Freezing in NH

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should be starting some sort of website (other than a blog) to bring in some outside income.  My employer is happy with my work but they are in a declining industry so it’s time for me to be looking around.  Anyway, I’ve had some thoughts but ran across another site today that seemed interesting. 

It’s a site that sells term papers and such.  Check them out and see what you think. It’s quick and easy to sign up, and then they bill you a fee per month ($29.95) until you cancel. I like the idea of setting up something that will produce a stream of income, and the monthly charge is a pretty good idea. I’m not in school anymore (nor in a business where I need to write any sort of position paper) so the site itself isn’t that useful to me, but it’s a really good idea. I didn’t join so I can’t vouch for the quality of any of the papers.

If you do join, come back and leave a comment about the site so we’ll know it’s worth it.  I wonder if they pay for nicely written papers.

As a followup to my last post (about baby steps and continuous improvement) here’s Deer in the Headlights Decison-Making. The take-home message is “don’t freeze, when conditions change, you need to change too”. Or as he puts it in conventional wisdom:

This is the first day of the rest of your life.

The NYTimes Small Business section has some interesting articles this week. 

Don’t Go West, Young Man. Buy Yourself a Franchise Instead

“I pretty much knew I didn’t want to go and apply for jobs and fight against the rest of the working class and try to stand out above it,” Mr. McGee, 24, said. “So I started shopping for a franchise because I figured it would be a good opportunity for someone to hold my hand through the whole thing.”

Costco Offers Health Insurance to Business Owners

Costco is now offering small-business health insurance plans for customers in five states on the West Coast — Nevada, Oregon, Hawaii, Washington and California. The program is available to Costco executive members — the premium level of membership offered at $100 a year — and was designed to cater to small-business owners and employees who cannot afford coverage.

Can you afford to follow your dreams? Can you afford NOT to?

Saw an interesting post worth reading on Wisebread the other day:

Lest you think I’m just a sentimental idealist, we also realized (how practical of us!) that the relative value of the financial security we were pursuing wasn’t very high. Even if we paid off all of our debt more rapidly than we could possibly imagine, we wouldn’t be satisfied. We would be more secure, but not happy. The money that we could then accumulate (when we were not longer using it to pay off debt) could not buy us our dreams, nor the years spent not pursuing them. For us, that price was simply not worth paying.

Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?  Interesting question.  I wish I had more education about financial stuff, and less about which president came in which order (and other things I could look up easily).   I mean, I’m not bad at math (as long as I have paper and pencil, or a calculator) so balancing my checkbook was easy, but I had no idea about taxes, retirement accounts, real estate, etc.  I’m not sure how you’d teach that sort of thing in school, but we could have had a few examples of compound interest in math class.  For example a couple questions about saving for retirement and a couple about how much you spend by paying the minimum on your credit cards.  If we had ten minutes of that every couple weeks for a few years, it might have sunk in. 

I also wish my college had an accounting course.  And maybe one basic business course as well.  I think they would have gotten enough students to fill it easily.  Doesn’t everyone dream of starting a business at one point or another?

Some tips on how to make habits and keep track of all the little steps:

How to use a checklist to focus your entrepreneurial efforts

Checklists for a Successful Life

24 Daily Habits

Pricing - Can You Charge More for Your Services? Summary:  Yes!

It’s Not Just Honey.  A discussion of Burt’s Bees, which started out as a small business and is now quite a bit more!

Money Smart Life talks about the business he’d start with a 50K windfall.  I think it’s an interesting idea, and maybe could be done for a lot less than that price.  You’d need some initial advertising, but some could be word of mouth and flyers.  You’d need a truck or two, but could probably get away with a used pickup and trailer.   Rent a smaller place with room for expansion.  I think he could start with 20k or less, and that kind of money (assuming the “begging and borrowing” method of financing rather than the windfall) would allow him more flexibility than being crushed under the payments on a larger debt.

The NYTimes Small Business Toolkit reviews “The Small Business Savings Plan” by Timothy R. Gase.  The take-home bullet points are “involve your employees — reward them for saving money” and “ask what you’d do if a recession hit, and start doing those things now”. 

I just discovered a new section in the NYTimes devoted to small business.  There are a couple interesting articles, and I hope to see more in time.

When it Comes to Careers, Change is a Constant
How to Be More Effective (and Less Annoying and Counterproductive)
Entrepreneurs Can Earn Their Stripes in the Minor Leagues, Too

And more…check it out.

BusinessWeek has a nice small business section http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/. 

The article She Did it Her Way is interesting (and the women very inspiring) but it seems a bit patronizing.  The lead question is “Why are women bailing from Corporate America?” and the answer seems to be “because they wanted to do things their own way”.  If this were an article about men, would it be phrased the same way?  I think it would say “because they want to be in charge” or “because they want to make more money” or even “because they want to be in control”.  I don’t think the motivations are that much different, just that the media slants things certain ways based either on the preconceptions of the writer, or because the writer thinks it’s what the audience wants to hear.

 Anyway, it’s not a bad article, go read it.