The answer? The Starbucks’ Bearista!!

If you have a year 2000 Asia version of Dragon Bearista, you are sitting on gold. Check out the following eBay bid. The $12.95 9 inch tall bear is sold for $580! Yep, you are sitting on gold if you have a few of those.

Well, I am not that lucky. Plus, I only have to come up with about 50 bucks a month. Luckily, the Starbucks bearistas have become hot collectable items on eBay. There are some crazy bearista lovers who would spend 50 bucks on a single bear to complete their collections. I started buying and selling bears on eBay a couple of weeks ago. The profit I made in two days is enough to cover two months worth of White Mocha.

I know I won’t reach financial freedom by buying and selling the little teddy bears, but I can probably fatten up my Starbucks fund so I may not need to pay for Starbucks again – at least that’s what I am hoping for.

Laura Rowley, author of Money & Happiness wrote a letter to her younger self about what she wished she had known when she bought her first primary residence. Here are a few tips that I find quite insightful:

1. No need to feel bad to drag your agent to show you 100 houses for 3 months. It’s his/her job. And ask for Comp Data – what are the selling prices of the comparable homes in your area in the last 18 months.
2. Look at the bone structure of the place, rather the depressing decors or the faded wallpaper, because the wall color can be changed easily, but not the guts and bones of the house. Well, unless you are in the fixing and flipping business
3. Live in a home for at least one year before doing major renovations. You need to have a better idea of how the space is utilized to better understand what are the critical changes will be.
4. Convince your spouse or partner to use professional services to get the paining and the flooring job done all at once, rather than targeting room by room for the next 10 years.
5. Save every receipt from your renovation. When you sell, the IRS will allow you to include these renovation costs in calculating what you paid for your home.
6. Try your best to take a 15-year mortgage rather than 30. The amount of interest you will save is phenomenal. Use a calculator like the one on bankrates.com to see an amortized table. You will be amazed by the 6 digit saving.
7. Don’t be so quick to tear out the former owner’s quirky additions. That weird foam padding on the back of the attic door might have some practical use you don’t know about until you settle in for a while.
8. Do a little more research on the schools before you buy. You may not have or want kids, but it doesn’t mean your future homebuyers won’t either.

Click here for the original article

Every middle-class person probably has different opinions as what “extravagance” should be. So, here is my list:

1. Big Screen TV – I was house shopping lately and had perfect excuses to tour about 50 homes in the range of $300K - $390K in Denver area. Ironically, I have only found one 60 inch Plasma TV and another 60 inch DLP TV, Both families who own these large screen TVs are from the lower end Duplex homes. None of the single family home owners had those TVs. Plasma has become such a trendy thing that a lot of us, especially the young GenXers label the P-TV as a must have item. I think it is too extravagant for the middle class who makes about $60,000 a year to spend 3000 bucks on a TV. I once dropped $2400 on a 52 inch TV. To be honest, I think the flat screen big tube that costs 500 bucks works just fine.
2. Buying a house that is 4 times of our annual household income. We Americans want everything big! Big car, big hamburger and big house! In my mother’s little friend circle, everybody wants a 4000 sqft all brick home in the Brentwood neighborhood, which is the richest town in Nashville, TN. And most of them did buy these big houses. My jaw was dropping when I visited their homes this past Christmas. I don’t think any of us should go beyond the magic number of 3. If the house costs 3 times more than your household income, then let it go. Otherwise, you will be stretched so thin and your saving power will just disappear in the thin air if any unexpected events happen. And forget about saving for both kids’s college funds and retirement if you have a large house bill to pay.
3. Cars. Yeah, that sweet BMW coupe with the M-3 engine! A couple I know probably makes a combined income of 100K, yet they own $80K worth of cars. It’s a bit too much for car loans. As of me, I dream of having a Lexus 330 for some years! I almost bought one this year after wrecking my Honda. I make good salary and I thought I deserve it. But I only had $27K cash at that time; I had to let my Lexus go and bought a Toyota instead. I am happy that I don’t have any car loan and I intend to keep it that way. I will buy my dream Lexus one day if I can pay for it with cash.

So what is your thought on the “extravagant list”? Let’s hear it…

So if you ever want to give it a try, here is a pretty good guide about “How To Ask For Money On The Street” on wikiHow, a cardboard is highly recommended:

STEPS:

1. What you may read will be brash, and at times distasteful to the average bum. Hence, although blasphemous, you must realize that you are the vagabond of every city in the world, with the exception of maybe Washington D.C., where you may be praised as a Lobbyist.
2. Any sound plan begins with an initial investment of effort. Before we begin, make an effort to not reek of urine and make an effort to not alarm people with your depraved and desperate appearance/behavior

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I don’t know if you feel the same way, but this side gig income really excites me so I decide to boost my occastional one-dollar income to maybe.. one-dollar-everyday?
So I made the following changes with my friend Cyco Miko who’s a PHP expert:

1. Look through my stats and find out what pages are the highest hits from the search engine. I found out that my PhotoBlog is the most popuplar one. Especially this photo and this photo.
2. I decided to change the Ads location just on my PhotoBlog and Gallery to bring the Ads closer to the top of the pictures. According to Google Guide, that’s the “Hot Spot”.
3. I created channels to track the performances of each placement
4. I edited each photo in the hardest hit albums to include keywords and added poems to some photos to attract relevant Ads. This is hard work and I am no where near to be done. But the problem was that due to popularity of the photos, people started to leave lots and lots of comments. That sort of kind of distracted the converntration of the keywords and the relavant Ads always go away. But, as long as the readers are having fun, I am OK with less dollars.

I am making more than a dollar every day now. I sometimes bring in more than 3 dollars a day. Although it varies from day to day, but I am pretty happy that I can drink Starbucks for free and ocassionally buy my friends a few “FourBucks” coffee as well.

My goal right now is to increase the traffic to my blog sites, which are lot harder to do than images. But again, I believe in the “Turtle Theory”. As long as I make changes and improvements everyday, I will get there somehow.. But a project plan will help though… That’s next step after I am done with my house purchase in July.

1. Make your kitchen really cook. The kitchen is still considered the heart of the home. Potential home buyers make a beeline for this room when they first view a home for sale, so make sure your kitchen looks clean and reasonably updated.
   For a few hundred dollars, you can replace the kitchen faucet set, add new cabinet door handles and update old lighting fixtures with brighter, more energy-efficient ones.
   If you’ve got a slightly larger budget, you can give the cabinets themselves a makeover. “Rather than spring for a whole new cabinet system, which can be expensive, look into hiring a refacing company,” says serial remodeler Gwen Moran, co-author of “Build Your Own Home on a Shoestring.”
   “Many companies can remove cabinet doors and drawers, refinish the cabinet boxes, then add brand-new doors and drawers. With a fresh coat of paint over the whole set, your cabinets will look like new.”
   If you’re handy, you can order your own replacement cabinet doors and door fronts from retailers like Lowe’s Home Improvement or The Home Depot and install them yourself.
2. Give appliances a facelift. If your kitchen appliances don’t match, order new doors or face panels for them. When Nicole Persley, a Realtor with Real Estate of Florida, in Boca Raton, was sprucing up her own home to sell, her mix-and-match kitchen bothered her. The room had a white dishwasher, microwave and wall oven mixed with other pieces that were stainless steel with black trim.
   When Persley called the dishwasher manufacturer to see about ordering a new, black face panel, the customer service representative clued her in on a big secret: Many dishwasher panels are white on one side and black on the other.
   “All I had to do was unscrew two screws, slide out the panel and flip it around. Sure enough — it was black on the other side!”
   Persley, who has remodeled numerous homes for resale, says that a more cohesive-looking kitchen makes a big difference in the buyer’s mind — and in the home’s resale price.

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1. Research – 30 mins - 1 hour
2. Taking pictures and refine the pictures: 20 mins
3. Writing description: 15 mins
4. List the item: 10 mins

Total time spent on just one item could be anywhere from 75 minutes to nearly 2 hours!! Not to mention the 4 hours I spent on writing a HTML template with a StyleSheet.

Plus my regular day time job, I am working 16 hours a day. Boy, I am really exhausted. But hard work pays off. Finally, my eBay id acmekwglobal has an unique look and feel that I am pretty happy about.

So far, I have listed 15 items on the site and have about another 40 to go at the moment. But my mother’s retail store has about … boy…. 20000 different items!! Not sure if I will ever finish working on all of them.. But I will stick with my “turtle theory” and move a little bit forward every week. One day, I can build a sizable store. It’s a hard start, but I am really enjoying it, which is the most important thing.

I found a small guide called “My 13 steps to profitable auctions”. It’s pretty interesting and has some good insides. Check it out.

The $70 billion tax bill that’s likely to clear Congress this week would let upper-income taxpayers shelter future investment gains from taxes by converting traditional individual retirement accounts into Roth IRAs.
According to the current law, married taxpayers who have more than $16K in adjusted gross income and singles who have more than $110k can’t invest in a Roth. Starting in 2010, those people could contribute the maximum to a regular IRA, then turn around and convert it to a Roth to avoid capital gain taxes upon withdraw.

However, there are few things to keep in mind:

1. The taxes on conversion could take a bite out of your earnings. Not only you have to pay the tax on the contribution, but also the capital gain when you make the conversion.
2. What is your tax bracket going to be when you retire? If you are in a lower rate, then it might not make sense to pay higher tax up front to save lower tax rate later.

Here is an example to understand the impact of this law:

According to Deloitte Tax analysis on an conversion of 200K from traditional IRA to Roth IRA. In the scenario, the taxpayer would pay 33% on the account converted if he is in 33% income bracket. Assuming an 8% annual return on the investment, the taxpayer would come out ahead if his retirement tax bracket were 25% but lose money if his retirement tax rate were 15%.

So if you want my personal opinion, I am not too excited about this new law. Especially, I am a believer in saving today’s dollars. Here is a post I wrote in comparing Roth IRA and 401K. So I am just fine with the traditional IRAs.

However, I have always wondered if anyone would actually fall for their scams. Since I have been getting these emails ever since I posted my webmaster email account online (which by the way was a HUGE mistake), I guess there must be some business for them, otherwise, they would have changed ways to scam us…

I was shocked to read the following story. Not only these bastards are getting their dirty money from us, none of them was put behind the bars simply because it was a pretty lucrative business for Nigeria and the shitty corrupted government doesn’t do a darn thing about it. They even pointed fingers at us saying that if the Americans were not greedy, none of these could have happened. The sad thing is, the victims who have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars are usually the ones being prosecuted and put into our jails for money laundry, bank fraud and all other fraud counts.

Accoirding to the story published by “THE NEW YORKER”:

Eric Zahren, a spokesman for the Secret Service, the lead U.S. agency in investigating advance-fee frauds, says. The agency estimates that 419 swindlers gross hundreds of millions of dollars a year, not including losses by victims too embarrassed to complain. In February, the son of a prominent California psychiatrist named Louis A. Gottschalk—he identified what turned out to be early signs of Alzheimer’s in Ronald Reagan after analyzing his speech—filed suit seeking to remove his father from control over a family partnership, claiming that Gottschalk had lost more than a million dollars to Nigerian scammers. Some victims try to pass along their losses. The former Iowa congressman Edward Mezvinsky, who had refashioned himself as an international businessman, was caught up in a 419 scam, and during the nineteen-nineties stole from his law clients, friends, and even his mother-in-law to cover his losses. He is serving more than six years in prison after pleading guilty to thirty-one counts of fraud.

The article went into a great length to tell the story of fall of a minister who believed in God and educated people to fight against Satan. But in reality, he allowed himself to be taken over by greed and ultimately wired $600K via fraud checks to these Nigerians in addition to his personal assets worth of $80,000 hoping to receive 16 million dollars one day. He was sentenced to a 2-year prison term and ordered to pay back $600K. And he is a 62 years old man who thought he could have a happy retirement before all of these had happened.

It all goes back to the old saying, “You can’t cheat an honest man”. Indeed, there is no free lunch. If you can’t justify the money, don’t take it. It’s not yours and there is always a catch. After all, peace in our hearts is by far more important than the temporary comfort money can provide. So if it is not your money, let it go.

If you have time, read the entire story. It’s pretty sad.

Tip 2: Finding Growth

Just like the previous “saving money vs making money” discussion, I think Jonathan from MyMoneyBlog hit the bulls-eye: “Why not doing both?? “

Same principle applies to the real estate purchase : while cutting down the cost, why not finding a house that has potential to grow? I am not talking about sitting on the property waiting for the market to appreciate (although that’d be nice). There are ways to significantly boost your home value without major renovations.

1. Look for a room to add:
   The home I am negotiating now has only 2 bedrooms. Although it does have another den/sitting room on the main level, it doesn’t have a door so it is not qualified as a 3 bedroom house. There is actually a clause on the MLS remark for this house: 3rd bedroom to be confirmed. To qualify as a bedroom, I think there must be a closet, a window and door(s). I don’t think adding a door can be that difficult and all the sudden, I have a legitimate 3 bedroom home.
2. Try to add some more finished sqft.
   For an area that has lots of small older homes, every square footage counts. If you look at MLS provided by the realtor, there is a sqft number and a finished sqft number (usually including finished basement). If your neighborhood is sqft hungry like mine, the finished sqft number also matters a lot. So finding a home that has full basement with the potential to be finished can add a lot of value. Adding a sunroom may not be a bad idea either so look for a yard that is suitable for that type of home improvement. Not only you can add sqft to your home, a nicely finished basement and a bright relaxing sunroom also add lifestyle, uniqueness and excitement to the house. This kind of lifestyle “add-on” is usually the key factor to have the buyers to “Fall In Love” with the house.
3. Try to look beyond the cheesy décor and disgusting wall paint.
   A lot of home owners don’t stage their homes before selling so their own lifestyles and tastes turn away a lot of buyers. The home I am negotiating right now is painted in dark grey with horrible dark grey carpet. The bathroom got some very unpleasant black and white tile. With the owner’s ancient furniture and stone-age décor, the house seems quite depressing and we figured that was probably why it has been sitting on the market for so long. But, it is a very solid home comparing with majority of the homes we saw. It is very well maintained, and has a very nice floor plan. I can picture how charming this home will be after I give it a face lift and change its color and style. So, yes, definitely try to look beyond the wall color and the furniture and focus on the house itself. You can find diamond in the rough that other people can’t really see.

So I think the house I am buying has a lot of potential to be priced in a much higher category once I add a room and possibility some sqft, and insert some energy into it by adding lifestyle to the house. According to my market analysis, a 3 bed 2 baths with 1700 sqft can be sold for $425K - $500K depending on the condition. So, yes, I definitely think this home has some potential to grow. And such growth is able to help me to offset the market downturn if that happens.