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Don’t Screw Future-You

Finance, Life

A conversation between me and my temporally displaced self.

Future Me: Excuse me, Jason?

Me: Yes?

FMe: <Slap!>

Me: May I ask what that was for?

FMe: Of course.

Me: What was that for, jerk?

FMe: That was payback for all of the hell you have put me through.

Me: What?!? I’ve never even met you, before.

FMe: Of course you have. I am future-you, and I’m sick of getting screwed by past-me, that is, you.

Me: Huh?

FMe: Listen close. You’re not the sharpest brick in the box and I don’t want to explain this twice.

Me: ???

FMe: A long time ago, when you first met our wife, you were dumb.

Me: I don’t appreciate….

FMe: Shut up. I was dumb then, too. Remember? You…err…we bought a new truck, built an addition on our…err…your…err…whomever’s house, got married in the same year. On top of many other expensive decisions. Do your recall?

Me: Yes, I do. So what?

FMe: If that wasn’t enough, you and your smoking-hot bride are still shopping like you’re rich. You drive a new car. Your kids wear new clothes. You’ve got a house full of new furniture. How did you pay for all of that?

Me: Naturally, I charged it. Zero payments, zero interest for a year! Pretty smart, huh?

FMe: What happens in a year?

Me: I don’t know. I’ve got a full year to figure that out.

FMe: <Slap!> I’ll tell you what happens! Future-you, that’s me, gets screwed! Your raise didn’t come through. You had a baby. The truck broke down. Your wife took maternity leave. A roommate moved out. You took a loss in the stock market. You didn’t plan! You had no savings to cover any of those problems because you were too busy servicing debt to pay for your current life.

Me: How was I to know?

FMe: <Slap!> Life happens! You never know what is coming next. You need to plan and save for what might happen. Otherwise, you’ll just accumulate more debt to be serviced by yours-truly. That is not acceptable.

Me: So? What are you going to do about it?

FMe: <Slap!>

Me: Really? Again?

FMe: <Slap!> I’m struggling to pay your debt. Your son starts college next year, but you’ve left me completely unable to help. Your daughter wants to get married in a couple of years, but the Father-of-the-Bride can’t afford a tux. My wife, your beatiful bride, wants a vacation that I can’t afford. You’ve screwed me, dude.

Me: I’m sorry. What can I do to fix it?

FMe: Buy me dinner, first.

Me: Huh?!?!?

FMe: Stop the excess spending. Spend less than you make, for a change. No credit.

Me: None?

FMe: None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Only spend what you can afford. Budget. Pay off those nasty bills. Don’t leave me hanging.

Me: So, what you’re saying is that, if I don’t have the money, I shouldn’t buy it?

FMe: Exactly. That’s the path to wealth, freedom, and financial independence. Live in the real world.

Me: Gee, thanks, Future-Me! Now I know.

FMe: And knowing is half the battle.

What would your future-you have to say to you?

8 painless ways to save money

Finance

I saw this list on US News and thought I’d give my take on it.

Get healthy. They are right. It is cheaper to be healthy…in the long run. Short-term, eating crap food is cheaper and obesity doesn’t get expensive until you are older. But remember, long-term planning is important. I intend to enjoy my old age, so I am working on losing weight and exercising. Fat and lazy is easy, but it won’t be in 50 years.
Rethink your auto insurance. I don’t have an argument here. When I established my initial emergency fund, I set my deductibles to match it. We regularly review our policies to make sure they match what we need.
Improve your credit scores. I don’t know what they were thinking with this one. If you’ve got lousy credit, it’s hardly painless to improve it. Digging out of a pit of debt hurts.
Invest on the cheap. This is another one that’s hard to argue with. Low-fee funds are, by definition, cheaper. Will you get a better return on a fund with higher fees? It’s worth checking the historical return to see if the fee is justified.
Think triple play. They recommend bundling your internet, TV, and phone. It is cheaper, but I don’t recommend it. I don’t like putting all of my eggs in one basket. If the cable goes down, or the the power goes out, I’d still like to be able to make a phone call, if I have to. My landline is independently powered, and I always make sure there is a corded phone plugged in somewhere. My basic landline only runs $35/month, so a bundle won’t save anything for me, anyway.
Go prepaid with your cell phone. I have a coworker who pays, on average, $5/month for his cell phone. I use mine far more than he does. If you don’t talk much and don’t use data or texting, this can work out well for you.
Shop online. I do shop online for a lot. I even buy my toilet paper online. For some things, I prefer to shop locally. When a store owner gets to know you, he can get you some fantastic deals, and give you advice that can save you a ton of money.
Get cash back. I have a couple of decent cash-back credit cards, but I won’t use them. Until all of our credit card debt is paid, I won’t consider making regular use of any form of credit. Your mileage may vary, but that’s the condition I had to set on myself to make our debt plan work.

How many of these ideas do you use?

Five Ways to Save Money On Cable

Finance, Life

Cable is a luxury. There are very few people out there who can actually and legitimately consider cable television to be a necessity of life. For the rest of us, it’s just something that’s nice to have. Unfortunately, it’s expensive. In my area, prices come as high as $90 plus tax, and that’s not including any of the fancy channels that could feed my True Blood addiction. If you start adding on channels, you can get up to $250 per month.

That’s a lot of cash.

Cutting back on cable TV is one of the easiest ways to get your spending under control. Here are 5 ways to make it happen.

1. Ditch it

Do you really need cable at all? How much of your life do you waste in front of the TV? This wouldn’t work well in my house. We enjoy too many shows, and a lack of TV aggravates my insomnia. When I wake up at 2AM, I need something mindless to distract me while I fall back asleep.

2. Netflix Instant

I love my Netflix. With Instant, as long as you aren’t too hooked on watching the latest show as it comes out, you can catch most of the show you enjoy. There are thousands of TV series to choose from. I make a habit of choosing a couple of shows at a time, and watching the entire series before moving on. This does have the drawback of leaving you a couple of seasons behind for some shows, like In Plain Sight. Grr.

3. Go basic

If you do need TV, do you need the extended cable-only channels? Can you get by with basic cable, and just get the shows that would be otherwise broadcast? That’s what we did. This, combined with #2, make TV cheap and easy.

4. All internet

Did you know that you can use a Roku box to get Netflix Instant, Hulu Plus, Crackle, and more? I have more channels available there than I’ve ever had on cable. Starting at $50, it’s a steal.

5. Drop the fancy channels

HBO, Skinimax, and Showtime are pure unnecessary luxuries. Save yourself some money and buy each series on DVD as they come out. If you buy one a month, you’ll still come out ahead.

I’m not about to tell you that cable is evil or that TV is rotting your brain. I enjoy my rot, and you should be able to do so, too. Try not to waste extra money doing it.

How do you save money on TV?

Christmas for the Destitute

Finance, Parenting

First, my disclaimer: I’m not destitute.

However, I’m trying to spend Christmas acting like I am a pauper.

Why, with small children and beautiful-and-more-than-deserving wife, would I want to deprive my family of a bountiful holiday?

Before we get into the reasons for being a horrible grinch bent on depriving my children of their god-given right to rampant consumerism, let’s look at the Philosophy of Destitution.

The primary reason to pull back and tone it down is basic frugality. Excessive anything is not frugal. I am training my children–and for that matter, my wife and my self–in the finer arts of personal responsibility and frugality. Accumulating debt for a fleeting holiday is insane. If we can’t afford to buy it, we certainly can’t afford to give it. Anything else would be setting a bad example and children learn best by example.

Another piece of the Philosophy of Destitution(when I read this word, I hear a deep, booming voice in my head, like a 30s radio superhero voiceover) is “green”. I consider myself a conservationalist rather than an environmentalist, so don’t read too much into that color. I try to be responsible, instead of destructive and I try to avoid being wasteful. Toys that won’t be played with are wasteful. A garbage can full of packaging for those same toys costs money. It is much cheaper to avoid the landfill here.

Back to “Why”. Why would I be willing to deprive my family?

Make Extra Money: A Niche Site Walkthrough

Make Extra Money Part 1: Introduction

Right now, I have 7 sites promoting specific products, or “niche” sites. When those products are bought through my sites, I get a commission, ranging from 40-75%. Of those sites, 5 make money, 1 is newly finished, and 1 is not quite complete. I’m not going to pretend I’m making retirement-level money on these sites, but I am making enough money to make it worthwhile.

Make Extra Money Part 2: Niche Selection

These three topics have been making people rich since the invention of rich. Knowing that isn’t enough. If you want to make some money in the health niche, are you going to help people lose weight, add muscle, relieve stress, or reduce the symptoms of some unpleasant medical condition? Those are called “sub-niches”.

Making Extra Money Part 3: Product Selection

My niches site are all product-promotion sites. I pick a product–generally an e-book or video course–and set up a site dedicated to it. Naturally, picking a good product is an important part of the equation.

Make Extra Money Part 4: Keyword Research

If you aren’t targeting search terms that people use, you are wasting your time. If you are targeting terms that everybody else is targeting, it will take forever to get to the top of the search results. Spend the extra time now to do proper keyword research. It will save you a ton of time and hassle later. This is time well-spent.

Make Extra Money, Part 5: Domains and Hosting

In this installment, I show you how to pick a domain name and a website host.

Make Extra Money, Part 6: Setting Up a Site

A niche site doesn’t amount to much without, well, a site. In this installment, I show you how I configure a site, from start to finish.

Make Extra Money, Part 6.5: Why I Do It The Way I Do It

Several people have asked me to explain why I use the plugins and settings I use. This explains the “Why” behind Part 6.

More to come….

Make Extra Money, Part 6.5: Why I Do It The Way I Do It

Business, Finance

This is a follow-up to part 6 of the niche site walkthrough, Setting Up a Niche Site. If you haven’t read that post, this one won’t mean much. Go ahead. Read it. I’ll wait.

Several people have asked me to explain why I use the plugins and settings I use. In this installment of the Make Extra Money series, I’m going to explain every choice I recommended last time.

WordPress

WordPress is a site development dream. With the right themes and plugins, you can literally make a WordPress site look, feel, and behave in any way you wish. Even without digging too deep into plugins and premium themes like Headway, you can put together a niche site blog in very little time and know that it’s happening on a robust platform that is actively being improved.

Configuring WordPress

Updates

Keeping your site updated is the single most important thing you can do to avoid getting hacked. Since I haven’t yet figured out how to make hacking a terminal disease, I do the best I can to avoid letting them cause problems. Keeping your site updated is the condom of WordPress.

WWW

This is entirely a personal preference, but, after 20 years of reinforcing habits, most people type “www” by default. WordPress will automatically forward visitors correctly, so this isn’t actually a necessity.

The “Misc” Category

I don’t spend much time worrying about categories when I post, and sometimes I experiment with using external software to post from pools of articles, so I set up a default category. “Misc” is much nicer to see than “Uncategorized”, even if they mean the same thing.

Theme Selection

I like SimpleX because it is uncluttered and easy to navigate. It’s hardly the most powerful theme out there, but it doesn’t pretend to be. If I want more, I use Headway.

Plugins

Plugin Central

Plugin Central is just a plugin installer that lets you install and activate many plugins at once. Even knowing exactly what plugins you want, this easily saves half an hour of setup time.

All in One SEO Pack

SEO is important. In fact, it’s what I base my niche site traffic on. All in One SEO makes it easy to manage the SEO titles that search engines see and the meta descriptions that search engine’s display to visitors when they see your site after a search. Some themes do this themselves, but I still use this plugin.

Meta keywords are all but useless, but not entirely. Google and Bing don’t care, but some networking and sharing sites do.

I “noindex” the tag archives because I don’t want the search engines finding each page twice. Identical pages with different addresses will register as two pages with Google. How does it know which one I consider most important? It doesn’t, so I don’t give it the option of indexing my tag archives.

Contact Form 7

This is just a free and easy contact form. I haven’t found anything better for the price.

WordPress Database Backup

Backups are important. Always back up your data. Do you want to spend 3 weeks building a site, just to have your server crash, killing everything? 5 minutes now will save hours or days of headache later.

SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2

When someone comes to your site from a search engine, this plugin takes the term they searched for and appends it in a list at the end of the post the visitor found. This reinforces your site as a good result for that search term. It also provides a handy list of the most popular search terms people use to find your site.

Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress

I hate spam. If Akismet finds a spam comment being posted, this plugin will give the user a change to enter a CAPTCHA code to post the comment. Even if I turn off comments on a site, I keep this installed in case I ever change my mind. Real comments are good for SEO, so I occasionally test allowing the comments. I won’t waste the time moderating comments on a niche site, so this is a good compromise.

Date Exclusion SEO

If someone comes to a site and sees the last post was two years ago, they’ll leave. I don’t want a post to look like it’s outdated, so I suppress the dates.

Pretty Link Lite

This plugin lets me mask a link and set it to nofollow. Nofollow tells the search engines to discount the value of the link, which removes a spam-site indicator from their algorithms. Masking the link turns a messy affiliate link into a link that looks internal, making it easier for a visitor to click and allowing you to see how often a link is clicked.

Google XML Sitemaps

Making it easy for Google to find your entire site is a good thing. This plugin helps with that.

WP Policies

This plugin provides a long list of site policies, formatted for a WordPress page. The most important one is the disclaimer announcing the fact that your are making money on your site.

WP Super Cache

Super Cache creates a pre-generated copy of your page so the site doesn’t have to hit the database to rebuild it dynamically every time someone visits. It’s all about speed, which affects your search rank.

JetPack

I like using the WordPress.com stats instead of Google Analytics for most of my niche site. I don’t see a need to announce to Google that these 12 sites are owned by me, so I don’t. WordPress.com included their stats plugin in JetPack, then discontinued the standalone plugin, so I use JetPack.

Backup

If I subscribe to my own feed, I get every post in Google Reader. That means I don’t need to make a daily backup of any of my sites. For the amount of changes I make to my niche sites, weekly might still be overkill, but that’s what I do. I get the backups by email so I have a copy somewhere other than the host. I don’t believe in letting anyone control my money but me.

Settings

Discussion

Most comments to niche sites are spam comments, so I hide them without actually turning them off. Sometimes I test letting the comments through, because some niches might have great people that want to post good comments. I haven’t had a lot of luck with that, on my niche sites.

Permalinks

The default permalink structure is absolutely not recommended for search engine purposes. It’s also harder for someone to mention. I don’t put dates in the link for the same reason I hide dates in the posts: I don’t want anything to look outdated.

Menus

I keep the navigation menu simple. It has three purposes:

Link to the page that’s designed to make money.
Link to the pages that show Google and readers it is an active site.
Link to the disclaimer that keeps my butt away from federal fines.

Anything else is wasted space.

Widgets

On my niche sites, I use widgets to help with navigation and to point people to the pages that will make the most money. I haven’t addressed how I do the second part yet, because I haven’t created those pages yet.

Posts

Right now, http://www.masterweddingplanning.net/ has exactly one post, and it’s a duplicated post from eZineArticles. It has served its purpose. This site is fully indexed by Google.

When I get the rest of the content written, I’ll delete that post.

There you have it, the reasons behind every choice I make during site creation. Did I miss anything? Do you have any other questions?