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Using 5-HTP for Mood and Mindfulness Enhancement

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I have known about 5-HTP as a mood enhancing supplement for a long time now but had never gotten around to trying it. Three weeks or so ago, it popped into my head and I picked up a bottle of Nature’s Way 5-HTP at CVS, in order to give it a try and see how it would work for me. I wanted to write up a quick report or review of my experiences using this supplement and provide detail on any benefits I’ve noticed (if any) while using it.

Here’s the Wikipedia description of 5-HTP for some context as to what it is: 5-Hydroxytryptophan (5-HTP), also known as oxitriptan (INN), is a naturally occurring amino acid and chemical precursor as well as a metabolic intermediate in the biosynthesis of the neurotransmitters serotonin and melatonin from tryptophan.

My 5-HTP Experiences

I wanted to do a comparison of taking 5-HTP vs not taking anything vs ingesting caffeine through coffee or energy drinks, in the morning. I figured this way I would get a noticeable variance of moods and mental states that was different each day. A few days of each could accentuate the effects and establish a more noticeable pattern, in my opinion.

Obviously, the effects of caffeine are highly noticeable to me. While it does provide that energetic feeling, I find myself much more impulsive and often unable to focus on work or reading. It actually takes more effort for me to want to do things or to have the concentration to do anything efficiently. On low doses of caffeine, it’s much more manageable but with energy drinks that have 150+ mg of the stuff, it’s a constant battle.

The days that I don’t take anything, I am much more rational than when on caffeine. The problem is that I need to ween off of the caffeine for a day, so that I don’t experience any withdrawals that will make me feel completely drained for another day after quitting. My mood is quite baseline during this time period. Some days, it is elevated and I’m quite social. Other times, I feel completely stifled. Of course, I don’t identify with these positive or negative stories about myself, and while I do still experience some of the low energy moods associated with depression…I haven’t been ‘depressed’ in like 6 years now. That’s the power that meditation, philosophy, and mindfulness has had on my life. I still have days where my brain doesn’t seem to have the right chemical mix or whatever but it doesn’t send me into a tailspin. I can just sit back and be aware of my experience.

The first time I took 5-HTP, I started with half a pill, just in case there was any adverse reaction to it. Normally, side effects can include gastrointestinal upset, but these specific pills are coated to help prevent any of that. I didn’t notice anything with the first half a pill dose, either positive or negative. Now, the bottle says to take 2 or 3 pills with food but honestly 3 probably overkill and unnecessary (at least for me). I should also note that this particular brand also contains vitamins B6 and C, which is supposed to help with the production of serotonin. I don’t know the validity of these claims or how this may react with other things people may be taking, I can only speak for myself and the effects it has on me personally. I will say that I do avoid taking in more vitamin B6 through things like energy drinks or other sources.

The second day, I upped the dose to one pill and that’s when things got interesting. About 45-60 minutes after taking the pill, I started to feel really positive about things. It was like a sense of joy for just being alive. I can only relate it to being completely present to the moment, such as how I feel after a meditation session, except that I didn’t need to do anything…I just was already in the perfect mood. This feeling lasted for the rest of the day and while I slept, I seemed to have really vivid dreams throughout the night. Awesome!

The next day, I boosted it up to 1.5 pills and got a similar result in terms of amazing mood, etc. No side effects had occurred at all and I was extremely impressed by how well this elevated my baseline mood level. I felt no anxiety. I felt really social and I wanted to be around other people all day long. There was no stifling of my personality and work wise I never felt distracted or unable to get things done efficiently.

After this initial test run, I went back through a cycle of caffeine days, and days where I took nothing. Again, I experienced the usual caffeine craziness, but on my all-natural days I felt normal to slightly above average during that three day span.

When I started taking the 5-HTP again, the results were still mostly positive. Most of the days I simply felt relaxed but not super upbeat. On these days, it was just calmly observing the world around me, and staying in the moment. A few of the other days, I again experienced the super positive moods, where the world just seemed bright and amazing. Then, on other days, I noticed absolutely no difference in my mood after taking the pills. On some of those days, my mood was low, and there was no elevation from the 5-HTP.

Overall Impression

5-HTP has been a really great supplement for me thus far. I’ve taken other supplements in the past that have had no effect on me, despite their claims, but this one does amp up the serotonin and give me a positive mood enhancement.

Now, sometimes, this is a huge and noticeable difference. Other times, it is only slightly above average. Finally, there are days where it does nothing at all. I try to cycle on and off of it to help prevent it from losing its potency by adaptation. I will say that, it does have a beneficial effect 80+% of the time for me and no effect the rest of the time. I have experienced no negative side effects during my use.

None of this is to say that others will have the same experiences as me on 5-HTP and it is obviously not for everyone. I can’t advise the reader as to whether or not they should take it or what side effects or interactions it may have with any meds you might be taking. I can only share my experiences with this product.

 

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How to Read More Books

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I used to read a lot of books back when I was an elementary school student. Almost every weekend, my mother would take me to the local library and I’d pick out a new stack of random stuff to read. However, this habit began to tail off towards middle school and completely evaporated until my senior year of high school, when I started reading again on a regular basis. In the ensuing 11 years or so, I have probably read something everyday, whether it be at least a few pages of a book or some lengthy article and in the process made my way through hundreds (if not, over a thousand) of books. Whenever I divulge my reading habits to people in my personal life, I usually get asked not only what I read but how I manage to find the time to read…and how they can, “Read more books” or even, “read a book a day”. Well, with that in mind let’s see if we can’t tackle this issue for all you current non-readers out there.

 

Decide What You Want to Read

The simple advice is to just grab a book and get to it. The problem with that method is that most people don’t have the patience or mental muscles developed in order to just hop right into a regular reading program. People get bored, they get lazy, and they don’t know how to counteract these effects. In a very real sense, boredom arises when you’d rather be somewhere else than in the present moment. If you don’t want to be reading because you’re bored while reading, how are you going to make it a habit that sticks?

As such, I would recommend that you start by choosing a topic that you actually are interested in and reading about that. It doesn’t matter what the topic is, this phase is simply about establishing the habit of reading on a daily basis. You can read books on sports, sex, humor…whatever it may be that can keep your attention for at least a while. Once you’ve developed the reading habit, you can move on to more academic works.

OK, once you have your topic selected, go to Amazon.com and open an account if you don’t already have one (it’s free). Then search in the books category for your topic. Find popular books, one’s that look interesting, or have lots of positive reviews…use the button at the top of the page to add books to your wish list…there will be a big button that says ‘add to list’. Find 10 books to put on your list, that look interesting enough to read.

There you go, now you know exactly what to read. We still need to solve the how aspect of the equation but at least we have a list to work from. The beauty of creating lists on Amazon, is that it not only gives you a clear path of what to read but also suggests books for you to read in the future, thus creating a self-fulfilling cycle.

Find the Books

Obviously, the easiest way to get started is to order the books off of Amazon, especially in Kindle format as you can get started right away. Not only that, the Kindle app can be downloaded on any mobile device which will allow you to steal more reading time, wherever you might be…you can always carry a book with you.

Now, money might be a concern for some people reading this. I don’t really give myself a budget for reading, like I do with other expenditures in my life, as I consider it an ongoing investment. If I never started my reading habit, I wouldn’t have anything in my life that I currently have…from my life’s perspective to my income. BUT since you might not have the means or the same philosophy, we can either finds used copies on Amazon for cheap or hit up your local library.

One cool method is that if you live close to a university, you can usually donate a small fee to them each year and check out as many books as you like, just as if you were a student there. University libraries are generally the best since they will usually have a better selection than some local city or county branch.

Forming the Habit

Once you’ve gotten at least one of these books in your possession, let’s get crackin’. Developing a habit is like weight lifting, in that, if you overburden yourself right off the bat, you’ll probably stop doing it. Don’t go for volume right off the bat, just get over the hurdle of stringing together consecutive days.

How much time you spending reading each day at first, depends on your schedule and attention span obviously. Break things down as far as you need to take them…if you can only do 10 minutes, then do those 10 minutes to the best of your ability. Shut off everything else and pour your focus onto the book for 10 minutes and then be done for the day. Do this for a week, then the next week, bump things up to 20 minutes…break it up into two 10 minutes sessions if you must.

Yes, if you’re at this very low level of attention span currently, you aren’t going to read very much in terms of volume those first weeks. However, you are making this daily reading time quite routine and easily expandable. Each week bump it up to more time, splitting it into one longer session or multiple reading times, until you hit your key number for the week.

If you can read 50 pages on average in an hour (depends wholly on the book, some books require lots of attention and may only get through 30 pages in an hour) and you read an hour each day, then you should average roughly a 350 page book per week. That’s a pretty damn good number to hit.

Remember when I wrote that you can download the Kindle app on any device? Yeah, well, do that. If the book you’re reading is a physical copy, then try to take that with you where ever you go each day. It’s just much more convenient to pick up your phone or other device and read, then carrying around an actual book. Now, whenever you get a moment throughout the day, pick up a book and start reading. Lunch break? Read some pages. Standing in line? Read some pages!

I used to download free audio books from librivox.org (they only have books that are in the public domain and no longer in copyright) and listen to these books while walking to class, sitting at my desk at work and while on the treadmill. Audio books like these are a great way to get through a ton of books fast, as you can speed up the playback to 1.5-1.7x and still absorb all of the information. When I was doing this, I could sometimes add up to 3-4 audio books a week to the two or three I’d still read each week. Yes, I was at a book a day for months, years back…that was a crazy growth period.

These little moments you can read 1-2 pages start to add up and can add multiple books a year to your total and instill the reading habit within you.

Reading 100 books each year

To read 100 books per year, you will have to read 2 books per week, which is doable. Last week, I read a book on Financial Statements and Waking Up by Sam Harris and The Empty Boat by Osho. Now, those aren’t the only three books that I read from, just the three that I finished completely. All told those three were probably 700-800 pages total in length. I probably was reading 2-3 hours each day on average.

Continuing that pace, 100 books each year should be no problem for many people. Keep in mind though, that the total number doesn’t matter. You can probably fly through tons of short novels or get bogged down in a philosophy or history text for a longer period of time. Either option may be a worthwhile endeavor but may produce huge differences in the ‘number of books read’ and the usefulness of the information obtained. Reading for education is a different animal than reading for pleasure.

So, how you read 100 books in a year is to simply ratchet up the reading to somewhere between 2-4 hours a day. If you can stay on the same topic for an entire year, you’ll be one well educated mofo. Also, try utilizing the audio book habit I’ve already described, it’s an easy way to get through the classics of the world while going about your day.

How to Read More than One Book at Once

Reading more than one book at the same time isn’t really all that difficult. In fact, it’s my preferred method for getting through my list. My mind can jump all over the place in terms of its interests, so reading only one book straight through doesn’t conform to how my brain works. If your brain can focus straight through, then it might be optimal for you to take it one by one and ignore trying to read multiple books.

Now, what I do, is to always have multiple books on different subjects to choose from. This keeps me from getting confused and mixing concepts up. For instance, as I mentioned above, I read a book on financial statements last week. This is a part of my effort to learn in depth about accounting, finance, real estate, etc. BUT of course, my brain is all over the place and would get extensively bored/drained reading about that stuff one after another without any counterweight.

So, each week I am reading at least one book on finance (sometimes two) and at least one book on any other topic that may interest me. So far, it’s been meditation/philosophy, novels, history. I read from two separate books each day and actually do still manage to get plenty of reading done. Since the finance can be really number intensive and I’m terrible with math, the other topic I’m reading gives my brain a break, and actually feels much more refreshing than having to study.

OK, so this has given you a simple overview of how to read more books each year. I find that it’s best if you have some kind of list to work from and then just slowly add more reading time each day or other random books. Once you’ve gotten the habit of reading down, you can add as much intensity as you want to. There have been times, I was reading a book each day with the supplement of audio books while at work or the gym.There was also a time (when I was unemployed and in school) where I’d read 6-8+ hours each day. These times were very beneficial but I always needed to cycle off of that schedule after a few months. Your brain will need a break and it is actually more beneficial to just pull things way back and not try to have an insane pace…plus, you might want to have an actual life at some point too.

 

 

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How to Have a Spiritual Experience

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There is this popular idea within culture that sometimes people must undergo some sort of enlightening experience or a so called spiritual awakening. Some people seek to do this with drugs while others want to discover a process that can be followed without drugs to reach some ultimate enlightenment. In either case, they want to fully encounter all of the blissful symptoms and keen awareness that is supposed to come along with such an experience. So the question begs, how does one have a spiritual awakening? How do we reach enlightenment? I want to use this post to touch a bit on this topic using my own experiences and ideas.

 

Why Do You Need a Spiritual Awakening?

We have all undoubtedly heard stories of those who have had some sort of awakening experience or have reached an enlightened state of being, suddenly. However, what we also tend not to hear about is that a sudden and overwhelming experience is not necessary to go through, and often times it can be short lived.

I, personally, have felt short term experiences which allowed me to feel as if I was in a state of bliss (that’s the best word to describe it). All of them lasted a week or less and were ‘achieved’ without drugs. While these experiences felt important at the time, and allowed me to dig deeper into trying to crack the code of making that feeling permanent, they weren’t necessary to experience the truth of each moment.

What do we need to awaken to? This is the question I want to ask to you. If we assume that we need to experience profound and almost drug-like experience, in order to become enlightened or feel at peace or whatever. Then, we have set a goal that we must work to reach. We have to undergo a process of becoming something or learning how to trigger the experience that we wish to feel. As spiritual teachers such as Eckhart Tolle and Nirmala are fond of asking in their own ways, “Is there something wrong with this moment?”

Why are we chasing the experience itself instead of becoming centered with the moment and allowing it to be as it is? Are we simply in love with the process of working towards it? Do we just want to experience the symptoms of an awakening and escape the seemingly mundane tasks of everyday life?

When we put forth the goal of achieving spiritual enlightenment, it immediately sends this achievement off into the future. Who knows whether or not we can ever reach this lofty ideal BUT it does take our awareness off of the present moment. This creates the thought that we cannot achieve some inner peace or stillness until that unknown date in the future. The reality of our experiences is set in this moment and this is how you get to some understanding of what is true.

Seems boring, right? What if you’re looking around and you don’t see anything going on around you? Or what if you’re looking around at a busy street and seeing everyone moving rapidly and lost in their own thoughts? Our mental conditioning wants something to happen, we want to be stimulated, and have some completely divine experience. It doesn’t always work out that way, and it is more of an allowing of things to be, rather than trying to force something memorable to occur.

Besides, in wanting a memorable experience, what are we really after? An actual transformation or something that is more ethereal and overwhelming? Do we want a memory of our spiritual transformation, which we can play back again and again in our minds as if it were a favorite film? Memories are highly edited versions of what has occurred (or what we think has occurred) in the past and each time that you play back the memory, it may get further and further from the truth of the experience.

Each successive moment is another opportunity to get sucked back into our conditioning and lose touch with awareness. That isn’t to say that our awareness or our being ever disappears, but we can become almost unconscious to its presence at times.  As such, each moment is also an opportunity to increase our awareness and get in touch with the truth.

Getting in touch doesn’t need to be going into some deep meditative trance, rather, it can simply be an awareness of any sensory inputs, emotions, thoughts, or any other feelings one may be having in the moment. The goal isn’t to become free of thought or free of emotions but instead allow them to be, observe and bring awareness to them, and ultimately let them go.

For example, if a feeling of anger arises do not become identified with that feeling as if it is you. Allow the anger to be, feel it, and question what that feeling is? Why did it arise? Is what triggered this feeling, actually a big deal? Is it simply a reaction of the ego? Does this rage ultimately matter? It does not, it is just passing through, and the anger can only set up camp in your mind/body if you let it.

Living in the Ether versus the Real World

Just because we have an awakening, doesn’t mean we can neglect the reality of our life situation. Could you imagine what would happen if everyone went and lived the life of a monk? What would get done? How would society function? Would people have to abstain from sex, in order to meet some ascetic ideal? Would that be the end of the species?

It is simply not practical for our survival, to sit around meditating and chanting all day, in order to reach some enlightened realm. I also feel, that this  scenario or something equally nonsensical like people expecting to become awakened and have some super powers as a result, just isn’t realistic. Food still has to be grown, life still has to be created, and jobs still need to be done in order to keep everything running in our society. Enlightenment isn’t some woo-woo esoteric type of thing, which requires you to purchase endless training and ‘power crystals’.

The ‘truth’ as so far as it lies in each moment is gained by bringing our awareness to each moment. Sometimes, this process is effortless, it just happens while you’re in sort of a flow state. Other times, your senses are overwhelmed with the massive information influx of your day to day life and it takes a concerted effort to peel back the layers of noise and allowing your awareness of each moment to take over. We can get caught up in the extremes of life but becoming aware and present is the way to snap back towards the center of experience.

 

Emptiness, Being, and Nihilism

Also note that, this process can be scary for some people because it rids them of their identity and makes them recognize that they are not truly their bodies, their job titles, their family names, etc. and instead are fundamentally an awareness. Delving into each moment in this way, can make it seem as if the world/your mind is truly empty, which can lead some down the path of nihilism or avoidance of experiencing these moments all together.

That’s a short-sighted approach to take, I’ve learned. Just because you search for the ‘truth’ or some meaning you can prescribe to human experience and all you find instead is an empty ‘awareness’ doesn’t mean that it was a fruitless journey. That emptiness contains nothing yet it is still something, its a space that is fundamental to the universe as a whole, which is rather beautiful in a way and speaks to a oneness that connects everything.

If this direct sensory experience is all we currently have, then why not make it as fun and enjoyable as possible? Accepting the moment doesn’t mean you have to accept life as it currently is…life is always fundamentally changing, so it never is the same in the first place. Things may not be ideal and the ideal is never what we expect it to be but we can still bring our awareness to the moment, give it space to be, even when the moment isn’t what we currently want to be doing.

How to Become Present

Allowing yourself to become present to the moment is a matter of allowing your awareness to be focused upon the moment. An easy way to begin is through the use of your physical senses first, before moving on to thoughts. The world around you is processed as information through your various nerve endings and into your brain. Pay attention to this information. Thought can often get muddled together with this information because of our past interpretations of the information which our senses brought in. A thought or memory can then be replayed, and seem as if it is real, even though it is simply a concoction of old data we’ve collected about the world.

What do you see around you? You don’t need to label it or make any judgments about it, just observe the visual sensations that your eyes are taking in.  Recognize that even when the room appears to be stagnant, things are constantly changing on a molecular level and in each passing moment, the room is fundamentally not the same as it previously was. Our eyes aren’t so finely tuned as to be able to pick up changes on the molecular or atomic levels or even with certain changes in the light.

Sound is another experience which we can bring our attention to next. It can be one of the most distracting of the senses and for that reason is why so many like to meditate in a silent room or with some background music, so that they are able to focus and not be constantly distracted by jarring noises. Becoming aware and present to the moment doesn’t require specialized auditory conditions. In fact, simply surrendering to the various sounds and noises of your environment is often enough to become present to the moment.

Through the use of tools such as meditation, we can simply allow the moment to be as it is, and develop a greater and greater skill at allowing this to happen until it becomes almost effortless. The mind is full of chatter and beginning meditation practitioners may notice that it takes them a long time into their session to stop getting sucked into each thought as it comes about. That’s okay, it still happens to me too, the key is to stick with it and allow that silent awareness to come into focus.

 

 

Shifting awareness levels

A favorite thought experiment of mine has been to view my experience with the world as being sort of like a microscope. I can magnify my attention and awareness on certain things or I can zoom out or indeed even back away from the microscope completely. Being in a highly magnified state, so to speak, can be great for working on an individual project but it can also easily become a negative when we begin to identify with our thoughts or become completely egoic or lose ourselves from the bigger picture of our lives.

On the flip side, stepping away from the microscope and taking on a ‘universal’ perspective can be great for becoming aware of the ‘oneness’ of life and how small we are as individuals compared to the larger configuration BUT it isn’t so good for tackling practical day to day matters…which are a fact of our modern lives. The ‘spiritual awakening’ which many people have experienced occurs on this level of thought and like so many other things can become addicting to want to stay on this level constantly. However, time still marches forward and as a practical matter, it isn’t always beneficial to stay at this level of awareness.

We still have biological and societal needs that are required for keeping the human experience going. One doesn’t have to take our daily tasks as a super serious affair, rather, we can allow ourselves to experience each successive moment without labeling it our creating an overall narrative about it. Whether a man works in an office or on an oil rig, he can do the physical and mental tasks which his life circumstances currently require, without creating an identity around it and putting it all aside when the tasks are complete.

I have found that in my own life, there needs to be some sort of balance between the interplay of my societal tasks/duties, my biological underpinnings, and having the conscious awareness to recognize the shortness of it all. It’s this balancing act that has made my life so much more enjoyable over the past 5-6 years. I’m not stuck in the pure societal mindset that had me feeling lost, depressed, unable to enjoy my work, etc. I’m not falling into the pure biological either, though I still enjoy sex, food, and the like…it doesn’t keep me in a never ending cycle of more and more. At the same time, I haven’t had to follow the teaching of some yogi, attend seminars, go meditate in the mountains in some pursuit of truth…it’s right here, whenever I’m ready to face it. Wouldn’t it be a sad fact for humanity if this so-called enlightenment was only available to the rich and leisured classes? I don’t want to be pulled to far into either direction and spend my life chasing something that isn’t really there. I want to enjoy this life for whatever it is and for however long I am allowed to. That’s it and that’s my truth of a spiritual experience.

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Amazon Marketing Service for Kindle Authors

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One fantastic way to generate (eventually) passive income online is through ebook sales. The most popular platform for this is Amazon’s Kindle, which allows self-published authors to easily upload and distribute their writings to potentially hundreds of millions of customers around the world. The main obstacle? Actually, getting the word out about what you have written, and getting people to plop down the cash and download your book. This can be extremely difficult if you don’t have a built in audience who can get you those initial sales, reviews, etc. to push your Kindle book to the top of the category rankings. So, as an alternative or complement, you will need to have a marketing campaign to drive sales and one specific way to do this is creating a campaign through Amazon Marketing Services. In this post, I want to share my experiences thus far with AMS, my campaign strategy, and if I think it is a platform worth using for other self-published Kindle authors.

 

Self-Publishing on Kindle

So, over a year ago, I published my first ever ebook and uploaded it to Kindle. It is a short book in the dating niche, geared towards men in the 18-30 age range. I never expected to make a ton of money off of it, certainly not a living wage, as I set the sale price at $2.99. Essentially, I’d be making roughly $2.06 per each copy sold. Not exactly a blockbuster wealth creator, but selling even one copy per day would generate $751.90 a year in pre-tax income, which is equivalent to having a $25,000 dividend stock portfolio yielding 3%. Sure, it’s not going to make me rich but it is a few less dollars I’d need to worry about making.

Now, this is to be the first of multiple books that I was to publish. As such, I wanted to use this one as a sort of flyer, to test out marketing and the best way to go about selling lots of Kindle books. For the first few months, I did some marketing on forums related to the topic, by answering specific questions or problems guys were having for free and then offering further advice through the purchase of my book. This direct strategy worked in getting the ball rolling on my book sales, but it wasn’t ever huge.

I would sell 10-20 copies per month using this strategy, which cost me more time to implement, and obviously didn’t yield big returns. It did however, drive sales for months on end and get me my first three reviews. BUT, the one thing that I had failed to accomplish is to create an organic stream of purchases on the Amazon platform itself. My book failed to appear on other Amazon sales pages in the ‘Customers who bought this item also bought…’ section, which is how book sales can begin to really grow organically and spur demand well into the future.

After a few months of this, I let my direct marketing strategy lay fallow, and sales began to slip to 1-2 copies sold per month!  I basically gave up on this book and publishing other Kindle titles in the near term to focus on other projects which would garner me a better return. It wasn’t until I started researching alternative advertising options for a client of mine that I even knew that Amazon had its own ads service, it hadn’t even crossed my mind.

 

Creating an Ad Campaign with Amazon Marketing Service

It finally clicked in my head that I should try advertising my book using AMS and see if I could push my book into the realm of being a consistent seller. Now, I knew right off of the bat that turning a profit off an ad campaign by selling a $2.99 book, probably wasn’t going to happen. The conversion rate would have to be really high in order to keep up with the cost per click. Yes, going into it I knew that I was going to lose money on advertising (at least initially).

My real goal with the advertising was to drive sales in order to get even more reviews and hopefully get my book on other Kindle books ‘Customers also bought’ section in order to finally reach escape velocity. I want a stream of royalty income that I don’t really have to do much in order to maintain and builds on itself with time and sort of snowballs in the same way dividend income would. Losing some money in the short-term was an investment in the long-term profitability of the book, which can be bringing in the cash years and years down the road.

The strategy for this first month of campaigning was not to push sales in any way possible. I wanted to isolate this book’s sales solely through Amazon Marketing Services. That way, I could see the type of results I should expect without me influencing the sales through more direct methods of promotion (which I will get to starting up here soon).

My advertising strategy was to have a specific and appealing ad targeted at who I knew my audience would be (18-30 year old men). This meant that I’d have to search out that audience and not waste time promoting on pages geared towards women or business folks or history buffs. I had to break things down and find out exactly what books guys were buying within the dating/romance/sex/personal development niche and run my ads only on those Amazon product pages.

In order to launch a campaign, you have to start with at least $100, which is what I put in to start. I spent a few hours looking up other books that were related to mine and decided to run my ad on about 25 other product pages (which I later expanded to 35). I opted to spread out the spending over a 30 day period rather than trying to go through the $100 as quickly as Amazon could spend it. A steady trickle seemed like the best option.

 

My Advertising Campaign Results Thus Far

What shocked me for the first 5 days or so of the campaign, was that, my conversion rate was staying in the 18-20% range the entire time! This meant that I was almost breaking even and it seemed that running the campaign would only cost me about $4-5 for the month after profits, which would have been awesome, all things considered.

I then upped my campaign amount to $200, figuring that I could probably capture more sales. What actually happened is the during the following six days, I sold zero copies. Not one stinkin’ sale for almost a week. Amazon actually couldn’t even spend my whole $200 budget allowance because there simply wasn’t enough traffic in these category of books, even if there is a huge market of potentially interested buyers…just not as many on Amazon as I would’ve thought. I spent just over $100. It appears that going to directly to my potential customer base is going to have to be apart of any strategy to push sales.

28 days in…

20 copies sold

246 clicks

8.13% conversion rate

 

Is It Worth It for Kindle Authors to Use Marketing Services?

It honestly depends on your specific book. In my case, I do still think that it is worth it as a part of an overall strategy of selling Kindle books, and can definitely help sell more in the future. 8.13% is a damn good conversion rate, in my experience, especially when these people aren’t specifically looking for my book. This is a total blind buy for them. I did have that long period of six days with no sales but it has been pretty consistent otherwise, so perhaps, a 12-15% conversion rate would be doable in an average month with more positive customer reviews and whatnot.

The real question is the long-term effects and whether or not I can get my book featured on other product pages to generate more random sales on a daily basis. All and all, I’ve put about $60 into when figuring my book sales and getting 2x points from American Express by charging my ad campaign to my card.

If I had a more expensive book in the $5-7 range I’m sure I’d at least break even each month.  Alas, I kept it cheap for a reason. I am going to do at least one more month advertising and seeing if I can help get this over the hump. Again, this single book isn’t going to make me rich but I am determined to make it a piece of the puzzle.

 

 

 

 

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How to Make Passive Income: What it Is and Getting Started

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Roughly seven years ago, I began experimenting with making money online. Before that, I didn’t know anything about creating websites, marketing, affiliate programs, or anything of the sort. I just wanted to know if it was indeed possible to have cash flowing into my bank account while I slept. I began to do some research and saw all types of crazy schemes that people used to generate income through the internet. Eventually, I got started writing for a company called Associated Content (which got bought out by Yahoo! and is now defunct) which paid me money based on the number of views my content would generate. At first, it was a few bucks a month and eventually grew to a few dollars per day. It wasn’t a lot but it confirmed for me that I could get paid outside of the hours (and during) the hours I went to my job each day.

I quickly realized two important things from this experimentation with passive income generation. First, that if I wanted to create enough money to live off of, I’d have to scale up my operations. Secondly, I learned that it would be necessary to diversify my income streams because they could be turned off at any point in time, much like getting fired from a job. That is what happened with that original Associated Content cash flow stream, it paid out monthly for a few years, and then the site was shut down from its then current form.

These lessons were very important for me to understand viscerally. Many people believe that having a good job is the key to financial independence and with the right career path, luck, savings, and investments this CAN BE true. However, it isn’t guaranteed. As with everything, there is risk involved and the intelligent course of action is to minimize risk through diversification. People tend to carry this thinking over to generating residual income, as well. They are constantly on the search for one big idea or fail to ever attempt getting started making money online because they don’t have that ‘big idea’, which will generate mountains of dough every day, and allow them to do whatever they want to with their lives.

OK, ask yourself. What’s more secure, creating one website that generates an extra $1000 a month or having twenty sources of income generating $50 a month from each? Obviously the second and it’s none too difficult creating less than two dollars a day passively and can easily be replicated again and again. It would simply take the time and effort to create these streams or pay to have them created on your behalf.

For this post, I want to present to you, what passive income is and some different sources of creating residual money. In future writings, I will get much more in depth on how each of these can work towards making one financially secure/independent but for now let’s focus on the 30,000 foot view of things.

Also, please don’t get discouraged when you are starting out making small amounts of money. Keep at it and it will grow. You will learn so much by working consistently for years and not treating this type of thing as a get rich quick scheme (although you potentially can, get rich relatively quickly with the right skills/ideas).

There’s nothing wrong with creating a page on a website that makes $2 a month in revenue and only took you an hour to create. Yes, you may make $20 an hour or more at your day job but that $2 for the webpage can grow and/or continue in perpetuity. After a year, you’ve made $24 for that hour and you’re still getting paid for as long as that webpage gets traffic. I have work I did 5-6 years ago, which has generated and still is generating thousands of dollars in income, and only took around an hour to complete. That’s the idea, to create streams of income, which flow towards one another to create a river that doesn’t dry up.

 

What is Passive Income?

I’ve seen some debate as to what qualifies for money being truly passive. However, just to keep things simple, I am going to define it as revenue that is being created while you go about your day and aren’t actively working on it. Now, of course there are varying levels of passivity. Some streams of money require no work after the initial action, while others may require simple maintenance, and others require fairly consistent attention (but still less than a full time job).

I never particularly cared about having to do some upkeep or whatnot in order to maintain or grow my ‘passive’ income, as it was still better than having to go to a job each day and only get paid for the hours I was there, doing that job. That’s the main difference and the best aspect of creating income sources for myself, money is coming in while I’m simply existing as a human being and it doesn’t matter if I’m being ‘productive’ in the traditional sense. I can sleep, workout, go to the beach, have sex, or whatever else and that cash is still trickling in by the minute.

Your ultimate goal with passive income doesn’t have to be quitting your job and doing (basically) nothing. These sources can also be used simply to stir up supplementary income, sort of as a mini pension plan or something like a yearly vacation fund or simply designate the small income you generate to pay off your monthly phone bill. You can scale this thing to as large or as small as you’d like.

Personally, I wanted to create the freedom of not working in an office each day and the ability to do (most of) what I want to with my time, without having to completely sacrifice other areas of my life. I do still have a job, which pays me, regular non-passive income. The cool thing is that I work remotely from wherever I have internet connection, I get to learn the details of running a business without risking any of my own capital, further diversify my sources of money, and send a high percentage of what I make into an index fund held in a retirement account…which, generates dividend income…oh look! Another source of future wealth!

That is another interesting aspect of residual money, you can use it to create even more of it by utilizing the wonderful concept of compounding. For example, there were websites that I have owned, which threw off steady streams of extra cash each day and every week or month (depending on the payout structure) this money would be deposited into an account. I would then take this money and use it as investment capital for buying shares of companies I was interested in. Most of these companies, also paid dividends to me as a shareholder, which was either used to purchase more shares or pooled into my brokerage account to help buy shares of other companies that I felt were of better value at the time. So, my residuals were used to effectively purchase more residuals, further expanding and diversifying my income.

This can go on and on, until a complex web of holdings has been assembled, that is hard to screw up once it has been assembled. Sure, a company may go bankrupt. Your website may lose it’s traffic. Your books sales might tank. BUT all together, the many streams of income which you have created will continue on, barring some cataclysmic disaster. That’s the beauty of diversification, if one falls, the many will pick up the slack.

 

Passive Income Generating Sources

I’m going to first briefly cover some more traditional streams for residual income before moving on to the online variety, which generally takes less money to get started up. Not saying I’m any kind of expert in the investment options, I’m presenting here first. These are some things you’ll have to take the time to research and learn about on your own.

Equities

One of the most common sources of generating passive wealth is by investing money and buying stock in already established companies. Obviously, this is what many retirees have done either directly or indirectly through some work-related retirement plan. This method is also one of the best methods to generate long-term passive income and wealth creation.  It does however, take capital in order to get started. The cool thing, is that it is completely non-discriminatory, if you can get the cash, you can own the stock and immediately start getting dividend income (assuming the company pays one, otherwise, money will be generated  only through price appreciation of the shares). So, if you had 1 million dollars today, one could easily construct a diversified portfolio of well-run blue chip stocks that paid 3-4% per year in dividends…giving the owner $30-40 K a year in pre-tax income.

Awesome, right? Obviously, the challenge is investing the money over long periods of time and through price appreciation and/or dividend reinvestment, have a substantial net worth in the future. For most, this will hopefully occur by retirement age but if you can generate more money earlier in life, the process can be sped up much more.

Another aspect of this, is that, most people don’t have the temperament to hold individual stocks long-term or even the know how of buying shares at a rational price. A lot of people panic sell, buy shares at horrendous valuations, trade in and out of positions, and trigger endless taxes and fees. All of which, ends up cancelling out most of their good decisions, and lead to getting sub par returns. The choice for most people looking to invest in stocks should then be some kind of low fee index fund, that they simply contribute to each month without having to do much research.

For those, who are willing to learn and do the work of buying individual securities there are many low or no cost options to get started. For example, Loyal 3 is a website which offers free buying and selling of dozens of major company’s stocks. The minimum investment is $10. Also, there are direct stock purchase plans (DSPP) and dividend reinvestment programs (DRIP), which are offered directly from corporations as a low or no cost way to invest as a small investor.

Bonds, MLP’s, REITS, ETC.

These are some other investment vehicles, which can generate passive income:

  • Bonds (corporate bonds, government bonds, municipal bonds, etc.)
  • Master-Limited Partnerships…probably should ignore these unless you absolutely know what you’re getting into.
  • Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs)
  • Peer to Peer Lending
  • Mineral Rights…again, not something the vast majority will ever need to know about.

 

Real Estate

While direct real estate ownership can be somewhat simulated through owning REITs, real estate can be a great source of ‘passive’ income for those who have the talent and work ethic to develop the skills. This could of course be anything from houses, condos, hotels, industrial complexes, etc. Now, of course, if you’re a landlord you have plenty of work to do with your properties but you can always give up a portion of  your profits and outsource this work to a property management firm. All of this is outside of the scope of this article, though.

 

Online Streams of Passive Income

Now we can get into the passive income sources which don’t necessarily require large amounts of capital or even any upfront money at all. These are the things which we can create online in order to further build out our streams.

 

eBooks

I mention this one first because it can be done completely for free. All one needs to do is write the book and upload it to a platform such as Amazon Kindle. You can set the price, give Amazon their cut of the sale, and have a built in audience of users who may be looking for a title such as yours. Once it’s uploaded and ready to go, the income stream is completely passive, and money is deposited into your bank account each month.

Naturally, there can be expenses involved in any advertising or book promotions that you may want to do. However, it can also be done without any costs and promoted in other ways.

What skill set does this require? The ability to string together coherent thoughts on a topic. You can also pay someone to ghostwrite a book for you but I have no experience with setting up that kind of thing.

Ask yourself, do I have any specialized knowledge or unique takes on a topic which may be helpful to others? Any life experiences, which can benefit potential readers who currently face the same issues? Perhaps, you’re just a damn good storyteller and you have want to release a novel or series of novels. Figure this stuff out, plan it, and make it happen.

For instance, the one ebook that I’ve released thus far, “Game Without Games“, relates my experiences with dating and women when I was in my late teens and early twenties. I approach it not from a ‘how to’ approach, rather, relating these topics to my own personal philosophy on life. I was banking on the fact that there’d be other young guys who were in similar situations and could benefit immensely from having what I learned distilled down to them, without having to go through it themselves.

Now, I did get a bit lazy with the promotion and was working on other projects in lieu of that. But it is something with which I could ramp up the income fairly rapidly, with some concerted effort. Most of what will drive sales on Kindle is getting enough reviews and popularity so that your book is featured on other pages, “Customers who Bought this also Purchased…” section. Once you reach a certain saturation point, sales will be at least pretty consistent.

Are ebooks a big money maker? Possibly. Though even if you only sell 3-4 copies a day, you’d be around 100 copies per month, multiplied by 70% profit on each copy sold and you’d have at least a steady income of hundreds of bucks per month.

 

Websites

Niche/Authority Sites

It is easy to get the idea in one’s head, that if I simply build a website, that I can make lots of money off of it. Well, the truth depends on what kind of website you create and how you plan on monetizing it. I’ve talked to plenty of people over the years who had started their own personal blogs, worked on things for a while, and then became disheartened when they weren’t creating a self-sustaining money stream.

The problem with a personal blog is, even with good traffic, how are you going to monetize it? Sure, people come to your website to read an article but are they ready to buy something because you mentioned it in an article about your last family vacation? Probably not.

Two very simple questions you can ask when brainstorming website ideas are:

  1. Does this help solve a problem for someone?
  2. Does this condense information into manageable chunks for people who want to know?

A classic example of a website which solves the first question, is one built around how to get into better shape. People may need to lose weight or build muscle (problems) and the website would offer up solutions to these problems. The website owner could then offer workout/diet plans, personalized coaching, and make money off of advertising.

An example of the second question could be something like a website which reviewed cameras. People who are shopping from cameras want things broken down for them and made easily accessible, so they don’t have to scour the internet in search of specs and reviews on every single type of camera they may be interested in. Folks are busy and they want things simplified so that they can make easy decisions. This type of website can be monetized with ads and affiliate links to some place like Amazon, that sells digital cameras…any time someone clicks your link and buys something, you get a commission.

Since we are talking about creating passive sources of income, these website will need to be geared towards creating ‘evergreen’ content. This means that, the content on the website is relevant for long periods or time or basically forever. People are always looking to get into shape, so, a fitness website is always relevant. A post about dieting is still valuable after 5-10 years. Meanwhile, a blog about topics such as sports or celebrity news, always need to be updated because the content is only relevant during that news cycle (and tougher to monetize), which kind of defeats the purpose of having a residual income stream.

These types of websites can be created by you or by purchasing an already existing website through a broker or auction site such as, flippa.com. The good thing about just buying an already existing site is that, it already has traffic, useful content, and is often already generating money. Often times, you can get a website for cheap which has solid traffic numbers but it just poorly monetized by the owner, and quickly get sizable returns on your investment by making a few simple changes to things like advertising placement or improving upon affiliate product promotion.

The whole creation of websites, creating content, getting traffic, etc. is something I plan on tackling in depth in future posts and I don’t want to make this one 100,000 words in order to cover all of those topics. As such, I’ll leave it at that for now and move on to other aspects of online passive income.

Ways to Monetize a Website

  • Advertising (ex: Google Adsense)
  • Selling Advertising space directly to an individual company
  • Amazon Associates
  • Install Viglink
  • Clickbank Product sales (affiliate programs, ebooks, etc.)
  • CPA offers (If someone signs up for an offer you get a commission)
  • ebooks
  • Personal coaching
  • eCommerce store
  • paid membership (create exclusive premium content)
  • Create digital products
  • Create an online course/class
  • Create an app for smartphones
  • Consulting/Business Services
  • Rent Your page to another business (ex: Ranking a website high in Google search for local dentists and then renting the page out to dentist offices in that area for a monthly fee)
  • Referral commissions
  • Building email lists (not a direct monetizing method but can be used to market the other options on the list)

 

Drop Ship eCommerce, Private Label, Fulfillment by Amazon

These are some of the methods of passive income creation, that I am least familiar with but, I thought that I’d mention them anyways so you can explore them further on your own.

We are all aware of eCommerce stores and making purchases online. Obviously, it can be a very lucrative business to get into. However, one of the issues holding many people back from starting down this path is the idea that they would need lots of start up capital and then having to warehouse their physical product stock, which may or may not sell.

Another way to approach this type of business does exist. By utilizing third party companies to handle the stock and shipping for you, you can avoid having to interact with the customers or dealing with the hassle of shipping physical products.

To put this in clearer terms, let’s take a look at a basic example: You want to sell t-shirts. You have designs created and a market you wish to target. In order to create your own t-shirt line, you can create a store on a platform such as Shopify, find a supplier who will print t-shirts on demand, and upload the products to your store. Now, when a customer buys a t-shirt the supplier prints that shirt and ships it out to the customer (you carry no stock, the shirt only gets created when someone buys it). The supplier gets paid for their services and you get sent the profits without having to deal with any aspect of the sale beyond getting traffic to your store.

That’s the basic idea of it. How much work is involved on the upkeep and interactions with the customers will be entirely based on the structure which you set up. It is arguable how ‘passive’ this method is, although, so much of the work can be outsourced (usually for a fee) that it is entirely plausible that one wouldn’t have to do much to have a successful and mostly hands-off business model.

Fulfillment by Amazon

One could also set up a very similar model of private label creation by leveraging the power of Amazon’s customer reach and fulfillment abilities. With this method, you wouldn’t even need to create a website.

Here’s a simple skeleton structure of how this works:

  • Search on Amazon for potential products which you could sell. Something that is fairly popular but without much competition.
  • Once you have an idea for a product (or line of products: for example, a line of yoga equipment/accessories)
  • Utilize sites such as Ali Express or Alibaba in order to source a supplier to manufacture your products. You can work with them to create labels and put your logos/graphics on the product. Thus, a private label brand is created.
  • The supplier then ships the products to Amazon distribution facilities. Amazon’s website can walk you through this.
  • You upload the products to your store on Amazon.
  • When customers buy the products, everything is handled through their Amazon accounts, and Amazon ships it out + takes care of returns.
  • Your profit is what is left after paying the manufacturer and Amazon takes their cut. The money is sent directly to your account.

This method does require that you research heavily to find the right product niche which actually creates sales, source a reliable and inexpensive supplier, and have a large enough profit margin to make it worthwhile. Yes, it takes work to set up but once you’ve got things running smoothly, it’s pretty automatic. Plus, once you have a supplier nailed down, its pretty easy to work with them to get another product created…thereby expanding your product line and sales (people will often buy related products together, so if you have the ability to bundle multiple products, it can be a seriously profitable business).

 

YouTube Videos

There are many people who have become celebrities off of YouTube and have managed to carve out a solid full-time income from it. Once the video is created and uploaded, there is really no work to be done except to let the view pile up (maybe some promotion). Creating videos consistently, raises the odds that at least one of them will be a hit, and allow those viewers to discover your other content.

Becoming a YouTube partner and collection advertising revenues is really easy to set up. Although, it can be a good source of revenue, it often isn’t until you have a serious amount of traffic and even then it won’t be boatloads of money (in most cases). The great thing about YouTube is that you have a built in audience which you can direct to explore your other content on a website, promote your ebook, product, or service, or any other way you can think of to monetize your viewership.

 

Conclusion

I hope that this post has answered some of your basic questions about passive income and has given you some things to ponder as to how you will proceed into generating your own monthly residuals. Remember, that not all passive methods are entirely passive, and most will take some level of work up front to set up properly. However, once you have done so and have cash finding its way into your bank accounts each month, it won’t particularly matter too much that you might have to do some work in order to maintain it. This doesn’t have to be a path towards a job-free existence, it can serve as income diversification in order to protect you from the downsides of life and make it easier to enjoy some luxuries that your 9 to 5 might not be able to furnish you with, on its own.

 

Even Your Spare Change Matters in Wealth Creation

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Over the weekend, I was cleaning around my house and noticed that I had small stashes of coins in various places around my home and inside my car. I wondered how much money that it would add up to and of course decided to count to find out for sure. All told, it ended up being around $50, I had just lying around doing nothing. I think that most people probably have more change than this around in their home but I don’t really use cash all that often, so this haul seemed significant. Significant? What good is $50 in change? Well, this post is going to discuss why even your loose change matters in creating wealth.

It’s losing Value to Inflation

Money that’s not being put towards some kind of economic gain in the form of dividends, profits, or interest payments is being subject to inflation. That’s right each year that change sits there it is losing real value over time. Even if one were to collect that change and put it into a savings account, that yield would still be losing ground to inflation currently, though not as much.

Sucks, right? Not only is change taking up space in your house but it’s not even producing anything of value for you. It’s actually losing some of the value it has.

Change can be put towards debt

If you have some sort of debt, whether that be of the credit card or student loan variety, even this pile of change you have can go at least some of the way towards paying it down. That $50 of change that I collect around my house represents 5% of a $1,000 debt. Considering that I have a credit card with a balance of under $1,000 that I am pushing to finish paying off for good, it goes even further in my case. Every penny counts towards paying off debts because interest accrues on the balance, making it take even longer to pay off the amount of money you borrowed.

Change can be invested

$50 can be invested and indeed be turned into something significant. For instance, had one invested in American Express stock 5-6 years ago, it could have been had for roughly $10 a share. It has since then, reached a high of over $96 a share. If one were to have reinvested the dividends paid on those 5 shares of AXP stock, it would have reached about $500 in value. Not a bad return, eh? This could have been done using a broker like Sharebuilder.com which has no minimum to open an account and by using a promo code for a free automatic investment credit or real time trade. Thus, avoiding fees and putting that small bit of money to work for you.

Now, of course to see that kind of return in such a short period of time, one would have had to pick the right stock. Still, even in an index fund would represent a return better than inflation and would compound over time. Here is a Return of Investment Calculator to see some of the results.

It can be invested in your education

Even $50 can go a long way towards increasing one’s base of knowledge. For example, if you have one particular field of study that interests you, that small amount of money can be used for books on the topic. Many used books on Amazon, total about $5 with shipping, so feasibly up to 10 books on a topic can be had, just for collecting loose change!

For non-readers, it is hard to explain the benefits and dividends you receive from reading books. No, 10 books will not make you an expert. However, let’s say you bought books on personal finance and investing with you spare change. Would that information not save you a ton of money over time by teaching you to budget money, how to invest money, how to structure you taxes, etc. This small investment could yield thousands of dollars in benefits over time.

I’m not proclaiming loose change to necessarily be life changing BUT it is much more useful than people give it credit for. Coins can be used in a variety of ways to your benefit and so many people just have them lying around the house collecting dust and losing value. It can also be used to fund the start of an online business.

How to Start a Website

How to Get Ideas for a Niche Site

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Invest Using PortfolioBuilder from ShareBuilder?

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For the small time investor, there are very few options available to being your investing journey without having a sizable minimum amount just to open up a brokerage account. One such place that has no minimums to get started is, Sharebuilder.com. Sharebuilder is now owned by Capital One but before that it was owned by ING Direct and someone else before that, I believe. To me, it is the best choice that I have found for the small time investor, especially one who is of the buy and hold mindset. With some clever uses of free Automatic Investment Credit promo codes, I have not paid one cent in trading fees since I opened up my account with Sharebuilder in 2012. That is huge in terms of return on investment because even when I could only put in $100, I avoided paying the $3.95 fee which is a 3.95% loss of my money right off the bat.

One of Sharebuilder’s newest tools for the small time investor is something they call “Portfolio Builder”. Here is how they describe this tool:

PortfolioBuilder is an investment strategy tool for the self-directed investor. As a self-directed investor you select the investment amount, investment style and asset allocation model that corresponds to your financial situation and investment goals. The asset allocation models were designed to help investors diversify their portfolios, using risk profiles ranging from very conservative to aggressive.

Essentially, Portfolio Builder is a program which an investor decides how much they want to invest in total and then purchase a portfolio of Exchange Traded Funds (ETF) at once for a fee of $18.95 currently. Every dollar is allocated to a specific fund at a certain percentage.

So for example, if one were to choose their “Moderately Aggressive” investment style plan, 24% of the money would go into a large cap value fund while 6% of the money would be place in a fund for International emerging markets. The entire portfolio consists of 8 ETF’s for different sectors of the global economy.

The money is broken down into securities (stocks, REIT’s) and fixed income assets (bonds), thus, giving instant diversification for the new investor. Sharebuilder offers varying investment styles from very conservative to very aggressive (100% in securities). So based on age and/or taste for risk it is designed to fir a person as an investment template.

The great thing is that there are plenty of funds to choose from in order to make the best portfolio for your own brand of investment. There are plenty of index funds which are not managed and thus also have a low expense ratio, meaning, you won’t have to pay really high management fees and your portfolio is pegged to market composition and not actively managed.

One downside, that I do see with PortfolioBuilder is that the percentages in the asset allocation are fixed upon purchase and it is up to you to re-balance the portfolio later. Having 85% of your money in securities and only 15% in fixed income assets seems really aggressive to me but that is what is termed the “Moderately Aggressive” plan. For me to start a plan under that model, I would immediately add more money to the fixed income side of my portfolio to achieve a better balance for my age and retirement strategy.

Another issue I see, is the possibility of being over diversified, in a way. One theoretically could achieve diversification with 4 funds but this program puts your money in 8 smaller segmented funds. The rate of return for the 8 fund approach could actually under perform, one that wasn’t divvied up quite as much. However, this does seem like an easy way to achieve an indexed portfolio in one fell swoop after some initial research.

The cost is $18.95, which spread over 8 ETF’s is roughly $2.37 for each position. In itself, that is pretty good, BUT it does take a pretty large chunk out of the smaller segmented positions in the portfolio. For instance, if one were to invest $1000 into a PortfolioBuilder plan, such as the Moderately Aggressive. It would allocated 6% into International Developing Market Stocks, which equals $60.

If the fee is $2.37 and the total amount invested ends up being $60, then right off the bat that eats up 3.95% of the investment. On a larger upfront investment that might not matter but with $200 being the minimum to start a PortfolioBuilder plan that is concerning.

I think that perhaps the best way to become diversified with index funds is to have a set plan going in and see if you can’t find some Automatic investment credit promo codes to invest money for free. Perhaps scale back and do a 4 fund plan. I don’t know, though, I don’t think PortfolioBuilder is for me.

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Quickly Pay Off Debt: Tips to Get Out of Credit Card Debts

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Debt has become a serious issue throughout our society in the past few decades. From individuals, to states, to institutions, to entire countries, it seems that everyone has a chunk of debt that needs to be paid off. Heck, if you think about it, even our currency is in itself debt. When I was in my early twenties, I started to get myself into debt and rarely had the financial discipline to keep a budget or truly ‘get’ how debt works on a fundamental level. It is one thing to know that you will have to pay back the money at some point but quite another thing to see that while you’re paying it back, much of your repayment is going straight towards interest and not the actual principal.

Now that I am older and somewhat wiser with my finances, I have been aggressively tackling my debt of late in hopes that I can get rid of my credit card debt within a couple years and begin chopping down that big sucker they call ‘student loans’. This month, I have managed to pay off 11% of one of my credit cards’ balances and plan to pay off even more towards the end of September. With an aggressive policy and strict spending discipline, I know that I can eliminate that particular debt within six months.

Do More Than the Minimum

Even on a small debt (less than $1000), paying the minimum is a bad proposition. Not only does it take longer to get out of the shadow of debt, you end up paying the creditor way more money than the original amount borrowed, thanks to interest (which can be 15-20% or higher). It was interesting to see that when I was cash strapped and could only make the minimum payments, how little the balance would move each month. In some cases, the balance would actually increase, which is particularly demoralizing.

One popular method, is to double the minimum payment. So if the minimum is $20 do $40 or as close to it as possible. I like to make more than one payment each month. The first one, I make the minimum payment or a bit more and then on the second payment, I throw as much as I can afford at it during the end of the month. This way, I know I’ve at least got the minimum payment made during the month and then after my expenses have been paid for that month, I can really put some weight behind it.

Read Your Statement Carefully for Fees

Many credit card companies will have things like Payment Protection or credit score reporting which charge you fees either every month or quarter to use. If you haven’t done so already, call up the credit card company and get these cancelled. Payment protection isn’t really necessary if you’re planning to pay on time each month and properly budgeting. The credit card company when you call them will try to get you to keep these programs and generally make it a hassle just to cancel them (they ask you 50 different ways if you’re sure you want to cancel), so try to call when you’re in a good mood and stay calm.

No More New Debts

Emergencies do happen, which is why it is a smart idea to build an emergency fund for cash. However, under normal circumstances, one cannot go on creating new debts each month. Learning how to budget and live within your means can go a long way to making sure that you don’t have to accumulate any new debts each month.

Take a Stand Against One Debt

One way to pay off debt faster is to focus most of your money on paying off the credit card or loan with the highest interest rates first. High interest rates are absolute killers when trying to pay down debt and preserve your wealth each month.

Another method is to go after the debts with the smallest balances first. This way you can quickly pay off a small debt and at least win a moral victory for yourself. For me, the credit card with the highest interest rate was also the one with the lowest balance, so it’s both important for me to pay it off but also close enough within reach to be tangible.

Balance Transfers

It is often an option to roll one or more balances onto another credit card at a lower interest rate and pay that off at a more reasonable rate. A lower interest rate can end of saving hundreds or even thousands of dollars in debt over time. It is however, important to adequately research the balance transfer offer and make sure that it isn’t simply a short term fix or one with hidden fees sometime down the road. When done properly, this option can save one big bucks.

Get Your Spending in Order

Take the time to look over your bank statements and other bills to calculate exactly how much you are spending each month. One you have a list broken down into categories of spending, look for places you could easily cut. Got a gym membership? Learn how to workout at home for free. Could you cut food costs by keeping better track of what you’re buying? Take a good, hard look at what you’re spending each month and find ways to reduce that amount. Once you have a budget, stick to it and you’ll be amazed by the type of money you can free up to pay off debt.

Learn How to Make More Money

Do you have time to get another job? At least temporarily? Instead of watching TV each night, could you start a website or blog and make extra cash that way? I know it sounds like a lot of work or an improbable thing to create extra income online, but it really can be quite simple. I have generated thousands of extra dollars over the years by building websites or getting paid to be a writer for others. Either way you decide to go about it, if you really want to get out of debt as fast as possible, then making more money is something that must be done.

Here are some posts I’ve written on that:

How to Make Money with a Niche Website

How to Get Ideas for Your Niches Website

How to Setup a Website with Hostgator

How to Hustle Money

How to Eat Healthy and Cheap: $4-6 a Day

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I have been pouring over my spending habits for the last few months but especially in the past few weeks. In the last week, I have really tightened the reigns on my spending, as a way to save money and eliminate debt for good. One of the areas where I had the most wiggle room was of course, food. I can’t opt out of paying off other bills, though, I can reduce to an extant. However, I found that I was spending stupid amounts of money on food for months on end and I wanted to cut that down by a large margin. Now, as a man in my twenties, I like to eat and can eat a ton of food. I’m also 6 foot 2 and even when I’m ripped still weigh in at 180-185, so I definitely need more calories than most other people. I wanted to write a post documenting how I have gone about slashing my food bill by more than half.

Stop Eating Take Out or Restaurants

This one kind of crept up on me as the months went by. I started to look at my bank statement and realized how much I had either gone out to eat or had ordered lunch while at work. Even an inexpensive lunch at most places will still run $5-6 and do that enough and you can quickly be looking at $50 no problem. Also, I was for some reason ( cough, cough: laziness) eating fast food at least once a week. That fact was one of the major issues I needed to correct, as crappy fast food nutrition needs to have no place in my life. Even if I only spent $12 a week eating out somewhere, that still adds up to $624 a year!

Stop with the Drinks and the Snacks

I needed to cut out spending on drinks such as coffee, during my early morning shifts, as well as buying some snacks during the day to keep my energy levels up. One change was to simply buy a box of green tea bags and use one for days I have to be up really early and go to work. One box costs $2.99 and lasts me 3-4 weeks versus buying a cup of coffee or other caffeinated beverage which usually costs at least $2 each. To combat snacking, I planned my meals out more carefully and decided to eat more at breakfast time and earlier in the day, then  taper off at night. I’m usually not very hungry during the evening so even something low carb like chicken and veggies will keep me satisfied through the night. However, I need to eat more during the day, otherwise my productivity and mood plummet.

Start thinking about the long terms cost

It is easy to justify in your head that something costs two bucks and is no big deal to purchase. That is, until you start adding up all those little costs and extrapolating it out for an entire year. Even at $2 a day, that’s $720 each year, and $7200 over a decade. Yes, that is a huge total and long time period but through the power of compound interest that $7200 could be invested much more wisely and end up yielding a 6-8% each year. This is not to say you have to be completely frugal all the time but really cutting back can have huge impacts on the future, even in small amounts.

Have Staple Foods to Buy at the Grocery Store and Eat Some of the Same Things

Learning to control cravings and eat some of the same staple meals each day can go a long way to saving a ton of money each month. You can take the time to learn how to cook and prepare things in different ways so that boredom doesn’t become a factor. I try to focus on buying foods that I enjoy, could eat daily, and have nutritional value.

Some staples that I buy and the price

Whole Grain Bread- $1.99 a loaf

Whole Grain Spaghetti- 0.98 for 13.25 oz.

Light Pasta Sauce- $1.69

Bag of Stir Fry Veggies- $1.50

Eggs- $2.89 for 18 count

Oats- $2.29 for 42 oz.

Natural Peanut Butter- $4.50 for 28 oz.

Frozen Skinless Chicken Breast Tenders: $8.39 for 2.5 pounds. (Usually on sale for $6.65)

Bag of Potatoes- I forget the price on a 5lb bag of red or russet potatoes but I think it’s like 2.99 or 3.99. Either way potatoes can be a great addition to help keep you full.

A sample day for me building off this template might be, with possible additions in parenthesis:

3 Scrambled Eggs (add cheese and/or salsa) and 1 cup of oats (add raisins)

2 PBJ Sandwiches

Whole Grain Pasta with 6-10 oz chicken and a whole lotta veggies

1 cup of oats (add raisins)

That is essentially it. I could go cheaper but I elect to eat whole grains instead of processed white breads and the like. I opt for natural peanut butter which is less processed and has less sugar. I may also buy whey protein powder for extra protein for lifting weights. Apples and/or bananas also find their way onto my menu, for further vitamins and antioxidants.

Oats are a great way to add calories for cheap. 1 cup of oats has 280 calories and 20% of a daily value of Iron. Plus, a little bit of fat and plenty of fiber. I can eat 2 cups per day and it’ll only cost $2.29 for the week. Buying a canister of raisins costs me about $3.99, when I do so, but it does add some great flavor to the cooked oats.

There are plenty of other meals such as rice and beans that can also be made for dirt cheap.  Veggies are always important to include and can be done so in a really inexpensive manner. Shopping this way I can eat for as low as $130 a month and usually around $150-160 if I add some more variety. That works out to $4-6 a day which really isn’t much, probably less than most fast food meals, while being more nutritious and lasts the entire day not just one meal. I know that this way will save me a couple thousand dollars in a year’s time and that is money that can be spent on anything else of value. Hell, it can pay off a credit card and still have enough left over to invest in my portfolio. I’ve seen other experiments, where people live off like $1 a day or like $100 a month, and that’s great but it’s not my goal to eat that restrictive. Maybe the $100 a month is doable and I’ll work my way down to it but if I’m not in grinding poverty I don’t want to eat like it. I want simple, whole foods that maintain my health and don’t break the bank.

You Need to Practice Social Skills

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It’s funny to me sometimes to think about how so many guys out there think that being attractive to women is a skill that you are simply born with or you’re not. Throughout their own lives, these guys have seen images in the media and within their own lives of guys who the ladies just seem to flock to, meanwhile they’re stuck out in the cold. The reality of the situation is that ‘getting good’ with women is a social skill and like any other aspect of socializing, one can get much better at it with proper practice and direction. If you think about it, all of the things that make a great public speaker or one of those people who seems to make friends wherever they go, are also the things that can attract women. The male/female dynamic, does however, have extra layers to it that go beyond just being social. It requires more depth and understanding of social cues, body language, and what sparks that sexualized attraction. These extra layers are why certain guys, just naturally attract females, even from a young age. They are the good looking guys in school who all of the girls would always swoon over and as a result the guy usually adopted an attitude of indifference and entitlement.

I wanted to cover in this post, why practicing  social skills and building a solid foundation to work from is a necessary part of becoming ‘better with women’.  Also, to drive home the fact that this is indeed a skill which can be improved upon like any other, and one doesn’t have to accept his current status with the opposite sex as something that is set in stone. While it does certainly take work and change is a part of the process, it can definitely be done.

Do You Really Need Social Skills to Get Women in Your Life?

Yes, but you don’t necessarily need a social life to have women.  When I first started my own journey of trying to attract women, I really didn’t know anyone in my city, and as such had to go it alone. Now, I got numbers, sex, girlfriends, and the like but I didn’t have a social circle from which to build from. I did have some modicum of social skills, from moving often when I was a kid and having to make new friends, and that allowed me to present myself in such a way that was attractive.

However, I can tell you that if you are currently living as a loner type, the further along you get into a relationship with a girl, the more that it will come up and be an issue. It’s almost like once they find out you don’t have friends, they no longer believe your confidence and don’t want to be apart of your lifestyle. So, while you don’t need friends to go out and get women, you do need social skills and having a social circle is ultimately beneficial if you want to build actual relationships.

Why Do You Need to Practice Socializing?

The short answer is obviously to get better at it. You must understand that so much of attracting women is reacting to unspoken cues, that you’ll only catch if you have a high level of social awareness. It’s almost like a quarterback in football, trying to read defenses, those who prepare and have lots of experience are going to be successful while the ones who don’t are going to get eaten alive.

Reading books and articles about conversations and how to pick up women can be useful but they are still abstract concepts if not put into practice. A real life situation, teaches you how to think on the fly, how to get over nervousness, recognize social cues, and build up your skill level. Your mind will often make judgments on things it really has little experience with. So, if a guy has bad experiences with girls in high school he will most likely believe that his situation is hopeless as an adult because women ‘won’t like him’.

Getting experience in social situations, allows one who goes into it with an open mind, that not all people are bad, evil, dumb, or whatever. Many times the shallowness you will encounter is merely a social mask or a mechanism to keep a person from having to get close to anyone new and risk getting hurt. Certain environments such as bars and clubs are shallow and more geared toward the physical and material but this doesn’t mean that everyone there lacks depth as a person. To get over preconceived notions about others, first hand experience is required, and a big reason why socialization is key.

Interpersonal Skills

A lot of guys when they think about approaching women are not only freaked out by the act of walking over to the lady but also by the fact that they fear how to conduct the ensuing conversation. Look, going to a bar or club by yourself like I did, and forcing yourself to sink or swim can be a good idea for some guys. There were times when it felt absolutely brutal getting rejected but it was something that I felt I needed to go through and it was definitely a period in my life where I learned a great deal.

There are other guys, however, who don’t have the fortitude to currently undertake such a thing. They may try it out but will quickly find any excuse to get out of it, so that they never have to feel that level of awkwardness again. Okay, fine, but these guys still need to practice social skills if they ever want a hope of getting a choice of women. Going through the route of building a social circle and meeting women through that is a great way to go about it but it can definitely take longer and be more difficult. On the flip side, it is probably the best bet out of the two, to really gather social experiences over a longer period of time.

I have personally done both approaches towards meeting women, social circle and straight going out alone to pick up chicks, and I feel that the experiences that I have gotten from both have had an enormous impact on my life overall.  I still meet women both ways. If I’m out with a group, the experiences I gained from going out alone, give me the confidence to talk to not just women but anyone around who is outside of my social circle. Meanwhile, interacting with women on a real level, through socializing with them, has allowed me to develop way more empathy, understanding, maturity, and to not be focused on results (getting numbers, sex, whatever) which has led to a more attractive version of myself.

Practicing social skills of any kind really can go a long way towards building yourself up and creating the type of life you want to lead.  You can learn some by reading, some by watching, but most of the results come by doing. You can practice your social skills bit by bit and get better at certain aspects of it but it won’t happen if you don’t try. One can start on a very basic level, just by learning to make eye contact and say hello to people. I know that doesn’t seem like much but as your comfort level builds so does your skill level which translates into friends and girlfriends. Yes, it takes time but so does anything else you want to get good at. If you want women in your life, learn to get social!

Here are some further posts that work on specific aspects:

INTRODUCING ATTRACT YOUR DEVELOPMENT’S FIRST EBOOK

GAME WITHOUT GAMES: TRANSCENDING PICKUP ARTISTRY AND PURSUING ATTRACTION THROUGH CONSCIOUS PERSONAL GROWTH 

$2.99 on Amazon.com  (For Kindle) download the Kindle App for Free

 GAMEWITHOUTGAMES

Exploring the world of dating and so-called Pick-up Artistry, through the lens of the mind. Game without Games, from attractyourdevelopment.com, eschews traditional pickup advice and gets down to the core concepts of self including: fear, truth, connection, and desire. Taken from the author’s own personal experience in approaching, attracting, and dating women from age eighteen through his twenties, this book strips away all of the tips and tactics of the PUA community. Instead, this book focuses on personal development and cultivating what the ancient Stoic philosophers referred to as the internal.

With a greater inner strength and by focusing on developing one’s life in totality, attraction occurs naturally by becoming a ‘desirable man’. Game then is about expressing of oneself and exploring who she is, instead of trying to remember lame pick-up lines or tricks and tactics to get laid. Things become natural and flow from the relaxed and confident state of the man. He has control of his mental faculties and thus can accept life and social interactions on his own terms. Not chasing women or putting up with disrespect or other nonsense.

If you want to learn how to talk to girls, in a step by step format…go elsewhere. However, if you want to explore the mental side of game and the letting go of pickup dogma, Game without Game might be the book for you.

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