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.

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Just being poor doesn’t make you authentic. And it certainly doesn’t make you a better (or more successful) artist.

Money is a tool like any other. It’s leverage. And you can use it to create the life you want to create. For me, it’s a means to a much more creative end. Art and business are both self-expression (self-promotion, I mean), and I’d rather be an artist who’s financially secure enough to work on the things he wants to work on. Some of the most authentic people I know are the ones that are financially independent. They don’t have to prove themselves to anyone. Rejection isn’t the end of the world because they don’t have to worry about their next meal. They have that air of comfort and confidence about them. They’re not endlessly worried about making other people happy. When you don’t worry about other people’s judgement, you’re free to be who you want to be.

In other words, being self-funded is awesome.

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Definition of “Bull Pen”:

“A temporary holding area for prisoners, as in a courthouse.”

And oh yes…it was.  The only sounds were the breathing of the other guys, and occasionally the breath of your “boss” over your shoulder as he is looking at what you’re doing and you jump out of your boots going “Jesus!  Announce yourself.  You almost gave me a stroke!”.  That doesn’t go over well by the way.

The only advantage of a job is if you work for 2 quarters and accumulate enough paid time in total to make 1.5 times your highest month’s pay…which I did by 200 dollars…you can collect unemployment when they fire you.  Which they did.  Thank you.  The lesson there was a “full time” job means you won’t have any time to do anything else.  As my dad always said: “When you’re working for someone else, you’re just working for someone else”.  All the promises in the world, or the hopes based on someone else’s whims or the strength of the market mean nothing.  My sister worked for GM for 25 years, they let her go in 15 minutes with a pocket sized kleenex (which they asked for back if she didn’t need them) and that was it.  No pension.  No retirement.  So tell me there is security in anything, even life.  You take life and make life.

Getting a job? No. We have reduced all expenses to bare minimum.  Survival living.  Time is the gold, not money. Living lean means eating healthier, working out, sleeping when needed versus in your cube having to explain its your lunch hour and wanting to say go fuck off instead.  I picked Fuck off.

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In frustration as we boiled over at fever pitch trying to run 6 or 7 ideas, (see the post on quitting) Rio spent $1,000 on her credit card and took off to LA in the hopes of relieving some stress. During that waste of time, she stole 27 cents off of this guy’s desk.

This totally counts towards our 1 million.

She came back, shrugged her shoulders and is back at this game again.

The moral is, push though the pains, learn from mistakes, and don’t quit.  If you do quit, yet still come back and try again, then that makes you an entrepreneur.

P.S. I figure tit for tat, so I stole the 27 cents from her and am going to put it in a little frame that will read:

“I am now officially an entrepreneur!”

Good job Rio! Someone had to make a buck.

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1 million dollars seems to be that magical number for people, that unreachable goal that would fix everything. But what’s our goal here? Winning the lottery wouldn’t change much in the grand scheme of things. My business partner says to me out of the blue the other day: ” If we had $10,000, we still wouldn’t know what the fuck to do.” Slightly worrying, but what he meant is: throwing money at problems doesn’t exactly encourage you to solve them in a creative way. Having no money as a startup does have some advantages, it turns out: you start being really creative. I’m not talking about using food stamps to pay for dinner with potential investors. I’m talking about coming up with really clever viral marketing campaigns because you can’t afford to pay for traditional print advertising. We’re still working on that viral idea for my main business. But if it pays off, we’ll get a bigger payoff than we ever would have with a traditional media campaign. I’m not saying having a bit more money wouldn’t be nice. But a lack of funds means we’ve had to put off impetuously launching all of our products, and has actually forced us to brainstorm and come up with some pretty good long term strategies in the meantime.

My goal is to create a self-sustaining source of income. Money is just a means to and end, a means to much more creative endeavors. For me, an automated source of income is a way to free up my time to focus on the things I really want to focus on. Not that those things are clearly defined. Yet. Why can’t I just work at Starbucks and do this whole entrepreneurship thing on the side? I admire the people that can work on great projects while keeping their day jobs. They’re pretty focused, and persistent. For me, though, the opportunity cost of working a day job is just too great. The cost is not only time, but the wasted opportunity of working on becoming financially independent. I also really hate getting up at 8 am if it’s for someone else. If it’s getting up at the crack of dawn to post offensive ads for my portrait photography business all over campus, I’m all for it.

Tim Ferriss had the right idea in The Four Hour Workweek: a person who earns $40,000 by working 4 hours a week is richer than the guy who earns $500,000 a year and works 100 hours a week. In terms dollars per hour, the first guy is making more. Time is my most valuable asset right now. I can use the time and freedom I have right now to create even more opportunities for myself.

Money can then serve as a springboard to bigger and better things, if you reinvest your money into bigger projects and get your money to work for you instead of working for money. It frees up your time to focus on the things you really want to focus on. And that’s what being rich means to me.

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