Entrepreneurism Archives - Lazy Man and Money

Want It? Maybe You Do. (Plus an Exclusive Offer for Lazy Man Readers.)

March 1, 2018 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

I get dozens of emails every day. (Don’t we all?) Unfortunately a lot of those emails border on spam. There are people shooting out thousands of emails looking for any website owner to promote their stuff.

I’m a bit of a sucker. I write too many of these people back. Fortunately, I have a couple of form letters that makes responding to most requests very quick.

Because a lot of these are quasi-spam to start with, writing back the people is help only once in a blue moon.

Today, I’d like to tell you about one of those blue moons. The initial email wasn’t as spammy as most, but it start off with the general, “I’ve been reading your website and I’m a fan of your work.” I don’t think anyone writing me with such words have taken 30 seconds to leave a thoughtful comment on any of my articles.

The email continued on to say that the company was starting an Indiegogo campaign. The company is an alternative to Craigslist, OfferUp or any of those community sites where you might physically trade products in exchange for money. One of the reasons why an alternative is necessary is because there are a lot of scams on Craigslist. There are so many scams that Craigslist even has a page about it. You might not think that cashier’s checks could lead to a scam, but they can.

It seems like whenever we post something on Craigslist the first two people to contact us will be scammers. So I’ll all for an alternative that fixes the problem.

Introducing Want It

The company that is hoping to change all this is called Want It. Here’s a video introduction about how it works.

I hope you were able to watch that video as it really explained it better than I could.

Right off the top, I have to ask you to keep your expectations fairly low. The company is really new and the founder is bootstrapping it. This isn’t a case where they got $10 million in venture capital funding. I have some doubts about their ability to compete against the big companies and build a critical mass of listings. It’s a ginormous challenge.

There are probably dozens of reasons why Want It won’t work out. However, that describes just about every start-up in all of history, right? Instead of dwelling on the negative, let me give you two of the reasons why it will work out:

It solves a problem. I really can’t express how big this Craigslist scamming problem feels to me.
The founder himself. I’ve exchanged a lot of emails with Redmond Parker and one impression I got is that he’s all hustle all the time. One of the reasons why I chose the name Lazy Man is because I can’t seem to manage the motivation/drive to take an idea and bring it to life. Parker appears to be just the opposite to me.

Want It is raising some money through Indiegogo. They are raffling some cool items. At least people tell me they are cool, but I’m not hip enough to recognize a few of them. You may be interested in the Coachella tickets. It seems like the odds of you winning them are pretty high given the few people who have supported the campaign thus far.

I’ve made a couple of very minor suggestions to Parker and he’s agreed they are good ideas and implemented them. That’s one of the really cool things about working with a company at this stage. It reminds me when I saw Mint and Credit Karma were just offices with boxes piled up to the ceiling and not even a beta product to show off. Sometimes companies do make it big.

Want It is offering readers a “special perk” if you click through this link to the Indiegogo campaign. That perk is unlimited featured listings for life for $49. Everyone else will pay $69-79. You get to beta test the application (which is kind of a silly perk to pay for, but whatever) and entry in the raffle for the Coachella tickets.

If the company flames out, you’ll likely lost your money and get nothing. Featured listings only mean something if the company exists and does well. The raffle entries really only count if you win the raffle. So rather than looking at this as a “What in it for me?” situation, I’d like to twist it around and say, “Thinking of it as investing in a person or as investing in entrepreneurism itself.”

For full disclosure, I was going to this write up as a sponsored post, which is a fairly high rate. However, I felt strongly enough about the idea and the character/hustle of Parker that I took no money. Instead, I’ll be receiving featured listings for life and no Coachella entries (good luck to everyone else). I’ll see you at the beta test.

Hosting a Yard Sale Made Easy

August 29, 2017 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

Welcome to Limbo Week. That’s the week after camp ends, just before school begins. It’s difficult to get work done, but we’ve been learning about dinosaurs (thanks Dino Dana) and math (Cyberchase – both streaming free if you have Amazon Prime.) I also picked up some very basic Disney workbooks from DollarTree: first reading, addition/subtraction, and time/money. It’s amazing what a dollar can buy you these days!

Limbo Week is so crazy that I’m introducing it on a Wednesday! I’m going to do things a little differently today and go with a shorter article. Like Zombo Com, I can do anything during Limbo Week.

This past weekend, I found out how easy hosting a yard sale can really be. And by “I”, I mean my wife. That’s tip #1 to hosting an easy yard sale: Pass it off to your spouse… and hope he/she doesn’t read your blog that day. It wasn’t like I was just eating Bonbons on the couch, I was watching the kids and dog sitting… while eating Bonbons on the couch.

The yard sale hosting tip I wanted to share was renting a table at a community sale. One of the reasons why we don’t have a yard sale is that we’d have to create signs, advertise in Craigslist, and all that stuff to bring the traffic to us. All that just to waste 5 hours in the morning with people talking you down from 50 cents to 15 cents on everything. I have a friend who just donates everything to Goodwill and takes a tax write-off.

My wife found a community yard sale at a local church. The table fee was $30, which might be a tax deductible donation (check with your tax advisor). I figured that even if we didn’t sell anything, we’d still be helping out a charity. My wife brought a bunch of baby clothes and baby toys that we could no longer use. She ended up selling over $100 worth, to make a profit of $70. At the end of the yard sale it still looked to me like we had as much as she started with, but she assured me that it was much, much less. I suppose it would have to be because making $70 at 50 cents and a $1 here and there is a lot of selling.

Making $70-$75 isn’t exactly going to change our lives. However, the idea that someone else can reuse the products to help the environment and clear some of the garage/basement is big. It feels like a triple win for us and I’m sure the buyers feel the same way.

While on the topic of buyers, I love saving money by buying stuff at yard sales. We built a room from yard sale stuff.

I brought the kids to this yard sale for a little bit and ended up finding a very basic checkers game for $1, this Spin and Store food storage set for $2, and this Brain Quest America game for $2.

There’s another church sale in October. If the schedule lines up, we’ll be back with a lot more to sell.

The article above may have affiliate links where I may earn a small commission if you buy any of the products.

How Much Would You Pay For Online Content (Not Mine)

July 28, 2017 by Lazy Man 5 Comments

A week or two ago, my Twitter feed started blowing up with talk about a new website, Boston Sport Journal. It immediately caught my attention, because I initially started blogging with some friends on a similar-named website back in 2004. Also, I follow a LOT of Boston sports.

Think of how much you should follow something and then multiply it by a hundred. That’s what a neophyte would spend to follow as much Boston sports as I do. I’m greatly exaggerating to get the point across. And if you hate Boston sports, that’s cool and you can keep on reading. I’m going to write generically, and you can follow along as if it were something you might be interested, even if it happens to be the Jets and Yankees.

(Side Note: I want to specifically state that I was NOT paid for this review. These people probably don’t know that this website exists.)

There were three unique things about this website from the start.

1. The People Involved

The website is started by Greg Bedard, Sean McAdam, and Christopher Price. Or at least those were the first names attached. Bedard worked for Sport Illustrated for years, but I remember mostly with The Boston Globe from 2010-2013. McAdam has been covering the Red Sox in paper, radio, and TV for at least a decade now. He’s everywhere. Christopher Price is a newer name to me, but the only person who covers the New England Patriots like him is Mike Reiss.

These three journalists shouldn’t even be available. They wouldn’t be… except there been big layoffs at Sports Illustrated and ESPN. I don’t pretend to know the sports journalism industry, but it is hyper-competitive nowadays. Here are a couple of articles on that topic.

2. The Business Model

This is one of the few content website start-ups I’ve seen that are looking to charge a subscription on day one. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but people aren’t used to paying for content on the Internet. As John Oliver has covered before, this is a very bad thing.

However, we all like to save money and there’s a lot of free information out there. There’s so much that it’s impossible for anyone to keep track of what’s being published every day.

The pricing is around $5 a month, but it gets cheaper if you are willing to pay up front for a 1 year or 3 year commitment. You can even buy a lifetime membership. Students get special pricing and active duty military is free. (I didn’t see a senior discounts, which all that I can think is missing.)

Will people pay for sports content when the free model doesn’t seem to be keeping great journalists involved? That’s the elephant in the room.

The other potential problem is that there will still be ads. As they say, “We also need the right corporate sponsors to help offset our travel expenses so we can be your eyes and ears when the teams are away from Fenway, Gillette and TD Garden.”

I would think those travel expenses get quite expensive. Fortunately, as a personal finance blogger, I don’t need to travel.

3. What if the Website was Done Differently and Better?

Here is a great pitch from their about page:

Other things we can promise you:

Our coverage will be hyperlocal to Boston and New England. If it doesn’t matter to you, it doesn’t matter to us.
No clickbait articles or contrived opinions. While we will be striving to provide exclusive, interesting and unique news and analysis, we’re not going to be outlandish just to gain attention. We will mean what we say, and say what we mean. And if we don’t? Call us out on it. Our focus comes back to one thing: is it the coverage you want and deserve.

There will be no discussion about politics. We want to this to be an oasis from the outside world.

We will be interactive and accessible. Lots of Q&As, mailbags, in-game chats and Tweet-ups. Podcasts, videos and other multimedia projects are in the works. The only wall at BSJ is the paywall. Once inside, we are here for you. Want my opinion on a blown coverage from a Patriots game? Ask somewhere and I’ll give you my best insight. Same goes for the rest of the staff.

We will not clutter up your experience with annoying ads and autoplay videos. We want this to be a place where you feel at home and never want to leave. We’ll be striving to make it the best experience possible for you.

The use of clickbait on the Internet has become a real problem in my opinion. I try to stay away from that kind of stuff as best I can. (Unfortunately, sometimes I accidentally write a title that turns out to be more clickbait that I thought.)

The politics discussion should go without saying, but unfortunately that isn’t the case for one Boston sports radio station. It doesn’t help that it’s very right when the community is very left. You’d think it would hurt ratings, but it seems to be a contrived opinion and a radio version of clickbait to get calls. The callers call in and then get cut down even when they are have good opinions. However, they usually only take calls where they can easily disprove the point of view. Interestingly sports discussion has taken a backstage to his form of entertainment cesspool. (Now you know how I really feel.)

Some of the rest of their promises might sound like the kind of thing that you get here. I try to interact with you as much as possible. I eliminated most of the annoying ads (I think). Of course, I don’t charge you anything so I need to keep the ads.

Back around 2010, I had hoped to launch Be Better Now as a self-improvement website with a similar style. I couldn’t find the time or the right partners to pull the website together as I had hoped. I have high hopes that someday I will be able to make it into a great community of content and people.

In the meantime, I’ll keep an eye on Boston Sports Journal. I’m curious to see if it works.

Dog Sitting: My Two Month Review

October 14, 2015 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

A couple of months ago, I announced that I’d be jumping a new gig – dog sitting. It was a no-brainer because dogs are awesome, they love me, and we have a perfect fenced set-up for it. Oh and I noticed that I could make around $30 a day per dog. As if that wasn’t enough, the dogs will be good company for own dog.

It’s responsibility, but think it is what some professional athletes think, “I get paid money to play games… life is good!” Unfortunately, dog sitting will not be making me quarterback money any time soon.

I’m on two dog sitting services, Rover.com and DogVacay.com. I prefer DogVacay as the interface is better and the rates for hosting seems to higher. Unfortunately, I seem to find every technical glitch with DogVacay. I got an anxious dog mommy a couple of weekends ago when the DogVacay app didn’t send pictures as it claimed to have. Lesson learned: Still with good old MMS or uploading through the website.

The worst part was that their dog Vincent has been by far the most well-behaved we’ve had. It’s not that the other dogs weren’t well-behaved, but he was like a movie dog where he’d sit and ask for permission a paw wave before coming into your lap. After their stay, I wrote back that I’d give them a discount. I didn’t get a response. Oh well, you can’t please everyone.

Enough of that, let’s get to some numbers:

How much can you expect to earn dog sitting?

This is going to vary greatly depending on how many reviews you have, how you set prices, and demand in your area. The person I take my dog to when I’m on vacation usually has 4-6 dogs there and her rates are higher because she has awesome ratings and sends pictures about every half hour. (Seriously, I once got at least 20 pictures in the first two hours.) Some of the dogs are her own, but if we just to estimate $40 by 4 dogs and account for a little vacancy, it can be $150 a day. That’s more than $50,000 a year. It’s a lot of work dealing with that many dogs, but it does have income replacement potential for the top sitters.

But I didn’t title this a 2-month review to write about that person. I want to give my own data.

I have a spreadsheet that I set up. Record keeping is key. It has the dates the dog stayed, dog name, dog breed, age, owner information, vet information. I’m tempted to create a little database, just because it would be fun.

The thing I use the most though, is the money columns. I have what owners pay and what my cut is. The services take 15% for insurance and matchmaking. It automatically extends numbers based on the dates of the dogs’ stay. I then let some Excel formula do their thing. The result gives the following information:

I’ve netted (including booked) $976.65 through the end of October.
In September it was $15.27 per day due to a popular Labor Day with multiple dogs (and a lot of days with no dogs).
In October it is $10.97 per day. For some reason, Rover has come up big for me this month.
Annually, I am on a pace to net $4,193.85 or around $350 a month.

I think that $350 a month is the number I want to focus on. If that average holds up over the long term, it’s like eliminating a car payment. That’s not chump change by a long-shot.

Much of my personal finance situation this year has stayed the course. I think I’m going to add a projected dog-sitting income to my annual $200,000 in retirement income next year. I’ll probably be conservative and put it at $2,500 in case we travel more in retirement. In either case, it feels good to add another diversified income. Every little bit helps.

Are FortuneBuilders’ House Flipping Seminars a Scam?

November 20, 2016 by Lazy Man 149 Comments

[Editor’s Note: This article was refreshed on October 2, 2015. See the end of article for general change history.]

The other day I overheard a conversation between two people about flipping houses. One person went to a seminar over the weekend to learn to flip houses. I cringed, but bit my tongue and didn’t say anything.

I’ve been hearing commercials on the local radio for these seminars for a couple of months now. One of the stars of “Flip This House!”, Than Merrill, was pitching the seminar saying something to the effect that he needs a few business partners in the area. The company running the seminars is called FortuneBuilders. Medford, Oregon’s KTVL News 10 covers a few snippets of the commercial here:

Radio Ad:

“Do you want to learn how to make a ton of money flipping houses right here in Medford? My team and I are looking for a handful of people in the Medford area who want to learn how to consistently make a lot of money, per deal, in your spare time, without using any of your own money… Medford is a perfect market for my system.

KTVL News 10:

“It almost sounds too good to be true… kind of like a scam.”

Did that wording make your Spidey-sense tingle like it did mine?

It definitely sounded like a scam to me as I heard the same pitch in Rhode Island, thousands of miles away. It make you wonder if there are a lot of “perfect markets.”

As my friend likes to say, “We have ‘The Google!'”

Using “The Google”, I found that there was a warning about FortuneBuilder seminars on Cleveland.com a couple of years ago. Than Merrill’s seminars have gotten a review of NBC12 News Investigation that found, “Some of the advice we heard ranged from the questionable – to the absurd.” You kind find the warnings about the seminars in Michigan as well. Even in Washington state where you’d have to be more or less a registered contractor to flip a house, the advertising continued.

Indeed it seems like FortuneBuilders has found a lot of “perfect markets.”

Getting back to the conversation that I had overheard. The person was obviously excited about what she learned this weekend. She explained to her friend how that seminar was free, but that this next one was going to cost $1200 to get into all the details. As that Cleveland.com article says, “The Cincinnati Better Business Bureau, which sent staffers to one of Merrill’s seminars downstate two weeks ago, said organizers told the crowd that its three-day real estate investment course costs $1,200 but those signed up that day could get it for $200.”

A tremendous price difference like that raises another huge red flag for me. Is the value of the course $200 or $1200? I understand early bird pricing with seminars, but it usually 1/6th the price to act now or 6x more to think about it and research the FortuneBuilders overnight. I’ve seen a difference of a hundred dollars for the first few days… but this level is extreme. It reminds me of when a RainSoft salesman offered thousands of dollars in free soap if I signed that day.

I have to give FortuneBuilders a little credit for learning from how drug dealers work. Get them in for free and hook them with a combination of an extreme urgency deal and use the sunk costs to push the next thing.

The “Business” of Flipping Houses

I can see how people get sucked in. I love watching house flipping shows on television. I get sucked into Flipping Vegas. I find it entertaining when Scott goes ape-poop crazy if there’s an extra $300 expense. Or when one of his contractors asks for an extra scoop of porridge only to receive 30 lashings (this may not have actually happened). Then he drives off in one of his million dollar sports cars at the end of the show. He might be the nuttiest-nut on television.

I also love watching Flipping Boston. I feel like I grew up with Peter and Dave, just as Boston as Boston can be. I tell my DVR to record every episode. I particularly like these shows for background noise while I do work. I don’t have to follow it like an episode of 24.

Here’s the thing about these shows: they are entertainment. Have you noticed that they never lose money on a house? I must have seen 200 of these shows in my life and I can’t recall ever seeing them end up in the red. They seem to make at least $50,000 for about 5-6 weeks of work… EVERY TIME. It’s easy to see how someone could watch these shows and think, “I can make a half million a year doing this.”

And when you hear a too-good-to-be-true-sounding radio pitch from FortuneBuilders, you almost wonder how anyone escapes it.

What the Flip This House viewers might not realize is that the people in the shows are professionals and have been doing this for years. It’s their full-time job, not something they do on the weekend to make a little extra cash. It isn’t done in their spare time as the radio suggests. In many cases they are contractors and designers themselves which allow them to cut major costs of hiring contractors and designers. With the shows themselves, I often wonder if they get a break on some labor and materials as a kickback for having them featured in the show. All of these things are impossible to duplicate for the average amateur. Even a professional isn’t going to a break on labor or materials for advertising a brand on television.

FortuneBuilders Criticized by Yahoo Finance

In November 2014, Yahoo Finance criticized their marketing techniques. It called them out for not being transparent that they are trying to lure people into the $34,000 program. It also questioned them for telling people to put that money on credit cards with double digit interest.

The response was that people were “investing in themselves” with a comparison being made to college. That drew more criticism as these seminars aren’t accredited and there’s no transparency into where the money is going like colleges and universities.

If you want to use the same logic, why not pay me $34,000 to teach you how to blog. Hey it’s investing in yourself, right?

FortuneBuilders Isn’t Alone. See: Armando Montelongo

Years ago, I meant to write how Armando Montelongo was doing a similar thing using Flip This House to sell his teaching kit. Unfortunately, I never got the article off the cutting room floor.

Fortunately, Forbes did… and their article was a lot more scolding than mine would have been. With an “F” from the Better Business Bureau, he’s raking in $50 million selling house flipping kits. The Forbes article is a great read at how dangerous the advice can be in flipping houses (such as taking on a large amount of high-interest debt). That seems to be a theme with seminars costing tens of thousands of dollars. Robert Kiyosaki’s seminars were caught doing the same thing.

FortuneBuilders Conclusion

I don’t want to discourage people from being entrepreneurs and I certainly don’t want to discourage them from getting education. This seems close to some of the MLMs that I cover, where the people making the money aren’t the ones digging for gold… they are the ones selling the shovels and pick axes. And like with the MLMs, extremely few people seem to ever find a speck of gold.

The ones that do are trumpeted as examples of success. Consumers aren’t given the full picture. If they were, people might not buy the shovels and pick axes.

My advice as usual. Stay away from high-cost, unaccredited, seminars that rarely seem to work. As Mark Cuban says: “I don’t broadcast my great deals. I keep them all to myself. The 2nd thing to remember is that if the person selling the deal was so smart, they would be rich beyond rich rather than trolling the streets looking to turn you into a sucker. There are no shortcuts.”

In short, if Than Merrill really found a perfect market, he would not be likely to be telling people about it. He’d hire a group of managers and contractors in the area to take advantage of the situation.

Refreshes

This article has undergone what I call refreshing. Sometimes, I get more information from readers in the comments or I’ll read another article on the topic. I feel like incorporating this information into the article improves the reader experience. I tend to class them as minor and major refreshes.

January 1, 2015 Refresh (Minor)

– Added information from Yahoo Finance review.

October 2, 2015 Refresh (Major)

– Changed Title from Flip This House to FortuneBuilders. When I was starting my research, I went off the name Than Merrill who I knew from Flip This House. I don’t recall the commercial saying anything about FortuneBuilders and my initial research into this was from Armando Montelongo also from Flip This House. Montelongo has his own $25,000 house flipping seminars. Armed with more information, it isn’t fair for me to categorize this as being related to Flip This House as the show’s producers may not be connected. However, it is worth noting the connection.

– Added Medford, Oregon’s KTVL News 10’s coverage

– Added Conclusion