The Writer’s Coin

Early on in the life of this blog, I got lucky. A post I wrote about 401(k) accounts, somehow got linked to at the bottom of a Wall Street Journal post and I saw a spike in traffic. It was exciting and encouraging because it gave me a chance to see what can happen if your content is decent and you have a little luck come your way.

Last week I had some more luck come my way: I broke all kinds of traffic records for this blog and I broke them by A LOT. My goal has always been to slowly increase my traffic from month to month. I was actually telling M about this goal and how I just managed to “make it” on the last day of July. Then August came and one post got crazy amounts of traffic that made everything I’d gotten until then seem like chump change. Check out the month-to-month numbers:

From averaging just a smidge over 4,000 visits a month, I’ve already gotten over 30,000 hits and the month isn’t even over yet. What was the brilliant post that got me all this traffic? A little something I wrote about Marilyn Monroe on the cover of Poets & Writers. It was an afterthought. Who knew? Here’s what the daily breakdown looks like around the day it hit:

Suffice to say, I was VERY excited. I didn’t even know it was possible for this many people to visit the site, let alone for a “simple” post on Marilyn Monroe. With that, here are the lessons I’ve learned from all this insanity:

• Every post counts: When I wrote the Marilyn post, I did so only because I liked the picture. I didn’t think it was a particularly useful post or had a lot of meat to it, but I wrote it anyway.
• Networking is essential: I sifted through all the traffic data and it all started with someone linking to me from Librarything.com. I couldn’t find out who started it, but I’m eternally thankful.
• There are LOTS of people on the Internet: Who knew that 30,000 people would come to my site? This is a little bit of naiveté on my part. I mean come on, I’ve seen the numbers the big bloggers get out there so what’s to stop me from attracting that kind of traffic? This just opened my eyes to the possibilities.
• Be ready at all times: Luckily, I have been cleaning up the site and looking into additional ad opportunities before all this happened. Otherwise I would’ve been scrambling to try to make changes to make the site “better” as this rush of people came along.
• Blogging is fun: Getting this many people to read what you’re writing and to comment on it is what it’s all about. The more people show up, the merrier this whole thing gets.

The downside? I have to get lucky again next month if I’m going to increase my traffic for September. Help me out and tell everyone you know to come check me out, otherwise I’m doomed!

One of the very first personal-finance pieces I ever wrote was about Bank of America’s Keep the Change program (it was years ago and it wasn’t for this blog, I was trying to get it published in a magazine. It never happened). At the time, I thought it was a great idea and gave customers a creative way to save money without having to think too much about it.

Here’s how it works: Every time you use your debit card to buy something, your total gets bumped up to the nearest dollar and the difference is shot over to your savings account. So if you bought a soda for $1.23, your BofA statement would charge your card for $2 and 77 cents would be deposited into your savings account. Poof. Just like that. And for the first three months, they will actually match your savings at 100%. That means that, on that last example, you’d be getting $1.54 sent into your savings account. After the first three months they match at 5% with a total limit of up to $250/year.

That’s awesome, isn’t it? But I never gave it much thought because, even though I’m a BofA customer (my tribulations have been well documented), I’m a credit-card rewards person. I buy everything with my card and accumulate points, which I then turn into cash. It never occurred to me that the two savings programs might comparable. And after a little bit of research , you might be surprised to see what I found.

Keep the Change

I decided to run a simulated savings year with Keep the Change to see what I would’ve saved if I was using their program. I took the last two months of credit-card activity, figured much I would have deposited into my savings if I was using my debit card, and then added any matching funds. Here’s what I found.

Bank of America will match those funds for the first three months at 100%, so that means for a hypothetical three-month period, I would be saving $96.

For the rest of the year I would be matched at 5%, which means those months would net me $151.20.

Not bad for not really changing any of your behavior, but how does it compare to my current system of using my credit-card rewards?

Bank of America WorldPoints Card

This card has lots of different ways you can redeem your points (magazine subscriptions, buying stuff from a catalog, travel, etc.), but I always take the cash. And that means calculating the return on my money is pretty straightforward. If you wait until you have 25,000 points (a dollar spent is a point earned), then you get a check for $250 cash. This is what I do, and so my return on the card is 1%.

I went back into my credit-card statements and calculated the average amount of money spent per month. It was $1,484. So,

And that’s UNREALIZED gain because you have to wait until you get into the 25,000 point range to get to a 1% return. Keep in mind, this is free money as long as you pay your balance in full every month and don’t incur any penalties or fees.

Recap

So that means that the program I’m using is netting me less than a program I have available to me, right? Technically, yes. But technically, Keep the Change isn’t free money. It’s my money and they are matching some of it. The free money I’m getting from them is the match, which for a year comes to $55.20, in which case the credit card beats it pretty good. This is kind of like the ING/savings rate debate of where to keep your money — I will keep my current system because changing the way I spend and save money isn’t worth the minor difference I would be getting back.

What do you think about these two programs? Do you use either of them and if so, which one do you prefer?

A few other things to keep in mind:

• If you have trouble resisting the temptation of credit cards, then it’s obvious you should go with Keep the Change.
• More on BofA’s Keep the Change program here, including a nifty little calculator tool that will give you an idea of how much you could be saving.
• In the end, the important thing is that you’re saving something and making it a habit
• I own shares of Bank of America stock, which doesn’t mean I’m promoting them, it just so happens I have accounts with them and own their stock. Grain of salt.

P.S. I should add here that this is NOT the way you should save money. You should set up an automatic pull from your checking to feed into an ING account or something like that. These two methods I’m discussing are only “bonus” or “extra” ways to save money. The way I see it, I use a card on everything, so I wanted to see which system gave me more bang for my style of spending. And now I know.

[this post has been included in the Festival of Frugality over at FIRE Finance. Make sure to check out the other articles. They aren't as good as this one, but they're decent enough]

Right now I’m reading A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while now but only started after buying it for 50 cents at a sidewalk sale a month or so ago. If you’ve never read it, it’s about how the author decides to hike the Appalachia trail even though he really doesn’t have the experience to do it. The book is funny, and that’s the main selling point, but it got me thinking about embarking on a project like that. Something big, unwieldy, and gutsy.

I thought about a lot of stuff: driving cross country, quitting TV taking guitar lessons, etc. What do all of these ideas have in common? They give me something to write about. That may sound lame (I’m sure Bryson didn’t hike the AT just for the literary value of it—although you never know), but that’s the way a writer’s mind works. We are constantly on the lookout for our next fix. So I asked myself, where might I find some fresh material? After giving it a lot of thought, there’s only one project that fits the bill and doesn’t require me to quit my job or strain my marriage.

Writing a novel I’ve already written. Huh? A couple of years ago, I participated in National Novel Writing Month, and I came away with 40,000 or so words of something that I didn’t think was too bad (at the time). That was a while ago and I haven’t revisited what I wrote since then. I’ve been eager to go back and see what I wrote (and if it was any good), but since I write by hand I haven’t been wanting to sit and type it all out. It would take weeks. It’s one of the main reasons I bought voice-recognition software recently. The idea being that I would narrate the novel and the computer would type it up for me. That was the theory, anyway. I have used the program to type up some recent stuff I’ve written, but the novel is still sitting there, ignored. Steven King would be proud — he usually sits on his rough drafts for “only” six months before revisiting them.

So here is the idea: take out the novel, type it up, and shape it into something worthwhile. Maybe it will turn into a novel, maybe it’ll turn into a short story but I think the experience would be a valuable one either way. Even if what I already have on paper isn’t any good, it’ll be a good exercise in editing and it’ll give me some practice working on something longer. It’ll be a challenge to take whatever I wrote back then and make it good.

That and it’ll give me something to write about.

OK well I totally forgot about this earlier in the month, so here is what the blog did financially last month. As you’ll notice, the biggest change is that the freelance income is gone. The job was becoming a time suck for me and was paying me very little per hour, so after some wrangling the last couple of months, we decided to end it. Which is fine, because every time I had to sit down and do that work, it was a major pain. Not only that, it was taking up more and more time without paying accordingly. So that’s a good sign.

On the other hand, the ING interest is up and so is Adsense (even if it is only by a dollar or so). The goal is increase from month to month, even if it is only a minimal amount. And the good thing is that August is looking just as good, if not better. So that’s a good sign. So if you take the freelance money out of the equation, we’re still moving forward, so that’s good. I also got an ING referral by someone who signed up and got $25 for free. If you’re interested, check out my ING page and go from there.

Right now I’m back under $100/month, but next month we should climb back out of that.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a BBQ dinner with some friends of M’s friend. Basically, I didn’t know anyone except M and her friend. Which is a good way to meet new people and expand your horizon, but sometimes you just don’t feel like going through the hassle of meeting new people. One of the people I met was the very gracious host, David Smidt. We got to talking and when asked what he does for a living, he said something like “I run my own website.” Which was interesting to me because I run this site (which makes nowhere near enough money to claim that I do it for a living, but still) and because I’m all about expanding my alternative income with side businesses.

So we got to talking and it turns out his website is a directory for senior discounts called SeniorDiscounts.com. M and I had a good time with him and his wife (and their dog) — but I wanted to follow up a little bit and learn more about the site. So I asked him a few questions that might help some of the other entrepreneurially inclined out there on starting/running a site:

First of all, could you give us a quick rundown of how Seniordiscounts.com works?

SeniorDiscounts.com is an online directory of US businesses that offer discounts to people 50 years of age and older. We currently list over 150,000 business locations, which include the contact information, discount information and other information necessary to receive each discount. We publish a weekly e-newsletter, which is free to everyone and also feature free discounts submitted by seniors each week.

How did the idea of Seniordiscounts.com come about?

SeniorDiscounts began when the founder and Chairman, Doug Brown, a retired financial executive, realized that as he got older he qualified for discounts on many products and services – but they were typically not advertised. He attempted to locate a directory of businesses that listed senior discounts, and the natural place to begin his search was the Internet. He found that no such directory existed, online or off.

There was an obvious need to provide one source identifying businesses that offer age-related discounts, what the discounts entail, and where to locate the businesses. The fit between the Internet and the application was perfect and Doug created SeniorDiscounts.com with me.

What’s the hardest part of running your own business? What’s the best part?

The hardest part to running your own business is the work involved. There always seems to be a dozens things to do and you can never quite get to all of them. A business owner takes a very personal approach to ones business and it can be difficult to separate your work life and your social life. The best part of owning your own business is the flexibility in the work schedule. While you may work many hours, you are not bound to a specific schedule and can work when you want to.

You’ve done a good job of marketing your site out there, what have you found is the best way to spread the word?

SeniorDiscounts has largely used a “Grass Roots” approach. We rely heavily on word of mouth advertising and recommendations from other seniors. We have also worked hard on link exchanges with other web sites, search engine optimization and the press.

What’s the best tip you have for seniors that want to save some money (besides signing up at Seniordiscounts.com, of course)?

The best tip for seniors is to always ask. Most businesses will not advertise their senior discounts, but one would be surprised at just how many companies actually do offer a senior discount. Another great place to look for discounts is through the local Department of Aging with your city. Many cities have created programs for low income seniors. Discounts can include utilities, phone services, food and transportation.

One little thing I noticed about your site is the ability to blow up the font size to a much larger, more legible size. It’s a small, obvious fix that makes all the sense in the world considering your market. Is the site “optimized” in any other way to appeal more to seniors?

We try to make the site as easy as possible to use. We have much of information on the web site available for print, as some seniors like to read our articles and newsletter as they wood a newspaper or magazine. We also provide a toll free number on our site, as seniors like to be able to ask questions and talk with people in person.

From what I gather you get businesses coming to you to get into your listings and then you sell those listings to your members. Which of the two is the hardest, getting more businesses to sign up or getting more customers to join?

We don’t seem to have too many difficulties getting seniors to sign up, although we are always working to improve our member list. Most of the larger business we have listed on our site, we have had to track down, but seniors also have the ability to tell SeniorDiscounts about discounts they know about. Every week, we give away a free membership to a senior that has told us about a discount. We then research the information and add these businesses to the web site. Many of our business discounts have been found this way.

Do you ever get any strange reactions from people when you tell them what you do? What would those be people be most surprised to know about what you do?

I think most people think it is strange that we have a web site dedicated to seniors. Most people do not realize just how many seniors are using the Internet these days. They are also surprised to find out that many of the discounts we have on our site are for people 50 years of age and older. Most people don’t consider a 50 year old person as a senior.

What do you see in the future for Seniordiscounts.com?

We are working on many new aspects to our site and business model. For instance, businesses can now provide SeniorDiscounts to their customers as an added value product. We are also creating a new Question and Answer Blog, where seniors can ask SeniorDiscounts questions and we post the responses in our blog.

–o–

If you know anyone that is over 50 and needs/wants a deal (and who doesn’t?), then spread the word about SeniorDiscounts.com. I like how they give away free memberships to people that contribute good discount ideas and I like that they are serving an undervalued group of people that so many businesses take for granted. Even I, as a blogger, rarely think of something to write aimed specifically at “seniors.” Why? I still have that perception that they don’t go on the Internet, that they don’t even know how to turn on a computer, etc.

And by the way, no one is paying me or giving me anything to write about this site: it’s simply a good idea/service run by someone I happened to meet in real life. So I wanted to share, that’s all.

There is a lesson to be learned here too: socializing is a good thing. For lots of people it can be awkward and painful, but it’s the only way to meet new people who may (or may not) have something in common with you. I ended up meeting someone that does something similar to what I do: run a site about ways to be smarter with your money. Now I just have to figure out a way to make more money from it… Thanks Dave for taking the time out to let me interview you!

I have gotten very complacent. Not that this site is getting crazy amounts of traffic, but it has slowly grown from getting absolutely no traffic at all to a trickle here and there. Which is very exciting, but every now and then I’ll catch myself lollygagging with some of the basic, tried-and-true blogging tips that help drive traffic and get people interested in what you’re writing. Writing something good/interesting means nothing if there’s no one here to read it.

So I’ve decided to take another look at those tips that new bloggers always hear about when they get started and recommit myself to them. In other words, I’m going to pretend that I just started my blog today and that no one knows about it. That means I have to drum up some interest. But how?

• Comment on Other Blogs: I remember hearing about this one non stop when I first got started. This accomplishes a lot: it gets you reading other people’s blogs and it gives you a chance to make yourself known on an established blog. The key here is to write thoughtful, insightful comments, not just something to get people to click over to your own site. That is not cool. And I did — at the time, anyway. Now I visit the same blogs over and over again and will only comment if I have time. I need to set aside more time specifically for this reading/commenting stuff.
• Submit to Carnivals: I didn’t buy this one at first. It took me a while to come around, but once I did I liked it because I found other sites I thought were pretty good and that I wanted to include in my daily readings. These can get you some pretty good exposure, so it’s good to submit to a carnival every time you have a relevant post. Plus it’ll motivate you to write good stuff — not every post gets picked.
• Write Good Content: The most subjective of the tips, but most bloggers will tell you this is the number one thing you need. The rest you can be slow to come around on, but without this you’re toast. What is good content? I have no idea, but it doesn’t always match up with what gets the most comments or the most visitors. At least not in my experience.
• Update Often: I follow this pretty well, with a new post every day of the week and sometimes on the weekends. I used to post three times a day but those posts weren’t very deep so I quit that to focus on meatier posts once a day.

Anyway, I’m going to pretend I just got started with this blog and start over. Go out there like I did at the beginning and work my butt off to get some readers over here. I know some established bloggers already do this (I’m looking at you Mrs. Micah), but I think I need this wake-up call to get me going.

It’s kind of challenging (but fun) to think up activities you can do here in Chicago that are enjoyable and cheap, so here are some that I have done and are more than worth the price of admission:

• Ride the Ferris Wheel: Ride one of Chicago’s landmark structures on Navy Pier for just $5.
• Visit the Art Institute: Sure, it’s an expensive ticket. But get a passport from the Public Library for free and save your money. The only hassle is you’ll have to wait for one to be available.
• Stand Under The Bean: This one is free, you’ll just have to go at 7am if you want to avoid the crowds.
• Go to the Botanical Gardens: This is a nice one, especially in the summer. Get a couple of friends to drive with you and it’ll cost each one of you $5 (parking is $15). Or you can ride the Metra from the city to Braeside stop: that’s $4.30. You will have to find your way back though…
• Visit the Garfield Park Conservatory: This one is free too! Parking is free or you can take the CTA green line train for $2.
• Go see a movie: Join the Five Buck Club and after a movie has been out for two weeks, pay only $5 to get in!

Make sure you bring your camera (or snag a disposable for $4) and take as many pictures as you can! Enjoy Chicago!

Even though I claim to be a responsible investor interested in as much return as possible without too much risk (hence why I like index funds so much), I’m still human. I watch stock prices shoot up 30% in a matter of days and I imagine how much money I would have if I pulled off a couple of those trades. The allure of the market is tough to resist — it’s like the rush some people get from gambling. Anyway, I will sometimes indulge the market and buy some individual stocks (right now I own two), but for the most part I stick to index funds. But how do I get rid of that itch?

Paper trading, that’s how. You can’t make any money and you can’t lose any either, but you can learn a whole heck of a lot while you’re doing it. Looking back on “moves” you’ve made can teach you a thing or two about investing, yourself and the psychology of the market.

Today I am adding a stock to my virtual portfolio: Research in Motion (RIMM).

Even though I wanted to “get in” at $116, I’ll just go ahead and buy it at what it’s running today, which is $131. Simply adding stocks left and right is no fun, however. The fun part is in analyzing why you bought certain stocks and whether or not you were right. Why am I buying RIMM? One word: Thunder. That’s one of the new phones that RIMM is going to release this year. Why such a big deal? It’s a Blackberry phone with an iPhone screen. There has been an ongoing debate ever since the iPhone came out about which is better: an iPhone or a Blackberry. RIMM still has way more market share than Apple does and business users still rely on their Blackberries like nothing else. Pay attention on the train or the bus next time you go to work: do you see more Blackberries or iPhones? Now imagine there was a Blackberry with the sexy touch-screen that is all the rage right now. Things are about to get interesting.

If this all sounds familiar, I’m basically going off of what the iPhone 3G did when it came out. Being the “it” device drove a million people to buy it in just three days. I’m expecting the buzz over the Thunder to be just as big. And in case you’re a curious cat, Verizon (VZ) has the exclusive with the Thunder, so if you like what’s happened to AT&T (T) with all the iPhone mania, then maybe you’d like to take a look at Verizon. As for me, I’m just going to add RIMM to my mock portfolio. Does that mean the stock will go up? Not necessarily, but since I’m a long-term investor, I’m willing to bet it will eventually impact the stock in a positive way.

By the way, how do I “know” all this stuff? Well, I love gadgets for one. So while I guess you could call it “research,” to me it’s exciting reading about all the latest bells and whistles that these phones are going to have in them. I wish I could buy them, but my frugality is too strong to give in (so far). Plus my wallet is too thin. And in case you’re curious, I own a Motorola PEBL that doesn’t do much other than make phone calls and look small.

Paper trading will never replace the feeling you get when you’re actually putting real money into a stock. It’s a rush but it can also be very stressful. Luckily for me, I don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in any particular stock (not yet anyway), so the stress level for me is minimal. Once you’ve paper traded for a while, you’ll be better equipped to make these kinds of decisions and eventually buy real shares in real companies.

DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a recommendation and you should NOT take it as such. This is me, a regular dude with no financial training, fake-investing in the stock market. Grain of salt please.

[Image from Engadget.com]

PS. This post has been included in the Money Hacks Carnival over at Our Four Pence Worth. Make sure to check out all the other great entries.

http://www.lsureveille.com/

I usually like to find interesting/useful stuff for other people and share with others on this site, but every now and then I find that research and talking to other people only goes so far. So today I’m the one that needs help. M and I have spoken often of buying bikes so we can enjoy Chicago and the lakefront while getting a little exercise. We do go for walks a lot, but that can take a long time and riding a bike just seems like more fun. So we want to buy a couple of bikes but we don’t want to spend a whole lot of money — and we need help.

There are a couple of bike shops in our area but it’s kind of intimidating stepping in there when you don’t know what you’re doing. I’ve asked around at work and they’ve given me some tips about buying used and how much I should be spending, but I still feel a little lost. When I look at bikes online, I look at the picture and think, “This looks like it would do.” Like this bike at WalMart.com. I mean, is that a bad/cheap bike? Is buying used OK? If I just want a basic bike to ride down the like every so often, how much do I need to spend?

I’m always out there trying to find a deal, but in this case I’m a little lost as to what features I need and which ones would be silly for me to get. It might be a case of me thinking too much — maybe I just need to buy a used bike that is in good shape and make sure I don’t overpay. But when you’re obsessive about spending and not getting scammed, this is what you get. I’m thinking this is how people feel when they buy a new computer or a new gadget that they know absolutely nothing about. It’s tough.

Anyway, any and all help would be greatly appreciated!