Affluent beggars
February 8, 2007 | Filed Under Entrepreneurship, Business Opportunities, Money making as young | Leave a Comment
You can earn a great amount of money by begging. As long as you do not waste it on alcohol and drugs you can live a pretty nice life. This family makes $300 daily by begging and sometimes as much as $800, they refer to themselves as “affluent beggars.”
Golden Rules for Making Money
August 11, 2006 | Filed Under essence of e-books, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Money making as young | 4 Comments
When a book is more than 100 years old the copyright expires. That is why P.T Barnum’s masterpiece from 1880 is freely available for reading online. The book is known under two names: “Art of Money Getting” and “Golden Rules for Making Money.”
I’ve browsed through some of the chapters and this is really good stuff. 126 years old and it is basically the same advice as Donald Trump gave me in his “How to get rich.”
A few good chapters are:
WHATEVER YOU DO, DO IT WITH ALL YOUR MIGHT
LEARN SOMETHING USEFUL
READ THE NEWSPAPERS
BE POLITE AND KIND TO YOUR CUSTOMERS
DON’T BLAB
PRESERVE YOUR INTEGRITY
Have a look at it and enjoy the basic, common sense advice that clearly stood the test of time and inspired countless of later “how to get rich” books.
Help a felon find employment
July 27, 2006 | Filed Under learning from failure, Practical tips, hard labour, Money making as young | 2 Comments
Interesting question from a woman who wants her brother in law to find work. He is a felon and is having a hard time getting a job:
”This person is 24 years old and is under medical treatment for bipolar disorder and ADD. He is a high school graduate, but has not pursued any vocational training beyond that (this is not a possibility now, either, due to financial constraints and a need to gain employment ASAP to support himself). Previous jobs have included kitchen work in a restaurant, food prep and counter work in a deli/bagel shop, roofing, and warehouse jobs. He has left these jobs due to either conflict with management/coworkers, or a lack of steady hours.
Now, understandably, he’s having tremendous difficulty lining up any kind of work.”
The ask.metafilter community have lots of interesting answers.
Ranging from the unethical, but extremely practical: “The other option is to put “no” to the felony question on employment applications. IANAL but I am almost certain that this is NOT illegal but is simply a civil matter, providing he’s not applying for something like daycare or some sort of licensed trade. The worst that can happen is they do a background check and tell him to get lost. This won’t work for getting a job at IBM of course, but a lot of businesses don’t run checks, particularly small businesses and quite a few entry-level positions. If he starts small, it may not come up later — and even if it does, he has still scored a nice period of employment.”
To more conventional suggestions about going to college or back to kitchen work. It sure is no easy way to solve this, but the man is 24 years old and is ready to make changes to his life. Read the full post here.
Good to Great: 5 reasons why some beggars earn more money than you
July 26, 2006 | Filed Under money, short term profits, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities, Money making as young | 16 Comments
Get something for doing nothing. After walking around in big cities in Europe I have discovered the 5 habits of successful beggars.
1. Keep your voice down
Ask for some change, but do not be loud! Be soft spoken, almost silent. By keeping your voice down you force the unlucky by-passer to stop to hear what you have to say. Once they stop, your chance for success increases!
2. Be “honest”
They know you are not going to use their change to buy a bus-ticket. Try to give them a likable reason to give you money.
This works: ”Yo, I’ve been doing drugs for 2 days and really need to eat something, can you spare some change so I can buy me some bread?”
This fails: “Yo, can you spare some change, I need to take the bus”
In the first example you are undressing your soul in front of them, who can resist giving you money? In the latter example you are just lying and they walk away.
3. Be clean and nicely dressed
All great salesmen try to imitate the prospective buyer. By dressing similar to the ones you beg from you are bridging the gap between you and them. I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but it is easier to give to your own type! If they meet someone very different from themselves it is easier to just walk away.
4. Remember a sucker
If someone gives you money you better remember their face. Then you need to acknowledge them every day you see them by greeting them with “Good Morning Sir!”, “Lovely day, eh?” This will remind them about the day they gave you money, and they know you hope that they will give you more. It is painful to walk away from you after you have been nice to them by remembering their face. Two things happen, either they walk another way to work, or they will give you money to ease the tension they feel inside!
5. Learn to love rejection
95% will not give you money. Love it! You get the opportunity to show how good and clever you are. Shout after them “Have a nice day!”, “Thank you, bye”, “No problem, thank you very much Miss”, “Enjoy the rest of your day Sir!”
The result is that they will think: “Oh.. he was pretty nice.. maybe next time..”
Got more tricks used by beggars? Please feel free to share them.
Get rich mumbo jumbo?
July 19, 2006 | Filed Under money, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, hard labour, Money making as young | Leave a Comment
Get rich quick schemes is one thing, to think yourself rich is another. There are countless variations out there. The owner of the blog Towards Better Life has recently jumped on a new idea:
“Recently I have come a cross four very important words: Easy, Relax, Healthy, Positive. I encounter these words in Steve Pavlina is Million Dollar Experiment. I have participate in this experiment and I’m currently holding the following intention:
In an easy and relaxed manner, in a healthy and positive way, in its own perfect time, for the highest good of all, I intend $1,000,000 to come into my life and into the lives of everyone who holds this intention.”
I wish him all the success, but to be frank, to me, this sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo. But that is just me. I would rather read Golden Rules for Making Money (P. T. Barnum 1880) one more time. It contains genuine no bullshit advice for any aspiring entrepreneur.
College Startup sold for $1400, or $17 per post
July 14, 2006 | Filed Under Money making as young | 2 Comments
The College Startup asset was sold for $1400 to “Problogging“.
The site is 8-9 months old and has 82 postings. That gives a price per post of $1400/82 = $17. In addition comes work with link building, being a part of the blogosphere and so on. Also, the site has a great positioning as “make money from your dorm room.”
I look forward to see what happens to the site. As you all know, I was a bit worried for a moment.
Update: Problogging resides on Problogging.com. It is not “the Problogger” who has bought it. Sorry for the mistake. Thanks for informing me, Darren. Link fixed.
Make some money on Sunday’s World Cup final
July 6, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, rich on eBay, Entrepreneurship, Practical tips, Business Opportunities, Money making as young | Leave a Comment
I surf around the money making sites of the blogosphere and found this little piece of gold: sell shirts that you make at a CafePress store on eBay.
Sunday is world cup final. Italy - France. Using this scheme you can make some money on Sunday. After the match is over you can sell shirts with the following slogans, sold on eBay (depending on the match incidents):
Italy - France: 2-1
Thierre Henry and Cristiano Ronaldo: The jokes of the Premiership.
It was not offside!
I am sure you can come up with your own suggestions.
The risks of selling your blog
July 6, 2006 | Filed Under Art of the Deal, Start ups, Entrepreneurship, How to create a successful blog, Money making as young | 1 Comment
College-Startup.com is a damn good blog with a great positioning in the blogosphere: One college student, on a quest, to make money.
Now it is put up for sale. Starting bid $1000. The price includes a Google PR rank of 5, unique design, pages indexed in Google, all the posts, a high technorati rank, links from high profile sites like ProBlogger and a monthly income of about $100 if I remember correctly.
The minute after I read the news, I removed my permanent link to College Startup.
But why Money Matador? Why are you removing the link to such a jolly fine blog?
The success and quality of blogs are heavily correlated to the inputs of the owner. A new owner may continue what was already started, he may even improve on the “product.” Or he may just put up lots of spam pages and monetize it with adsense to milk the juice of the site. Even though, there are probably cheaper domains to buy if you want to go that down that route.
Either way, I take down the link and wait for the outcome.
Hah! Nobody cares if your little pimple blog removes the link
Probably very true! But, if some other more influential blog owners think like me..
Another issue is the damage to the blog if it is not sold. Will the readers of the blog have the same relationship to it when they know the owner tried to sell it and was unsuccessful?
Let’s finish with a conspiracy theory
I am just writing this post to negotiate a lower price than the “buy now” price of $6500.
Edit:
He has already received a bid of $1200 and a blog real estate expert claims it is worth at least $1600.
10 reasons your great start-up is gonna fail
June 21, 2006 | Filed Under Start ups, Entrepreneurship, Money making as young | 1 Comment
When discussing entrepreneurship, starting your own company, making money on your own and so on with friends and acquintances, a lot of people seem to have a very pessimistic outlook on their opportunities to create wealth for themselves.
The law of Jante
This is of course written from a North European standpoint where the “Jante Law” often comes into play. Allow me to quote the law, from Wikipedia:
“There are 10 different rules in the law, but they are all variations on a single theme and are usually referred to as a homogeneous unit: Don’t think you’re anyone special or that you’re better than us. The 10 rules are:
- You shall not think that you are special.
- You shall not think that you are of the same standing as us.
- You shall not think that you are smarter than us.
- Don’t fancy yourself as being better than us.
- You shall not think that you know more than us.
- You shall not think that you are more important than us.
- You shall not think that you are good at anything.
- You shall not laugh at us.
- You shall not think that anyone cares about you.
- You shall not think that you can teach us anything. “
It is damn difficult to make serious money if laws like this keep you down.
Selling firewood
June 17, 2006 | Filed Under manual labour, Money making as young | 4 Comments
If you have access to natural resources like trees and wood you can count yourself lucky.
Easy to sell, but do not forget the delayed gratification
When I was 17-18 years old I chopped down wood all summer, put an advert in the classifieds section of the local newspaper in the winter and people started to call me.
It was easy to sell because the demand for firewood was high at the time due to rising electricity prices. The alternative cost of using firewood instead of electricity to heat your home was favourable, therefore creating demand for my products.
The downside of it is that it is very hard work to do for a lifetime and it can be hard to expand the business due to limited natural resources (only had a tiny tiny forest to work with). Another thing you have to be aware of is “delayed gratification.” You work during the summer to produce the firewood, then it has to dry for a few months before you can sell it in the winter when people demand it. You will not get your money until 4-7 months after the work is put in.
How to become filthy rich in the firewood business?
As I worked with all this wood I had plenty of time to ponder about that particular question. The solution if I was to go into the business on a larger scale would be to import wood from countries with low wages and plenty of resources. In Europe this would be Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. By importing the goods I would gain 2 things:
1) No more hard labour for myself
2) The business was easily expandable because you could only import more if you wanted to sell more.
Of course, this transformed the business from a production based enterprise to the art of marketing and selling firewood.
At the time there were several other people doing this import of wood from low cost countries so I decided to not go through with it. A few years later the price of firewood had dropped due to the competition.
An OK option for young people
To conclude, firewood is like a commodity. I think it would be pretty hard to become filthy rich by selling it, but if you enjoy some hard work on your own, I think it is a nice little earner for teenagers or children that want to earn some extra in their vacation.