Neville's Financial Blog

Today an article I wrote on Business Blogging was published in the Daily Texan, the largest campus newspaper in the nation.

I’d like to thank Murray from Capital Ideas and Charles Kirk from The Kirk Report for their interviews. Capital Ideas was featured in the Personal Finance Blog section, and The Kirk Report (my personal favorite) was featured in the Stock Blog section.

The article was in the Focus section, highlighting the benefits of reading or maintaing a blog for financial purposes. The whole process of writing the article was extremely educational thanks to the staff at the Daily Texan, especially the Focus editor Jonathan McNamara.

Click here to see the article!

I am currently writing an article for The Daily Texan on how college students should save. The article will highlight :

• The power of compound interest and its ability to turn a small savings into a huge one over time.
• Different types of savings accounts college students can open.
• How much money should be put away per year. I am doing my calculations based on a person putting away $3,000 per year.
• How to put away $3,000 a year. This section will inform people that only $8.21 needs to be saved everyday to add up to $3,000.

The article will be running this Tuesday, pressing my schedule a bit. This will be especially hard since I have several tests and papers due this week.

On the more financial side, I have opened up another Bank of America account for paying bills. I’ve deposited $300 into the account, and will add to it every week. This account will grow till I graduate, then I will split it up into several different accounts for different bills (car bill, house bills etc.) at that time.

On an unrelated note, a family friend that lives right next to me just bought a Lamborghini Gallardo. He starts small businesses (like storage facilties, car washes etc.) and sells them. He also owns many rental properties and apartments. With a little persuasion and lots of begging, I may even get to drive it!!

I had another article published today in the Daily Texan on savings for college students. You can check out the article online here.

The article has a few quotes from a fellow blogger at All Thing Financial. Thanks JLP!

I was interviewed by Wall Street Journal Online reporter Terri Cullen on Monday afternoon, and the article is out today:

Blogs Expose Personal Finance: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The article features other blogs such as:
PFBlog.com
Mymoneyblog.com
Iwillteachyoutoberich.com
The Budgeting Babe
Neville’s Financial Blog
Savvy Saver blog
Insideblogging.com

Congrats to everyone who got a mention!

I really liked a particular quote Terri had:
“Another thing I liked about the blogs I visited was that most have yet to be consumed by the omnivorous beast that is GoogleAdSense.”

As I’ve mentioned before, I hate being idle. I am in Houston for Spring “Break” and like I planned it has been a great mixture of business and fun.

The business side is in the form of helping to market condos and several web designing projects on the side. I am also doing some accounting for my online business in the meantime.

I also finally got a chance to see the Lamborghini Gallardo of a family friend today.

I look a bit goofy in this picture, but I am revving up a brand new Lamborghini and I could care less!

I also took a visit to our local Honda dealship one beautiful day to check out the motorcycles:

I have another published article out in The Daily Texan today:

Interviewing 101: How to impress employers

Check it out!

As I struggle to tack some zero’s onto my bank accounts, I found this comment left on my site by Jack Miller very inspiring:

“The first $50,000 is tougher than the last $5 million.”

Tell me about it! I can also attest this is true from all the highly successful people I have spoken with, they all went through some sort of struggling period before they finally hit it big.

I’d like my first $50,000 to be made primarily by ME. This means I want to make the bulk of my money through any means other than a 9am-5pm job. I am more proud of the $5.43 I made from my water experiment than the $3,121 I have made from working at my job.

When you can’t have something, you want it more. This fact of human nature can be exploited to save you money.

Personal Example:
Despite having built up a nice amount of cash from several businesses in my early college years, I would subconsciously deprive myself of money, making me “virtually broke” so I didn’t spend too much money.

I did this by just pretending I didn’t have any money in the bank. Unfortunately this method worked a little too well. I would only spend about $60 a month on entertainment, not a lot for a socially active college student.

My Remedy: The spending account.

I created another free account with BankOfAmerica and labeled it my Spending Account. This is the money I designate for spending on anything I want. This money is MEANT to be spent and not saved. It kept me from spending too much money, but also kept me from living like a total cheapass.

If I don’t have enough in the spending account, I don’t buy it.

Thanks to this method, I have a healthy amount of money to spend, and I don’t take it overboard.

-Nev

I generally mention productive things I do, but I also need to check myself and analyze the things I haven’t done:

–I haven’t kept up with my online resume business: Resumite.com
–My excuse?
Charging $50 for a website where I must deal with individual people who know nothing about web pages would logistically kill my time/profit ratio. The person must email me their info, I must register DNS entries and deal with all the logistics of creating a page, then go back and forth contacting the person to check if they like the final product. I had plans to automate this process, but one site does not fit all. Even if I charged more money, the time required for each site would not fit in my schedule. This is a basically a long way of saying I was too damn lazy.

–I haven’t carried through with my traffic eradication experiment.
–My excuse?
I really wanted to do this, even though it was not a profitable idea in the short term. I wanted to do it…
1.) Because I loathe traffic.
2.) The exposure it would get.
This was a very good idea that would work perfectly in Austin if I could get around all the bureaucracy and federal laws involving public highways. The experience in navigating the government would be worth it alone. This experiment still fascinates me to this day…I’m not sure why I never carried through. I even got permission at several tall, nearby buildings to observe traffic patterns from a birds eye view. I still want to do this. I can see the headlines now, “College student defeats traffic“….or “College student causes worst traffic jam in Austin history“

–I haven’t kept up with FancyBlog.com
–My excuse?
I have no excuse for not adding one blog template a day to the site. I designed the page in a dynamic fashion, but it still requires a little work to make even small changes. I need to make the site into a blog-format, something I didn’t want to do initially. I also wasn’t into this idea that much. Once again, a drawn out excuse for laziness.

————————————————-

These ideas haven’t failed yet. They simply have not been carried through, which in my opinion is WORSE than having them fail.

Assessment:

Resumite.com – I probably will not fully carry through with Resumite.com in the near future.
FancyBlog.com - I want to make this extremely easy to update so it will only take me around 2-3 minutes per day to update. Still in progress.
Traffic Experiment - I’ve always wanted to do this. This project could literally erase the completely unnecessary traffic on I-35 near Downtown Austin, a stretch of road I must travel every single day. Still in progress.

I went to a wedding in Houston this weekend. There I met a friend who recently bought a Mercedes S55 AMG and a Mercedes SL600 (you read right: six hundred). Together these two cars cost well over $200,000.

I was tossed the keys to the S55 AMG and I played around in it.

I had been drinking, so the most I did was rev it up. There’s a very excited Neville inside that car:

As I came back to Austin on Sunday night, I posted up some quotes in my room. The wall to the left of my desk is now my “Motivation Wall”

There are also several quotes posted around random areas of my room, like near my mirror:

My favorite short quote on there is:

“I’m a great believer in luck,
and I find the harder I work,
the more I have of it”
–Thomas Jefferson


My favorite long quote on there is:

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn’t matter if you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better be running.”
–Taken from TheKirkReport.

-Nev