To everybody who has been wondering where we have gone, don’t worry! Were still here! Classes end this week so as soon as they do we will be posting new posts. So stay tuned.

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The other day when I was in my financial economics class, our teacher was very biased towards the open borders of trade in favor of NAFTA, the North America Free Trade Agreement. Simplified, NAFTA is an agreement between the United States, Canada, and Mexico to allow mostly unrestricted free trade between the three countries. My professor was obviously pro-NAFTA in speaking on talking points such as saving money with these cheaper products and strengthening our relations with Canada and Mexico.

Personally, I don’t have a stance for or against NAFTA but many American workers including those in unions have a hatred for this political agreement. My SUV was made in Mexico by the Ford Motor Company and its a great vehicle. Yet, I would like to see higher paying jobs inside the borders to help strengthen our countries GDP.

NAFTA isn’t the problem. Both Republicans and Democrats alike have spoken on NAFTA various times throughout this campaign cycle yet have ignored the bigger threat that President Bush adressed a few years ago in his State of the Union Address. Hint: Its the country everyone is protesting for the Olympics…yep…Big Red.

Now a days, China is the huge pain in the ass because people still buy their cheaply sold and cheaply made products in stores all over the US ande Canada, yet fail to realize we are sending massive amounts of capital overseas to China for these goods when they could be made in our country. Wait, isn’t China in a communist political system? Didn’t know it was a tradition for the greatest country on earth so send billions each year to China only for them to return the money to bail out our financial brokerages and banks. Since when did the United States need Chinese products and Chinese investment to bail out our country? What would Lincoln or FDR think of such filth?

Can we please trade just between the US, Canada, and Mexico…some of our biggest allies that are in fact democratic nations?

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I just wanted to apologize to all the readers for my gaps in writing lately. I have been hit by a truckload of school work so my priorities have shifted a bit. Don’t worry I’ll be shifting back into full throttle as soon as possible. I’ll also be sharing some special info that isn’t talked about a lot among financial blogs, so stay tuned for some really good content. Cameron and I really appreciate you staying with us.

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Basically put, I need PayPal. From sending my friend money to play poker or receiving money for my article writing service, I find it uberly necessary to use PayPal. But man do they charge outrageous rates for receiving transactions. Let me say this, for a $4 transaction, they took $0.46 out of that money, thats almost 20%. Who else charges that much? Ridiculous. Quoting one of my fellow bloggers, “PayPal sucks and they use it to pay for the money market rates”. I concur.

The only outstanding factor with PayPal is that I can watch my money that I receive from all of these transaction, now totaling $78.23, is put into a 2.98% interest money market account on PayPal. Yes there is some risk involved but as of now its too little to worry about the risk and barely anything to acrue interest off of.  It’s very convienient to have the money you earn put into a virtual savings account. If you use PayPal and want convienience, definetly use this system and make them pay you back for charging outragteous rates on each transaction.

This concludes one of my short weekend posts. Cameron, out.

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Filed under: Alternative Income | 2 Comments

With the imminent recession coming here in the states, I know many of our readers are looking to find some way to borrow money to pay of credit card bills or debt. Every other commercial on television which is specifically targeted to the middle class is about borrowing money online and “comparing rates”. Trust me, don’t buy it. As many people have successfully borrowed money online and haven’t had any problems, there are still some areas of caution.

Eloan and Proressive are fine. Progressive actually has offices in many cities where you can walk in and talk to a person face to face. Eloan, not so much. Google the term “online loan” and try not to laugh. If you don’t laugh, you scam proned. Most of us know to stay away from the “Pay Day Advance” centers such as MoneyCorner as they have always charged outrageous interest rates that banks typically don’t do.  These traps also have websites that promise anyone an easy way out of a short debt crunch. Look at the picture below for many of these traps:

If you honeslty would trust any of these websites, I wish you all the luck and strongly suggest you subscribe to our RSS feed.

On top of that, an intra-personal relationship with a bank is invaluable. Think of it this way…would you rather have an online website charge you an outrageous interest rate and not have any brick-and-mortar offices or would you like the personal touch of actually talking to someone at a bank or financial brokerage about your loans and the risks involved? Me, I’ll take the bank.

There are other benefits as well. One of which is to have an oppurtunity to increase the amount of your loan or to achieve a lower interest rate by negioating with the lender at the bank. They may see you as having mediocre credit but you speak well and have on nice attire. Or, maybe you drive a nice car that you could put on as leverage. Wouldn’t you agree that you would feel more comfortable knowing your lending agent that having a fun time paying off an online sever? The lenders what to know who you are, what job you have, what your mortgage is, and if you seem like a honest and trustworthy person and ditto with you finding out the same of the lending agent.

I could almost guarantee that these shady online lenders have overseas telephone support and most of them are in another realm of lending as they are dealing with their business transactions completely online.

This post has just been a word of warning as I just feel that the online lenders aren’t my cup of tea and an actual bank is a better route. Regardless, good luck and pay that bill on time!

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Filed under: Debt, Due Diligence | 3 Comments

Alright, brace yourself I a about to apply some economic theory to the real world. Yes I am that crazy and luckily there won’t be a lot of numbers involved so it is safe to continue reading.

Take two activities, it doesn’t matter whether they’re chores or enjoyable activities. Now you are going to prefer one of them over the other, so going to a water park might be more fun then sweeping, unless your afraid of water. This means that you value the time spent at a water park more then time spent sweeping, which is pretty understandable.

Now in order to make this more applicable to the real world, try and place a value on that time. So for enjoyable events it is the maximum you would spend to go, and for boring things like chores it is how much you would need to get paid in order to do it. This allows you to give a number to each activity and allows you to really see if your doing what you want. Everybody’s numbers will be different since each person has different preferences and has a different value of time.

Now for work its a bit different since you have to include the money you make too. So if you earn $10/hr of satisfaction from your job and then earn $20/hr for working, you are gaining $30/hr ($10 + $20) from working. But say you hate your job and you actually lose $5/hr of enjoyment. Instead of gaining $30/hr you would now only gain $15/hr ($20-$5).

I hope that is the most confusing part Now think of how you live your daily life.  Are you working for $25/hour when you would pay $30/hour to sit in the sun and read? This means you aren’t as happy as you could be. So change that! Start getting the most value from your time, although wealth can buy you a lot things it cannot buy you happiness. Wake up each day with the idea that your happiness is the number one goal, soon you will realize that earning the most money per hour wasn’t what you really wanted.

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Filed under: Personal Development, Retirement | 1 Comment

As I found it necessary to find some extra side income to help pay for some extra magazine subscriptions, an upgraded internet connection, and to build a new website, I thought it would be necessary to find some extra income on the ‘net aside from my ebay sales and this blog’s income(which is nill). So I offered my services as an article writer. Yeah, it involves me writing content for other blogs and niche websites and I always put my best effort forward.

So far, I have made $16 from 8 articles and the buyers have been very impressed with what they have received. Take into account I have only been offering my services for a day or two. I have a huge list of requests that people have been sending me and I am completing the articles in the order in which I received them. Typically I charge $1 per 100 words and if you request some anchor text or linking, it might cost more.

Unlike many of the other “professional” online writing services that write students essays and term papers, I actually put due diligence into each and every article and I try and make them interesting and complex so the buyer is happy and requests my services in the future.

I will not write anything that has to do with cheating such as a term paper or an essay and I simply write these articles to help people add content to their blogs and bring a new approach to a topic. So far, they ask me to suggest a topic and allow me to talk about whatever I want on a given topic as long as I don’t bash a product or website as they are usually adding their referral links to each post, or “anchor text”.

I estimate that I will receive about 30-50 article requests per week and as long as my financial economics and trade policy classes don’t get me bogged down, I will be able to keep pace with this amount of articles per week. And as you all know, this blog is a huge priority to me so don’t worry about the lack of content coming from MM and You.

In regards to other extra income programs, I have completely quit all of the “Get Paid To” programs that I mentioned in that post. None of them were scams, I just figured it was necessary to focus my time on school and this blog. I previously mentioned that I was going to open a Build-A-Niche-Store, but after some consideration, I am going to postpone that venture for now and focus on this blog, article writing, and creating a niche website which all streams will make me some extra income.

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Filed under: Alternative Income, Blog Revenue, Due Diligence | 2 Comments

I have been wanting to get this post out for a few weeks now but have been bogged with other posts that actually do relate to the overall theme of the blog.Any-who, lets talk some basketball.

Were now down to the Sweet 16…man do I love March Madness. Even though my Noles didn’t make the dance, I still enjoy watching each and every game. I’ll be the first to admit, my bracket is completely messed up. I went for the upsets in all four regions and the only team to standout so far is Villanova, so I’m routing for Jay Wright and his team to make the Elite 8, probably not going to happen though. Duke, our fellow ACC rival, donked out to West Virginia and I was slightly happy to see the Dukies go home crying once again. Maybe I’m sour that my team didn’t make it to the dance, oh well!

So we have 16, actually 12 since some teams played tonight. UCLA looked tough in the first half vs. WKU but looked sloppy in the 2nd half and I was amazed to see them catch up. The Tarheels blew out Washington State which isn’t a surprise to anyone if you have seen them and Hansborough play this season. North Carolina is actually my favorite to win it all and I am confident they will. Memphis always looks soft to me and I’m not sure why, I guess it’s because they play in Conference USA and that’s not even a major conference for basketball.

So Tennessee, WKU, West Virginia, and Wash. State are out with 4 more games to be played tomorrow.

Even though it’s a bit late for predictions, I’m sticking with UNC to win it all…who are you taking?

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One of the key ways to create wealth is by leveraging your money. Although I won’t go into the math today, simply due to its complexity and I’d like to review it before writing about, the theory behind leveraging is quite simple. Essentially leveraging money is when you borrow money (hopefully a low interest rate) and then invest it (trying to earn a return greater then what you borrowed at).

You can think of leveraging as amplifying your results. So when the investment goes well it will go really well, but when it does bad the effects are more severe. Luckily for us the market statistically goes up over the long run and not down.

The most common place that people leverage their money is when they purchase a home. Generally they get a mortgage from a financial provider and then use this money to purchase the house. Mortgages are great because they are low interest which makes it easier to be profitable when investing.

Although a mortgage is the most common, there are still other places to get money. You can take out an investment loan from a broker, I suggest putting this in index funds or at least something that has been relatively stable in the past. Another often overlooked form of leveraging is when you take out a business loan. Businesses accelerate their growth by borrowing money, accelerate your wealth by doing the same!

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Filed under: Investments, Saving | No Comments

If you’re not on eBay already, you need to be. That’s the bottom line folks. Everyone has household has junk they either don’t use or don’t want and it needs to be turned into cash from a dust collector. Just by looking around my bedroom, I see a few books, an old cell phone, a picture and a frame, as well as an old US coin which all need to be put on eBay and will be soon. You can list anything on ebay, even a cornflake that is the shape of a US state. No seriously, look around the room you are in and see if you can spot any items that are just sitting there without any use or purpose in your home.

Even if you choose to save everything you own, go outside and find something you can sell. For instance, there are hundreds of auctions selling lots of 20 pinecones that are bought to be used as decoration or whatnot. Outside my house, there are hundreds and hundreds of pinecones I could sell for $8 per 20 not including adding $5 for shipping. Sea shells, bonsai plants and other plants are sold from people that live in the climate regions of these plants.

If you absolutely cannot find anything to sell or add to eBay, create something! People are always listing their artworks and handmade creations and if this is something you can whip up, add an auction and sell that baby! Since ebooks are no longer allowed to be sold on eBay, take that off of your list of your own creations to sell.

So, the final decision is that you don’t have anything to list on eBay and sell. Do what I do when I run out of stuff to sell, list other people’s goods and take a commission. You can either sign them up on eBay and get a nice affiliate commission or list the item yourself with you account and take a commission off the final selling price plus the auction fee.

Ebay is the world’s online marketplace and you shouldn’t let this great online resource go to waste. Sell your goods and have some extra $20 to order take-out and leave your savings alone!

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Filed under: Alternative Income, Passive Income, Uncategorized | 2 Comments