I have A Plan

At the end of ’99 I gave up my secure job with no future or satisfaction and made a living out of online affiliate marketing. I wasn’t hugely successful, but I well and truly covered expenses, and in three years that I spent full time in affiliate marketing I was travelling for atleast nine months of that. When I was at home, I doubt I worked 20 hours a week.

I found lots of ways to make money, I developed a system that would make me $100 for about an hours work. Did I work 8 hours a day to capitalise on this ? nope. I did enough work to make a living. And as with everything on the internet if you don’t exploit an oppurtunity while it’s there, then other people will work out your system and copy it until it loses it’s value.

Towards the end of the three years I got sick of working in isolation in my spare room, and instead of finding something interesting to do to make a living, I let my business slip to the point I was borrowing money from my parents to get by. I ended up returning to the workforce.

At the moment I have a very secure job thatprovides me enough income to make me comfortable, though I’m still paying off the credit card debts I genereated when I let my business go to the scrap heap.

I’ve always maintained an interest in affiliate marketing and I have a few ideas that should generate several hundreds of dollars a day (if I put the effort in), but I keep cruising in my job because I like the life I have now, my job is interesting, I have a great social life and extra money won’t make me any happier.

However I am starting to crave the freedom I had when I was doing affiliate marketing fulltime. The only time I set an alarm in those three years was to catch a plane or catch a fish.

My plan now is to get into my several hundred dollars a day idea while I’m still working, and then possibly use the profits to launch another web business that I believe has the potential to put me into retirement in three years (I’m 33yo). The key to the new web business is that I’ll actually set up an office with staff so I don’t suffer from the isolation that I had when doing affiliate marketing from home.

I’m waffling so I’ll stop now.

Me and The Credit Cards Getting Busy

I’m a very busy boy at the moment, the pre christmas socialising commenced last week, I hardly seem to be home, two christmas functions last weekend, I’m off on my first of two weekends interstate in a couple of hours, I have the other weekends booked solid with functions and events.

My credit cards took a hammering last month, and with my hectic schedule making a drain on the finances it looks like I’ll be making minimum payments only until the new year. But I’ll deal with it all then, Having too much fun to worry about something so trivial like credit card debt. And for those that are saying that I need to tighten my belt, Life’s too short.

To illustrate the point, a guy I used to work with was killed in a motorcycle accident last week. I’m not saying don’t plan for the future, it’s just you never know which day is your last.

Joe left a comment on my blog, he’s doing it a lot tougher than me. Check out his blog, http://crcardblues.blogspot.com/. One of his recent posts talks about his frustration of dealing with a not for profit debt counselor.

This may surprise some people but my previous job used to involve debt collection. I’m not sure what the situation is like in the states but I’ve seen so called debt counsellors sending through payment proposals and offers on behalf of their clients. The fee’s they charge and the methods they use are disgusting.

One company demanded that all income (from employment and social security allowances) be put into a trust account and they then negotiated with the creditors for lower or reduced minimum payments. One guy was earning $40k a year, handing over all his cash, then getting a weekly allowance to live on from the debt counsellors. For this service they were charging him 10% of his income. I looked through the figures and they had developed a three year plan for the client to pay out his total debt of around $6,000. So for this service they were going to get paid $12,000 where as the client could have, worked out a simple budget and bowled it over in less than 12 months and saved himself $12,000.

It’s all evil I say.

Anyway posts here will be sporadic until the new year, and we’ll see what that brings for the credit card victim.

Just to let you know I’m still alive.

I just thought I’d drop by and let people know I’m still alive. All in life is good, going through money like water through a sieve at the moment, but I’m having a great time. Though it’s not helping the credit cards.

I did one of those dinky online surveys :

This Is My Life, Rated
Life:	5.6
Mind:	6.7
Body:	5.3
Spirit:	6.5
Friends/Family:	4.9
Love:	1.4
Finance:	5
Take the Rate My Life Quiz

It looks like I need to spend more time worrying about my love life than my credit cards !