Lazy Man and Money

Twitter Just Saved Me Money: Quickbooks Pro Free Today Only ($199 Savings)

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I’d like to thank Free From Broke for passing along news via Twitter that Quickbooks Pro is free after rebate today from Staples. I’m really tempted to pick this up and graduate from Excel for my businesses. The biggest issue I have is that it’s a whopping $160 mail-in rebate. I have never trusted rebates because the “breakage” (hoops they make you jump through in hopes that you’ll disqualify yourself from being eligible) is so high. Still, this is something that I could use and at the price of free, it’s hard not to take advantage.

This brings up an interesting side note. I’ve only been on Twitter a few days now (follow me: https://twitter.com/LazyManAndMoney) and I’ve found tremendous value in the relationships there. I’ve helped Tim Ferris, author of The 4-Hour Workweek find tickets to a sold out show in my neighborhood (I consider SF my neighborhood even though I live about 20 minutes away). It’s networking and creating contacts like this that may be extremely helpful to me down the line.

At the very least, I’m learning a lot and getting great advice on questions I have that aren’t worth a full blog post.

I’ve Joined the Dark Side – Twitter

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About a month ago, I wrote a draft about how Twitter, FaceBook, and all the copycats seem to me to be ginormous wastes of time. It wasn’t too long ago, I got wrapped into instant messaging and found that I spent 5 or more hours there a day – much of it just chatting about nothing of importance.

With Twitter, I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to tell other people that they are eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. That’s not the kind of thing that I want to read. Yet today, I’ve taken the plunge, you can now follow Lazy Man on Twitter.

The obvious question here, is “What changed?” I think it’s a combination of a few different things:

  • Connecting With other influential people – Jeremy from Generation X Finance said that he has been able to meet some interesting people – and not just people in the personal finance circle.
  • It doesn’t have to be all PB&Js – I realized that Twitter would be perfect for the times where I don’t have a full post – just a quick idea that’s worth sharing. For instance, I might read that ColdStone Creamery is giving away free ice cream tomorrow during a certain time. That’s perfect for Twitter. I don’t think I could stretch that to 300-500 words of something that you’d want to read as a regular post.
  • It allows me to be a little more personal – If I’m having lunch at John’s Grill, a setting in The Maltese Falcon, I could share that. I’ll try to keep these down to a minimum – it’s a fine line between that and PB&Js for many people. I predict this will be easy for me as I don’t live an exciting life :-).

I’m still having trouble getting into FaceBook. I realize it’s a chicken and egg scenario – it’s hard for me to get anything out of if I don’t put something into it. Maybe it’s just a matter of taking baby steps.