Lazy Man and Money

Dog Sitting: My Two Month Review

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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?

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[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?

Are Flipping House Seminars a Scam
Are Flipping House Seminars a Scam?

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

My Dog Sitting Business is Taking Off!

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I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was going to try dog sitting to make some extra money. It’s a perfect fit for me since I love dogs and work from home.

I planned to wait a few months before writing an update. However, I’m going to jump the gun after a few weeks and declare it a success. I initially worried that I wouldn’t get business because I had no reviews… and that would lead to getting no reviews since I had no business. In an attempt to steer clear of this, I put my prices below market rates.

I also went the extra mile to make sure that my profile popped. I took pictures of our yard that made it look especially huge. (It really is large though.) I waited to take pictures of our house until after our cleaning service came. I tried to show off pictures of my dog enjoying himself at home.

I don’t know which played the biggest role, but the combination worked. It took a couple of weeks for the first request to come in. When it finally came in, a second one came the next day. A week later, I had a third request for that evening while I was sitting another dog. I write this having sat three dogs over a span of 10 days and having 8 more days of dog sitting lined up through the middle of September. Even at my cheap rates, I should take home nearly $400 in a little over a month.

It has some room to expand. I didn’t get “up to full speed” until the middle of August when the reviews were in. We are on vacation now, which means losing a week of business.

Now that I’ve given some of the financial highlights, let’s look at some of the low-lights. Maybe it’s just luck, but so far the oldest dog we’ve had is 2. Our own dog is a mellow 6 years old. I don’t know if it’s just that these dogs are young or if it is the excitement of the new environment. In any case, they are super-charged when they show up. Sometimes they get they so excited they can’t control their bladder.

With this business, we need to raise our budget for carpet cleaning supplies. In addition, I’ve found that these new dogs love my dog’s bones and toys. The cost of these aren’t really significant compared to the income, but it’s not zero.

The biggest difficulty is really the feedings. If one dog is getting food, they all want food. Fortunately, our baby gates serve the purpose of separating dogs too. Unfortunately, it is still difficult to feed 3 dogs and 2 kids under the age of 3, which I had to do recently. It’s not impossible and I’ll certainly get better with practice… and just maybe a plan or system of some kind.

Was I Scammed by this Kickstarter Campaign?

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Two years ago, I saw this very cool E-Ink watch on KickStarter. I wish they had a way to import video from here, but I’ll let you click that link and open up the campaign in a new tab.

If you watch the video, you’ll see the founders saying that they spent a year prototyping. They even show a working prototype. The company, Central Standard Timing, was looking for $200,000 and actually got more than a million dollars from over 7500 backers. Those are pretty big numbers.

In reading the FAQ they state, “You can back the watch on Kickstarter and we will ship you the watch as a reward when we ship. We expect to ship in September.”

The campaign was funded in February of 2013. The estimated 7 months has now stretched to 25 months… and it is going on 26. For those keeping track that’s 5x the budget and almost 4x the time.

I still have no watch.

A couple of people have claimed to have a received a watch. However, no one has actually stepped up with any proof of it. And those people have quickly disappeared from the conversation. The vast majority of the comments are people exploring legal action. Some have tried to get Kickstarter to intervene, but that hasn’t worked so far

It’s not as if the two founders have been completely silent. They have had quite a few updates… 29 of them to date. It’s just that they’ve been very irregular. They’ll post 4 updates in a month and then be silent for a couple of months. They post pictures like progress is actually happen. On Feb 4th, they posted a photo with 16 boxes saying that they are shipping. They showed a table with what appears to be 30-40 watches.

It’s been a month and a half since that update and a dozen comments come in every day asking what is going on. The people can see that the founders are logging into Kickstarter every couple of days and yet, there are no further updates. For what it is worth their last Twitter update was July 2014.

There isn’t an update saying that they shipped 30 units out or anything of that nature.

They are still taking pre-orders of the watch on their website. Even that says, “This is a pre-order, expected to ship summer of 2014.” Also, instead of the $129 I paid (some got in at $99 I think), they are now asking for $299.

I’m starting to wonder if they blew through all the money and it was much more expensive than they thought.

I think everyone understands that things can go wrong. Over the last two years, there have been enough updates of things that have gone wrong. However, at least that was communication. Communication is free and easy. It really is the least that anyone can ask for.

I read a lot of Kickstarter success stories. My sample size of this one campaign is probably not indicative of how things typically go. However, it should be a good reminder that things do go wrong. And when that happens, there aren’t a lot of places you can turn. You can’t make the founders give you an update. You can’t make Kickstarter leave a message that they are investigating it.

You really can’t do anything. And while it does nothing to help the situation, having a blog to vent helps a little.

Solving My Too Much Mr. Nice Guy Problem

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When I went to college to study computer science, there was an unfortunate side effect. I became “The Computer Guy.” Whenever anyone had a problem with a computer they’d come to me. And I’d help them as I lack all ability to say no. Sometimes that leads to me not having enough time or energy to get my own work done as well as I would have liked.

I found that most people have unrealistic expectations of “Computer Guys.” I was expected to have a success rate of 100%. Maybe it’s because mechanics generally have 100% success rate. I tried to explain that computers are extremely complex systems. There is a lot of very complex software installed on them… many of which I’ve never heard of. It’s a little bit like being a doctor. You probably are very good at diagnosing and solving the most common stuff, but if someone comes with a Dr. House odd case, it’s baffling. And with millions of pieces of software written every day, there’s no possible way one person can stay on top it.

The most difficult part, was explaining that I write software, I don’t fix other people’s software or hardware. It’s like expecting a podiatrist to be a great dentist (I’m loving doctor analogies today). They are both in a broad medicine field, but they deal with very different things.

As my interests shifted to creating websites, I got more requests along that nature. You know, “Hey, I want to get my business online. Can you help me?” The good news is that I can get a website up and running in 30 minutes, maybe even faster, if you tempt me with a burrito.

As an optimist, I always think of this best case scenario. I also (wrongly) presume that people are as super-frugal like me. I’m not going to charge people for 30 minutes of my time. I’ve got plenty of spare hosting space on my server. So I can essentially get them up and running for free… or the price of them buying their domain name. I’d rather solidify our friendship. Maybe they can help me someday.

The bad news is that once I get the website up, there are endless typically requests about customizing it. Most of the time, they don’t know what they want. They sometimes see a few websites they like and want to piece together bits from all of them. Then they want to do very small changes, move this icon here… and that pixel there. It makes sense, this is their business and they put in a lot of hard work to make it successful.

The vast majority of these people, such as a local dentist, doesn’t need this much customization. In fact, trying to be perfect is the enemy of getting something very good up and running. Most business owners may think they need a lot of information on their website. However, their clients are typically going to Google, typing in the name of their business to get a phone number or driving directions. As long as a website serves their needs and looks professional, it’s a win.

Should I start directing people to hosting companies? Most of them, such as 1&1, have design tools that anyone can use to make a website look professional. It isn’t free, but it isn’t expensive. Also, it’s money customers had offered to pay me anyway. And if they get in trouble, the websites often have professional help who can even do it all for them.

I’m kind of stuck not knowing what to do. On one hand, I love helping people. On the other hand, I always seem to be juggling at least five projects without counting these one-off ones. I have one friend who haven’t been able to get to in awhile now and it almost seems like a lose-lose situation. Fortunately, she’s dragged her feet for years with the website when I was available to help, so she’s very understanding.

I think I’m going to try the hosting solution and see how it goes.