Raising Money for your School with Schoolpop
I really love kids and even though I only choose to have one of my own I do what I can to help all kids especially when it comes to education. So when I was asked to look at a site called Schoolpop that offers simple elementary school fundraisers I was more then happy to do so. Now I have purchased things form kids that knock on my door or have parents bringing it to the office that range from candy to candles to popcorn and chocolate. They all have one thing in common, they are about 300% more expensive then buying the same thing from a store. Still we do it just to help out, right?
Schoolpop is totally different here is how it works strait from the Schoolpop website,
“Simply register with Schoolpop and start shopping. You don’t need to purchase anything you wouldn’t normally buy. Just shop with hundreds of Schoolpop merchants online, in stores, or through catalogs, and you’ll automatically earn contributions for your favorite school or nonprofit. All of our merchants are committed to helping your community by contributing a percentage of your purchases to the school or nonprofit of your choice.“
The beauty is you just buy things you would buy anyway and a percentage goes to your school of choice. To make this successful PTAs and Student Groups will need to be sure to advise the students and parents of the options but it is clear a decent sized school could do very well if each parent made even two-three purchases a year. All that and we don’t need to send our kids door to door giving people an excuse to overspend and break their diets. These guys definitely make my list of recommended sites.
Filed under Personal & Home | Comment (0)Protected: The easiest way to make money online
A great way to connect children to their roots
If you have read this blog for any length of time then you know I am big on teaching children to save, invest and understand money from an early age. What I have observed in talking with people from many generations is that there is a direct correlation between how a person views both money and debt and what generation they come from.
My Grandfather’s generation saw debt as a prison and felt that you should scrape and save every penny you could. My father was a lot like his grandfather and passed much of that wisdom to me but yet his generation was more open to some debt and some more free spending. In my generation people live in debt (I am a Gen X’r) and the Y generation is graduating college with enough debt to fund most first home mortgages. With each succeeding generation comes more spending, less savings and more debt.
I really feel it was my firm connection to immigrant grandparents that went through hell to get here, then dealt with the great depression and then served in World War 2 that cemented my firm conviction in the principles of saving, keeping debt low and always planning for a “rainy day” that I discuss on this blog.
One thing I think parents can do with children to ground them in these sound principles is to make sure they are connected to their roots. So when I was asked to look at a website where you could build a family tree for free I was happy to do it. The site is called Tribal Pages and it is very cool and at a cost of free it is a great low cost activity for you to do with your kids and involve the rest of the family.
As you build out your tree you have you are able to do it on your own free web page, other family members can view it online and help you fill in missing spots. (Don’t worry if you are not technical it is a very easy system to use.) I firmly believe that a child that knows their past and how hard their ancestors worked to ensure they could have the opportunities we do today will be more likely to value money and opportunity. When I interview and hire people from Gen X and Gen Y, I see a ton of “entitlement attitude” and it really bothers me. Most people today seem very disconnected from the reality of just 50 years ago.
So if you want your kids to value what they have and in fact if you want to value it more yourself I encourage you to research your past, build a family tree and understand why we have so much opportunity today. Research the values of your family a generation or three ago and build that connection. Tribal Pages definitely makes my list of recommended sites for providing a great service at no cost that helps families understand and preserve their identities.
Filed under Personal & Home | Comment (0)Tax rebate checks may be on the way
In an effort to stimulate the economy the congress and the president are working to provide an economic stimulus package. One big part will be sending most tax payers some of their tax money back, to the tune of from 300-800 dollars per taxpayer may be even as high as 1600 per household. You can read an article by newsday.com to get more specifics about it.
In any event I have mixed emotions about this. As a Libertarian I believe that all income tax is theft in the first place and I really can’t argue with the government giving back money they should have never taken in the first place. However, in this instance while not totally opposed (I just can’t oppose less tax no matter how it comes) I have sever very big concerns/issues with this plan.
- Right now everyone is worried about the 2008 election. So even Mr. and Mrs. raise taxes (Barak and Hillary) are behind this massive retroactive tax rebate. Make no mistake this is buying votes by both sides of the isle.
- True conservatives are always saying lower taxes are good for the economy and liberals always say that is wrong. Yet now that we are in deep shit everyone agrees cutting taxes makes the economy better? All this means is they all know all the time that low taxes are good and simply keep up the graduated income tax as a way to distract us all with “class warfare”.
- In most instances I don’t see cutting taxes as “spending” yet in this case it is pure reckless spending. Why? How? Simple, no one in congress is talking about cutting any expenditures to fund this rebate. In other words they are still going to spend all the money they were going to spend and GET THIS our country is OUT OF MONEY. So where will we get the billions to fund this rebate? Well the fed will fire up the presses and just print more money at least symbolically. Honestly though our government will borrow it from foreign governments and increase out debt. In other words you kids get to pay back you debt on your 800 bucks with interest and will have to do so with a dollar that is weaker in the world market every day.
- This package is a very short term fix. The whole theory is most people will “blow” their money and dump it in the economy and that will beef up spending for a bit and put more money into the economy and the rising tide will then float all boats. The theory is sound most people will blow it (instead of saving or paying on debt) and it will make it “better” but our “boat” has big holes in it. Make sense? This move won’t reduce US debt, reduce toxic consumer debt, fix the housing market or reduce our massive spending deficit.
So how could this plan actually work? You only have to change the spending equation on the side of the government to make it work very well. Check this way out,
- Require the government to give back at least the money they plan to right now.
- Require that they also cut 2 dollars in spending for every dollar returned to tax payers
That’s it! That would “stimulate the economy”! Our nation is not in trouble because our people spend to little, it is in trouble because the government takes too much of our money and then spends far more then even what they steal from us. Fix that problem, yes cut taxes but cut spending by 2 dollars for every dollar you refund to us.
Filed under Business & Marketing | Comments (4)Teaching kids to invest and think smart about money
I know a lot of adults that are doing what they can to teach kids about investing and saving money. The most common way is the good old fashioned piggy bank. There is something to be said especially with younger children to putting some change in a piggy bank. It is a good start but it is also quite limited. With the good old pig you always can open him up and raid the savings and the savings lack any type of leverage. You earn no interest and little Johnny’s or little Dorothy’s pennies end up worth less ever day, unless they are solid copper that is.
My view is it is important to have kids open their first bank account as soon as they are old enough to grasp the concept. A Roth IRA with some monthly contributions should be set up by age 12 and money should be discussed from a positive outlook. Don’t teach your children things like, “money is the root of all evil” as that is not the proverb anyway.
People that do well with money come from homes that discuss and value money. Now of course you must teach ethics, family values and over all life lessons as well. Your kids shouldn’t worry about money or believe it is the end all be all. Yet they should understand it and its power, both good and bad and you should teach them the Building Wealth Philosophy as early as possible.
One of my favorite books for parents helping kids learn to invest is Rich Dad Poor Dad for Teens The Secrets About Money–That You Don’t Learn in School! To me this book is an absolute must read.
One way or another make sure you are making things like money, avoiding toxic debt, savings and investing positive topics of discussion with your kids. I am not saying your kiddos first words should be leverage and interest over mamma and dada but you get the point.
Filed under Personal & Home | Comment (0)Double your money in the metal market with no investment
Ok, hold on, don’t get to excited. Indeed I am going to tell you exactly how to get an almost immediate 2 fold return on your money. I am also going to show you how to do it with out spending any money, hiring a broker or even with out doing any paperwork. However, I have to tell you right up front you are not going to get rich with this technique.
In fact this technique is first and foremost fun to do, second it is designed again to program you mind in how you think about words like “money” and “value” and finally last it is about actually making/investing money.
Now that big lump to the left is a chunk of raw copper. Copper has skyrocketed in both price and demand over the last ten years. Copper is used in countless industrial activities and as countries like China, Indonesia and India continue to modernize the demand will continue to grow and often to out pace production capacity. This issue will be compounded by the boom in coal, gold and silver. Consider that you are a mining company and you are choosing where to go and what to do next. You can either mine coal which is far easier then any metal or you can mine silver or gold which is worth far more then copper. Or last you can mine copper which is profitable but if you had the option what would you mine?
Great! So how does this help you double your money with out spending it? The answer is in the humble penny. Currently and since mid 1982 all U.S. pennies are made from mostly zinc with a copper cladding, basically a zinc coin with a very thin layer of copper on the outside. Such pennies are worth damn near nothing from a metal stand point. However, any penny that is older then 1982 is 95% copper and 5% zinc alloy. What does this mean? Let’s do some math.
Step one - When you look at pennies that are made from 1981 back they are heavier then today’s. In fact there are 146 pennies to a pound. Yet we must consider that such pennies are only 95% copper so 1.05 x 146 = 154 pennies make one pound of pure copper.
Step Two - 154 pennies even those from 1981 back are “worth” in currency a whopping $1.54
Step Three - Copper is currently trading at the time of this writing for $2.84 per pound. Hence 154 pennies are “worth” $2.84 in raw copper and copper is a commodity you can actually sell it for very close to the current spot price.
Step Four - Calculation of our return by simply dropping an 1981 or earlier penny into a “special” jar or container is as follows. $2.84 - $1.54 = $1.30 of “profit”. Now take you profit of $1.30 and devide it by your “initial investment” of $1.54 and you have a “instant return of investment” of 84%. Not quite double but as soon as copper goes back over 3 dollars a pound (which analysts believe will be quite soon) and you are at a full 100% return.
We should also consider that copper was trading for about 60-70 cents just 20 years ago and you start to realize just how high your “return” can be if you just start tossing all you pre 82 pennies into a jar for the next twenty years.
This is a great project for adults and kids alike. The bad news is again you are never going to get rich with this and in fact copper will have to go up to say 6 bucks a pound before you will really be able to “cash in” pennies in any real volume. The good news though is there is no doubt that over the years that will happen and because we are talking pennies not many people are making an effort to store away copper pennies.
In 1959 the U.S. stopped making the “wheat cent” and while most of those have been horded away by collectors from 1959 to 1981 100% of pennies produced in the US are 95% copper and virtually no one have really collectively valued them at anything more then one cent. That is 22 years worth of pennies still traveling around in circulation which means their are hundreds of millions of these pennies out there being spent every day. I always drop my pre 82 pennies in a jar and about 1 out of 5 tend to be pre 81’s. Over the years that is a lot of pennies.
So why do this? I mean save 4 dollars a month this way and you make about 4 in return and you have another 400 fricken pennies to deal with right? Short sighted my friend, the key is you don’t do very much to earn that return and most people are making less on their interest bearing savings accounts a month in America. All you do is follow my advice and “spend cash” and each day go through your pennies and drop any 81 or earlier examples into some special container. How much easier can “investing” be?
Just consider if in 10 years you had 15,400 pennies or $154 bucks. Those pennies if copper is at 6 bucks by then will be worth about get this, 600 dollars. Retirement money? Heck no! Just another little store house of money. Additionally while I never get to concerned with numismatic value because of how highly subjective it is there is another opportunity here.
See first let me warn you if you are currently thinking of buying 200,000 or so pennies from a bank, sorting them out and melting the older ones don’t do it! The U.S. Government will frown on that and possibly make you wear some silver bracelets and break a few rocks for a few years. Such activity is illegal for now anyway. Yet as copper keeps going up (and it will) sooner or later the mint will begin to “retire” the old copper. That is a nice way to say they will take the pennies out of circulation and harvest the copper for use. Of course the government is free to do that. This will make a lot of these 60s ad 70s pennies harder to come buy and add some numasmatic value to them as well.
That is many years into the future but let me ask you this. How cool would it have been if say your grandfather started collecting 1964 and earlier silver dimes for you when we stopped making them in 65? For about 10 good years it was easy to pluck silver quarters, dimes and half dollars from circulation. Today it is very rare to find one. I happen to own a huge pile of such coins put away for me by a very smart grandparent. This led to my love of silver in the first place. Today we have the opportunity to start doing something like that for our children, their children and possibly their children’s children. What would 100,000 Indian head pennies be worth today?
There is more at work here though tied to the production of pennies and the metal price. Do you know why 1982 was the year that the penny changed to a zinc core? In the early 80s all metal prices spiked for a while and even then a penny was worth more as copper then as a penny! So zinc was a cheap alternative and coating it in copper kept the penny looking like well, “a penny”.
Today though even zinc is rising in price and it costs about 8/10ths of a cent in raw metal to make a penny. That is before production costs, etc. This means the US Mint is Loosing Money to make pennies. Additionaly so long as people spend cash we can’t get rid of the penny we have to have something in order to make change of a dollar with. I predict therefore that the days of the humble Lincoln cent are numbered! The easy solution is to come up with coin made of something perhaps even cheaper then zinc and make it smaller too.
Since no vending machines take pennies there is no problem with changing the size of the penny. Don’t think it can’t happen either, they did it with the dollar coin. When sooner or later this change occurs it will be another numismatic bump in the value of all pennies and even more so to the all copper variety. So I encourage you to take the phrase, “save your pennies” with a new vision. Start plucking the little copper disks from circulation today and just put them away.
Filed under Personal & Home | Comments (3)Never resent a person doing better then you
Let me be blunt you will never and I mean never become wealthy so long as you resent people who are wealthy. This has been written about extensively by Robert Kiyosaki in his Rich Dad Poor Dad series. Yet I think it is worth repeating here because I believe it is the single biggest reason the poor and the broke stay poor and broke.
Follow this simple logic, in the 50s and 60s many blue collar families had parents working say construction (you can fill it in with just about any trade) and all through the 70s etc young men grew up and if they were not college bound aspired to work construction. Hence middle Americans worked construction jobs for many decades. These jobs paid for houses, college tuitions, retirements and life in general.
In short being a “construction worker” had a certain status. It was considered a good paying blue collar career. Sure you had to work hard but Americans valued hard work and some kids never wanted college they wanted to build things, run back hoes and tear old buildings down. Who can blame them while hard work playing with heavy equipment is kind of fun.
Now a whole book on why construction wages fell over the 80s, 90s and 2000’s could be written. Floods of illegal cheap labor, a weakening job market, etc. Today we also seem to believe that every child should go to college and get a degree. We have forgotten that we need a middle class, a blue collar work pool, we have stopped valuing hard physical work as an admirable quality.
So how many kids today have a positive view of being a back hoe operator, or framing houses or building roads? The answer is not many, today that is something most people “settle for” not what they aspire to. Hence not many young men grow up in the US and become construction workers any longer. The logic is quite simple when people have a negative view of a profession, a place in life, a title, etc. they tend not to become what they dislike.
Pretty obvious, not ground breaking, what does this all have to do with wealth and money?
Simple if you see rich people and grumble, if you think the guy that is already in the 35% tax bracket should pay more and if you think all corporate executives are “rich jerks” you are going to have a real hard time moving up in income. Even if you do you will become what I call the “highly paid broke“. That means you will blow all your money and simply match spending to your income to satisfy material needs.
I see people all the time that resent the wealthy and the rich. I watch them grumble when Bill Gates gives 4 Billion to charity, they say with irritation “well he has it to give”. Then you put together an office pool to buy kids toys at Christmas or help a needy family and these same people make excuses and often give nothing. Don’t get me wrong there are poor people that give all they can, very generous folks, most however, don’t resent the wealthy.
Simply put if you want to be wealthy you must first have a very positive view of wealthy people. You can’t begrudge a guy his lifestyle then expect to achieve it yourself. I believe as I stated before this is the NUMBER ONE reason people stay poor and or broke. So the next time the urge to scoff at a successful person crosses your path, ask yourself, “do I want to become wealthy?”.
If the answer is yes think twice before you reinforce to yourself once again that being wealthy is a negative thing only achieved by insiders, the greedy and the lazy. You are going to have a real diffcult time doing what it takes to become wealthy if that is your view of those who have already done it successfully.
Filed under Wealth & Investing | Comment (1)Advice from the broke is useless
I know this seems so obvious, never take advice on money, investing and business from the broke. The problem is it is not always easy to recognize the “broke”, when I refer to people that are broke I am not saying they live in a “poor house”, make very little money and eat mealy porridge. I simply mean they are broke as in more money goes out that comes in.
Broke people live next door to you, they live in neighborhoods that are both two steps down and two steps up from yours. Broke people are everywhere, most of the people in America are broke by my definition. They are the people in huge 50K dollar SUVs that they justify as being needed “to cart the kids around in”. Jeez, how big are these kids? They have beautiful homes, nice furniture and perhaps even lawn care service. Many have vacation homes or time shares or other true luxuries. How can I call these people broke?
Easy they are broke, they have very little to no surplus cash flow, they save next to nothing other then what perhaps goes automatically into a 401K (Thank God for that at least). They have TVs on credit, cars on credit, pools on credit, some have charged the very paint on their walls and the sofa they sit on. Cut off their income for 30 days and most would loose every thing they have. They are broke because they have no “wealth” only things, stuff and the appearance of wealth.
Such people are always big talkers. They tell you “now is the time to buy” or that “that business deal seems risky” and other wonderful nuggets of advice. They tell you how great that new SUV is, how wonderful owning a plasma TV is and they always have investment advice for you.
My advice is, don’t take their advice. If you follow the advice given by most people it will lead you down the same path they are on. In other words take advice from your uncle who has that beautiful house, nice cars and kids in top schools and you may just get their yourself. Yet you will probably do it “his way” (the normal way) and be in debt up to your eyeballs and working into extended retirement years just to pay the interest on all of it.
So where do you go for advice? To the successful, to the millionaires next door. Look for the guy that pays cash for everything, the woman that has a 6 figure job and a 150,000 dollar house and a sensible car along with a nice savings account, a good team of advisers and a very fat and growing Roth IRA. These people are not “broke” they could go with out work 6 months to a year with just a bit of sacrifice if they had to.
How do you find them? There are many of us, just talk to people and you will know right away.
- The broke talk about how expensive gas is and the wealthy talk about how efficient their cars are.
- The broke think rich people are “over paid” and “thieves” and the wealthy think the rich are “generous” and “admirable”
- The broke shop for “deals” on consumer goods, the wealthy look for “deals” on real estate and investments
- The broke think cars are status symbols and the wealthy think cars are a “necessary expense”
- The broke talk about “saving money” by spending it, the wealth talk about budgeting and investing the savings
Just realize it is not income that separates the broke from the wealthy. In my town I can show you people with a household income of 100K or more that are “broke” and I can show you some with a household income of say 70K that are very “wealthy”.
Just remember this and consider it when anyone advises you how to spend your money, what to buy, how to invest and on what is important or what is safe vs risky. Now I am not saying that no broke person ever gives any decent advice. Sure many times they do, just don’t let the broke counter your instincts or justify what you know to be a mistake for short term gratification.
Filed under Wealth & Investing | Comment (1)