Seriously, its cool to have an online business.

The cool factor is like 234,892.

The business doesn’t necessary have to be an online retail store, but that’s what I have and it’s what I’ve been doing for the past 3-4 years.

When I first set up the website years ago and spread word about it on related message boards, I woke up the next day with about 10 orders. Although the amount wasn’t much (a bit over $100), it was still pretty darn cool.

It was my first experience of “making money while you sleep.” I giggled all the way to the bank - or rather, I giggled while I click away to transfer the money into my bank account.

“Just a couple more orders and I’ll break even!” Was my initial thought, imagine my joy when profit actually came knocking.

For those that have sold items on eBay before, it’s a very similiar experience as your first ever sale. Whether you made a profit or not, your efforts brought in some result, and it was pretty darn cool, wasn’t it?

So I’m totally for spreading this coolness. Got an idea? Notion? A niche you think you can fill? Go for it!

Don’t have any of those? Well neither does everyone else. Even though it helps, they’re not requirements to get going.

The point is: get going.

If you’ve always been itching to try it out too, now’s as good of a time as any. The start-up costs are very doable these days. You don’t have to invest thousands to get going. It’s also made mcuh easier by the many different options available out there. It will require a good amount of your time, but I think its worth it - if only in the educational sense.

So come on, everyone else is doing it, don’t you want to be cool too?
 

 

Disclaimer: I’m not liable if you lose your life savings trying to be cool.

Through the years I have come across two types of mindset when it comes to money matters.

I’m sure there are more than two types, but that’ll just make this compare and contrast longer than necessary, plus it’ll be a lot more work. So er… no thanks.

Type A Extreme:

“Hey hey Jim!” I said to an acquaintance, as I bumped into him one day. “How’s senior year in high school treating ya?”

“Hi Cap. Things are swell!” Jim the 18 year-old happily replied. “Listen, I’ve been thinking about rolling my 401K into my Fidelity ROTH IRA. You got any inputs on that? I might be missing something.”

“Ah… I thought you just work at McDonald’s…”

“Never too early to start saving!” Jim exclaimed.

“Right…” What a weird kid.

“Say, did you know that Fannie Mae has consistently outperformed the market? Of course that wasn’t till the 20th century.” Jim continues, “Speaking of which, boy those flash memory sure are getting popular. It’s looking pretty hot huh? You never know, SNDK or LEXR might be the next best bet.”

“Uh…” He lost me. The heck’s he talking about?

“Still, the real sure bet is to just stick with those index funds and ETFs. No actively managed funds for me, no sir. Those are usually just too much of a rip off in fees.”

“Mmmkay.” Damn high school kids and their street talks.

“Anyway, think you can give me a ride to work?” Jim asked.

“Sure, no problem. Hook me up with some McNuggets?” I asked.

Type Z Extreme:

So after I dropped Jim off at McDonald’s, I bumped into another acquaintance of mine in the parking lot, Bob. Bob “works” for a MLM company.

“Hey hey Cap!” yelled Bob as he ran up to my car.

“Uh… hi.” Damn.

“Listen, do me a favor?” Bob asked me through the car window. “I need a ride to this business opportunity meeting. Tell ya what, if you take me there… I’ll let you attend for free.”

At that point I just wanted to run Bob over and get on with my day, but Bob still owes me $60.

“How bout you just give me that $60 you borrow a few years ago and we’ll call it even?”

“Aw come on!” Bob pleaded. “How bout this, I’mma tell you about this other great money making idea of mine. It takes a bit to explain so let me draw it out for ya.” He pulled a piece of paper out of thin air.

“Now, this diagram may look a bit like a pyramid, but don’t you worry this isn’t a pyramid scheme.”

“Hey you know, I’m pretty busy today so I really got to go…”

“Aw come on, you know I’ll get rich soon enough, and when that happens you’ll be glad you took me to this meeting.” Bob said as he continues to work on that diagram of his.

“Sorry but I really have to go- ” I told him.

“Hey wait.” He stopped me and sniffed. “What’s that smell?”

Damn.

“Are those McNuggets?” Bob asked. “Oh hey wow. That’s quite a lot of ‘em! Can I have a box or two?”

So I ran Bob over and got on with my day. He probably would have never returned the $60 he borrowed from me anyway, so it’s not a big deal.

Ah… McNuggets.

Yum.

Yeah yeah I was a Boy Scout. With the cap, uniform, geekness and all that jazz. In fact, I’m an Eagle Scout!

Here’s the funny thing, I just remembered right now (for no reason) that the Personal Management merit badge is a required merit badge to become an Eagle Scout. Earning a merit badge means you have obtained basic understanding, knowledge or ability on a certain topic. (There are some specific

A Personal Management merit badge course teaches a Scout how to manage their time, money, and resources. It really could be called a “Personal Finance” merit badge since about 80% of it has to deal with finances.

Here’s a snapshot on some of the requirements of the Personal Management merit badge:

• Explain the following to your merit badge counselor:
  1. The differences between saving and investing, including reasons for using one over the other.
  2. The concepts of return on investment and risk.
  3. The concepts of simple interest and compound interest and how these affected the results of your investment exercise.
• Select five publicly traded stocks from the business section of the newspaper. Explain to your merit badge counselor the importance of the following information for each stock:
  1. Current price
  2. How much the price changed from the previous day
  3. The 52-week high and the 52-week low prices
• Pretend you have $1,000 to save, invest, and help prepare yourself for the future. Explain to your merit badge counselor the advantages or disadvantages of saving or investing in each of the following:
  1. Common stocks
  2. Mutual funds
  3. Life insurance
  4. A certificate of deposit (CD)
  5. A savings account or U.S. savings bond
• Explain to your merit badge counselor the following:
  1. What a loan is, what interest is, and how the annual percentage rate (APR) measures the true cost of a loan.
  2. The different ways to borrow money.
  3. The differences between a charge card, debit card, and credit card. What are the costs and pitfalls of using these financial tools? Explain why it is unwise to make only the minimum payment on your credit card.
  4. Credit reports and how personal responsibility can affect your credit report.
  5. Ways to eliminate debt.

Full list of requirements here.

Pretty involved stuff if I may say so.

The weird thing is, I don’t remember learning any of those things at all, even though I have earned the Personal Management merit badge. So I’m not really sure how I passed the course. It sure would have been useful to know though because all of those things are quite important.

Update on the Emigrant Direct opening.

I finally got the letter last week, at least I think its the letter. It looks more like a statement than a letter teling you how to setup your online account, but all you really need is the Account Number anyway. They also sent me two of ‘em… duno why *shrug*.

So I went to login, setup, fill in all my info… but for some reason when I login, none of the links under ACCOUNTS work. Summary, Account Activity, and Account Preference all results in error messages. I wonder if its because I funded the account with $0.

Emailed them about it, hopefully I can have functionality soon so I can transfer some funds in ASAP.

Ah pooey. I really want to take advantage of the 4% APY.

10/30/05: I finally received control of the account. It took about a week and three emails for someone to finally reply. Customer service could be better. My money has since been in Emigrant Direct for over three months.

02/03/06: Emigrant Direct closed my account. More details here.

FICO Score Tracking #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 | #6 | #7 | #8

I know I don’t! At the very least, not in the near future.

Like many of us, I’m taking advantage of some 0% balance transfer offers, as of right now I have about $14,280 in cash via three different credit cards, stored in ING Direct and HSBC online savings account, earning 3.4% and 3.75% respectively.

The $4,300 balance on the Citi Dividend has finally showed up on the credit report (as have other balances), so the scores took a nice deep dive in August, as reflected by the September score.

 

• Number of accounts opened: 7
• Inquiries: 3
• Total revolving balances: $16,000
• Total available credit: $50,000

Want another example that shows high utilization kills your score? There it is. You should note that Providian doesn’t provide the specific date for when the scores are computed.

Here’s a low down of my total credit card accounts opened and their current balances so you can get a better idea of how the scores fit in. To get more details on what happened during those other time frame, please refer to Part #1 of FICO Score Tracking.

Credit Card Name	Since	Credit Limit	Current Balance 10/06
American Express Blue	05/05	$10,000	$1500 (0% for 1 month)
Amex Blue for Student	11/03	$14,100	$74 (paid in full)
Citi Dividend MasterCard	07/05	$9,600	$4,300 (0% for 10 months)
Bank of America VISA	07/03	$7,800	$7,680 (0% for 2 months)
Chase MasterCard	03/04	$3,000	$180 (paid in full)
Chase VISA Card	05/05	$2,500	$2,300 (0% for 10 months)
Providian PayPal VISA	05/03	$3,000	$0 (never used)
Authorize User Cards
Credit Union VISA	1992	$13,000	under $200
Capital One VISA	1998	$20,000	$0 (hardly used)

 

Note: Amex Blue with $1500 has been recently paid off.

Update: Thanks to a mention by Jonathan at MyMoneyBlog, I realized that Citi lets you do another neat thing on their online account. You can request balance transfer online (which isn’t anything new) but you also have the option for them to send you the balance transfer in the form of a check, so you can deposit it any banking account you have.

I decided to take out another $5,300 in balance transfer since the rates are still 0% and no fees. I wanted to take a screenshot of the option to pick a check, but I forgot to and I can’t go back to that page now. Oh well, here’s one showing where you can check the status and request a balance transfer.

If you live in Southern California and you commute any significant distance.. you’ll know how I feel. In fact you’ll feel way more than me since I only take long commute occasionally, but yeah whatever I can still complain. Its my blog dammit.

I head from Orange County to Riverside occasionally through out the month (and sometimes back down to the Temecula area via the 15 South) . It’s not too bad of a drive, an hour and a half or so.. but if you go at a bad time and your luck stinks, expect it to be a 2-4 hour drive.

I was considering getting an account with the 91 Express Lane Fastrak so I can avoid those heavy traffic - till I saw the toll prices on these lanes. Check out the Eastbound 4 PM to 6 PM prices. Holy cow!

To taunt us even more, they have a lovely “virtural drive” video of how relaxing and stress free the 91 Express Lanes are (with soothing background music!). If you’re curious about Southern California traffic, take a peek:

(4.2 MB, WMV - Windows Media Player) 

Yeah I’m one of those suckers stuck in one of the right lanes.

I guess its worth it for a lot of people though, especially if your employer pays for your expensive tolls!

I’ve mentioned before that I’m taking a personal finance class as an elective to learn more on the subject. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m getting much out of the class. The class doesn’t really have a lot of depth, and none of the test requires much reading or studying at all. Basically I’m not being forced to learn more. So to get more out of the class, I’ve decided to type up as much notes of the chapters as I can, and share ‘em here.

Personal Finance 101

#1 Personal finance planning and your life situation.

So what is personal finance planning? It’s the entire process of managing your money to achieve personal economic satisfaction. It could be planning your budget so you can buy Cap N’ Crunch cereal everyday for the rest of your life, or so you’ll have enough money to buy that silly house. Whatever that is more important in your life.

That’s the key thing here to realize, financial planning revolves around your life situation. For example, the priority of a weird 22 year-old college kid who has a stupid blog - can be very different than that of a married couple in their 30s. (Sugar filled cereal versus home ownership).

So what are the advantages of personal financial planning? Here’s some of ‘em listed from my textbook, Focus on Personal Finance:

• Increased effectiveness in obtaining, using, and protecting your financial resources throughout your life.
• Increased control of your financial affairs by avoiding excessive debt, bankruptcy, and dependence on others.
• Improved personal relationships resulting from well-planned and effectively communicated financial decisions.
• A sense of freedom from financial worries obtained by looking to the future, anticipating expenses, and achieving personal economic goals.

As I’ve mentioned, different life situation results in different financial planning. Some factors that affect daily financial decisions are age, household size, marital status, and your income level. Another important factor is your personal belief and your lifestyle, which heavily influences your spending and saving habit.

My textbook refers to these life situations as the adult life cycle, which is shown with the picture below (click to enlarge).

So, in order to start any type of personal finance planning, you’ll need to determine your current life situation and your needs. Other events such as graduation, changes in health, marriage, divorce, are all factors that will need to be considered. It is important to understand where you are in life, and what your short/long term goals are.

A somewhat subjective part in all of this is your value. Value in this case is defined as ideas and principles that a person considers to be correct, desirable, and important. Your personal value has a direct influence over the financial decisions you make. So having a clear grasp of that is also important.

So what’s coming up next? Let’s take a look at how the economy affects our financial planning, and then get into the necessary steps involved in the actual planning process. Stay tune!

Amendment: pfadvice pointed out something that should be noted. In the picture above, one of the “suggestions” the book have for young and single (18 to 35) to consider home purchase for tax benefit. I’m sure this applies to some people, but I doubt it applies to most people. As pfadvice has mentioned, that’s not really a common reason why people purchase a house.

I looked through the list again and everything else looks peachy, though you can always add more activities within each of those categories. Let me know if you spot anything else!

Have you ever bought something online, and it took forever to arrive? You sent off multiple emails to the seller, only to get slow response - if any at all.

So the whole experience ticked you off big time, you get on your favorite online forum and rant about the merchant in question.

Well, the chance is little, but I may be that online store that just pissed you off.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I sell a particular widget on one of my site. I’ve been doing this for about 3+ years now and lately for whatever reason, my service has been slowing down. What made me realize this more than ever, is reading those customer complaints in a more open environment.

So yeah I did a quick Google search, and found my little store being discussed. It wasn’t completely negative, but overall I think I have an unreliable image. There’s the occasional mix of “this guy is great, don’t worry about it” and “got my widget the next day!” but most of the recent ones are along the lines of “bought it a week ago, still haven’t received it.”

Do’h!

So yeah, that’s been hurting my tiny sales, and it’s hurting my tiny income.

Moral of the story? If you do something half-ass, you’re going to get half-ass results.

I’ve been trying to improve and expand the business though. I’m setting up a new store front and domain; getting wholesale/drop-ship service set up with larger retailers; and messing with osCommerce, an awesome open source e-commerce solution.

But yeah I figured if I make a mention of it here, I can get my lazy butt to take some action.