works for me.

I’ve already set up all but two of my bills to be paid automatically. I also transfer money out of my checking account into a savings account the days that my wife and I get paid; no need to manually do it and its kinda like forced savings. I just created entries in our Google Calendar that track when bills need to be paid - even if they are done automatically. As they come in the mail, I’m going to track that and determine the bill/mail/due-date cycle of all my payees so I can create my own cash flow statements to understand. I’m even going to include the amounts of the bills in the calendar so I can really see what I need to pay, how much, an when.

Obviously, I need to budget. And while I kinda sorta don’t really have a formal budget, I do have a rough idea of what I take in and what I need to spend. What I don’t do is figure out how to maintain the budget as I do activities or buy things throughout the month and year. My wife and I hired a financial planner in January or February and we are waiting for his recommendations. When he delivers his plan, we will take a look at what we need to do to cover the most important goals (like retirement, colleges, summer home car, and rainy day). After that, I need to figure out a way to track my budget in real-time so I know where my money situation is like.

I tried Quicken. It didn’t work. Not only did it not reconcile with my bank very well, the tedious way it balanced the transactions made it a real chore to use. Neither my wife and I really used it more than a month or so after we got it because it was so cumbersome. Plus, we only have once license and three computers - my PC, her Mac, and our PC-based laptop. We installed it on the laptop so we could be good about our money while away from home. But my laptop is old and slow (lame excuse, I know) and it made it even harder to fix the problems I had with the electronic balancing it was supposed to do with my bank and credit card companies.

But I’m not giving up hope for a Quicken-like solution. I’m looking into Web 2.0 style websites that focus on money, budgets, and GTD tips, applying some of my own ideas (like the calendar thing), and working towards a plan that I can be proud of. Maybe someone will like to my money tip enough to link to it. Maybe I can start a tip site.