David Makes Cents .com

The whole point of this blog is to start new income producing businesses. You may have read my other post about my online arcade. While the site has been doing ok and I hope it does well in the future, I am going to continue working on it and continue to look for new ways to make money.

Today I went fishing. It was a complete failure, I didn’t catch a thing. I tried to make my own bait out of dough and that was a sticky mess. So I went to the local bait shop to buy some worms and they were out. I did notice however, that they were charging $2.50 for only 12 worms. This seemed pretty expensive to me. This gave me the idea for my next business: starting a worm farm and selling the worms to a bait shop.

I had thought about the idea before and had read up about it online. Worms are fairly low maintenance, there are few start-up costs, and there is a good market for them in summer months. I had recently decided to take up fishing, so even if I never get to sell any of the worms, because it doesn’t work out for some reason, I will be able to get my bait for free.

What I will need to start:

- Large metal tub

- Starter worms

- Organic Food Sources

- Water

The worms do all the work. All you have to do is feed them and make sure that they don’t get too hot or too cold and are living in a moist environment. They reproduce quickly, so you don’t need too many to start with. I will do a little research to figure out where to get my startup worms from either online or from a local bait shop or distributor.

How much I expect to make:

I don’t have a lot of space to start a worm farm, so I doubt that it will ever become huge. This is just meant to be a side business with some potential for growth if it is fun and easy. If I ever wanted the business to become real successful I would need to buy more land since my yard is too small to raise enough worms to become very profitable. For now I am just going to farm the worms in a tub, learning the ins and outs of the business and see if its right for me.

The exit plan:

In case the business doesn’t take, off like I am hoping it will, I have an exit strategy that will allow me to make full use of the resources acquired during the startup stage of this business. As I said earlier, I plan on fishing a lot, so I will be able to use the worms as bait for myself. Also the worms create very fertile soil that I can use for potted plants or in my parents garden. Initially this will be a very small operation, just to see how it works out. I will be sure to give you guys an update on how its going in the coming weeks.

Update: The business has actually been doing quite well. You can now buy red worms at my site Earthworms4sale.com.

Tags: Frugal, business by David
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I have officially made every day a “Bring your lunch to work day”. I am trying to save more of my paycheck. It is small enough as it is, I don’t need to spend all my money on food. I only make about $60 a day and easily spend $7 a day on food. This should really help me save more money and reach my goals.

What I Bring:

I actually leave my food in the car while I’m at work. We have been having 90 degree weather down here in the south and my food has been kept nice and cool. I use a mini cooler and two ice packs to keep it cool. It has worked great so far.

For lunch I usually make myself a turkey and cheese sandwich. I also bring and apple, pack of pb crackers, Oreos, and a water. I actually enjoy it more than I do the fast food restaurants I usually go to. Plus I am not drinking any soda which I try to avoid but I can’t resist when I am eating lunch at work. So its pretty healthy and its saving me some good money.

How Much I Save:

I used to buy a sticky bun and a soda on my 15 min break and on my lunch I would usually go to either McDonald’s or Wendy’s. The sticky bun and soda cost $2 and the food for lunch probably averaged over $5. So that is $7 I save everyday. One of the many benefits of still living at home is that my parents buy me my food. So lunch is free. Apparently there are free lunches contrary to what people keep telling me.

How Much It Will Be Worth At Retirement:

“A penny saved is a penny earned” , Ben Frank was a wise man. I am saving/earning $7 a day, 5 days a week, 52 weeks a year. Well not really 52 weeks a year because I will start going to school soon and stop working. But for simplicity’s sake, I will assume I am saving this every week. I will also assume that the lunch will be free for the next 47 years until retirement and that I can average 10% return on this saved/earned money.

Well 7*5=$35 bucks per week. Plug this, the 10% return, and the 47 years I have left until retirement into the calculator I found on CNN money and viola. I have saved/earned $1,977,657.88. That looks like its almost enough to retire on by itself, but in 47 years that will probably be peanuts. At least it will be a real good start. The main thing I have on my side is time.

Many individuals are confused about debt’s dominion. This is debt piled after massive mortgage not being paid, resulting in the creditcard cancellation. Often this is a result of debt consolidation. Only then can one hope of debt remission.

Tags: Frugal, How to Save, Retirement by David
14 Comments »

With gas prices as high as they are, I’m sure many of you are considering selling your SUV and getting a more fuel efficient car as your next vehicle. A lot of people are not very good with math, so I am going to go through the calculations with you to help you figure out if it is worth it to trade in your old SUV for a more fuel efficient car. I won’t just throw out a bunch of formula’s because I know they can be tricky to follow, instead I will set up a hypothetical situation with real numbers and let you guys follow along. Hopefully you will be able to calculate your specific situation after reading this article.

Q. I have an 8 year old SUV that gets 14 mpg and am looking to trade it in for a car that gets 32 mpg and costs $25,000. I drive about 15,000 miles per year and this $4 gas is really starting to get too expensive for me. Is it worth it for me to trade in my SUV for a car or should I hold on to my SUV a little while longer?

A. Your SUV is pretty old so besides gas consumption, you will have to factor in maintenance costs to figure out which one of these options will be cheaper for you. But first we will calculate how much you will save on gas with the new car vs the SUV.

15,000 divided by 14 mpg equals 1071 gallons multiplied by $4 per gallon costs you $4,286 in gas for the SUV every year.

15,000 divided by 32 mpg equals 469 gallons multiplied by $4 per gallon costs you $1875 in gas for the car every year.

For this example the savings will be $2,411 every year. Now we need to factor in the cost of maintenance for the SUV.

Maintenance for the new car should be free because it should still be under warranty. A rough estimate for maintenance on the SUV would be $2,500. This bring ups the cost of keeping the SUV up to $4,911 or $409.25 per month.

So $409.25 is the magic number that you can afford to pay every month for the new car. You would be trading in your SUV so that would lower the price of the new car. Go to kbb.com to check out how much your SUV is currently worth. Next deduct this from the price of the new car.

Now you need to figure out how much it would cost to finance this new car after you get the money from trading it in. We will assume you got $9,000 back so your purchase price on the new car will be $16,000.

If you have good credit, then you probably qualify for the 0% interest loans from the car dealers over a five year loan. I just googled car finance calculator and came up with this nifty little program. It says that you monthly payment would be $267.

This means that if you were to sell your SUV and buy a new car, you would save $142 every month. Sounds like a good time to buy to me. Don’t forget that you will be driving around in a brand new car and not some 8 year old SUV.

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Tags: Frugal, Gas prices, How to Save by David
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