Getting Ahead for the Little Guy
Sometimes blogging gets promoted as an easy source of wealth. You run a bunch of virtual ads, post about your hobbies, the world beats a path to your door, and you find fat checks arriving at your doorstep every month.
If this is the case, I must be doing something wrong (and yes, I probably am). [...]
When I was getting ready to our first house, someone told me how much money could be saved if you were to pay double the principle each month. At 6.5%, a 30 year mortgage will cost you more than double (over 225%) of the actual cost of the mortgage. I was astonished at how little [...]
This could be interesting news whether you are interested in e-publishing or just buying books in digital form:
Random House Increasing E-Book Inventory, Says Sales Have “Tripled”
E-Books are a great way to capture the “long tail” in the publishing business. Out-of-print books might not be worth putting through another print run, but once converted to digital [...]
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems these days more and more companies are not content to sell you a product. They want to sell you a plan that takes money out of your wallet month after month. I can’t blame them for trying – a constant stream of revenue like that can be worth [...]
Great video of invester Jeremy Grantham:
Interesting points – he claims that equities (stocks) are now, for the first time in a couple of decades (at least since 1994), “reasonably cheap.” but that the market has the potential to make them “spectacularly cheap” in coming weeks. He also suggests that there’s no hurry to invest in [...]
A few months ago, I interviewed for a position as a programmer for a hedge fund. It involved a lot of hoop-jumping and a ton of interviews over the course of several months, and I didn’t end up getting the job. Considering the economic environment over the last three months, that might have been a [...]
According to Morningstar (and this article), all but one of the 11,585 mutual funds they track but one is underwater this year.
Every Stock Mutual Fund But One Has Lost Money In 2008, Except One
Wow – do you feel the need to put your money in the one that isn’t losing money?
Hold on. The exception that [...]
A long time ago, in a college, we had a demonstration of wealth generation that I only vaguely remember. But it went a little bit like this:
Let’s say I can make notepads for a quarter (including my labor). And let’s say you can make pens for a quarter. I have a dollar in my pocket. [...]
One of the big tricks salespeople use to try to convince their prospect to buy is to break down the cost into a very small, seemingly insignificant amount when spread out over time. For example, if you take a year to pay off that new $2100 vacuum cleaner, interest-free, its cost to you is less [...]
I regret that it was so many years before I learned the magic word that opens all kinds of doors, saves you all kinds of money, and helps you in all kinds of situations. It is perhaps the most powerful word in the English language.
The word is, “ask.”
For years I’d just assume I knew the [...]