cash

Going Green: Help to make some green $$$ for a charity!

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Many of us work at home kind of bloggers use Laser printers a great deal! Even though we live in the digital age, we seem to produce even more papers than ever! So those old cartridges tend to lie around my office for ages, before I can figure out what to do with them! It’s not that I’m lazy, just forgetful! I know which stores have a recycling program! But when I go there, I always forget to pack up the old cartridge!

Now I’m guessing with the money available for recycling such items, a lot of volunteer groups could easily generate additional revenue to fund their activities, just by going round to small offices and homes and publicizing a pick-up service! FundingFactory will provide all the promotional materials and shipping. So there’s no real cash outlay at the beginning, but a nice check at the end!

Sponsored Post to promote a greener world!

February 2007 Income Update

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I guess it’s about time that I deliver my report to you all on my streams of income. The format for these reports is very flexible at the moment, as I go on with these reports, I hope to standardize the information more. However, I’ll present the information for February in the same way as January.

Well first, I have to restate January’s results by an additional $7.99. I missed an $8 payout for a posting from Payperpost. And I ditched Adbrite permanently. I had hoped that they would provide an additional source of income and alternative to Adsense, but after nearly four weeks of total inaccessibility (except through a proxy server) and no ads on my website, I finally mailed them to find out what was going on. They tweaked their ‘settings’ (whatever that means), and I ‘tweaked’ mine. Now Adbrite is history, I took a 1c bath on that!

February 2007.
Payperpost $149.00
Google $5.65
ReviewME $0.00
Other Blogs $15.00
Adlinks $10.63
Stockbroker $57.35
Hosting $107.69
Bank Interest $14.74
Journal $37.64
Business $307.69

The total for this month was in fact much higher: $705.39 altogether. I guess there were several new items:
a Chinese New Year bonus from my business (small, though welcome!), I finally sold a copy of my journal (a subscription, no less), and a customer from my hosting service renewed his hosting with me for another 12 months. Other changes included selling less text links on the top left ( perhaps a result of my blog dropping one PR placing from 5 to 4), I didn’t have any new clients for February at all (March is different!) on that count. Also, income from Investments dropped this month, as end of year capital gains distributions and bonuses were not included in February. On the bank interest front, I’m now making more as my CDs are renewing at higher and higher interest rates, currently approaching 2% (local rates here).

How is March shaping up? Well, I already sold two links for the year which will produce a nice bump. Interest income will increase somewhat as will dividend income. I’m increasing holdings in both areas from cash holding and cash in low interest bearing accounts.

A general overview will look at the range of income and the range of types of income. I’m not looking to only create an income from online activities, but also from ‘real’ world activities. In fact, there are 10 types of income in the statement. However, the general arrangement is below (for six months average)

Blog $168.36 46.07%
Stocks $66.37 18.16%
Hosting $32.12 8.79%
Bank $10.70 2.93%
Business $87.91 24.05%

General notes: Interest rates in Taiwan are different from U.S or U.K rates. All of these figures given are Gross Results – not including any taxes.

Anyway, the averages are much more favorable and suggest that I’ve reached about 30.4% of my target over the last 6 months, but February, it was nearly 2x that, at about 58.8%!

There are still two challenges ahead, though. #1 how to increase the total income to the minimum of $1200 per month and #2 how to stabilize the income over a longer period!

This is the Year of the Golden Pig (Boar)! I wonder if that will bode well or not for InvestorBlogger!

Tuesday’s Drop: Is it just China’s bubble? Or is it America’s too?

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It’s been three days since Tuesday’s large point drop, and the markets haven’t really recovered yet. Should we be concerned?
Chart from Yahoo! With Thanks.

This is just a personal opinion: but I’m not concerned at all. Why?

  1. The markets have risen steadily for months without a correction. In fact, many people believe that a correction was coming anyway.
  2. I’m not speculating in stocks at the moment. I do have some positions, but I have sold out my Tech stocks (taking a loss in the process).
  3. I don’t use money that I need or (I hope) will ever need.
  4. I wasn’t totally invested. In fact, up until this month I was sitting 25% in cash. Right now, I’m still about 11% in cash.
  5. I’m investing for income at the moment anyway. The stocks I have produced a fair dividend, albeit with some risk.
  6. With cash waiting, a correction like this could open opportunities to buy good stocks at attractive prices.

I don’t usually blog about the stock markets at the moment, since I don’t really have much expertise in them. But my hand was forced when I read John Mauldin’s latest newsletter Global Market Brief: China’s Engineered Drop written by George Friedman.

In the letter, he notes some scary statistics about the balloon that was developing China’s stock markets:

In January, the number of total traders on the Chinese exchanges grew by 1.38 million, an increase of 134 percent from a month earlier, while stock turnover was up 700 percent from a year earlier.

Given the penchant for Chinese to gamble anyway (and Taiwanese, I may add), whenever the stock market or property prices start to rise, or the lottery jackpots get bigger, we will see this phenomenon. Friedman notes that this is the first time that Chinese stock markets have had a major effect on Global Stockmarkets. One thing I’m sure about, this is not the last time!

I’d certainly welcome more informed comment from my readers…