Tag Archives: money

A Week Of Lists: Thursday – Ideas I had to make money (that I probably won’t use)

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So this is probably the most useful of the lists I’ve made this week, these are ideas I came up with to make money (as a I-don’t-need-a-job-look-how-much-this-is-making job)

They either need capital I don’t have, skills or experience I don’t have, I projected they wouldn’t meet income-requirements soon enough, or some combination.

  • Webhost, providing Domains, Dedicated Servers, Virtual Dedicated Servers, Shell accounts, etc etc. Can’t be competitive and profitable until about the 7th full server..
  • T-shirts, coming up with various ideas and selling – initially through a 3rd party but eventually self-printing.
  • Providing IT services as a contractor to individuals and businesses. Again, not competitive and profitable until a few contracts are secured and other people are being employed to maintain them all.

Christmas Shopping

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I did some Christmas shopping for Kelly today, bought a couple of things (I won’t say what they are — she reads this!) that I think she’ll like a lot. We still haven’t set a budget for each other with a few family members left to buy for, but I’m expecting it to be around $20 each and so far I’m fairly well under that. I still have a few ideas left when we actually set a specific number and I have a target, we’ll have to see how it pans out.

It’s difficult to find time to go out and buy things for Kelly though, because we live 20 minutes or so from the nearest worthwhile shopping space in Harrisonburg. With two Walmarts, Target, Ross, Big Lots, Michaels, the various Dollar stores, it’s just a great place to shop rather than the Dollar General and the few small stores in Broadway, and the Family Dollar in Timberville, everything else is more specializing than I’m looking for usually. But Kelly usually works from 9:30-6, meaning she’s gone with the car from around 9-6:30, and driving the truck is not a very appealing idea financially, so unless we have a day like today (where I dropped her off and will meet her for one of her work functions before coming home), I have to break away from our evenings together or on the weekend some time. I’m sure she feels similarly, because a one-hour lunch break isn’t very long when you have to traverse traffic on the roads and in the stores.

With this in mind it is little wonder that more and more people are migrating to online purchases, or at least online-research before going to the stores to buy (there is something about a face-to-face interaction, and having a store to take something back to rather than paying shipping for an RMA etc).

This is how I usually shop, let’s use me as an example:

  1. Think about who I’m buying for, and have a few core ideas about what they like. I like computers, I like guitar and music in general, and I like fun stuff with some kind of purpose.
  2. Think about stores that carry items that fit these categories. For example, Thinkgeek, Walmart, Music stores.
  3. Visit the online stores and get specific ideas. Specific t-shirts from Thinkgeek for example, maybe look at the electronics section on the Walmart website, or guitar or other music equipment at websites like MusiciansFriend.
  4. Research and try to find a good deal on each specific item. Google’s shopping site is a great tool for this. Often what I find can be found just as good but at a lower price if I look hard enough. Keeping in mind, however, that while many online stores are completely reputable, some aren’t. If I come across a site that is new to me I may run a few searches to see if other people have had good experiences or not.
  5. Weigh up which idea is the best for the person I’m buying for. Maybe they don’t need the guitar I found, or they wouldn’t appreciate the T-shirt I’m looking at, or maybe it is just out of the budget I had set for them.
  6. Give it a couple of days, depending on whether I am buying online or in-store (if in-store it is more likely to be an immediate decision, but still not necessarily). I’m not usually one to make a rush purchase if I think I have some time to think about what I’m about to do.
  7. Make a final decision, and buy it.

There you go. My 7-step guide to buying Christmas stuff. Unless you want to take a month to work through your family, I also recommend doing this process on several people at once 😉

Time Management

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I’m trying to make the best use of my morning time before I go to work rather than sleeping all day, in theory it will help me when it is time to leave my 2:30-5:30 job for full time work.

This morning I took Crash with me and went to Food Lion and bought breakfast stuff, lunch stuff, and some drinks. Breakfast will last most of the week, lunch stuff all week (with some to spare) and the drinks should last until next pay day. I filled up the truck, which should last two weeks unless I have to go somewhere much other than work, and after breakfast and lunch I took Crash on a walk.

Tonight I applied for another job, this time in Christiansburg, as an entry level help desk analyst. The pay is crap (for an IT job), but it’s better than what Kelly makes full time, and we always said that another job with similar pay would be enough to get ourselves off the ground.

We’re working on getting Crash to behave without needing a leash on, and today he hung out with me for about half an hour without a tether while I was grilling, and tonight stayed within hearing distance on the walk inside. He is still tethered and crated while we’re not around to watch him, naturally ;-).

Hopefully tomorrow I will get up and have breakfast, followed by an hour or two of programming on my current web-project, I also need to make a bunch of sandwiches to go in the fridge for the rest of the week. I’ll also continue to keep my eyes open on the various Craigslist pages and maybe checking out CareerBuilder and the other job site rounds, JMU, EMU, RMH, JenzaBar, DNR, etc.

But that is tomorrow, and tonight it is getting late, thus I shall sleep. Goodnight, world.

I Want…

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…to change the image of cheap internet hosting. I can’t see it happening. What I would love to do would be to run a small business supplying cheap webhosting for websites and IRC and Shoutcast and Teamspeak and VPSs and Dedicated servers and so on and so forth, meanwhile providing quality 24 hour phone and email support for a low monthly fee. I’d like to do that. I think that is what the internet would like. But it isn’t going to happen any time soon. Why? Because I don’t have the upfront money to pay for the first server, which itself would probably only be able to supply websites for example. And even if I did, I would probably not be able to afford long-term payments if only one or two people bought accounts – not much motivation to have people calling me at 3 in the morning because their website is running slow.

The sad truth is that small internet businesses are not very profitable. In order to make any money, you need a minimum amount of resources and get a large number of customers using them in order to pay for a) the resources being used already, and b) more resources.

I was crunching numbers a few months ago with the prospect of starting a VPS company, but in order to get going, I was needing around $240 a month for the server just to get it up and running, and then I needed 24 people paying $10 a month before it would break even. With that kind of package, I’d only have another 6 packages available on that server before I’d need a second one, and then I’m back to finding $180 a month until that one reaches a break-even point. Once I had 6 servers running, there would be enough profit from 6 full servers to fund a 7th without anything coming out of my own pocket, by which point I would be serving around 180 customers. The seventh server is what would be the turning point in the business. And somewhere in all of this I’d need to have found 180 people that want VPSs with the crappy support that I’d be able to provide on my own, meaning I’d probably need to pay for advertising of some description, and possibly provide some web-designing services of some kind. Keeping in mind also, that none of those numbers were taking taxes or any other mandatory expenses into consideration, so it would probably be the 8th server that was making money. Around the 10th server (Read: 300 customers) I’d be able to afford to visit a mobile communications store and lease unto myself a cell phone and a wireless data-card to provide support anywhere. I’d also be able to lease a VoIP account for the business and accept incoming phone calls for support. I would have undoubtedly branched out by this point, and be providing other services using similar hardware such as website hosting, but hosting more people per-server at a lower cost per-customer. I’d be reselling dedicated servers, probably looking at the viability of buying my own hardware and co-locating it.

And that is where it gets depressing. Maybe I need to just do it? Maybe I need to save the money and put a real plan together, put the time into it and make it work. Maybe I need to find a business partner who I can trust. Maybe I need to give it up already. I know I need to study the business side of it to find out how much that would cost before going further with the viability of the pure technical numbers. I know I need to study further, and make decisions regarding placing multiple service types on the same servers, such as ShoutCast hosting alongside TeamSpeak hosting – probably not a good plan. The same idea applies to mixing VPS plans on the same hardware, as it isn’t entirely fair to cram whatever will fit on a server on whatever is available at the time, at the same time I can’t afford to run 3 servers with 3 plans until they’re paying for themselves.

So I shall return to my silent pondering of greatness that will likely not come. I will continue to come up with ideas that may never see fruition. And I will proceed to consider possibilities to make money as well as a name for myself in the internet community.

Current Balance: $1,041.77

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Money isn’t really my friend. I have a bad habit of getting money and immediately spending money. I guess it’s a reflex left over from the idea of “Well, there’s money, let’s spend it before someone else does, or we find something else that it has to go towards.”

In fact, that $1000 isn’t hanging around very long anyway, there are a couple of credit card bills to be paid, and we’re going shopping tonight, so who knows how much we’ll have in the morning. But we’ve also filled up both vehicles with gas, and set aside our outgoing payments, we just need to keep doing what we’re doing and our standing balance should slowly rise!

I’m still looking for a job, so if anyone in Virginia (or DC) is looking for a Level 1 Helpdesk Analyst or DC Ops Tech (will work any shift if required), hit me up and I’ll send a resume. I don’t mind driving to work, I was quite happy to drive 2 hours each way to Rackspace, and I’ll be happy to do the same for you.

Making Money?

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I typically don’t bother with these sites at all, because most of the time you have to spend money to get anything at all, but this is an exception.

SendEarnings(.com) is a survey site whereby you can make money by taking surveys for which you qualify. Now, these surveys may be few and far between, this isn’t going to be a “Make $150/hr” or “Make $3000/wk” job-replacement style site. What it will give you is various other offers in which you may be interested, most of which reward you in some way. For example, there is currently a Discover card on offer, and they’ll credit $15 to your SendEarnings account if you sign up and they give you the card. (Discover are also advertising a $50 cashback). You’ll get various percentages credited if you make online purchases at online stores like eBay, Walmart, Petsmart, etc. If you’re into playing online games, (this can cost, although after a week they offered $20 in credits free..?) then you can join online competitions against other people for money that can be used to play more games, or withdrawn to your SendEarnings account.

The other way to make money is by receiving email. Seriously: Receive email (around 3 a day), click link, receive $0.02. You don’t have to buy or do anything besides clicking “Confirm reading this email” links, and you’re making money. (Pretty crap money, but still..).

Remember, this does not pay big! I’ve been fairly active over the last week or so and am now approaching $30. I’m running out of offers I can apply for that won’t cost me anything, and I’m not eligible for a lot of surveys (mostly because I’m not very adventurous..). I just started playing with the games today, since I got a credit for free. I’m going to again be cautious, I’m in this thing to make money – not lose it!

So, if easy money is your thing, sign up, maybe you’ll make something!

Get-Out-Of-Debt Quick Plan

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My apologies to all who find this to be boring crap, obvious crap, useless crap, or otherwise crap.

For the last 12+ months my wife and I have been in rather large debt, primarily owing to her student loans, but also loans to pay for immigration forms and some credit-card stuff, and now our new car is on that list too.

It got so bad we moved back in with her parents, where we’ve been since November last year.

But, things are looking up again. She now has a full time job, I have the promise of casual work and possibly a permanent part-time job at an after-school program (will hear from them tomorrow, hopefully). We have a budget surplus of around $300/mo after all the income and most of our outgoings are paid for. If I get the part-time job then our outgoings increase slightly (gas, mostly), but our surplus will increase to around $800/mo. Now, we need to save something, in case of emergencies etc, and $800/mo isn’t really enough to comfortably move out again. My plan for us to change our circumstances doesn’t come from moving out and then paying off debt, it comes from paying off debt and then moving out.

See, right now we have two credit cards, one of which is more than twice it’s limit, the other we are trying very hard to keep below the limit, and as close to $0 as possible (so far we are succeeding). We also have a couple of loans that are either small or rather annoying which we can get rid of fairly quickly. My solution is to take about $400 of our surplus per month and put it towards a single loan.

For example, the over-limit credit card charges us about $50/mo. If we add $400 to that, we can pay $450/mo until it is paid off. That will take roughly 3 months. Then we can take that $450 and put it towards something else, like one of our smaller loans that is $65/mo, so we’ll be paying $450 + $65 = $515/mo until that is paid off. A third smaller loan is about $75-80/mo, so we can take the $515 from our two previously paid off loans, and add it to the $80/mo, and be paying $595 on an $80 loan payment – how fast do you think that loan will go away? I think fairly quickly. And all it costs us extra per month is the $400 we put in to begin with. Once those three payments are knocked out, we could take our $400 back out again, and we’ve just found an extra $195 a month, bringing our budget surplus up to nearly $1000 – we’re getting closer to being self-sufficient now. The other two loans we have are $138 and $159, and I haven’t done the calculations based on how quickly these would have an effect on our current loan balances, but I envisage we could be fairly debt free (one loan has a huge balance) within 24 months.

3 Out Of 50 Ain’t…All That Great, Actually.

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Over the last 2 months or so I’ve been scouring ads online and in papers for jobs. I’m looking for something entry-level IT so that I can gain real and valuable experience. Mostly this means Level 1 Service/Help Desk positions. 2 huge negatives against me are a lack of college education (I might explain that in a later post) and lack of US Citizenship.

This means I’ve been able to apply for about 50 jobs, from DC to Richmond to Blacksburg in Virginia. [It just got more complicated, I’ll explain that in a paragraph or two]. Of the 50 jobs I sent applications to I received exactly 3 responses. I don’t know about anyone else, but I was kinda hoping I’d have had a few more rejection notices rather than just being ignored.

The first application I got a response from was James Madison University. They’d advertised a User Support position, and I applied within 30 minutes of seeing the ad in the paper. A few days later I received an automated email saying the position had been filled.

The second application I got a response from was Highland Retreat, a Christian Camp about 15-20 minutes drive away in Bergton, VA. I just got a call from the director there, who reminded me how complicated my future employment status is just with a phone call to update me on how well things are going with that application.

The third application I got a response from was RackSpace, an IT company with several ventures including MailTrust (Mail services) and SliceHost (a VPS company). I applied for a Datacenter Operations Technician position which would involve building servers, installing OS’s and diagnosing hardware and OS faults on servers in the datacenter. I have a phone interview with them tomorrow at 4pm, and I’m kinda nervous.

My biggest worry right now is that I’ll jeoperdize one position and the other will fall through, primarily the camp one. The camp job is looking very certain, they’re waiting contact from the camps in NZ that I worked with so they have a NZ camp reference. The RackSpace job is a much better option in the long term though, but isn’t guaranteed. The fact that they had 5 positions listed on their careers site makes my chances of getting one of them that much bigger, but I don’t want to commit or decline Highland’s offer until RackSpace offers or rejects me, because $160/wk is better than nothing at all.

So that is my complication – I want both jobs for different reasons, but the one I want more may not want me, and is moving slower so I may have to turn RackSpace down prematurely. I REALLY hope I don’t have to, a rejection I can handle, I’d much prefer that to having to say “well, you took too long and I’ve decided to work in a camp over the summer…” It’d be one of the most illogical things I’ve said in a long time..

That’s my dillemma, suggestions from people who have been in a similar situation would be helpful!

Highland Retreat Staff Assistance Program

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Hello all,

If you read regularly or know me well then you’re probably aware I don’t ask for things much, especially when I understand so many others are struggling right now, in other ways as well, but financially especially.

I’m waiting for confirmation (final paperwork was sent in yesterday, expecting a decision next week probably), but I’m expecting to be working at Highland Retreat over the summer, a non-profit camp focused at children and young people. I’ll be making somewhere in the vicinity of $20 a day, for around 22 hours work (a day) – because apparently when I’m sleeping it counts as work (in the same room as campers, and they’re still my responsibility).

They’ve suggested, and this is what this post is about, that I spread the word and try to gain further financial support beyond what they are able to provide themselves. Below is a copy of their suggested letter, and I’ll attach links to images of the original sample letter and the form provided on the back thereof.

Highland Retreat is a non-profit Mennonite camp located near Bergton, Virginia. Summer staff members often give up the possibility of better-paying jobs in order to minister in service to the youth who attend summer camp at Highland. Full-time summer staff work at Highland for 9 weeks and receive from $70­ – $130 per week, plus meals and lodging, for their service. These committed young people give their summer to help share their faith in the natural setting of camp.

In order to help make this ministry a financial possibility for those staff willing to serve, Highland has initiated the Staff Assistance Program. You are invited to help meet the financial needs of those serving at Highland through your support, thus allowing them to commit their gifts and energies in summer ministry. There are three ways you can contribute to this program.

1. Make a contribution to Highland Retreat and designate it for the Staff Assistance fund without naming a specific beneficiary. Such contributions will be used at the desecration of the camp leadership in assisting individuals who need help. Such a contribution is fully tax deductible.

2. Make a contribution to Highland Retreat and designate that it to be directed to a specific summer staff individual. Such contributions are not tax deductible.

(When funds given according to options 1 & 2 above are dispersed, payroll taxes apply both to the individual and to Highland Retreat. . Consequently the individual actually receives slightly less than you give.)

3. You can also make a gift directly to the summer staff individual. In this case the gift is not tax deductible but no taxes are withheld and the individual receives the full amount. Such a contribution should be sent to Highland Retreat Staff Assistance Fund but the check should be written to the designated staff person.

We will hold the check until the term of service is complete then pass it on to the individual.

Option three is the most efficient if you want to designate a specific beneficiary because it is a gift and is not reported on a person’s W-2. However if your contribution will allow the individual to receive matching funds from a Mennonite college or University you must use Option 2 because the contribution can only be matched by the college if it comes from Highland Retreat. The beneficiary of your gift should inform you if they qualify for matching funds.

Contributions can be made any time up until the individual completes his/her term of service. You will receive a receipt for your contribution when it is made. Upon completion of the individual’s term the support will be forward, either to the individual or to the institution as requested by the individual. If the person does not complete their term of service as agreed upon, your contribution will be returned to you, or we will consult you about an alternative.

Please prayerfully consider what you can do to help these young men and women share Christ with our youth.

For reference, I am not eligible for a college matching grant (as far as I am aware).

Here is the letter and form as promised! They’re PDF files so you may need Acrobat Reader to view them.

The Letter and The Form.

Your assistance is appreciated, thank you.