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Selling Your Car

Finance

English: Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Pa...

English: Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Park in Hidden Valley Campground (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When it’s time to replace your car, most people focus on the new car, instead of the old, but that is ignoring real money.  Your old car–unless it has disintegrated–still has value.  Sometimes, it’s just time to ask yourself, “When should I sell my car?”

When you’re looking to sell your car (like with We Will Buy Your Car), you generally have several options:

  1. Tow & crush. If your car has been wrecked, doesn’t run, or is just old and beat up, you may be stuck with calling a junkyard and accepting $50 for them to pick up your car and crush it for scrap.
  2. Trade it in. This is probably the least hassle, but–other than #1–doesn’t pay well.  Dealerships are willing to pay something under what they will get at a wholesale auction, which is quite a bit less than the blue book value.
  3. Sell it yourself. Now you’re thinking, “He’s going to buy my car! Oh, bother.”  It can be a pain, but it’s also the best way to get a decent price for your wheels.

When you sell your car, there are a few things to keep in mind, much like when you sell something on Craigslist.

  • Don’t be alone. There are bad people in the world, but they don’t like witnesses.  Bad things are much less likely to happen if you have company.
  • Know your price. Specifically, know three price: your dream price, the price that would make you happy, and the absolute lowest price you are willing to accept.  Make sure you figure these numbers out ahead of time.  Know what you are comfortable with before it comes time to close the deal.
  • Check IDs. The buyer is going to want to test-drive your car.  That’s fine, but you want to make sure you know who is driving off in your car.  “Officer, Sumdood took my car.  He was wearing jeans.”  That won’t get your car back.
  • Clean it up. Get the car detailed before you show it to a potential buyer.   A sparkling-clean car will almost always bring in a few hundred extra dollars.  It’s well worth the expense.

Following this plan should make the sale go as smoothly as possible and bring you the most possible money.

Readers, what have you done to dispose of an old car?

This is a sponsored post written to provide some insight into the world of used car retail.

 

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Daytrading Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency

Business

For the past 6 weeks, I’ve been playing with Bitcoin and Litecoin.

The bitcoin logo
The bitcoin logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I can hear you from across the internet.   You’re asking, “What the hell is Bitcoin?”

I’m glad you asked.  It’s a cryptocurrency.

And now you know as much as you did before.

Cryptocurrencies are anonymous internet-based money.   You spend it just like money, though granted, there are fewer places that accept cryptocurrency.

The big name in cryptocurrency is Bitcoin.   In second place, trying to play silver to Bitcoin’s gold, is Litecoin.

So what do I mean by “playing with” Bitcoin and Litecoin?

I’ve been daytrading, which is generally a horrible idea…when you’re doing it with stocks.   Daytrading is gambling.  It’s the art of doing short-term flips on a stock.  You buy it today to sell tomorrow, hoping it goes up.   With stocks, I play a long game.  I buy and hold.   I buy a stock that I believe has long-term value, and I hold it for months or years.

That’s not the game I play with BTC and LTC.    I play a short game, rarely longer than a week.  When the coins are at a low price, I buy, then I immediately sell when they price is higher.   When it’s high, I short the coin, essentially selling coins I don’t own to trade back when the dollar-price is lower.   When I’m paying attention, I make money as the coins go up and I make money when the coins go down.

Why is this a good strategy for cryptocoins?

Because they are extremely volatile.   As I’m writing this, Litecoin has had a 10% swing today, from $4.03 at midnight, to a current price of $4.16, with a peak of $4.36.  On Thursday, it was floating around $4.60 all day.   In the last 30 days, it’s been as high as $8.65 and as low as $3.18.  Go back to May and the low is $1.29.

Traditional wisdom says that volatile investments are bad.   In traditional investments, that’s true.  But when a stock is this volatile, nearly every bet is a good one, as long as you’re patient.   If I buy LTC at $4.20 and it drops to $3.90, that’s bad.  I lost money.   But, if I wait a couple of days, it’s almost definitely going to climb back up.   Except for large-scale sell-offs, it’s usually going to bounce 10% in a given day.     You can buy in the dips and sell at the peaks all day long, turning 5-10% profits with each time.   If you’re brave or stupid, you can short at the peaks and make 5-10% on every downturn, too.

For example, today started at $4.03.  Buy.  Today’s peak was at 7:15AM at $4.36.   When the graphs start swinging down, sell short.   Two hours later, it bottomed out at $4.20 for a 4% return.   Then, buy while it’s low.  Ninety minutes later, it was at $4.31, another 3% return.  Short it again, then close the position at 7PM for $4.13.

Let’s walk through this.

Buy $10 worth of Litecoin at midnight, sell at 7:15AM.    You have $10.81.

Turn around and short the same amount until 9AM.   You have $11.22.

Buy that same amount to sell at 10:30AM.   You have $11.51.

Short it again before closing out at 7PM and going to bed.  You have 12.01.   That’s almost a 12% return in 12 hours, assuming you guessed all of the major swings right.  If you guessed some wrong, you’d just have to wait until the next time it swung your way, and it will.   Did I do that well?  No.  I bought in at $4.008 yesterday and sold today-once-for $4.32.   I will not complain at an 8% return over 12 hours.

The only exception to that is during major buying and selling streaks.  On July 5th, a major buying run started.  By July 8th, the price was run up to $8.65.   A huge sell-off happened then, dropping the price to $4.36 on July 9th.

If you bought at $8.65 you’d be hosed.

The lesson there is, don’t buy at the peak.   I’ve had a number of trades that could have been huge scores if I would have held onto them longer, but I’m a wimp.   I sell as soon as I’ve gotten enough money to make me smile, then I refuse to regret the decision.   That also prevents me from holding on to my positions too long.  I avoid all of the crashes that way.  That giant buy-in happened while I was on vacation, so I wasn’t paying attention.  When I’m not paying attention, I leave my money in US dollars, so there’s no risk…and also no reward.

Also, an important caveat:  while I am learning the cryptocurrency ropes, I’m playing with a non-critical amount of money.  I put $75 into the exchange in June.   Not enough to cry over losing, but enough I can play with all of the different investment options.  As I said, I’m a wimp, although a 30% return in 7 weeks is pretty sweet.

Next up, I’ll show you how to get started investing/gambling with Bitcoin.

Avoid Getting Ripped Off On Ebay

Finance

My son, at 10 years old,  is a deal-finder.   His first question when he finds something he wants is “How much?”, followed closely by “Can I find it cheaper?”   I haven’t–and won’t–introduced him to Craigslist, but he knows to check Amazon and eBay for deals.   We’ve been working together to make sure he understands everything he is looking at on eBay, and what he needs to check before he even thinks about asking if he can get it.

Pricing
Pricing

The first thing I have him check is the price.  This is a fast check, and if it doesn’t pass this test, the rest of the checks do not matter.   If the price isn’t very competitive, we move on.  There are always risks involved with buying online, so I want him to mitigate those risks as much as possible.   Pricing can also be easily scanned after you search for an item.

The next thing to check is the shipping cost.  I don’t know how many times I’ve seen “Low starting price, no reserve!” in the description only to find a $40 shipping and handling fee on a 2 ounce item.  The price is the price + shipping.

Feedback
Feedback

Next, we look at the seller’s feedback.   The feedback rating has a couple of pieces to examine.   First, what is the raw score?  If it’s under 100, it needs to be examined closer.   Is it all buyer feedback?  Has the seller sold many items?   Is everything from the last few weeks?   People just getting into selling sometimes get in over their heads.  Other people are pumping up their ratings until they have a lot of items waiting to ship, then disappear with the money.   Second, what is the percent positive?  Under 95% will never get a sale from me. For ratings between 95% and 97%, I will examine the history.   Do they respond to negative feedback?  Are the ratings legit?  Did they get negative feedback because a buyer was stupid or unrealistic?   Did they misjudge their time and sell more items than they could ship in a reasonable time?  If that’s the case, did they make good on the auctions?   How many items are they selling at this second?

[ad name=”inlineright”] After that, we look at the payment options.   If the seller only accepts money orders or Western Union, we move on.  Those are scam auctions.   Sellers, if you’ve been burned and are scared to get burned again, I’m sorry, but if you only accept the scam payment options, I will consider you a scammer and move on.

Finally, we look at the description.   If it doesn’t come with everything needed to use the item(missing power cord, etc.), I want to know.   If it doesn’t explicitly state the item is in working condition, the seller will get asked about the condition before we buy.  We also look closely to make sure it’s not a “report” or even just a picture of the item.

Following all of those steps, it’s hard to get ripped off. On the rare occasion that the legitimate sellers I’ve dealt with decide to suddenly turn into ripoff-artists, I’ve turned on the Supreme-Ninja Google-Fu, combined with some skip-tracing talent, and convinced them that it’s easier to refund my money than explain to their boss why they’ve been posting on the “Mopeds & Latex” fetish sites while at work.    Asking Mommy to pretty-please pass a message about fraud seems to be a working tactic, too.  It’s amazing how many people forget that the lines between internet and real life are blurring more, every day.

If sending them a message on every forum they use and every blog they own under several email addresses doesn’t work and getting the real-life people they deal with to pass messages also doesn’t work, I’ll call Paypal and my credit card company to dispute the charges.   I only use a credit card online.   I never do a checking account transfer through Paypal.  I like to have all of the possible options available to me.

My kids are being raised to avoid scams wherever possible. Hopefully, I can teach them to balance the line between skeptical and cynical better than I do.

Budgeting Sucks

Finance

Image via Wikipedia

Budgeting kind of sucks.

Filling out a budgeting spreadsheet, putting in all of your expenses, listing all of your income,  tracking all of your spending.   Yuck.

Balancing the fact that you may have $200 to spare, but if your gas bill is a bit lower one month then you have a some more money, but if your electric bill’s a little bit high, then you have a little bit less.  It’s too much work.

Here’s the new plan:

I just opened up a new credit card. This credit card’s got a fairly high limit, not that I care since I’m never going to come close to the limit. It’s got an okay interest rate, not that I care–it’s going to be paid off every month.  It also has a good travel rewards plan, so our family vacations can, to a large extent, be paid for.

Now, with this card, I’m taking all of my regular bills, and setting them up to be automatically paid by the credit card.   It’ll get automatically charged every month.  I won’t have to think about it.  Once a month, I’ll just log on and pay off the card.   All I have to do is make sure the  balance stays under my monthly budgeted amount.  I already know what I have to be paying each month, so, no problem.

This will make it easier to budget and  track my actual spending.  It’ll even make it easier to balance my checkbook, since right now, I’m logging into my bank account a couple of times a month to compare it to Quicken.   Any budget helper is nice.

After this plan takes effect, my bank account will only have any ATM withdrawals that I need to make–which shouldn’t happen more than once or twice a month–and my checks to day care.  There should be just six manual transactions every month plus all of my miscellaneous transfers to and from INGDirect, which should also be minimal– there should only be two of those each month.

This will simplify everything while at the same time giving me the maximum amount of travel rewards I’ve been able to find.  Hopefully, it will work as well as I think it will.

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Making Extra Money Part 3: Product Selection

Finance

When you’re setting up a niche site, you need to monetize it.  You need to have a way to make money, or it’s a waste of time.

There are two main ways to do that:  AdSense or product promotion.   To set up an AdSense site, you write a bunch of articles, post them on a website with some Google ads, and wait for the money to roll in.

I don’t do that.

I don’t own a single AdSense site and have never set one up.  This article is not about setting up an Adsense site.

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.

The most important part of product selection is that the product has an affiliate program. Without that, there’s no money to be made.     There are a lot of places to find affiliate programs.     Here are a few:

  • Amazon.   If you don’t live in one of the states that Amazon has dropped in retaliation for passing laws that attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling on collecting sales tax, you can sign up as an associate and collect a commission on every referral you send that turns into a purchase.   That means you have a lot of product to choose from.   Unfortunately, your commission is small, so you need to promote fairly expensive products to get a decent return.   On the other hand, people trust Amazon, so that’s one less hurdle to making a sale.
  • Commission Junction.   These are the people managing affiliate programs for a large number of credit cards and banks.  If you’ve opened an account with INGDirect through one of my links, I got a commission for the referral. (Thank you!)   They have a lot of other products, too.
  • e-Junkie.  This one is a popular distribution system for bloggers.   It’s likely that, if you’ve bought an ebook from a blogger, e-Junkie handled the fulfillment process.   A lot of the products available there have an affiliate program, but that is up to the owner of the product.
  • ClickBank.  My favorite.   This is one of the largest affiliate networks specializing in electronic products, whether that’s membership sites, ebooks, or video courses.   Commissions are good, often 50-75%.   They also offer a 60 day guarantee of every product sold through their site, which helps soothe the wary customer.  This is the site I’ll be using for this series.

The first thing you need to do is sign up for whichever program you intend to use.

If you’re not going with Clickbank, feel free to skip ahead to the section on keyword research.

Once you are signed up and logged in, click on the “Marketplace” link at the top of the screen.

Clickbank

From here, it’s just a matter of finding a good product to sell.   Here are the niches we’re going to be looking for:

  • Back pain
  • Bankruptcy
  • Conflict resolution at work
  • Detox diets
  • Fat kids
  • Foreclosure avoidance
  • Job hunting
  • Weddings
  • Writing sales copy

I’m going to look for one or two good products in each niche.  When that’s done we’ll narrow it down by consumer demand.

For now, go to advanced search.

CBSearch

Enter your keyword, pick the category and set the advanced search stats.     Gravity is the number of affiliates who have made sales in the last month.  I don’t like super-high numbers, but I also want to make sure that the item is sellable.  Over 10 and under 50 or so seems to be a good balance.

The average sale just ensures that I’ll make a decent amount of money when someone buys the product.   I usually aim for $25 or more in commissions per sale.  Also, further down, check the affiliate tools box.    That means the seller will have some resources for you to use.

This combination will give us 36 products to check out for back pain, unfortunately, none of the results are for back pain products.    After unchecking the affiliate tools and setting the gravity to greater than 1,  I’ve got 211 results.    Sorting by keyword relevance, I see three products, two of which look like something I’d be interested in promoting.   One has a 45% commission, the other is 55%.  The X-Pain Method has an initial commission of $34 and claims a 5% refund rate.   Back Pain, Sciatica, and Bulging Disc Relief pays $16, which will make it a potentially easier sale.  I’ll add both to the list for further research.

I’m not going to detail the search for the rest of the niches.  That would be repetitive.  You can see my selections here:

Now we’re going to go through a few steps for each of these products.

The Sales Page

We need to make sure the sales page doesn’t suck.    If the site doesn’t work, is hard to read or navigate, has a hard-to-find order button, or just doesn’t look professional, it’s getting cut.

  • Raw Foods is eliminated.  The sales video is horrible and the order link is at the bottom of several screens worth of nothing.  It’s a crap site.
  • The 7 day foreclosure-avoidance product is out.  Site’s down today.  I want reliability.
  • Management Training By The Book is out.  I don’t like typos on the sales page, especially in the page title.

The Email List

If it has an email subscription form, we’ll need to subscribe, then double-check to make sure our affiliate information isn’t getting dropped in the emails.   If it is, the seller is effectively stealing commissions.  In the interest of time and laziness, I’m going to eliminate anyone pushing for an email subscription.  It’s harder–and time-consuming–to monitor that.  On of my niche site had a seller completely drop their product.  Instead, they pushed for email subscriptions so they could promote other products as an affiliate.  Absolutely unethical.

  • Wedding speeches is eliminated for  throwing a mandatory email entry into the order process.  There’s no guarantee they are up to anything shady, but I’m taking the simple route.

Checkout and Credit

Finally, we’re going to visit the checkout page.  You need to do this from every links in the newsletter and the links on the sales page, just to make sure you’ll get your money.

The way to tell who’s being credited is to look at the bottom of the order page, under the payment information.   It should say [affiliate = xxx] where xxxis your ClickBank ID.   Anything else, and the product gets cut from the list.

When you are checking these, don’t click on every possible link at once.  That confuses the cookies. Do one at a time.  I tried to do it in one batch for this post and lost half of the cookies.  If it weren’t for the fact that I already own one of the products and bought it through my own link and got credited, I would have been talking undeserved trash about thieving companies.

Other Factors

Sometimes, when you’re examining a product, it just doesn’t feel right.  When that happens, drop it.  There are millions of other products you can promote.   In this case, I’m dropping the anger management program because, in my experience, angry people don’t think they are the problem.  Here’s a life tip:  If everyone else is a jerk, the problem probably isn’t everyone else.

  • Another important factor is the sales page itself.  If it doesn’t make you want to buy the product, why would anyone else?
  • Amazing Cover Letters is eliminated because it’s too easy to overlook the buy link.  If I have to hunt for it, it’s losing customers.
  • Amazing Wedding Planning is getting eliminated because I don’t like the sales page.  The buy link is easy to overlook, and it doesn’t compel me to buy.

Now we’re down to 10 products in 6 niches.    At this point, we’re comfortable with the sales pages and we know that they are crediting commissions.   As it stands right now, all of the products are worth promoting.

We’ll make the final determination after doing some heavy keyword research in the next installment.   That’s where we’ll find out how hard it is to compete.

Any questions?

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How to Complain – The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease

Finance

A U.S. riverboat deploying napalm during the V...
Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever been screwed by a company?  Have they sent you the wrong item, or an empty box, or left your order backordered for so long that you can’t even dispute it with your credit card company any more?

What can you do?

I know you’ve heard the phrase, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.”  That means, he whines loudest, gets the most.  The thing is, you have to whine effectively, or you’ll just get round-filed.

Targeting Subsystems On

Who you complain to matters more than what you complain about.  The clerk at your local big-box retailer isn’t going to refund your online purchase.  You need to complain to someone who can make a decision to help you.   First, find the customer service email address.   Next, if you are complaining about a recurring service, find the retention department’s email address.  Finally, find the email address for absolutely everybody Vice-President or above for that company, including the board of directors.   Go to their website, find the email for some PR drone and figure out the format.  First.Last@Company.com or FirstInitial.LastName@Company.com or whatever.   Look up the company in Google Finance and translate everyone’s name into the email format.   You might not have the perfect list, but it should be close.

Target Locked On

Now that you know who you are about to blast, what are you going to say?   A few things to include are:

  • Your contact information.   If they can’t get back to you, they can’t make it up to you.
  • Details of the problem.  Include the date of purchase, date of delivery, and a detailed description of what actually went wrong.
  • Scanned copies of receipts.
  • Any names of anybody you’ve had to deal with, either in the original transaction or when the problem occurred, if you have the names.

Engage!

What to say, what to say?

  • Don’t be abusive.  It’s okay to be angry, and it’s okay to let them know your are angry, but swearing or threatening their lives will–at best–only get you ignored.  Worst case, threats are illegal and they can pass your email along to the police.
  • Stay brief.   It doesn’t matter that your daddy took you to Starbucks to use their free wi-fi when you were just three years old.   Don’t talk about that time the aliens abducted you or how sad you are that they never call like they promised they would.   Keep to the point.   “This is who I am.  This is what happened.  This is what I want you to do about it.”

Send that sucker out.   If you feeling particularly perturbed, send a CC to your state’s Attorney General and any possibly related regulatory agencies.   I tend to save this step for round 2.

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