Money Management 101 November 5, 2009
Posted by Rio in : Money, Resources, Rio , add a commentOk, kids. It’s time to learn how to manage your money! Besides not buying stuff, what can you do to save money?
Some of the more interesting things I’ve done to make myself spend less include cutting up my credit cards only to realize I had no way to pay for groceries, and then paying for my $10 pizza entirely in pennies (the ones I had in my change jar). Other things include never carrying cash or credit cards, and then going to the bank and asking the teller to withdraw $3 from my account so that I could pay for this event I really needed to go to.
Other great psychological tricks include asking a friend to hide my credit cards. He then leaves for a week and is out of touch, during which time I really needed to pay for something or other. My $2.75 stash of laundry quarters wasn’t going to cut it, so I resorted to one of my other favorite tricks: becoming a guinea pig for science! Thinking that donating my eggs was probably too drastic, I decided to volunteer for a research study that would involve, among other things, not brushing my teeth for three weeks. What happened to my social life, you might wonder? To hell with that, they were giving me $500! Besides, think of all the time I could save by not spending those 3.5 minutes brushing my teeth twice a day! I’m a busy entrepreneur, after all. I have things to do!
Instead of cutting up my credit cards, I had the better idea of simply never carrying cash or credit cards when I go places. I know, I know, what a crude method. But hey, it kind of works. I end up not making all those dicky little purchases like tea and books (I love tea, and I’ve probably single-handedly kept Borders Bookstore here in Ann Arbor from closing).
Sometimes the whole “not carrying any money” things has its problems. Like when I do actually have to pay for stuff. At the post office for example, where I went last to send off 15 packages containing things I had sold on ebay (more on that later). Only after I made the lady ring through and attach stickers to my 15 boxes did I reveal to her that I wanted to pay by check. She informed me that they couldn’t accept my check because I didn’t have my address on them (hey, identity theft, you know). I tell her I would write my address on the check for her. She goes: “um, No.” I point out the 15 boxes she had already stickered and put through the system, and would have to painfully remove if she didn’t accept my check. She caved. Sometimes you have to be cruel. The moral? I have no idea.
Not bringing your credit card does help, sort of. All those little purchases really do add up. Especially when you don’t always have time to cook. Now I love cooking good, healthy, homemade food, but….well, I’m slow. It takes me like an hour to make oatmeal (granted, my oatmeal is really fucking good.) Anyway, housewives get my respect. Cooking three meals a day from scratch is hard work. But anyway, there are times when I’ve managed to eat only home cooked meals for months on end, but that involved significant luggage. Meaning, if you don’t have a car and don’t live 5 minutes away from town, you have to haul all three meals with you for the day. Now that’s fun. Not only do you get your requisite workout in from hauling 50 lbs of stuff everywhere you go (really, I weighed it), but you end up being skinnier by eating less overall! (Damn you, rocky mountain chocolate factory, for being on my way to town).
Back to being a guinea pig. After prodding my teeth and cruelly stabbing me with various sharp metal instruments, my graduate student dentist friend tells me that I qualify for the $500 study. I would have thanked her, but my mouth was spewing blood. I wasn’t complaining though. You have to be tough in this world. Another favorite research study of mine was a series of “decision-making” studies that I participated in through the University of Michigan. Basically, they put you through a series of prisoner’s dilemmas to see how everyone interacts. I love this kind of stuff, being an economics major and all, but the real upshot was that we got to keep whatever money we made during the game! I once walked away with $57 after 5 minutes. (By defecting, of course). But the truly greatest study I took part in was one where I watched an episode of Sex and the City and then answered a questionnaire grilling me on my body image. I told them all about how skinny I felt, of course. Especially since I’ve been eating all these home-cooked meals!
Eventually I quit doing $15 an hour research studies because…well, let’s face it, we’re never gonna make a million dollars that way. Hopefully we’ll have bigger fish to fry, and better ways to spend our time (like being self-employed and all that fun stuff). I am going to add the $500 to our “money made so far” icon up there on the right, though. So that leaves us with our last idea: selling shit on ebay. Being a neat freak and all, I like to cleanse my room occasionally and get rid of the stuff I don’t need/use. The thing is, it turns out you can actually make money doing this. Old textbooks I’ve never used or wanted to, weird electrical appliances from the 80s, and those shoes I never should have bought because they are really fucking uncomfortable. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a lot of work selling stuff on ebay, and like getting a job, the opportunity cost is too high (I’ve talked about that already). Time is my most valuable asset right now.
So, besides being made fun of by your friends and having no social life whatsoever, my methods should put you on the right path towards dominating your finances! I’m Here To Serve You, America’s next generation, and to help this great country get out of debt. Remember that the next time you wait in line for 30 minutes at the bank only to have the person in front of you withdraw a total of $3 from their account. That person is probably one of my disciples. World domination, here I come.
Found a way to make money!!! in 45 days…part 1 – iPhone app. November 5, 2009
Posted by Mike in : Mike, Products, Rio , 1 comment so farAfter spending how much time, I have no clue, on a multitude of projects in an attempt to make money. Two projects stood out from the rest. I’ll discuss the second one in a follow-up post.
First was an iPhone app. Now I know nothing about iPhone development so I had to start from scratch about 2 weeks ago. The idea came when I was sitting with a friend who has an online business. He was talking how he’d like to monetize (fyi I hate that word because it sounds contrived and corporate (ptewiee) even though I use all the time) his business into products. I went well how about this, he said how about that, and in 15 minutes we had a simple iPhone app designed and drawn in my Moleskine. (fyi I also hated Moleskines due to the “I am a writer and artist and am super cool” factor. Turns out I’m a moron, they are great.) So he knows I do web programming and have done PC programming…or I attempt it at least…so it was off and running. We are going to split the revenue from the applications (there are three, same design, different target markets). I will do the coding. He will supply the content and the distribution through his current networks. No clue on what the price will be yet.
So where to start? (Here is a post of the steps involved) Apple brilliantly requires you to have a MAC to write an iPhone app. I have none. Luckily the guy I’m writing these for lent me his spare. Yes I know…a spare MAC notebook!…money is great ain’t it. So here I am, downloaded the 1+ gig iPhone SDK (“Developers Kit”…I have no clue what the “S” stands for) and went to the University of Michigan’s “fishbowl” do use the school’s O’Reilly’s Safari Books online to find the perfect manual on how to use this convoluted software language. There are over 3,000 online books to choose from mostly related to technology. Turns out the best book was like reading the history of scatology from Neanderthal Cave Droppings to post-modern Medical scat testing for influenza…actually that would be a hell of a lot more interesting.
The solution to this head nodding self torture came from none other than a short email from Rio. “Lynda.com now offers iPhone Development Application courses”. She has a subscription for her photo shop skills, been telling me how amazing “seeing” the work is versus reading about it. I went “yea yea…I’m a book guy”. BUT NO MORE! What I did not realize is that iPhone development, actually all design, is visual. Also most books edit out the mistakes they make on the way to writing the books. These mistakes however are invaluable to know about for when you program you will make those mistakes yourself. So I’m about half way through the total 6 hours instructions. Each hour instruction is cut up into short 2-11 min vids (I like how Alex from Clockwork Orange always said “vids”).
So Lynda shows you how to make a simple app in a day or two. It still is very confusing since its based on this NS language from 20 years ago, basically the “C” language…that is soooo not my bag, but they explain it well and I’m getting it pretty quick, so it’s doable. If your interested in doing this, I tell everyone who wants to get into programming: If you can read that 10 page manual that comes with your pc without falling asleep, its one of the first things you do when you get your computer, and when your done you say “cool!”…you can program.
And why 45 days? Rio said “AGHHHH!!!! I can’t take this anymore. We need a definable goal. Let’s make December 15th a short term deadline for something! I want to get the hell out of here, move to New York, anything, let’s get something happening by then!”. She’s talking about getting out of Ann Arbor, she’s been here 4 years doing undergrad and did not expect to still be here. If you talk to anyone from Ann Arbor, we all say the same thing…it’s like some psycho trap from the Twilight Zone, right when you get ready to go, you end up staying. So I say fuck it, why not. Just have to cull out the extraneous shit. So in 45 days I plan on ripping through this iPhone stuff, I have tossed out all the other bullshit projects we have been working on independently and together (though she has a cool website that is generating a tiny bit of Advertising revenue. I helped create the site.) So iPhone it is for me, never thought I’d do it but here I am.
Also on iPhone development: there is a good classroom series from Stanford iPhone Develpment that total 28 hours from iTunes videos. Very informative and actually very in-depth, but too slow for me right now.
And one more side note: Rio has her own iPhone app coming out in a few weeks for her other business. Figure this might get her to blog about it since when one of us blogs, the other wants to. We’ve been lax for 2 weeks now and haven’t discussed our products at all. Her app is pretty cool app and should contribute to the Million…at least $4 bucks from the one I’m sure her mom will buy. I hope my mom buys my app, though an iPhone to her is a phone with an eyeball on it.