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Should I Haggle For Something? Depends. What’s My Time Worth?

February 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

MoneyThere was an interesting post on Lifehacker recently about when is it worth to haggle. They had all kinds of ideas on what was worth bargaining for and what was not, to which I say, nonsense! How can you make this kind of decision without knowing the value of your time?

My time is worth about $75 per hour. How do I know this? Because that’s about how much money I can make in an hour if I focus just on making money.

  • This is based on my current consulting rate ($150 to $200 an hour)
  • Take into account the amount of time it would take me to find consulting work
  • Take into account the point of diminishing returns, which means I can’t literally spend 24 hours a day consulting
  • Take into account the amount of time I need to spend on breaks, eating and so on

So if X time devoted to bargaining is going to net me Y money, I should see if X over Y is greater than $75/hour. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Costs, Optimization, Saving Money Tagged With: , , , , ,

Starting My Own Business – Quick Update

January 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Diamonds or Dogs

Quick update on Diamonds or Dogs.

I added the “Diamonds” side of the site over the weekend, set up the landing page and moved a few blog posts over. I also added more posts and a few new female reviewers.

A few points:

  • I’m actually not an engineer, I learned most of this just by doing. The things I didn’t know I hired people to do.
  • Hiring people is easy these days. You can find qualified folks all over places like eLance or just by asking your network. My graphic designer was a girl I dated a few years ago and my developer is someone I’ve never met who I hired through a website. Total costs for both of them so far are around $700.
  • Total costs for the rest of the site are less than $100. That includes domain registration ($50), hosting ($10 a month), WordPress CMS (Free), Outbrain recommendations (Free), various Google tools (Free), Share This plug in to allow people to “like” posts and share them (Free), Feedburner plug in to allow people to subscribe to a feed of new items (free) and pizza for my first feedback session where my friends told me what they thought of the site ($30).
  • No complicated business issues so far. The only relationship I had to form was an affiliate one with Amazon. They’ll take care of actual ordering and fulfillment and then pass along a share of the profits. Sometime in the future I might work directly with drop shippers but that’s too complicated right now.
  • I’ve gotten amazing support through my network of friends and family. I’m about to publish my dad’s profile and first review plus one of my close friend just got his mom to sign up as a new reviewer.

Next!

My next goals are to start marketing the site.

  • AdWords campaign
  • Facebook campaign, which I’m hoping you, my readers, will help me with
  • eMail campaign
  • YouTube video. Yes, I have a good idea for a YouTube video about gift giving.

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Best of all, this has been a ton of fun and I’ve learned a lot.

Special thanks to my wonderful wife who keeps testing things, making sure what I write makes sense and giving my great ideas for how to improve the site.

Filed Under: Achieving Success, Goals, Making More Money, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , ,

Products Don’t Need To Be Perfect, They Just Need To Be Good Enough

January 18, 2012 By 1 Comment
This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Diamonds or Dogs

Steve JobsPerfection sucks. It’s the enemy of invention, it’s the thing that holds you back. Trying to reach it might be an ok goal but never finishing a project until it’s perfect is the work equivalent of dry humping, it feels good but you never really get to the point. Sorry, but perfection can go to hell, I’ll take good enough any day of the week.

I say all this because I’m struggling with finishing up Diamonds or Dogs, my gift site. There are so many things I want to do. I need more reviewers, more reviews, a better landing page, a better “about us” and more information on why the site is the way it is. That’s just the beginning of my to do list. However, the more I try to get the site perfect, the more I push off the important task of starting to drive traffic to the site. Yes, I want the site to look good but I also want to start doing marketing for it. I want to start linking to it, telling people about it, running an AdWords campaign and the dozens of other things I will need to do in order to get people to my site. I’m not doing any of those things because I’m working on the landing page… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Achieving Success, Making More Money, Optimization, Perfectionism, Step 1 - Priorities Tagged With: , , , ,

Starting A Business

January 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Diamonds or Dogs

lemonade stand posterWhen I was a freshman in college I came back home for the summer and my dad and I started a business selling chia pets. We made them in our garage and shipped them to stores around California. Actually, they weren’t Chia pets (because that’s someone else’s trademark) so we called them Green Heads, but they were essentially Chia Pets. We bought pantyhose from Target, filled them with saw dust from a lumber mill close by and grass seeds from Home Depot and then sold them to gift shops. It was fun and it made us a few hundred bucks. I also learned a lot about retail and manufacturing.

My senior year in college I started a comic book shop with a couple of friends. Actually, to give credit where credit is due, my friends did most of the work since they weren’t actually in college but I helped with everything from manual labor to business relations. It was pretty rough but doable with a minimum of resources and a lot of hard work. The store did well and you can still find Alternate Realities in the Lincoln Mall in Rhode Island (thank you Sue and Howie so very much for the wonderful experience). Again, it was a learning experience for me and I came out of it with a healthy respect for the power of accounting and inventory management. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Family, Friends, Goals, Making More Money, Step 2 - Make A Plan, Step 3 - Communicate Tagged With: , , , ,

The Plan For 2012

January 9, 2012 By 1 Comment

2012 !Earlier I wrote about my plan for 2011 and how that went, this post will be devoted to 2012.

Each of the items below is something I want to do or accomplish this year.  I’ve gone ahead and created a project for each one of these (nothing fancy, I just use tasks in Microsoft Outlook to track these).  Each project has various items under it that represent to do’s or tasks.  Accomplishing these tasks may lead to more tasks.  For example, when I figure out what I want to build from scratch I’ll have more to do’s around buying materials and making blue prints.

Each of these projects has measurements attached where possible.  These measurements are used to indicate success or failure.  for example, the blogging goal has a measurement of 1000 users per day to indicate success.  I then take this measurement and figure out what I need to do in order to achieve it.  Some goals, like children, have no measurements attached but in such a case I usually make a note to myself about why is it that I’m tracking this goal.  For example “I want to be a good parent”.  This will help me figure out what I need to do.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to my grand plan for 2012! [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication, Family, Goals, Losing Weight, Making More Money, Starting Out, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , , ,

How Did I Do On My 2011 Goals?

January 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

Happy new yearBack in January I posted these goals as the things I wanted to accomplish in 2011.  Looking through them now, I’ve accomplished a lot.  Yes, some of these goals failed and some only partially succeeded, but I aimed really high in 2011.  I also learned a lot about setting goals and creating plans; information which I am going to apply to 2012 goals. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Finance, Goals, Health, Jobs, Life Lesson, Perfectionism, Relationships, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , ,

Choose To Be Happy

August 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Roses...I’m on a plane to Austin right now.  I’m going to be meeting some customers there tomorrow and then flying back home tomorrow night.  When I boarded the flight I saw a sign that said “free Wifi mid air” and it occurred to me just how wonderful these times are that we live in.

Sixty years ago it took my grandparents two weeks to escape from Romania to Israel.  They huddled in trains and on ships, not quite sure where they were going or what was going to happen to them.  They left behind all their belongings and faced a completely unknown future.  And here I was, making a journey of about the same distance in comfort.  I sip my complimentary drink and surf the web 30,000 feet above the American southwest. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Goals, Happiness, Making More Money, Step 1 - Priorities Tagged With: , ,

All Of Life Is Sales And You’re The Product, So Learn How To Sell Yourself!

March 7, 2011 By 4 Comments

Sale In A Sale Shop Selling Sale SignsFirst of all, yes, all of life is sales.  You may not like it and you may think that’s not the way it should be, but it’s the way it is.  Whether you’re trying to get a job, get a raise, get a date, get married, get a house, get a loan, get into school or just get on that last flight home, you’re trying to sell something.  You want the other person to do something for you in return for whatever it is you’re trying to offer.  You need to understand that and get used to it.  Even when someone is doing you a “favor” you’re still selling.  You’re selling them on the fact that your friendship is important or that one day you’ll return the favor, or maybe you’re just selling them on the fact that if they do what you want you’ll stop bothering them.  Doesn’t matter, you’re still selling.  Don’t like that fact?  Too bad. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication, Getting Raises, Making More Money, Selling Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

You Miss 100% Of The Shots You Don’t Take

January 26, 2011 By 1 Comment

She said yes 2011 is off to an AWESOME start! I wrote about a couple of experiments a few weeks ago, one involving weight and the other involving money. Well, both experiments are going very well.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Losing Weight, Making More Money, Starting Out, Step 2 - Make A Plan, Step 4 - The First Step Tagged With: , , , , ,

Don’t Use Skepticism As An Excuse For Inaction

December 21, 2010 By 3 Comments

Now Is The Time To Try Something NewLast week Tim Ferris, of The 4-Hour Workweek fame, put out a new book called the The 4-Hour Body .  In it he describes the variety of ways in which he’s hacked apart his body and put together a healthy lifestyle.  It’s filled with a lot of tips, entertaining stories and a variety of pseudo science the likes of which every diet book contains.  It’s even got a great section about sexual performance with a hilarious addendum on sperm donation.  I picked up this book because I like Tim’s blog but I didn’t really have an intention to follow any of the ideas in it.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: 30 Day Experiments, Confidence, Decision Making, Losing Weight, Making More Money, Procrastination, Risk Assessment Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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