Free from 9 to 5

The new year brings new beginnings… and endings. Thus, this grand blog experiment is coming to a close. Actually, it’s been closed for a long time now; I just didn’t want it to be so. I haven’t made an entry at all during 2007 because nothing has happened. This quitting the dayjob thing is HARD. So all the more credit goes to people who started the journey with me at the about same time and made it, like Ian
Landsman of Userscape.

All my attempts at starting businesses have failed. I still have a dayjob, albeit a different (better) job than the one I had when I started this blog, but it’s still a suffocating cubicle existence. Despite my enthusiastic, and perhaps naive, forays into entrepreneurship, I’m pretty much back in square one.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do next. This blog will remain here to chronicle my failed attempts, maybe it’ll help someone, but unless something substantial happens, it won’t be updated anymore.

Thanks for reading.

Wanting to replace a 200,000 mile clunker, I came across two good websites on how to buy a car for the best price, Fighting Chance and CarBuyingTips.com. I had the chance to put the tips to work this past week. I didn’t use everything they offered, but enough that I think I got a good deal.

CarBuyingTips.com is just loaded with information on buying a car. Spend a few hours reading through the site and you’ll be a more informed carbuyer. Fighting Chance is a pay site that will provide you with information and market data to help you determine the best price for a particular car make and model. They’ll also make themselves available by phone for any coaching you want or questions you have. I didn’t use the pay portion of Fighting Chance, but their website is still has some information you can use to gain an advantage in negotiations.

Tips from these websites, coupled with my wife’s negotiating skills perfected through years of bargain shopping and my willingness, nay, eagerness, to just walk out when the salesperson started playing games, got us a Honda Pilot 2WD LX for $1700 below the invoice price. And not that sticker price means anything anymore these days, but it’s about $4000 off the sticker price.

The most important tip I used was to buy at the end of the month, when the dealership wants to meet their quotas. If they meet a certain quota, they get a kickback from the manufacturer (not sure if “kickback” is the right term but you get the drift). Knowing this and sensing that they were just trying to hold out for that last two hundred dollars, we left the dealership, asking them to call us back if they want to sell to us at the price we gave them. We were in no great hurry or need (another advantage for us). They called us back 2 days later. After the deal concluded, the salesperson admitted that they were trying to meet a quota before January and having a car sold was more important than the price it sold at, even at a loss. If they meet their quota, I’m sure the kickback they receive will more than make up for the loss (if any, I’m not so sure) on the vehicle they sold us.

During that 2 days waiting for them to call us back, I also did the so-called “Fax Attack”, where I faxed several other dealers in the area, seeing if they would beat the price we wanted for the car we wanted. This wasn’t very successful. Only one dealer responded, with a higher price. So either I didn’t do it quite right, or we got lucky in that we happened to visit the one dealer that really needed the sale.

I read David Bach’s The Automatic Millionaire over a year ago and have been meaning to implement the ideas found there, but haven’t gotten it all done until now. But I finally did it! I got my financial house into even more order. Here are some details of my particular setup:

• Every paycheck, 17% goes into a 401K, 80% invested in stock funds, 20% in bond funds.
• The net goes to a checking account. From there:
  • 5% goes to an ING Orange savings account. This is my emergency fund. I have enough here for one year’s expenses.
  • 5% goes to another ING Orange savings account. This is my vacation/goodies fund.
  • 40% goes to a Firstrade brokerage account to be invested in index funds as follows:
    • 20% to an international index fund (VGTSX)
    • 20% to a small cap index fund (NAESX)
    • 25% to a mid cap index fund (VMGIX)
    • 20% to a large cap index fund (VIVAX)
    • 10% to a bond index fund (VBMFX)
    • 5% to a REIT index fund (VGSIX)

    I use Firstrade because they have $0 commission on mutual funds. I hope they can stick around for a while and not get acquired! (I previously transferred a Roth IRA to BrownCo to get away from E-Trade’s high fees, only to have E-Trade acquire BrownCo a few months later! Goodbye, $60 account transfer fee!)

  • 50% stays here for monthly expenses and the mortgage (mortgage is automatically deducted from checking account every month). I would have monthly bills automatically deducted as well, but I don’t trust the phone or credit card companies, plus I want to review all charges before paying. I do have a “bill paying system” though (I pin them to a prominently placed corkboard in my office as soon as they come in), so I rarely miss any bill payments (only missed 1 ever; forgot to pin it to the corkboard!).

All this is automated with direct deposit and scheduled ACH transfers. Paycheck is direct deposited to my checking account. Since my paychecks come bi-weekly, I set up bi-weekly 5% withdrawals to both ING accounts with ING’s Automatic Savings Plan. And Firstrade allows you to set up periodic investments into mutuals funds, withdrawing money from a bank account. I could direct deposit directly to ING and pick up a few days more of interest every month, but should I need to, I find it’s much easier to change things in ING than to change my direct deposit amounts through my employer.

What about an IRA?

I usually don’t know if I qualify for a Roth IRA or not until I do my taxes each year, so for my IRA, I wait until my CPA tells me what kind of IRA I qualify for, and I write a check for it. My IRA’s are also invested in index funds (and always have been). I treat doing this as part of my tax return, so every year around April, I max out my IRA for the previous year using money from my vacation fund and/or emergency fund. I know, this is not strictly an emergency, but I always replenish the emergency fund when necessary. Besides, I don’t want to open yet another account.

Now I don’t have to worry too much about investments anymore, other than an annual reallocation. Before doing this, my 401k mutal fund returns and IRA index funds returns never fail to top my own stock picking returns, so going index funds all the way is probably for the best as far as I’m concerned. (Well, not reallyALL the way… I still have a separate brokerage account where I can play around with stocks if I want to, but there’s not much in there and I’m not adding any more. I don’t want to lose any more money!)

For some context into my choices, I’m in my early 30’s with no debt except for my mortgage. If there’s something I could be doing better, please let me know! This financial structure should ensure that I will someday be free from 9 to 5, if not as soon as I would like.

Before you can be free from 9 to 5, you have to know the state of your finances. How much do you spend every month? How much income do you need every month? Is your new venture making enough to allow you to quit your dayjob?

I’ve been using Quicken for 5 years now, and it tells me at a glance how my finances are doing. I know when any of my accounts are off by a penny. I know exactly how profitable each of my ventures are. I spend just about an hour every month getting all my information in, mostly by downloading data from bank, brokerage and credit card accounts.

Quicken already comes with categories for classifying your income/expenses, but I like to create more categories for things I want to track in more detail. For example, Quicken has a “Groceries” category, but I’ve broken it down further into Ralphs, Albertsons, etc. My “Auto” category is broken down by each car I own, and then into gas, repairs, insurance, etc. And everytime I take a vacation, I create a category for it and put all vacation expenses in there, so at the end, I know how much it cost me. This may sound extreme, but it’s taken me 5 years to get to this point and it is second nature by now.

I find the knowledge of where your money comes from and how it is spent to be invaluable, not just in terms of tracking income/expenses, but also for planning and forecasting. If you’re not already using some sort of personal finance program, I’d highly recommend doing so. It won’t speed or guarantee your freedom from 9 to 5, but it can play a part in facilitating it.

Pamela Slim’s open letter to CXO’s highlights what is wrong with corporate life. Then she tells us what we can do about it.

I believe this U.S. work-at-all-costs corporate mentality could be killing harming you. So make sure you take vacations to try and offset the harm. That said, I’m off to our nation’s capital for a week. My wife has never been there, so we’ll be doing the typical monument and memorial visits. My third time there, I’m looking forward to more exploration of the Smithsonian.

For most of last year, I tried to develop multiple internet/home businesses that would free me from a 9-to-5 job. Initially, the most difficult part was deciding exactly what business to start. After much brainstorming, soul-searching and web research, I started:
1) this blog,
2) a wedding favors e-commerce site,
3) a microISV,
4) and, I’m almost ashamed to admit, a “flycatching” adsense site.

All are still up and running, and collectively contributing about $20 in monthly income on average (plus a great book and a coffee mug!).

Obviously, none are runaway successes. In fact, judging from the ultimate goal of freeing me from my day job, all are failures. But I did gain something very important from all this: a change in mindset and perception.

I mentioned earlier that it was difficult in the beginning for me to conceive of businesses to start. Now, after starting all these mini-ventures and thinking about all this almost non-stop for the past year, I can see potential business opportunities everywhere. Not to say that all my ideas are good. They aren’t; some are just plain awful. Not all are feasible. And some just aren’t for me. But ideas are filling my mind. I know now that I just haven’t thought of the right opportunity yet, but that it’s only a matter of time. And that’s a great feeling.

So if you’re in the same boat as I am, I urge you to do something, anything, and see where it takes you.

I spent the month of December preparing for my wedding, getting married and going on my honeymoon. Not much else went on except chatting/relaxing with friends and family during the holidays. I spent some of that time reviewing what went on in my life this year:

Good:

• Got married to a wonderful woman.
• Bought a house (could be a bad, given the real estate market here).
• Transferred to a new company location, doing away with a grueling 2-3 hour round-trip commute.
• Took steps to start my own businesses, establish multiple streams of income.

Bad:

• Nothing much, other than the fact that I still have a regular 9 to 5 job. I say “nothing much” because in the context of the natural disasters that occurred this past year and people facing extended unemployment, I have to say nothing at all. I really have to keep this in mind when life and work’s annoyances get to me.

Switching to the new company location let some of the air out of my motivation to do my own thing. But the motivation is still there, and I’m deciding what to do next. None of my ventures have been successful in terms of freeing me from a 9 to 5 job; I’ll have to count them as the inevitable failures on the way to success. I’ve decided that the only one I’ll continue to actively work on is my wedding favors website, which is at least profitable and requires minimal time and effort.

For the better part of last year, I’ve been exploring ways to just make money, period. For now, though, I’ve decided to explore new personal interests and seeing where they lead me. I’ll be blogging about these as they progress.

I’ve been at my new job for 2 months now. The honeymoon period is just about over. Despite the 75% reduction in commute time and distance that had me swooning, I should have known that more 9-to-5 fodder would be forthcoming.

Once again, I’ve been asked to work overtime on a project that is mismanaged, overbudget and behind schedule. If there’s anything that motivates me to be free from 9 to 5, it is intrusion into MY time. All the rah-rah speeches about commitment and being a team player just doesn’t ring with me. If anything, it makes me sullen and disgruntled. You pay me for 40 hours, I do the 40 hours. That’s it. That’s the deal. Even if I’m paid for overtime, I don’t want it. I have better things to do.

But alas, being a new guy, I must agree to this. I haven’t built up my reputation and clout here yet. You might remember at my old job, I refused to work overtime. I ascertained correctly that my reputation and proven value will allow me to do so without repercusions, but I don’t have that luxury here yet.

So even as I toil away my evenings and weekends for The Man, I return home at night to work on my projects. I’ve been primarily concentrating on my wedding favors website. Despite my neglect, orders have been picking up the past few weeks. So in the past few days, I added a ton of new products and improved the product images. For each product, I previously uploaded just one large image that was used for the thumbnails as well. As you may know, resizing a large image to a thumbnail-size image within a browser produces ugly slow-loading thumbnails. I figured there was a gap in my Zencart knowledge. After doing some research, there was; it isn’t immediately obvious, but Zencart does allow me to upload a thumbnail, a medium-size image and a large image, and it knows how to use the appropriate one in the right places. So after revamping the images and increasing the product selection, the website looks a lot more professional now.

I reference a lot of Steve Pavlina’s writings and ideas here. He is a game developer turned personal growth guru. His thoughts and writings on personal growth are always thought provoking and inspiring. The meticulous intentional planning that went into his life got him where he is today, with multiple streams of passive income that gives him complete time freedom; it is exactly the place I’m striving to get to and the reason I started this blog, to be free from 9 to 5.

I find his experiments in polyphasic sleep just fascinating. Now he has gone and come up with another experiment. He intends to use the intention-manifestation model of goal achievement to generate $1 million. And he is asking people to join him. I’m in.

This post has been in my WordPress queue for a few months now. I never got around to posting it because I wanted to polish it a bit first. But after this post by The Window Manager, it reminded me of this post-in-progress, so I just decided to post it, rough edges and all.
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What a bunch of crock

“Get good grades, get a good job!”, yammered my parents, my teachers, everyone. Well, I got great grades, and by conventional measures, I have a great job. But what would have made me happy got lost in between.

For the first 20+ years of my life, following the Plan was paramount. Any deviation from this was surely the road to destitution and misery. I’m not destitute, but I don’t like the job my education prepared me for. I’ve finally seen through the well-meaning brainwashing to begin the road to recovery. It would have been easier to start this road 10 or 15 years ago. I wish I spent less time studying and more time doing, in high school and in college. But I didn’t know. And Paul Graham’s articles (1 2 3 4 5) weren’t around back then. But better now than 10 or 15 years hence though. What am I going to do? No clue. But realizing I need to do something is a start.