What I’m mainly interested to see is how the rising middle class is affecting the country. Is it like the rise of the massive middle class in the U.S. in the 1950′s, or is it different?

While I’m there I’ll try to visit some of the massive call centers I hear so much about, perhaps make a few contacts. Some of the best engineering talent in the world is in India, so some interesting things must be happening there regarding entrepreneurship. This is a democratic country with tons of talent being used to develop tons of large scale projects, so it’s inevitable that Indian entrepreneurs will spring up all over the place. I’d like to meet some of these people.

Some questions I’ll ask myself while there:

-What brand of cars are becoming prevalent? Fiats dominated the road last time I visited.

-Last time I went, disposal waste per household was extremely low. I remember one guy with a small basket picking up the garbage for every household in an entire colony (equivalent to an apartment complex). Hardly anything was wasted. How has that changed with modern packaging techniques, fast food etc?

-How easy/hard is it to get an internet connection and power outlet for my laptop over there? Is it expensive?

-Cell phone usage?

-Adjusted price comparison of a Big Mac in the United States and India. Over there It’s actually called a Maharaja Mac and is made with lamb or chicken instead of Beef. McDonald’s got in some trouble for serving beef.

-Attitudes towards the United States?

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I’m also highly interested to see if the level of corruption has gone down, as this is one of the more powerful issues I see holding India back.

The way of doing business there is entrenched in bribes and “Bonuses”, many which are now considered a normal part of doing business. The sad thing is the people who enforce the law are involved too, so people are forced to continue the system of bribes in order to get anything done.
For example: If you open a restaurant and need a liquor license, let’s just say unless you pay someone a very large “gratuity” for their work, your license won’t show up for the next 10 years.

This also happens on a smaller scale. For example: If you want to park your car in a no parking zone, an officer will ticket or tow your car unless you “encourage” the officer not to with a monetary incentive.

I also want to try some sort of money experiment while in India. With the sheer amount of poor people already trying to sell stuff, I don’t know if my bottled water experiment would fly over there, so I’ll have to look for something else!

It will be called www.BodyMonkey.com

The name came from a body jewelry store I was going to create, but my lack of interest left the domain for dead. I then needed a temporary domain name to let the Yahoo designers build the site, so I used BodyMonkey and then started to really like the name. It’s catchy and can eventually become a brand. ……and the name just makes me laugh!

A setback on this business is of all the shopping cart platforms out there, the one I know the LEAST about is Yahoo Stores. Another setback to the process is the limited number of Yahoo Store designers out there, because Yahoo uses their own custom programming language called RTML. This means a specialized designer must be hired, and “specialized” always equals “more money.” I’m not a fan of spending a lot of money on a business until its proven itself….but I had to suck it up on this one.

So far the rough shell of the site has been posted, and work is about 30% done on the site. Currently the site is a duplicate of my House Of Rave business, but that will somewhat be changed in the coming weeks. I will focus more on the design and layout in the coming weeks.

BodyMonkey will work much like my first online business, but this time I can correct a lot of the mistakes I’ve made in the past, and implement new features the HoR software doesn’t have. Something I’ve been having a lot of fun doing is making product videos and taking product photos for all the products that will be on the site. The supplier carries over 2,000+ products which I will eventually also carry, so this is no small undertaking and will be an ongoing process.

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I’m trying to find some sort of logo for BodyMonkey, and maybe even a character. When the site is running I want to rotate the logo every two weeks. Customers will be able to submit their logos, and if they’re used on the site, they get a free t-shirt or something like that.

This will be the first time I’m commissioning art for a website, which should be interested. It’s interesting to watch a talented artist use their creativity. So far, this is all I’ve come up with on my own:

The reason I think this business will do well is because I have so much fun doing stuff for it. Getting artwork done by caricature artists, learning a new ecommerce platform, taking product photos, playing with the products myself, making product videos etc…

The reason BodyMonkey never turned into a body jewelry store is because I don’t care or know anything about body jewelry. The whole project would have been half-assed and therefore never become anything big.

I wrote about taking product photos a short while ago which is challenging and fun, but even harder is making product videos. My first few were horribly cheesy, and I realized the need for proper camera techniques and proper editing. I may eventually invest in some expensive video editing software.

Here is one sample of a product video for these really neat Luna Candle things:

I’m sure I’ll get better at these product videos as time goes on.

So over the next few months, BodyMonkey.com will be transformed from just a simple shell of a site, to a fully functional Ecommerce store.

I’ve since cancelled and renewed everything in there, but the lack of credit/debit cards left me powerless to purchase anything…so I only had $400 in cash for the trip after that point. This means blowing $200 on gambling wasn’t an option.

On another note, I did make approx $120 from Vegas, but probably because I’m an extremely boring gambler. I’d put a dollar in a machine whenever I would walk by the gaming floors at different casinos, spin a few times, and the second I double my dollar, I’d cash out. This actually happened A LOT. I swear these slot machines felt like free ATM’s. I’d put in a dollar, get $2….put in a dollar, get $6……put in a dollar, get $15…

Of course I lost sometimes also, but little by little the winnings added up to a decent amount. Odds are if you gamble with your winnings, you will lose them…so unless you get great pleasure out of casino gambling (which I don’t) then it’s pointless.

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As for my lost wallet, it seems someone found it, charged $70 of gas on the credit card, got their other car and charged an additional $40 of gas.

Nothing else was charged. It seems an otherwise honest person, found the wallet and took advantage of an easy situation. I’m sure they also enjoyed the $70 of cash inside. Perhaps they could use some of that cash to at least ship back the wallet.

My business cards which have my websites were also in the wallet…so whoever found my wallet might be reading this right now.

Enjoy the free gas!

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I paid for my Vegas trip from the Spending1 and Spending2 accounts.
–Ticket = $300
–My share of Hotel + Internet charges = $140
–Cash spent = $500
–Total Spent = $940

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I sold my first stock in I don’t know how long. It was Baidu (BIDU). It was kind of an impulse purchase I made a while ago after reading TheKirkReport one day. I put $1,000 on it, and a little later it went down 75%. Instead of being rational and quickly selling this very speculative stock I knew nothing about, I held it and haven’t checked it for a very long time. I saw I was recently up 25% and decided to get out. $230 pocketed after fees. Dumb luck, as I knew absolutely nothing about the stock.

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General Account - $ 4,731
Spending Account – $ 87
Spending Account 2 – $ 42
Investment Account – $ 3,704
Bill Account – $ 739
Permanent Savings – $ 4,891
Charity Account – $ 318
Stock Portfolio Value – $ 11,227
Roth IRA – $ 6,912
Emigrant Direct – $ 5,020
Total Liquid Assets – $ 37,671

Credit Card Balance – $ 0
Business Holding – $ 6,645
Total On Hand – $ 44,316

I’ll give it a $200 budget (Courtesy of Interest.com)

There’s tons of little gambling experiments I can do, but I want something relatively unique or fun.

-Two spins of $100 on black?
-Couple pulls of the high stakes slots machines?
-200 $1 slot machine pulls?
-Sports bet?
-Quick go at the high stakes tables?
-?????

I need ideas!

Since I bought the phone in March 2006, I’ve paid Verizon Wireless $2,117 . This includes the phone, added features, overage charges, taxes, stupid fees and finally my cancellation charge for breaking the contract.

All that money for only 8 months of phone service.

In no particular order, here are the moves I’ve made in this process:

The interesting part is one day after I filed my insurance claim for a water damaged phone, the phone started working again! At this point I had already switched back to Catherine Zeta Jones and bought a regular $50 phone and a $50/month plan. The insurance company has already sent me a brand new phone, so I now have a brand new Treo 700P to sell and recoup some of the money paying for phone service.

Insurance fraud? Possibly….but not really.

I’ve definitely downgraded phones, and it’s not so bad. My new phone (Samsung t509s) makes calls and sends text messages, which is what a cell phone basically needs to do.

I do however feel a bit lost without the appointment feature on the old phone, and text messaging goes A LOT slower without a QWERTY keyboard!

-Nev

I’m sure this idea violates many, many, many laws, but it would be cool to outsource defensive driving to India.

You would signup for defensive driving online, go to the outsourcing service and have some kid in India do your course for $2/hour (maybe even less) and you’re done!

Obviously this plan is like Swiss cheese……full of holes.

It frequently gets cluttered, is a hassle to tabulate at the end of the month and doesn’t go into much detail about expenses.

For about $200 bucks I bought this thing called Neat Receipts. This system is supposed to digitally organize all your receipts….I originally saw it while browsing Sky Mall in a plane.

I’vebeen using it for a few weeks now, and it’s amazing! The whole system consists of a piece of software and this small scanner which fits neatly on my desk….it’s about the size of a TV remote control:

I was originally going to buy it, try it, and return it…but I’m actually very impressed. Just insert a receipt and the software AUTOMATICALLY reads it, tabulates tax, total price, tells what store the purchase is from, keeps a scanned copy, shows date of purchase and categorizes it!! Online receipts are also very easy to enter in. I was very impressed at how much information the program accurately picks up from each receipt.

You can I can see in real time how much I’ve spent for bills, investments, fun etc. in real time without having to input each purchase in an Excel sheet.

During tax time this thing will be extremely helpful because it basically tells you how much was spent for groceries, investments, transportation etc, and you can easily search for receipts digitally which beats rummaging through a large accordion folder full of them.

I’m sure for most people an Excel chart would be fine, but anyone with a considerable amount of purchases per month would benefit from this little system. This is personal finance for the 21st century!

The business people I most admire are the ones who start with very little and turn it into something great. Pete Coors is a 3rd or 4th generation family member who was handed his company. Of course there is a great amount of work in building upon a family business, but it’s not something I am familiar with or have much interest in. However I would have loved to meet his great, great, great grandfather Adolph Coors who started the whole thing from nothing.

I enjoy hearing inspirational stories of how people took nothing and turned into something despite great odds. However the focus of this talk was how the family runs and passes on the business. Not a bad speech, just not my cup of tea….althought it was rather dry.

After the speech, I didn’t particularly want a picture with him, unless I could hold up the Coors beer can I brought to the speech. This wasn’t nearly bad as the Wild Turkey Whiskey and cigarettes picture with Herb Kelleher!

However I was told by lots of people who had met him before that he wouldn’t do it. Naturally I didn’t listen to them and tried anyways….but I was flat out denied to take the picture with the beer can. I found this funny that I couldn’t take a picture with his own product.

It was a “decent”speech, and a little different…to hear about such an OLD company that is still run by the same family. I didn’t really pick up any useful information to share other than some small company facts which can be easily found on the company website.

This is a new milestone because it indicates I could realistically live off just one venture of mine if needed. Now the real work starts, sustaining and growing these temporary results.

HoR still runs almost the same, just a few modifications that cut out certain steps like manually charging each customer or creating orders one by one. My time should be spent growing, marketing and adding content, not caught up in small details which can be easily automated.