- RT @mymoneyshrugged: The government breaks your leg, and hands you a crutch saying "see without me, you couldn't walk." #
- @bargainr What weeks do you need a FoF host for? in reply to bargainr #
- Awesome tagline: The coolest you'll look pooping your pants. Yay, @Huggies! #
- A textbook is not the real world. Not all business management professors understand marketing. #
- RT @thegoodhuman: Walden on work "spending best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy (cont) http://tl.gd/2gugo6 #
Regret
There comes a time when it’s too late to tell people how you feel.
There will come a day when the person you mean to talk to won’t be there. Don’t wait for that day.
“There’s always tomorrow” isn’t always true.
Olivia Wilde is Having a Baby: What are the first-month expenses?
Olivia Wilde recently announced her pregnancy with fiance Jason Sudeikis as she’s due with her first child in the coming year. Although the couple have declined to reveal their due date, they likely are expecting to set aside a budget for their baby, even with their high incomes. With forty percent of moms saying that having a baby is more expensive than they initially assumed, it’s important to look at the overall costs in the first month for plenty of preparation and financial planning.
Food
The first-month’s expenses can slightly range, depending on if the mother is using formula to feed the baby or is breastfeeding.
Breastfeeding is free and will not cost a dime, besides the breastfeeding supplies that cost an average of $15 in the first month due to nursing pads and milk storage bags for freezing.
Name-brand formula can be expensive, an average cost of $25 a week as the baby will be feeding on it several times a day, totaling about $100 in the first month. Generic brands of formula cost half the amount, an average of $12 a week.
Medical
Health insurance is one of the most expensive costs for newborn babies with 39 percent of mothers paying $1,000 with their childbirth. Some even pay at least $5,000. Health insurance will also likely increase to $200 a month for the child with co-pays that range from $30 to $100 per visit. Some health insurance will refuse to cover certain costs, which include vaccines and immunizations.
Daycare
Paid maternity leave is considered a luxury in the U.S. and is often unavailable for mothers who are self-employeed or do freelance work, making daycare a necessity. Daycare for newborns averages to $100 a month, but can be at least $1,000 for celebrities that use an in-home nanny.
General Care
Wipes will cost an average of $13 in the first month with a $5 increase in the water bill for the baby’s laundry and baths.
Diapers are one of the scariest expenses that are priced at $80 for basic Pamper diapers for newborns. Using cloth diapers are a one-time expense, so if provided by a friend or relative at a baby shower, they are free to use consistently and do not require much water or detergent to wash every other day.
Bath soap, detergent, and baby-safe shampoo will cost $30 a month to maintain the hygiene of your baby.
Although Olivia Wilde’s baby will be unique in its feeding habits and the materials for diapers used, the average cost in the first month will likely total $200 and can go as high as $4,000 for a celebrity. Many of the costs simply depend on the baby and are determined by the type of diapers used, the amount of doctor visits, daycare that may be needed, and whether the baby prefers breastfeeding or feeding on formula.
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$1,000,000 Business Idea
I’m sick of working my day job.
I’m sick of working my side hustles.
I’m sick of working.
To make up for all of that, I’m going to launch a new business. My business model is guaranteed to generate $1,000,000 in revenue the first month.
Seriously.
It’s going to be a father/son enterprise, and to prove that the business model scales, I’m going to help him generate another $1,000,000 in revenue the first month.
This plan is infinitely replicable and infinitely scalable. Steal my business plan and you can have a million dollar business, too.
Ready?
First, my son is going to sell his XBox for $100. Yes, he’s taking a loss, but that’s the cost of getting into the business. Oh, and he’s selling it to me.
$100 for him.
Second, I’m going to sell it back to him for $100.
$100 for me.
He sells it to me for $100.
$200 for him.
I sell it to him for $100.
$200 for me.
If we do this just 9,998 more times, we’ll have generated $1,000,000 in revenue. At 1 minute per transaction, I figure we can both be running million dollar business after just 2 weeks of full-time work.
That’s a two-week vacation every single month.
Phenomenal plan.
Some of the haters are going to explode with comments about “profit” and “expenses”, but I don’t care. Cash flow is king. They can sit at home and whine about their $50,000 jobs while I’m making millions. Sure, my profit (the money leftover after expenses are taken from the revenue) is on the low side, but I can make that up in volume.
Millions.
If I do this every month, I’ll be sitting on a $12,000,000 business. I bet I can sell that for 5 times my annual profits.
Any buyers out there?
Any entrepreneurs ready to copy my business model?
Anybody have a better grasp of the difference between cash flow and profit than I do?
Mortgage Race, Part 2
As I mentioned last month, Crystal and I are in a race to pay off our mortgages. The loser(henceforth known as “Crystal”) has to visit the winner. Now, since–judging by the temperature–Crystal lives in Hell, I think it would be good for her to visit in the winter. There something about the idea of going ice fishing, staring at a hole in the ice while sitting on a 5 gallon bucket, cursing the day I was born.
Today, she threw down the gauntlet again. She has apparently decided that, since her prerequisites are met, she’s going to win. Sure, she’s closed on her house and built her savings back up to $20000, but it doesn’t matter. I’ve sent a small army of arson-ninjas to keep her from getting ahead. They are so small, they can only carry tiny matches and single drops of gasoline, so the damage they can do is tiny, but it will add up. Just a word of advice: if you hire an army of arson-ninjas, go for the upsell and get ninjas that are at least 2 feet tall. Anything less is just inefficient.
When I announced the race last month, my mortgage balance was $26,266.40. Today, it is $25,382.53. In three days, there will be another $880 applied to the principal.
In February, our renters will move in and we’ll conservatively have another $650 to pay. When that starts, our balance should be around $23,000. Adding a portion of the rent payment should mean we pay off the house in May 2014. However, when I bring in our side hustle money, that will bring us back to September 2013.
Crystal’s projected payoff is July 2013, so I’ll have to hustle.
How come my back hurts?
My favorite book series is the Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind. It’s a good sword-and-sorcery, good-versus-evil fantasy.
But I’m not here to talk about that series. Rather, I’m going to talk about one particular scene in book 6, Faith of the Fallen.
There’s a scene where Richard, the protagonist, ends up in a socialist workers’ paradise, where the government controls distribution and everybody is starving. Jobs are hard to come by, because everything is unionized and unions control access to work. That’s a non-accidental parallel to every country that has embrace socialist principles, or even leans that way. Go open a business with employees in France, I dare you.
So Richard goes out of his way to help someone with no expectation of reward. This person then offers to vouch for him at the union meeting, effectively offering him a job.
This is the conversation that follows:
Nicci shook her head in disgust. “Ordinary people don’t have your luck, Richard. Ordinary people suffer and struggle while your luck gets you into a job.”
“If it was luck,” Richard asked, “then how come my back hurts?”
If it was luck, how come my back hurts?
Seneca, a 2000-year-dead Roman philosopher said, “Luck is where the crossroads of opportunity and preparation meet.”
I won’t lie, I’ve got a pretty cushy job. I make decent money, I work from home, I love my company’s mission, and I kind of fell into the job.
By fell into, I mean:
- I started teaching myself to program computers when I was 7.
- I worked in a collection agency collecting on defaulted student loans to put myself through college while I had a baby at home.
- When I graduated, I went out of my way to help anyone I could, which positioned me for a promotion, getting my first programming job. The first one is the hardest.
- I spent 3 years studying the online marketing aspects of what I’m doing, with no promise of a payoff.
- I launched a side business in the same industry as the company I work for.
- I built a relationship with an author to include his books in the classes I teach. He happened to move to the company I’m with.
- I offered advice–for free, on a regular basis–on certain aspects of his business and his responsibilities with this company.
- He offered me a job.
That’s 25 years and tens of thousands of dollars spent earning my luck. How come my back hurts?
I have a friend on disability. He has a couple of partially-shattered vertebrae in his back, but he keeps pushing off the corrective surgery because the payments would stop after he heals. He refuses to get a regular job, because his payments would stop. He lives on $400 per month and whatever he can hustle for cash, and he will make just that until the day he dies. And he complains about his bad luck.
His back literally hurts, but not metaphorically. His bad luck is the product of deliberately holding himself down to keep that free check flowing.
I have another friend who made some bad decisions young. Some years ago, he decided that was over. He took custody of his kid and started a business that rode the housing bubble. When the bubble popped, so did his business. Instead of whining about his luck, he worked his way into an entry-level banking job.
He put in long (long!) hours, bending over backwards to help his customers and coworkers, and managed a few promotions, far earlier than normal. His coworkers whined about it. He’s so lucky. If it was luck, why does his back hurt?
We make our own luck.
If you bust your ass, working hard and helping people–your coworkers, your customers, your friends, your neighbors–and you are willing to seize an opportunity when it appears, you will get ahead. When you do, the people around you who do the bare minimum, who refuse–or are afraid–to seize an opportunity, who always ask what’s in it for them, they will will whine about your luck.
When they do, you will get to ask, “If it was luck, how come my back hurts?”
