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The no-pants guide to spending, saving, and thriving in the real world.

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Giving It All Away

Business, Life

Monday, I start a new job, but I wasn’t actively looking for a new job.

In fact, over the last month, while I wasn’t actively looking for a new job, I’ve had 5 job offers.  Solid job offers.  Some of them came after I announced I was leaving.

How does that happen?

First, I’m good at what I do.   At my last job, the company that developed the software system I managed would refer other customers to me if they wanted to do something the software wasn’t designed to do.  I had a reputation for doing the impossible.

Second, I give it away.   When somebody asks me for help, I do.  When I can, I try to share as much of my knowledge as possible.  I don’t hoard what I know, scared that somebody will steal it.   That has led to a number of people who make it a habit to call me before pitching an idea or moving forward on a new strategy.  “Jason, is this possible?  What would it take?”   If I can, I answer those questions, even if I’m not going to be doing the work.

Third, I’m not afraid of my limits.   If I don’t know the answer, I say so.  If I don’t know how to find the answer, I say that, too.   Admitting you don’t know something automatically makes everything else you say sound more credible.

In the case of the job I’ve accepted, I was available for my new supervisor for more than a year before he started with the company.  I helped him plan the websites and social media strategies around his book.   When he accepted his job, our next conversation progressed from “Let me ask you something” to “I’d like to hire you” over the course of a lunch because of the long foundation we had together.   At every step of the interview process, I continued to share. As we discussed the website, the social media, the marketing plans, I gave my feedback as thoroughly as possible, before I had a job offer.

Giving away my knowledge and experience with no expectations has consistently helped me to improve myself and my situation.   It helps that I enjoy being helpful.  I kind of dig being treated like an expert, too.

How about you? Do you share selflessly, or do you keep what you know to yourself?

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How to Build a Business on Cannibalism

Business

Last week, my wife posted on Facebook that she was frustrated with her job hunt.

HUFU: The healther human flesh alternative.
HUFU: The healthy human flesh alternative.

An hour later, she got a call from someone she hadn’t talked to in 10 years.  He wanted to talk about a great business opportunity.  He wouldn’t say what it was, but wanted to bring a friend over to discuss it.

Fast forward to last night.

The night my wife agreed to meet with the old friend.

The meeting we forgot about.

So we invited our friend and his friends into the house.   We sat down at the dining room table to hear the pitch.  Our friend is just getting started so his “friend” delivered the pitch.

While I was waiting for him to explain the business, he was showing us pictures of he and his wife traveling  around the country.

Instead of explaining the product, he asked about our most expensive dreams.

Instead of telling us how the marketing worked, he mentioned something about utilizing the internet–and i-Commerce–and talked about changing our buying habits.

Instead of showing us a product, he talked about driving volume and building a team.

There was nothing concrete, but a lot was said to ride on the dreams of people who are frustrated with their income or are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

More than an hour into the presentation, it was revealed that the “product” is a buying portal to allow people to buy Amway products from your personal Amway store.

Freaking Amway.

How do they find your personal Amway store, you ask?  I don’t know, because you are supposed to be your own best customer.  You make money by buying the products you use anyway, but buy them from Amway.   For example, there’s the $10 toothbrush, the $16 baby wipes, or the $38 toilet paper.

For six frickin’ rolls.

Seriously, this stuff is meant to touch my butt once.   I don’t need it made from pressed gold.

As for the visual…you’re welcome!

So I sell a kidney to buy enough toilet paper to keep my nether bits clean for a month and I get one point for every $3 I spend.   I figure that’s about 50 points per month, given the foot traffic our bathrooms see.

If I hit 100(I think, he didn’t leave the paperwork) points, I get 6%(again, I wasn’t taking notes) back at the end of the next month.  For the sake of the math, I’m going to double the number of butts in my house.   100 points means I need to spend $300.    That’s 47 rolls of toilet paper.  In exchange for this $300–and on top of gold-embroidered silk I now get to flush down the toilet–I’ll earn $18.

I know exactly how much toilet paper I buy right now.  Amazon sends me a 48 roll package every other month for $31.42, shipped.

To simplify, Amway is offering me the ability to spend $300 to get $18 plus $31.42 worth of toilet paper.  I’m supposed to end my financial worries by turning $300 into $50 every month.

Yay!

[Note to self:  Demolish Amway’s business model by starting a company that will let people turn $200 into $50, without the nasty overhead of stocking overpriced crap.  A 33% increase in efficiency will make me rich!]

But wait, say the imaginary Amway proponents that I hope aren’t frequenting my site, you’re forgetting the most important part!

Oh really?

There’s also a thing called a “segmented marketing team”.  To the rest of the multi-level marketing world, this is known as your downline.  If you can con your family and friends into turning their $300 into $50 every month, then help them con their family and friends into turning $300 into $50 every month, you’ll get rich!  Amway has apparently figured out a way to share a small fraction of their 600% markup with their victims to make them feel like it’s a business opportunity instead of a robbery.

If I get 9 people in my “business team” and each of them build out their team, I get the coveted title of “Platinum Master” or whatever.  All I have to do is sell the souls of 72 people and I can make a ton of money!  If each member of my downline turns $300 into $50, Amway will get $18,000.  In exchange for delivering those souls, the “average” Platinum Ninja makes about $4500 per month.  That’s about $12,000–free and clear–for Amway.

When your business model consists entirely of your sales force doing all of the buying and consuming, it’s not a business model, it’s cannibalism.

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How come my back hurts?

Business, Finance, Relationships

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?”

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Failed Side Hustle: Scrapping

Business

Last week, the washing machine in our rental house died.  It was older than I am, so this wasn’t really a surprise.  It was one of just two appliances we didn’t replace before we moved the renters in.

English: Melting metal in a ladle for casting ...
English: Melting metal in a ladle for casting Deutsch: Metall wird in einer Gießpfanne zum Schmelzen gebracht. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

My wife–bargain shopper that she is–found a replacement on Craigslist.  We got it in, then left the dead washing machine next to the replacement, as a warning to any other appliance that thinks it can shirk its assigned work.

This morning, we went over to pull the corpse of our washing machine out of the basement.

Now, I am an out-of-shape desk jockey, my wife is considerably weaker than I am, and a 40 year old washing machine weighs more than 200 pounds.

In the basement.

I’m Superman.  Although at one point, I did trade 10 years of the useful life of my right knee in exchange for not letting that thing tumble down the stairs on top of me.

What do you do with a dead washing machine?We could have the garbage company pick it up for $25.  Or we could leave it on the curb and wait for some stinking scrapper to take it.

Or…we could join the dark side and scrap it ourselves.

For the uninitiated, scrappers are the people who drive around looking for fence-posts to steal out of other people’s yards, or cut the catalytic converters out of  cars parked at park-and-ride bus stops, or steal all of the copper pipes out of your house while your on vacation.  Sometimes, they get scrap metal from legitimate sources, I’ve heard.

We decided to go the legitimate route and take the washing machine to the scrap metal dealer in the next town over.

It was pretty easy.  We pulled in with the washer in the trailer.  A guy on a forklift pulled up and took it, then handed us a receipt to bring to the cashier.  She paid us in cash, and we were on  our way.

$7.50 richer.

200 pounds of steel, and we made less than $10.

There are people who pay their bills by recycling scrap metal, but I have no idea how.   Driving around looking for things to scrap would seem to burn more gas than you’d make turning it in.

Some people scour Craigslist looking for metal things in the free section.

Some people have an arrangement with mechanics to remove their garbage car parts.

Some people are only looking to supplement their government handout checks enough to pay for cigarettes.

Us?  We’re going to leave scrapping to the scavengers.

 

 

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My Investment Portfolio

Business

I’m not a financial adviser.  I haven’t taken any of the classes or certifications that allow me to give investment advice.   Please don’t take this post as advice.

This is me, sharing what I have chosen to invest in.   These investments are scattered across a few different IRAs and brokerage accounts.  Copy me at your own risk.

BAC – Bank of America: I bought this low.  When any major bank is low, it’s time to buy.  I bought in stages starting at about $5 per share.  What I’ve got now has given me a 57% return.

CVS – CVS Caremark: I bought this on the advice of a friend.  It’s shown a 6% return over the past few months.

IAU & GLD – Gold ETFs: I wanted a way to get some precious metals into my IRA, so I bought a gold fund.  It’s down 7%, but I’m confident it’s going to come back.

MSFT – Microsoft:  This is one of the first stocks I bought with my 401k 10 years ago.  It’s up about 5% since I rolled it into my current IRA.

PAYX -Paychex Inc: I hate payday loans, but a friend recommended this stock and it has given me a 10% return.

SIRI –  Another recommendation from a different friend.  I don’t think it will ever hit the moon, but you won’t see me complain about the 60% return, either.

SLV – Silver ETF:  Another precious metals venture.  It’s down 3% overall, but that’s varying day to day.   A couple of weeks ago, it was around $19 per share, so it’s up nicely since then.  I predict it will continue to rise.

SYK: Stryker Corp: Another friendly recommendation.  This one is down 2%, but the recommender thinks it’s a good long-term bet, so I’ll hold it for a while.

VB – Vanguard Small-Cap ETF: I like Vanguard funds in general.  This one has given me a 5% return.

VIG – Vanguard Dividend ETF: This one pays dividends, which is usually a sign of a strong stock.  1% return.

VWO -: Vanguard Emerging Market ETF: If our economy has problems, emerging markets tend to thrive in response, so I’m hedging my bets with this.  It has lost 4% so far.

IDMOX – An ING family fund that has served me well.  13% return.

VFINX – Vanguard S&P index fund.  2% return.

RICK – Rick’s Cabaret: A few days ago, I read an article about Rick’s Cabaret losing a lawsuit that made all of it’s New York strippers into full employees entitled to minimum wage.  The article mentioned that Rick’s is publicly traded, which amused me, so I bought a few shares.

Those are the positions I have with one brokerage, across three accounts.   I didn’t share the balances, but overall, I have had a 10% return on these investments.

Now, I’ll share the contents of my wife’s inherited IRA.   This money was entirely in a money market when she inherited it last year.  She got nervous and would only let me play with half of it.  That half has averaged a 20% return since June 2012, with part of it hitting 29%.

These are all Fidelity funds for a specific 401k program.  I have no idea our accessible the funds are to the general public.  We are working on an IRA-mandated withdrawal of this money, so it will be moving over the course of years.

PYR INX LFC 2010/2035/2040/2045/2050 – These are targeted date funds.  Each of them has had at least a 20% return.

SM&MID Cap Equity – This fund currently has a 29% 1 year return.

That’s my investment portfolio.  Some gambles, some amusement, some solid investments.   I think I’m doing pretty well.  What do you think?

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