Five Ways to Get Rich (or Not) on the Side

I decided to do a different type of entry today. If you're anything like me, then you desperately need more money in life. Even if you're not like me, more money wouldn't hurt. And, even if you're filthy rich (which I doubt) you probably still crave money. So, I've decided to list (in no particular order) five ways to make money on the side, along with my feelings about how effective these ideas actually are.

1. Part-time job
Rating: Good





















Reason: The main way to get more money in life always has been, and will probably continue to be, working more hours (at least until giant robots take over the world in 2115). Whether you work as a tutor, a baby sitter, an Ebay seller, a McDonalds burger flipper, or muscle for the Italian mafia, a second job is the best way out there to ensure a reliable source of extra cash.

Cons: Who wants to work at McDonalds? And, even if we did, who has the time? Not I, said the little cat.

2. Couponing
Rating: Average





















Reason: If you can't make more money, you can at least spend less money. Milking the system for all its worth isn't going to make you any friends with store owners, big retailers, or dinner party guest who have to eat three month expired salad dressing, but it does cut costs when all else fails.

Cons: I tried this for about a six month period at one point. It's hard. First, you have to have access to lots of coupons, which is not easy. Then, you have to take the time to clip, organize, and match those coupons with deals and freebies (again not easy). On top of that, you have to find a way to use the stuff you buy -- again not easy, especially if you didn't really want any of the stuff in the first place.

3. Blogging
Rating: Mediocre

























Reason: Admit it. Everyone on Blogger who has Adsense (like me) and who has spammed for followers/hits on their blog (me again) secretly dreams of striking it rich. What else could be easier? You hop online, type a couple of silly anecdotes a couple times a week, have the one million online fans that know and love you read the story (and click on some ads while their on your site), rack up millions of dollars in your sleep, and retire to Maui while the rest of the poor saps have to work for a living. Sounds easy, right?

Cons: Doesn't work. In my time blogging, I've managed to make a grand total of about $16.49 for six months of work and 40+ blog entries. Why? First off, no one reads these blogs. Think about it: out of your friends, coworkers, family, etc., how many faithfully follow the blogs of some stranger off the internet? Excluding people who live in an apartment with 10+ cats and have stacks of newspapers from 1965, my guess is around zero. And, even if they do read your blog, they never, ever, for any reason, click your ads. Out of the $16.49 I've made, I know for a fact that about $16.45 of it was from clicks by either myself or my close family members.

By the way, if you've read this far in the blog, you could consider taking a hint from the previous paragraph and . . . click. I have them all up there. Don't you want to know what "Male Hair Replacement" or an associates degree from the University of Phoenix can do for you? Then, CLICK!

4. Pay-to-click emails
Rating: Blah














Reason: I once made 25 bucks off this. Hooray -- 25 bucks! I can retire now!

Cons: You're never going to get rich doing this. Actually, in terms of dollars per hour, it's probably not even worth your time.

5. Stock Market
Rating: Excellent



























Reason: There are two ways to go with money in life: invest in stocks or work for those who do. Seriously, this is the naugthy little secret of the rich. Stocks have a historical annual return rate of about 11% -- WOW! For those of you bad at math, it adds up to lots of freaking money after a while.

Cons: It takes money to make money. To seriously get involved in stocks, you probably need at least $1000, maybe more, to compensate for brokerage fees. Also, the volatility of the whole thing will sometimes eat you alive (think last year). Still, it's the best way to make money out there -- long term -- that doesn't involve grease fires, burger flipping, and being called pinche gringo by fat guys from Juarez.

Well, there you have it. Take it for what its worth. And, CLACK ON MY AADS!!!!


Give me your feedback. What are some ways you've tried to get rich (or die trying)?

I'm Betting on America

The stock market is actually a very simple idea to wrap your arms around at it's most basic levels. A company, let's pick an old standard that everyone knows like Coca Cola, wants to make some more money. It wants to make more money for many reasons: it can pay its employees better salaries and offer them better benefits, thus attracting better workers; it can build bigger and better facilities, and purchase newer vehicles to transport their products to market more efficiently; it can research and produce new products that will get them new customers; it can purchase another company that has a product or service which Coke feels would be compatible with their own; it can allow them to advertise more on TV, radio, the internet and thus sell more of their products. All of these efforts by Coke are efforts to make their company better, stronger, healthier. So the powers at Coke decide to 'go public' by offering 'shares' of Coke on the stock market. This means that you can purchase an ownership stake in Coke by purchasing a 'share' at a certain price. A number of people decide to buy these shares, basically giving Coke their money in order to do those things they want to make their company stronger. The market determines what that price will be, so for instance initially Coke might offer shares in their company at $15 each. If you believe that Coca Cola is run well by good people, that their company is healthy, and that it is going to thrive and even maybe expand strongly in the future then you may buy a share. By doing so, you are basically betting on Coke, and you are putting up $15 of your real money in order to get a share. If you buy 10 shares, you have $150 invested in Coke. Now let's say they do well over the next few years, and as they do well the price of their stock goes up. It does so because more and more people believe in Coke like you did, so the people at Coke can raise the price of their shares because people are willing to pay that higher price. Say a couple years later the price of Coke shares is now $25 per share. Those 10 shares that you put $150 into two years ago? Well now they are worth $25 per share, or $250 total, and you have made yourself $100 on your investment. On the flip side, if Coke did poorly, if their company assets were mismanaged or stolen, or if their products were no longer as valuable to the public (in other words, fewer people liked to drink Coca Cola), then the price they could get for thier shares would go down. Say they went down to $5 per share, then your 10 would now be worth just $50. You would have lost 100 on your investment in Coke. That is how the stock market works at its most basic level. What you hear on TV every day as the 'Dow Jones Industrical Average' or simply as 'The Dow' going 'up' or 'down' is basically the world betting on America. You get in on this action, get to 'play the market', by purchasing those shares which are sold by that thing which we call the 'stock market'. Not unlike going to the grocery market for your food, you go to the stock market to purchase your stock shares. The main place that Americans do their purchasing is at the U.S. Stock Exchange, located on Wall Street in New York City, and thus you hear the market sometimes simply referred to as 'Wall Street'. The Dow is the total value of 30 selected stocks that key investors have determined make up a reflection of a wide range of important companies in America. For instance if Coke is worth $15 per share, and McDonalds is worth $10 per share, and Home Depot is worth $16 per share, and Comcast is worth $20 per share, you would add them together and get a total of 61 'points', or the dollar value of all the 'costs per share' of the companies in our little example index. If tomorrow those share values go up, and the new total is 81 points, our index of those four companies has gone up by 20 points. So it goes with The Dow, only in their case it is with the prices of those 30 American companies that I mentioned make it up. So in other words, when The Dow is going up, people are betting that America is healthy and strong. They believe that, in general, the future looks bright for business here, which means that products will get better, that their will be good jobs available, that companies will succeed. When The Dow is down, people believe that America is not going to succeed, that companies will fail. When too many people begin to dislike too many things about too many companies, they may decide that they don't like having their money in shares of stock any more, and so they pull thier money out of the stock market and do something else with it. This makes the shares in the market drop, because they are not as valuable if many people no longer want them, and so the market goes 'down'. If enough people pull enough money out in a short enough period of time, as has been happening recently, we have a market 'downturn' or even a 'crash'. A 'crash' is generally defined as when the overall stock market loses 20% or more of its value in a very short period of time. They happen usually about once every couple decades or so, and are usually seen as being a 'correction' in the market. This means that people have found that prices on company shares were a bit too high and stopped buying them until they got to levels that people were again comfortable with. What always happens is that a time comes when people look at the prices of stock in companies and say to themselves "hey, that stock is getting pretty low, it's really worth more than that" and they jump back in to the market. More and more people do this, and the market goes back up aqain. The very bottom line here is that buying stocks in good American companies is like betting on America to succeed. Do you believe that the United States of America is going to fail? Really, ultimately, completely fail? Or do you believe that 5, 10, 50 years from now there is going to be a United States of America that is still a democracy, that still is a world leader, that still bases its economy on capitalism and the value of rewarding hard work by both individuals and business? If so, then you should do exactly what I am doing by keeping the shares of my retirement plan invested in ways that reflect the market. Despite all the doom and gloom seen on television broadcasts today, I am betting on America. Despite a few hiccups along the way, she has never, ever let me down in the long term of my 47 year life. She might struggle for a bit over the next few months, even the next few years, while some details are worked out and some badly run companies are weeded out. We might even suffer a bit more should Barack Obama get elected and Democrats control Congress, thus raising our taxes and our spending and worsening our situation in those next few years. But in the long run of the next decade or so, she will be back strong, of that I have no doubts. The bottom line for me is that I'm staying in the market, I'm betting on America.

$700 Billion Dollar Roller Coaster Quick-Fix

Our government is considering, is right at this moment negotiating, a $700 billion dollar package to 'rescue' the economy from what is being sold to us as certain ruin. This 'ruin', of course, was completely and totally self-inflicted. Interest rates at historic lows combined with a loosening of lending policies, especially by mortgage companies, resulted in a number of bad loans to poor credit risks that was inevitably going to come crashing down around many people and companies. Those who bet on an ever-expanding economy were right in the long run, because the fact is that over time the economy will likely expand, assets will increase in value, and investments will rise. But some people also forgot that the economy takes ups and downs, much like a roller coaster, on the way to the ultimate thrill of an ending. Some people are going to get caught in a 'down', they are going to lose in the market. That is the risk involved in the ride, that every once in awhile one is going to run off the tracks and crash. The ride is often a true thrill, because you have great highs where you soar, where your investments rise and you feel invincible as your account balances inflate. However, you also have to suffer the anxiety of the downturns. The economy will adjust from time to time, weed out the bad, and hit that roller coaster dropoff. Your stomach may rise into your throat at this point, and you may even scream out of sudden fear for your safety, the safety of your assets in this case. Thankfully on a real roller coaster, as on the roller coaster of life, we usually rise again. There are brakes and seat belts and safety bars to protect us, and there are also 'the odds', which say that the overwhelming majority of the time you will survive that dropoff and rise once again. Over time in the economic world, you will rise to a point higher than the point at which you started. However, like real roller coasters, every once in a blue moon one is going to go crashing off the rails. Often this will be as a result of poor maintenance, or a sudden brakedown in a normally reliable part. The same thing will happen with the economy. It will run off the rails, and those on the roller coaster are going to go down - hard - some to never get up again. It should never be the role of our government to bail out capitalist companies that live and die with their bottom lines. Individual investors, as well as companies big and small, take risks in order to experience rewards. Many will ultimately succeed. Some, and sometimes many, will fail and will collapse. It is these collapses and negative adjustments that the rest of us learn from, and that create opportunities for others to come in and build a better mousetrap. The government has no business bailing out this economy with our, you and me that is, tax dollars. The government does not have any money of it's own, it has only the funds collected by you and me in taxation, in taxing our businesses, our incomes, our investments, and in the interest they make on the investments they make with our money. Key words being 'our money.' Businesses, banks, mortgage companies, individuals were riding high on the upslope for years, and they also need to go through the downslope for the free market to naturally adjust at the bottom of its dropoff. It may be a long, hard, jaw-dropping, stomach in your brains drop, and some may not survive the scare. But the fact is that the real crash will occur by artificially propping up this economy with a bailout. It will have the ultimate effect of putting glue on a broken roller coaster rail. The force of the coaster will, sooner rather than later, overwhelm the glue. The rail may actually need to be taken up and replaced. The roller coaster may need to be taken off-line for a short period while true repairs are done. But in the long run, this will be best. The rail will be fixed, the rides will begin again, and the thrill will come back. The government needs to let the market do its work, and save us all the irresponsible $700 billion dollar quick-fix that it is trying to push on those of us who understand what riding a roller coaster is all about.

Freddie & Fannie Getting Some Help

You may have heard of them, but you probably don't know a whole lot about them. They are your good friends in the area of housing, and their names are Freddie and Fannie. That would be Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, to be more precise, and as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was quoted recently they "play a central role in the housing system and must continue to do so in their current form...". On Sunday, Treasury and the Federal Reserve moved to secure the finances of the two giants, to ensure that they do not drown under the weight of what is termed the current 'correction' in the housing market. Freddie Mac is the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, a mortgage finance system that makes home ownership and quality rentals a reality for more American families, reducing the costs and expanding the choices by linking Americans to the world financial capital markets. It is stockholder-owned, and is authorized to make loans and loan guarantees. Freddie Mac was chartered by Congress back in 1968 in order to provide competition for Fannie Mae, so the two are not so much a couple as they are competitors in the housing capital market. Fannie Mae is the Federal National Mortgage Association, which was founded back in 1938 as a part of Franklin Roosevelt's 'New Deal' programs. Fannie is also a stockholder-owned company that is authorized to make loans and loan guarantees. The basic premise is that both of these Federally designed, but publicly owned, corporations provide the money that props up the U.S. secondary mortgage markets. Stay with me for a quickie and simplistic lesson on the process here. For instance, you own your home and you have a mortgage with your bank for the financing of that home. Your mortgage is bundled in with a group of others to form what is known as a 'collateralized mortgage obligation', or CMO. This basically reduces the risk for the lending institutions, since the larger group is less susceptible to individual mortgages being defaulted on if a homeowner fails to meet their obligation of paying the mortgage. The grouping is then further sold to other investors as a product called a collateralized debt obligation, or CDO. These CDO's can then often be bundled with other CDO's to make giant CDO's made up of numerous mortgages. The CDO's are then publicly traded as investment products. So when housing is going good, the value of mortgages go up, and the value of the CDO's goes up as well. When housing prices and sales fall, the value of your mortgage declines, and thus the value of the larger CDO's also declines. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's role is that, for a fee, they guarantee that the money on each mortgage will be paid back, regardless of whether the actual individual mortgage-holder every really pays back their particular mortgage. Investors in CDO's with Fannie & Freddie allow the two to keep the fees based on this guarantee. However, when particularly nasty down markets occur, such as is happening now, many individuals default on their mortgages and walk away, never to pay them off. Fannie & Freddie are stuck with having to payoff these obligations, and thus the risk is very real for these corporations in a poor market. On Sunday, the government moved through the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Bank to ensure that Fannie & Freddie would be able to remain solvent today. Both corporations have a $2.25 billion dollar line of credit with Treasury that is designed to get them through tough times until the market can turn around again, which it historically has always done. However, this downturn has been so severe that both Fannie & Freddie could exhaust these lines of credit this week. So today, Freddie Mac is planning to attempt to sell $3 billion worth of securities on Wall Street for financing. There is real fear that they will not be able to sell these securities, and that this failure would set off a crisis of confidence in the world markets, and a worldwide sell off in all types of securities. If investors don't believe that they will get paid back on their investments, they will sell. That is where we are at. This is all high finance stuff, but it is all backed and affected by your own individual mortgages. The Sunday moves by the Fed and Treasury ensure that, should these debt securities sales fail, Fannie & Freddie will still be supported by the increased federal credit lines. Bottom line for the long haul is that what is needed is for the market to again turn around, as it always has, and begin another upturn. This will happen again at some point, but the sooner the better for the stability of American and world markets, as well as for individual mortgage holders.