Rich Twin Poor Twin

2007 – what a crazy year. We started the year out strong; our passive income was around 5 times our salaries as professional electrical engineers. As I mentioned in my previous post, the real spark that made this into a reality was through constant visualization of what we wanted and keeping our goals in our minds. Once you do that, you will start making decisions small and large in tune with the path to getting whatever it is you want. One of the first actions that we took (that we thought was small and insignificant at the time) was to model our adsense placement from high trafficked sites and from bloggers talking about how much they earned with adsense. Even though it was a small action and we SHOULD have done it years ago, it really never occurred to us to JUST DO IT until we were hungry enough to increase our passive income. You see, it’s really not how hard you work but the effectiveness of your actions and decisions in reaching your goals. And a lot of those actions and decisions are actually governed by your sub consciousness and uncontrollable events and people that are attracted to you.

Things were going well and it was almost a routine. We did our 9-5, came home, checked our stats and worked on our sites for an hour or two every night. We were at the point where we were deciding and planning on how and when to quit our day jobs – our professional careers, something that we were trained for much of our lives. But something always kept us back. Our jobs were actually pretty cushy and relaxing compared to some we knew about from our friends and family. Then the unthinkable happened – we got banned from adsense which was the majority of our online passive income at the time. Can you imagine? Getting a steady $x,xxx per day in passive income to almost NOTHING? To say the least we were hurt – bad. It was not even about the money, it was the questioning, the unknown of what to do now? How can we get back the income we were generating from our business?

This was around June and for about 2 whole months we were depressed. I have never been depressed like that in my LIFE. It is the sort of thing you only read about and yes the symptoms written about it are true – loss of appetite, deep sadness, weight loss, etc. I did not want to talk to anyone, reply to any emails, or do anything. I just did my 9-5, came home, and slept.

The first thing we did was try to work hard to fix it. To find an alternative – what a waste of time. Life was just telling us to move on. We went outside every day after work and just ran and really asked ourselves what it is we wanted and what it was we “had” when we were banking with adsense. You know what? We found out that we still had it and always will have it. It’s the ability to create anything we wanted, feeling free, being free, being grateful, and just enjoying life – Knowing that somehow someway we were going to make it.

Within 5 months from the day we lost almost everything, we were able to bring our passive income streams back to where they were and more and quit our day jobs. From this experience, I know that in order to be rich, I must be grateful, humble, enjoy life, never give up, and respect others – in other words I need to keep learning, growing, and becoming a better person.

Here is a common question from those who start blogs and want to monetize them correctly. We haven’t really tried to monetize this blog but think that the same monetization methods work for blogs as in any website. Here is the question from Thuy

“I guess my question to you is do you consider 6 months too much time to waste on building traffic to a single site? How long did it take you to generate money? Do you think that I should consider this sports blog of mine to be a failure? Should I move onto the next idea and scrap this one?”

The good thing is that you are taking action. A lot of people know all of this or are constantly searching for the How-to’s to make money online but they really do not take action.
From my experience, you probably learned a lot from that one site. Honestly, a site is never finished and should always be improved for traffic, content, etc. I think that you can see that you really can not “get rich” by working hard yourself – you need to leverage your time and money – If you want the blog updated often, have you considered finding a writer for it? I know that writing content takes a lot of time – at least for us. It looks like your traffic generation method is ineffective also or not producing the results you want. Have you tried link exchanges? paying for traffic? contests? there are many ways to generate traffic but it is vital to do so. PPC or pay per click is one of the most effective method of generating targeted traffic. If you do not have an Adwords and YSM account yet, go get them.
After you have traffic, you can monetize the traffic with different methods like adsense, ypn, affiliate promotions, selling your own product (test by selling on ebay first and gathering email contacts from your blog telling them of your planned product and check the buying potential). The most profitable and stable monetization method is having your own products to sell because you control almost everything – however you need to deal with customer service, product creation, branding, etc – you need a team to help basically. The other monetization method that is probably more profitable and stable is selling private ads on your blog. The easiest monetization method in my opinion is Adsense and CPM ads from sites like ValueClickMedia.com which pays per 1000 impressions – however, the profit is not as high or consistent as having your own product, and you have no real control over your revenue.

We have about 300 domains now and each one when we bought it at the time seemed to be a good idea. Only about 15 of them have “full” sites on them we have updated regularly. Yes you can probably move on and maintain this site but I suggest you continue to get traffic to that site and keep learning from it.

I don’t even have the words to describe the frustration we are going through right now. The total loss is around $200,000 or something but we don’t have an exact amount because we can’t log into any of our AdSense accounts. With server fees and programmer fees still bleeding us right now as I type. It’s quite depressing and the only reason why I decided to blog about this crap is because I read John’s post a few days ago. He did warn his readers about putting all their eggs in one basket way before this post but I just never broke the “engineer’s mindset” of trying to optimize systems with the training I went through in high school and college. I just thought that I could make sites with AdSense generating all the revenue. We never thought that this would happen to us. We were so close. We thought that it only happens in the movies – where the hero works so hard and is so close to achieving his goals and winning, but then losses everything because of something so small and stupid. Think of when Rocky lost all his fortune when his brother in law, Paulie signed a contract giving his lawyers power of attorney. Or when Tony Montana from Scarface lost everything because he got greedy and careless. We always thought that that would never happen to us and that we were smarter than that. One of the main things we have learned from this is that money can make you STUPIDER and lazier.

I think one of the possible reasons why we got banned for invalid clicks is because we logged into our accounts during our vacation in LA. Also it is possible that someone found our major sites and click botted for days when we were on vacation. We do not know if any of our sites were attacked or not but we have always purposely kept our personal sites like this blog low in traffic because I was scared that haters would do something like this. We have already appealed the bans but so far nothing but canned responses. There is no phone number or address or any humans there. Their forums are useless and replies just go unanswered.

I feel really cheated with the payments pending to arrive in days when we got the ban emails for invalid clicks. Google does not pay publishers even for the previous month’s earnings if you get banned. There was no warning and it never entered my head that I could lose all of our adsense accounts. We never clicked on our own ads nor told anyone to do so. We even kept most of our sites a secret. It’s not even about the money. It’s about the businesses and passive income we worked so hard to build. I have no idea how we can come back from this. I think the only person who truly knows and understands what we are going through is Robert Kiyosaki who lost his very successful business because of some stupid little mistake. I guess it is true, that true success comes only after many failures with priceless lessons. This is the greatest failure/setback that we have ever had in our 25 years of life so far. It has really opened our eyes to strive to become better people, businessmen, and being more grateful. The measure of a man is not the amount of money he has or the amount of daily passive income but the wealth of happiness he has during his time on this world. When we were banking all that money everyday we should have been more grateful, less arrogant, more careful, and should have been happier. We never truly appreciated what we had until we lost it. I should have actually followed what I posted here: Strategy for Success.

During the last few days when we were really down feeling stressed, depress, and even suicidal – one of our old high school friend called us. Surprisingly it uplifted us. We had last talked to him about 2 years ago but during this unexpected phone call he told us that he was actually starting on his journey to mastering money. One thing he said was “Don’t worry guys, you’re gonna make a comeback.” We are neither poor nor rich now but the knowledge and experience including this painful $200K lesson which we have learned during our journey so far is priceless.

I do not know when/if we will ever post again here. Hopefully we’ll make a come back. Cherish your success and time. Be GRATEFUL for what you have and Good Luck.

Henry and Wilson

One of the easiest and quickest ways to start making good money or passive income is by opening a high yielding savings account. It literally takes minutes to fill out the application forms and the banks will almost always approve your application if you supply them with the correct identifcation IDs. Approval times vary from 1 to 5 days depending on the bank you go with. You don’t even need a job or income to open up a savings account. And you don’t need money neither. In fact a few banks give out free stuff or money to people who open new accounts with them with no or low initial funding. I know many people who are out of college and working now who still don’t have savings account. They have checking accounts and just park their money their earning nothing. They say “why bother. Its like 3% anyway.” Or “I don’t have money left over to put into a savings account.” Again, its not the amount but the type of income you are able to easily generate by just opening a savings account. You can begin having money work for you. Even though your money is not working very hard with the high yielding savings rate at around 5% now, it generates passive income for you. No matter how small, you can grow that amount and say you have some passive income flowing to you monthly.

This was what my twin and I did to start. We opened up ING savings account a few years ago at a yield of just 2.2% We had like a buck or two of passive income from interest come to us.

Here is a current List of all High Yielding Savings Account:
FNBO Direct
6.00% APY $1+ (Rate guaranteed until Sep 28)
 $1 to open
 Only 3 ACH linked accounts
 ACH originate: YES, ACH target: Yes, checks: No, debit card: Yes
 
 Umbrella Bank Pot™ Gold
 Promo rate of 5.50% ($1000+ ) is guaranteed until 7/31/2007
 50k+ 5.10%
 25k-50k 5.05%
5k-25k 5.00%
$1,000+ to avoid fees
ACH originate: NO, ACH target: YES, checks: YES, debit card: YES
check deposits earn interest: DAY OF DEPOSIT

 Geauga Savings Bank Immediate Access Tiered Savings Account
 5.45% APY $25,000 – $99,000 (fees if below $25,000)
 2.00% APY $99,000+
 No interest paid until Dec 31st, but you will receive a check for the accrued interest if account is closed prior to 12/31.

 Countrywide Bank Savings
 5.40% APY $50,000 – $2,499,999
 5.25% APY $10,000 – $49,999
 ACH originate: YES, next day, but with only one bank, ACH target: YES, checks: NO, debit card: NO
 
 AmTrust Direct E-Money Market
 5.36% APY $1+
 $1,000 to open
 No fees, no minimum balance, free ACH.
 ACH originate: YES, ACH target: YES, checks: NO, debit card: NO
 
 Zions Bank Deseret Money Market
 5.36% APY $50,000+
 5.30% APY $0 – $49,999
$100 to open
 ACH originate: NO, ACH target: YES, checks: YES, debit card: YES
 Not available to residents of Utah.
 
 BankUnited Savings Account
 5.35% APY $5,000+ to open ($300+ to avoid fees)
 ACH originate: NO, ACH target: YES, checks: NO, debit card: NO
 
 Bank of America Money Market Savings Account through NEA
 5.34% for $50,000+
 5.07% for $500 – $49,999
 6.40% APY $50,000+ for first 60 days (BofA site incorrectly calculates this as 5.54%)
 6.14% APY $500 – $49,999 for first 60 days (BofA site incorrectly calculates this as 5.28%)
 $500 to open, $2,500 to avoid maintenance fees after 2/16/07
 ACH originate: NO, ACH target: YES, checks: YES, debit card: see AAA money market below
Read the threads carefully, BofA has trouble giving the right interest rates to some customers.
 
 
 Bank of America Money Market Savings Account through AAA
 5.34% APY $50,000+
 5.07% APY $10,000 – $49,999
 $1,000 to open, $2,500+ to avoid fees
 ACH originate: NO, ACH target: YES, checks: YES ($5 book of 20), ATM card: YES, debit card: see below
 BofA checking account customers can add a AAA money market account link onto their existing checking debit card. Some representatives incorrectly claim that accounts domiciled in different states cannot be linked on a single debit card (or ATM card) because they fail to realize the additional system entry steps needed to create multi-state links.
 
 
Union Federal Bank High Yield Money Market Savings Account
 5.31% APY No Minimum
 ACH originate: NO, ACH target: YES, checks: NO, debit card: YES
 
 GMAC Bank Insured Savings/Money Market (ACH)
 5.30% APY $500+
 5.19% APY < $500
 ACH originate: YES, next day, ACH target: YES, checks: YES, debit card: YES
 
 
 Igobanking (Online division of Flushing Bank)
 5.30% APY $1+
 ACH originate: YES, but takes 3 days over $2000, ACH target: yes, checks: NO, debit card: NO
 
OneUnited Bank UNITY Internet Savings Account 

 5.30% APY $10+

It is not easy to overcome fear and conquer anxieties that may be controlling your life. To overcome fear, you have to understand where it is coming from and why you are hanging on to it. Most importantly, you need to know how to banish fear from your life, and allow yourself to experience new and exciting things.

It’s normal to be afraid. Everyone’s always afraid of something, whether it’s public speaking, heights, spiders…those are perfectly common fears or phobias. But there are bigger fears in life to overcome that may spell the difference between having a successful life or a meaningless one. Overcome fear of failure and fear of change, and you could be getting so much more out of life.

Now how do you overcome fear?

First of all, you have to take the time to sit down and make a list of all your fears in life. Ask yourself why you are afraid of them and how you have been dealing with these particular fears. Figure out what’s more important to you – avoiding your fears or overcoming them in order to reach your goals. The answer should come to you easily enough and that’s a major step in helping you overcome fear. Make a list of your biggest ambitions in life and write down the things that prevented you from accomplishing them as well.

You must also learn to stop listening to your inner critic. Your inner critic is your voice of doubt and worry, the one that always tells you why you can’t do certain things. You may have been living with it for years, but if you develop enough strength and faith in yourself and your abilities, you will be able to overcome fear by shutting out one of the major things that keep you from your dreams.

Remember to let go of your preconceived notions. Ideas you have formed about how impossible some things are and how imminent failure can be can make you afraid of what will happen if you pursue your passions. Thinking positively about the future is a good way of ensuring that you overcome your fear enough to take charge of your life.

One major way to overcome fear is to really look it straight in the face. Giving yourself an inspired push and taking baby steps towards your goal will help you see that it is possible for you to succeed and will help prove that your fears are unfounded, which should give you enough courage to forge on.

Once you’ve finally learned to stop giving in to fear, then you’re well on your way toward attaining your goals. Don’t worry if it takes you some time to reach this level. Learning how to overcome fear may take some work and needs a lot of patience, but the rewards are endless. You should keep that in mind when working on conquering your fears.

The first thing that comes to your mind after getting your degree is to find a lucrative job in your chosen field. The job market is highly competitive and it is important to prepare yourself before you start your job search. Multiple careers, downsizing workforces, and a lack of job security are realities of today’s job market.

There’s nothing called a ‘lifetime career’ anymore – and on average, college students can expect to pursue about five different careers and change jobs about twelve to fifteen times during their working lives.

Planning

While most of us would love to get a job that pays well, what good is a job if it isn’t satisfying? You need to identify your goals and conduct a careful analysis of your skills and interests before heading out to find a job. Once you have a clear objective, it’s easier to focus on specific jobs that will give you both money and job satisfaction in the long run.

For a more effective job search, focus only on target industries and companies that are located in your geographical area (or an area where you would like to live). Put your research and networking skills to work – during your job hunt, if you get any good consulting assignments or temporary job offers, don’t turn them down. These jobs will give you good exposure and experience, along with a decent paycheck.

Do Not Underestimate The Power Of A Good Resume

If you lack the skills to write a dynamic resume, then don’t waste time – seek professional help from a career coach. After all, you need a well-written resume to get interview calls. A career coach not only knows what impresses potential employers, but can overcome the hurdles that a first-time resume presents, such as lack of experience.

A good career coach can not only help your resume present you in the best possible way, but can also help you clarify your career goals and evaluate potential employers. Best of all, they represent you and your best interests.

Your First Job Interview

Making a good first impression is important for successful job interviews. Make sure that you wear formal clothes for interviews unless you have been specifically asked to dress casually. Remember that on your first job interview, you are bound to be very nervous – that’s why you should be as well-prepared as possible, so there is less chance of you doing or saying something that could sink your prospects.

A career coach can help you be more successful on interviews – helping you to master such topics as asking the right questions and the art of negotiating salary. Your first job interview may not necessarily end up with you getting the job, however you must know how to deal with different situations gracefully.

As with anything worth having, the one thing that will help you find a good job is practice. Going on all types of interviews, even informational ones will help you become more comfortable and know what employers are looking for in candidates.

The mention of compound interest will usually arouse knowing nods in the room. However, if everyone seriously understood what compound interest is, then there wouldn’t be as many people falling into the depths of bankruptcy due to credit card debts. Without a doubt, financial institutions are making the most out of this moneymaking concept to the disadvantage of the debtors a.k.a. general public.

Do you know what compound interest is, then? Essentially, it’s interest generated on top of interest plus the principal sum over a length of time. To illustrate this, assume you have $10000 today and you’re supposed to get an interest of 3% a year for this principal sum. This means you would have $10300 by the end of the year. So in the second year, the principal sum is $10300 and by the end of that year, you would have accumulated $10609. In year three, the accumulated sum would add up to $10927 and so forth. In the same vein, $10000 compounded on a basis of 10% per year would have generated two-fold of what you started with, in 7 years. Therefore when you hear banks claiming to make your money work harder for you, they are just employing compound interest.

While it’s nice to imagine our money in the bank escalating away and making us richer, it also assumes that we do not make withdrawals, which dramatically reduces the impact of compound interest. How often have we withdrawn deposits made religiously due to ‘emergencies’?

How do we harness the benefits of compound interest? By taking note of how credit cards employ this very principle on our debts would be a prudent first step. Banks often claim to be diligently calculating interest on a daily basis, but one must question to whom does it benefit? Large firms are the ones using this exponential tool to their gain. The general public only has opportunities to take advantage of compound interest on a smaller scale, namely mutual funds and stocks that typically yield yearly dividends. On a similar note would be fixed deposits offering paltry yearly interest rates. Increments in salary happen once or twice at most in a year. Anything, which can be compounded to the general public’s benefit, is often on a yearly basis. So what must one observe in order to jump on the compound interest plane to financial independence?

Conclusively, compound interest works better for us if it happens more frequently. Which is to say, twice yearly is better than yearly and quarterly is definitely better than twice yearly and so forth. Therefore ideal investment plans should have these features:

- Returns of at least 5%
- Compounding on a monthly basis
- Low risk with high winning percentage (no less than 90%)
- Flexible withdrawal for liquidity (i.e. one is able to stop anytime)

So let’s start employing compound interest and be on your way to financial freedom.

Copyright (c) 2007 CashFlow Avenue

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