Posts tagged "money"

Blogging for Dollars

Wouldn’t it be great if….

We could sit at home in our underwear every day, pounding gallons of coffee, jabbering endlessly on our blogs, and getting tons of money to do it! That’s the life huh? I spent a few weeks reading some books on building and monetizing successful blogs before I started this one up, with the intention that I’d take over the internet with my wonderful wit and insight into the world – and get rich in the process…

Well… let me tell you what I learned from all of those blogging experts. You can make money with a blog, and lots of it – you just need to focus your blog on telling people how to make money with their blog. Those people will in turn build blogs focusing on telling people how to make money with their blogs, and so on and so on. They feed on each other. Everyone wants easy money. There are damned few people out there making a living with their blogs, but the ones that do, are filthy rich from it because they were the first.

I never really believed I’d actually make any money with this blog, but it was a nice diversion, it was a new concept for me, and I tend to have a obsessive streak when I get hold of a new idea, so I buried myself in building it.

I can’t say I haven’t made money, a few of my good friends out there have used the ‘buy mike a beer’ button to send me a few bucks.. so far, I’ve made just enough to pay for the boot-up price for the web hosting and domain regestration.. so I really can’t complain! Thanks guys, you know who you are!!

Well crap

Then I started thinking that everything I’d read about blogging in all those books might be true! It’s really not easy to come up with things to write about week after week. Maybe thats why everyone blogs about blogging, it’s the perfect form of naval-gazing.  I have a shit-ton of things I’d love to rant about, but most of it’s off-topic from this blog, and seriously – who would want to read any of it anyways?

To have a successful blog they say, you have to offer valuable content, and focus on a niche so your readers don’t get confused about your product – they get comfortable with the stuff you write about, so they keep coming back. They are reading your blog after all, because they were looking for information about a specific subject – when you throw a wrench in there and blog about something off-topic for your niche, they get confused and go away.

Fuck it

Well here’s my problem. I have a tremendous aptitude for ADD induced inspiration. I have a hard time focusing on just one thing. I’m interested in all sorts of things, and at different times. What I’m completely obsessed with one day, I’m totally ambivalent about the next. It frustrates ME, I can’t imagine how annoying it must be to anyone trying to figure out what the hell is going on in my head, let alone on my blog.

So after struggling with trying to force myself to write on one small set of subjects here, I’ve decided to say fuck it, if it’s not enjoyable to me, then what’s the effing point? It was either allow myself to ramble on about what I want to ramble on about, or shut this blasted blog down after only a month because it’s making me miserable trying to focus on one topic.

I also keep reading that a successful blog should be relatively impersonal.. that is, don’t blog about yourself – No one cares. This concept bores the hell out of me, because sometimes the only thing I have to write about is the crazy crap that happens to me, or how I screwed up one thing or another. I’m an endless source of blog-fodder; to ignore that would be a waste of 8 bucks a month for hosting fees!

This of course is the raging delusion of an egomaniac, it puts me squarely in the ‘I-think-I’m-cool-enough-to-write-about’ category, but who cares. It’s my blog, and I’ll self-serve if I want to. Personally I think it’s rather cathartic, working through my problems by writing about them – and I enjoy sharing my foibles with my friends.

Luckily I don’t have any followers other than friends, so I don’t have to worry about alienating them!

Cheers!
Mike

Credit Cards – Storm Troopers of Corporate Greed

Oh, you have more money? I’ll just take that.. thank you very much..

Yesterday Christina was looking at her Credit Card bill and noticed that since she had started making larger payments they had raised her interest rate. I’m not surprised since the goal of the credit card companies is to keep us in debt so they can continue to rape us for our money. As soon as they realized she might pay the damned thing off, they had to do something to protect their income – charge more!

Banks are approaching the fringes of what even the most die hard conservative republican freaks might call outlandish levels of greed. And the government is in on it.. they helped these fucks stay in business by bailing them out, when by every standard of what is right and holy in the world, they should have been going down in flames right to hell where they belong.

Here’s my sad-ass debt story

I made the debt mistake pretty early on in my life when I was 22. I was recently married, and broke as hell. I remember signing my name on that very first credit card application. I knew right then that it was a bad idea, but I didn’t know HOW bad of an idea it was until much later on. I had no idea that I’d just signed a deal with the Devil himself.

I was trapped from that point on. By the time I’d begun to make a semi-decent living about five years later, the monthly minimums on our credit cards were just about more than we could afford. We weren’t out buying jet-ski’s and big-screen TVs either, just trying to survive until we could get a decent monthly income rolling in. When the baby came, there was even more debt rolling onto those credit cards.

Then came the divorce. Talk about catastrophic phase-shift. Now on top of the credit card debt I had accumulated, there was child support to be paid. I had effectively almost tripled the amount of money I had to shell out every month, without gaining anything coming in. There was no choice.. either buy food and gas and clothes with credit cards, or starve to death naked in my un-paid-off car.

So I spent the next 15 years pushing myself to climb that corporate ladder – trying in vain to get even a small jump ahead of the line so I could begin sending that balance in the downward direction. By the time I was making 70k a year, the debt was feeding on itself. I had an almost 70% debt-to-income ratio. At this point on the curve, I was sending $1500 a month to the banks, and the balances were still rising.

Do NOT try this at home.

By the time I got laid off, I was so far in debt there was really no option left to me. I filed for bankruptcy.

I know, I know.. I’m NO good with money. I shouldn’t be allowed in the same room with it. Tell your money to walk on the other side of the street when it sees me.. I was young and stupid, and on top of that, I’m an artist, and the concepts of accounting are lost on me. My credit is screwed for 10 years, but luckily I don’t have the money or the desire to buy a house anyway. I had no large possessions, no home for the banks to take, my car was worth 500 dollars – I had nothing I could sell to bring the debt down.

I’d made my end run in a big fancy corporate job, and wound up with nothing to show for it at all unless you count personal experience, and the fear and loathing of corporate greed. But that’s a good topic for another post.

I AM NOT PROUD of myself, but these days I can sleep at night without panic attacks chasing me through the night because I can’t figure out a way to get ahead of the eight ball. My blood pressure has gone down, I’m happier, and I have for the first time in 20 years, a respectable hope for the future.

Yes, I should have been smarter about it and done something much earlier than I did. I shouldn’t have gotten married, or divorced, I should have gotten a better job, I shouldn’t have signed that first application, I shouldn’t have bought that ONE last thing.. hindsight is 20/20.

Credit cards are a gamble – if everything in your life goes as planned, you may be just fine. But life seldom goes the way we plan, shit happens, snowballs snowball, you marry the wrong person, shit rolls downhill, blah blah blah.

I honestly thought I would some day reach a point where I could take care of the debt, and feel a sense of accomplishment in paying it all off. I was a stand up guy after all, I paid my debts! Humph.

Banks are of the Devil

I tell that story not because I think anyone cares, and I definately don’t want any sympathy, but to illustrate how easy it is to be stupid with credit cards when life is happening to you.

This is exactly the kind of stupidity the credit card companies and banks are counting on. Schmucks like me who sign their lives away early on when they are working low-income jobs, only to find out the small print stated there was more to pay later on.. it’s the classic Faustian deal.

Banks WANT you to not be able to pay the debt off. They WANT you to get more debt. They make huge amounts of money off of you being in debt. It’s akin to the people out there making money by telling you how to make money. It’s a sucker bet, and the only people getting rich are NOT you. Don’t fall for it.

So anyways, my point is..

I’m certainly not going to sit here and tell you how to get by in todays world without having to buy things on credit, my credentials in the world of credit and money are obviously severely tarnished by horrible mistakes and stupidity – don’t listen to me!

I write this only as an example of the wrong way to do things. Learn from my mistakes, don’t trust the man - chasing a bigger and bigger salary only to pay off a deal with the devil is no way to live. You may as well go borrow money from the Mafia, at least they’ll kill you and put you out of your misery when you can’t pay.

So try this.. Live a simpler and happier life. Possessions mean very little in the long run. I didn’t learn this until I hit the wall while chasing the America Dream. I find myself now with much less baggage (mentally and physically), and I am far happier than I’ve been in almost 20 years.

Focus on the immaterial pleasures of life, and you just might find out you don’t need that plasma TV in your bathroom that badly after all!