David Makes Cents .com

I, like many others, don’t really like my job. I work part-time at a grocery store in the produce department. It is not bad, but it is a lot of heavy lifting (most boxes weigh around 40-50 lbs) and by the end of the day I am usually pretty exhausted. So, to get to the point where I don’t have to work as much or not at all, I am trying to develop new ways to make money. So far I enjoy all the alternative income streams that I have developed, even if they aren’t making me a whole lot of money yet.

My New Arcade Website:

A while back I wrote about how I was starting my own business. This alternative income stream was essentially arcade website where you can play free online games. This site has actually been doing pretty well. I am getting about 50-60 unique people visiting the site everyday and they are playing about 300 games per day. I don’t really make any money when they play the games only when they click my ads but, I know they probably like my site if so many of them are stopping and playing the games.

This blog:

I enjoy writing about personal finance. This blog makes me keep track of my finances when I probably otherwise would not. It has also started to make small amounts of money for me. The real big advantage of it is probably not the money I make from it, but all the work I do to keep it up. I do a lot of research for this blog and that keeps me knowledgeable about my finances. I am now making smarter, better decisions with my money. I hope to be able to retire early. Also if you haven’t noticed yet, I have a goal of saving $100k by the time I graduate. This will be very tough, but I think I can do it.

Tutoring:

My fellow blogger at Paid Twice introduced me to tutoring. I have always enjoyed math and science and I often help friends at school with their homework when they need it. I might as well get paid for doing this right? Well I signed up to be an online tutor just a few days ago and once the school year starts hopefully I can start tutoring calculus, algebra, and physics. I don’t even know what the pay is yet but paidtwice has said it wasn’t bad. It isn’t hard to beat my part-time job income anyways. This alternative income probably also looks much better on a job resume then produce clerk does.

Investing in Gold:

A little over a month ago I invested in gold. I thought it was a sure thing and that I would make around $200 in about a month. Well it didn’t go exactly as planned. The price of gold dropped shortly after I bought it. It has taken all the way until yesterday for the price to come back to break even. Now I am finally up around $60.  The main reason it went down was because the fed starting talking about halting the rate cuts. Now that oil is going through the roof, gold is climbing up with it and making me a little bit of money. I have enjoyed investing though since otherwise my money would be sitting in the bank. With the economy as it is, I am afraid to invest in stocks right now so gold was my other option.

Prosper:

It was fun to loan out money to people in the beginning, but now that all my money is loaned out, it is kind of boring. I enjoyed reading people’s loan requests but I don’t get to do that much anymore. I do get monthly payments from all my borrowers  but this probably only amounts to about $50 or so a month meaning I can only find one new borrower per month. I have gotten a pretty decent return so far but I am skeptical that people may default in the future because of the poor economy. I will hold off on my final decision of whether I like it or not until 3 years or so when all the loans are paid of and I can calculate my return. But if you are interested in Prosper to lend you and I both can get $25 if you sign up through my referring link.

If you have any other alternative income ideas for me to try feel free to contact me or just leave a comment on any of my posts, I read them all.

Filed under: Economy, Investing, P2P Lending, business by David - 1 Comment →

Earlier today I was thinking about a post idea for this blog. It was going to be about the steps you should take to get out of debt. At first, I was thinking that you should establish an Emergency Fund then start paying off your credit cards. I feel like I have read this over and over so I figured that was probably right. Then I thought about it a little more and it didn’t make sense to me why you shouldn’t pay off the credit cards first and then establish the emergency fund.

Reasons for Paying off Cards first:

1) Why not? I guess that is not much of a reason but, really I don’t see much of a difference in putting your extra money in the bank or using it to pay down your credit cards first. Nowadays you can use your credit card to pay for just about anything so as long as you have the extra balance on your credit card to spend, it should be able to be used like money in the bank.

2) You get a much better return on your money. Once you have paid off part of your debt, you are essentially getting the APR you were paying on the credit card as your return. Often times that is upwards of 15-30% depending how bad your credit score is. That is much better than the 3% you would get if you put it in the bank. Actually, it is better than most people do in the stock market.

How it Could Backfire:

1) In a real, serious emergency credit might not be good enough. Sometimes cash is better. But the kind of emergencies I am thinking of probably would make money in the bank worthless too. If it were some sort of extreme disaster cash on hand might be the only thing you could use and maybe not even that. Those are pretty unlikely so we will just keep moving.

2) Some people don’t pay attention to how much they put on their cards. If you just keep on spending until they tell you your credit limit is up this strategy may not work. You would probably just spend any extra money you put to pay down the card. Maybe having this extra money in a bank account would help because it wouldn’t be as easy to spend as a credit card (assuming its not in a checking account).

Well, tell me what you think. Is it ok to pay off your credit cards before starting an emergency fund? Does it not really matter?

Filed under: Credit Cards, How to Save by David - 2 Comments →

I live in a small town that doesn’t offer trash and recycle pick-up for free like many large cities do. We have to pay for this service ourselves. There are three companies that offer trash pickup services. Two of them are very similar, just have slightly different prices. My parents (I live with them still if you didn’t know) would obviously choose the cheaper of those two. The third however, is different from the first two, it does not offer recycling pick-up. So here were my parents two options:

Option A: Trash and recycling services for 1 year.

Option B: Trash only, no recycling and Save $35 over the course of 1 year.

Yes this would mean we would throw away all of our bottles and newspapers etc. Surprisingly (to me) my parents chose Option B. I was very surprised when I heard this. I am kind of an environmentalist a little bit so this news made me sick to my stomach. It hurts every time I see my parents throw away a newspaper or glass bottle etc. I haven’t made a big fuss about it or anything like I usually do about things I like but it is eating away at me.

So I was wondering, am I just a big baby and should get over it? Which option would you choose? Is saving a little money worth it to you guys? I would love to hear what you guys think/ would do in this situation. Feel free to contact me or leave a comment. I look forward to hearing from you.

Filed under: Uncategorized by David - 8 Comments →