Neville's Financial Blog

Trying to Learn Flash

2008-05-08T09:19:00.000-07:00

Learning Photoshop has brought me lots of value (and money), and I think it's much past due that I learn how to use Flash.

I can sssoooorrrrrt of use Flash right now as seen in my crude re-creation of my accident. I was also able to quickly pick up Swish which is what I might use from now on.

I'm not looking to become an expert in this, but I want to be able to regularly incorporate Flash into different projects. I can already make simplified little movies, but I want to learn how to use Action Script which is the programming language behind Flash (from what I understand). My end goal is to make small Flash files which react to mouse movement. Like when you roll your mouse over an area, it reacts in a certain way, or makes other objects in the file react. Shouldn't be that tough.

As for now I'm starting to get re-acquainted with Flash, and this is my first little experiment with it:

That's just from playing around a bit. I need to start learning how to properly use more advanced features. Both Flash and Swish have tutorials included in the software, perhaps those would be a good start. There's also a massive amount of free flash tutorials out there (Google it), but has anyone had luck with a particular one?

I've given myself a reasonable time line to get familiar with making customized Flash modules: Two weeks. So come 5-22-2008 I should have some crude example of a interactive Flash file posted here.

Improving HoR - Day 19 - Newsletter

2008-05-07T17:44:00.000-07:00

HouseOfRave has thousands of registered users on the mailing list and yet I've never sent out a newsletter or mass mailing with new products, news yadda yadda. It seems I'm missing out on a decently large opportunity here (well, I sent a ghetto one before which was a total disaster).

I'll be using Vertical Response to send out this upcoming newsletter as I've had some experience with it before. Today I designed, wrote and formatted the pictures for the upcoming newsletter.

I'm actually waiting to send this email blast for a little while, because coming up on May 22, 2008 Vertical Response is having a free workshop @ the Driskill in Austin which will teach a bunch of tips, tricks and recommendations for email marketing. I'll be going if anyone here in Austin wants to join me for the ~~free food~~ workshop.

Anyhow, currently this is what I've come up with for the Newsletter:

It looks a little plain, but hey, it's only the first day I've worked on it. I also have a feeling the final product that goes out will look much different than this initial composite.

I'm sure the upcoming workshop will have a bunch of recommendations on what works and what doesn't. I've heard little tips like giving away a 15% of coupon in the email is good, but it never works good as offering free shipping....little things like that can make or break a campaign (so I hear).

I'll be sending this initial test email to 4,000 registered customers, and it's crazy to think of that percentage wise.

If only 2% order something, that's 80 extra orders.
If only 1% order something, that's 40 extra orders.
If only .5% order something, that's 20 extra orders.

I'm wondering if that's just wishful thinking, or if this email marketing stuff really works that well. Anyone here had any success with it?

Improving HoR - Day 18 - Yahoo Shopping Feed

2008-05-06T12:50:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I setup HouseOfRave to send an XML feed to Google, now to further expand HoR's reach I've submitted a product feed of 350 HouseOfRave products to Yahoo.

I had to format the product list myself since my software doesn't automatically do it, but Yahoo makes it simple, so anyone relatively familiar with Excel could figure it out.

For BodyMonkey.com I use Yahoo Stores, so all my products are automatically listed on the Yahoo Shopping network. That business is rarely updated yet still makes some orders solely from Yahoo Shopping Network listings.

What I like about the Yahoo Shopping Network is that when people click your product, they are usually ready to buy. However since HouseOfRave is not hosted on Yahoo Stores, I'm curious to see the actual buying habits.

Unlike Google's Froogle, inclusion in the Yahoo Shopping network costs money. I added $50 to my pay-per-click account and am anxious to see the results in the coming month. If an investment of $50 brings in <$50 in profit I wouldn't have had before, then the campaign will be a success and I'll increase my Yahoo spending. If not, lesson learned.

Improving HoR - Day 17

2008-05-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote about improving the shopping cart layout and flow for HouseOfRave, and it's definitely much better than it used to be.

I added upon that and started making new checkout buttons that stay congruent with the main site. Previously all the buttons looked like this:

There was nothing really wrong with the buttons, but they didn't fit the color scheme of the site very well. I went ahead and re-designed some of the buttons to appear like this:

The changed buttons were basically transposed from the "Add to cart" and "View Cart" buttons customers see on all the products.

MAIN CHECKOUT BUTTONS:
Now I realize the "Continue Shopping" and "Checkout" button have not been changed. I actually DID change them, but reverted them back. I'm trying to make the buttons congruent with the site, but that was the problem, the new buttons blended in too well with the site. I think the checkout button should stand out a little more, and I'm still trying to find/make a good one. Even Noah commented on this saying checkout buttons should stand out.

I do like how it looks at the moment. The "Remove" "Empty Cart" and "Recalculate" buttons are routine user operations, and the associated buttons look completely different from the main site functions (Continue Shopping and Checkout").

An extra backend function that was added to the site courtesy of the recent Shopsite upgrade is I can track user store searches. So whenever people search for something, I see the results in the backend. This feature was just implemented this feature very recently so there's not much data yet, but it's another metric I can use to improve the overall ease of use for House Of Rave.

Improving HoR - Day 16 - Disco Time

2008-05-02T18:57:00.000-07:00

Today for improving HoR I added a bunch of cross-sell items to the products in the Disco Ball section of HouseOfRave.

Another improvement to the disco ball section today is the addition of a "how-to" page. Every once in a while I get calls or emails asking what is needed to create a full disco ball setup. I'm sure if a few people are emailing and asking about this, a lot more are wondering.

Come to think about it...it isn't very intuitive. People who want a whole disco ball setup in their house, apartment, game room, business...whatever, need three things: A disco ball, a motor and a light. There are different types of disco balls, different motors for different sized disco balls and different types of lights. To cure this confusion I decided to make a simple graphic that explains this:

....that's not quite enough to explain it, so when clicked, it brings visitors to the "How To Setup A Disco Ball" page which I made today. I'll admit this isn't the neatest tutorial around, but it can help clear up some confusion to the novice disco ball buyer.

In the tutorial are several steps on how to setup a disco ball and it also shows HouseOfRave's offerings. It isn't overly complicated, but it gives people a better idea of what's needed.

I wrote the tutorial, snapped some quick pictures, cropped them and posted them in a new page. Hopefully this little addition will help improve the quality of the Disco Ball section.

Upgrading HoR - Day 15 - Shopping Cart

2008-05-01T12:36:00.000-07:00

On Noah's recent trip to Austin I introduced him to a friend who's a huge player in the viral marketing field. Now he runs a big media company yadda yadda, and showed us some of his tactics.

One of the things he's absolutely fanatical about is optimizing his checkout forms. Whether for buying a product, filling out an email form....basically anything with a customer text entry box...he does massive amounts of multi-variate testing to see which layout, which font, which words, which images, which checkout flow, which spacing etc. results in the highest amount of successful transactions.

Now his market and sales are much different than mine on HouseOfRave, but something can be learned from this.

SO I decided to take a page from his book and for the first time EVER....optimize the checkout form on HoR.

I was actually quite horrified at how bad it was. The colors made me wanna throw up, there were no links to see the products you were buying, there were some confusing forms, some unnecessary fields and more simple fixes that had remained untouched for years.

Thanks to the recent upgrade of Shopsite I have the ability to change my forms a lot more. I realized that a lot of these names are strange to people and they have no idea what they're getting when they press "Checkout." Fortunately I can now add links and images on the shopping cart, which lets people know what they're getting. Now when someone adds something to the shopping cart it looks something like this:

When people checkout they now see something like this:

There's a lot of very minor changes in this new form such as the addition of writing "Optional" on the 'Address 2' field. Despite most people knowing this is where you'd enter an apartment number or office number, some people not familiar with online commerce scratch their heads wondering why they need to enter a 2nd address. Clearly writing "Optional" instead of simply denoting it with an *asterisks* should help.

I also want people to give suggestions in the comment box, so I wrote that. I want to change it soon to include something like "Why are you buying these products?" so I can more clearly understand what market I'm catering to (Hint: hardly anyone actually buys from the site for raves...it's kind of counter-intuitive).

There were also little things like lining up the text entry boxes correctly so it looks neat.

If you can spot any confusing parts of the form or have suggestions, please let me know. I also plan on doing this sometime soon:
Allowing all the readers of this blog to place test orders on the site and send me feedback on what they thought was confusing or could be improved. I'll try to get that test out sometime this month.

There's still a lot of work to do, but simply paying some attention to the things I've overlooked for so long has already made a world of difference.

What It Costs To Be Alive

2008-04-30T11:56:00.000-07:00

I don't know where this came from, but I was randomly curious on how much it costs me to simply exist here in Austin, TX. per year.

Fixed Yearly Costs:
$1,000 = Car insurance ($84/month)
$1,800 = Health insurance ($150/month)
$960 = Cell phone ($80/month)
$6,000 = Rent ($500/month)
$12,000 = Food, gas, general items ($1,000/month)
$2,400 = Random Costs ($200/month)

Total = $24,160

That's just to live, doesn't even account for going out, travelling etc.
I also have few monthly bills because I have no debt, no loans and no car payment.

Hmmm....good to know.

Upgrading HoR - Day 14

2008-04-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

Today for updating HoR I added a few more products to the site to various sections, nothing particularly crazy but a necessary step in the improvement process.

I also took advantage of a feature in the recent upgrade of Shopsite: Google Sitemaps. The new software automatically populates a sitemap specially designed for Google and submits it via the Google Webmaster Tools.

On another note, a very small change that has been particularly helpful lately has been the percentages metric I added to my accounting sheet. Little did I realize how many of my products had a much older version of the shipping metric on them.

It becomes especially apparent on large orders where my percentage should be 30+ percent. Before I would get a large order, and after the numbers were entered, a nice profit sum would be spit out. This profit seems nice until you realize it should be nearly a third higher. What a big difference such a small metric can make!

Improving HoR - Day 13

2008-04-25T12:59:00.000-07:00

I did the $325 upgrade for my shopping cart software, and I am proud to announce something:

It was the first installation of new server software in the history of mankind where nothing went wrong.

On another not I got the 4th of July section relatively done, populated and have put up a small denotation for it in the left navigation bar:

I've also got the Froogle feed setup...another thanks to Adam's post about this. It went pretty smoothly thanks to an automatic Google Base submit feature in the newest version of Shopsite I just upgraded to.

Improving HoR - Day 12 - Percentages

2008-04-22T11:43:00.000-07:00

When I get an order for HouseOfRave there are two numbers I plugin to get my profit count for the day: the amount of money brought in by the order and the cost I pay the supplier to send it.

It's a very rudimentary calculation of Income - Cost. With this system some orders would have a high profit, some would be low. Sometimes an order would make me $25 another order of similar value would make me $5. This shouldn't be the case.

When an order goes way below my margin rate, that means something is funky on my end. So to more obviously identify what is going on, I added a simple income/profit percentage rate calculation. Now with this simple percentage I can more easily pinpoint problematic orders and fix them immediately.

Check it out:

That first problem order was for $49.25, yet I only made $2.33 in profit....less than a 5% margin, yikes! However, orders of roughly similar value bring in at least $12 or more.

So now I can see something is wrong and fix it. With that particular order, the person ordered with 3-day shipping, and my formula for 3-day shipping on the products they ordered was wrong. Easily fixable.

That order isn't the only problem, in fact almost every order has some small issue. Every order should have a margin percentage rate at or above roughly 30%.

So this set of shown orders brought in $1,168.02 and profited $274.38 for a profit margin rate of roughly 23%. If there were no problems with my shipping table and all prices matched the supplier, then this set of orders would have brought in about $350 instead.

One of the real culprits here is the shipping prices. My software can't do the same type of calculations as my supplier, so they are always a little off. Hopefully the upgrade can help solve this issue soon.

One of Bob's Rules really is true:
Anything that is measured and watched, improves.

Improving HoR - Day 11 - Cart Upgrade

2008-04-21T23:47:00.000-07:00

Today for HoR I further populated the 4th of July Section which I want ready by month's end, however the most important thing today is I bought a $325 upgrade for Shopsite, the server-side software I use for HouseOfRave.

A few of the goals I previously set out that will be now be possible with this upgrade are:

Upselling commonly bought items at checkout.
Integration with Google Analytics.
Automatic Google Base XML feed submission (thanks to Adam's post for jump starting this idea).
Free shipping coupons.
Analyzation of in-store keyword searches.

There's a couple more features the upgrade has, but the main ones I bought it for is the checkout screen upsell feature and auto Google Base XML submission.

In the coming days I install it, I'm sure there will be a little learning time for the new features, plus maybe a problem or two. Murphy's Law ya know!

Improving HoR - Day 10 - Seasonal Stuff

2008-04-18T10:29:00.000-07:00

I spoke about getting seasonal a few days ago, so to take some action on that I've created the HouseOfRave 4th of July section

This section is the second to be added under my recently created "Seasonal" section. I've started populating the section with new products my supplier carries, I'll add 5 or 10 products per day. A lot of the existing products I carry also go in this section, so it shouldn't take very long to populate it.

So for today I made the 4th of July section, added some products, created the banner and added it to the seasonal section.

Improving HoR - Day 9 - Tattoo Experiment 2

2008-04-17T11:31:00.000-07:00

A while back I did a business in a box inventory experiment. It's been almost a year now, and even on a small scale I realize that I really don't like maintaining an inventory, and especially don't like physically sending out orders.

This is why HouseOfRave has always continued to be a dropship model.

Since I've done this little experiment in selling the tattoos I've had to re-order inventory twice, buy more packing supplies (aka envelopes and stamps) and this time I ordered a little more stuff, which was perhaps a mistake, but a learning experience nonetheless.

So to keep in conrguence with the "small, lightweight, can-be-sent-in-an-envelope" theme I also ordered some of these tattoo sleeves from the supplier:

(Yes, that is my arm with the tattoo sleeve)

I did a quick photo shoot of them and made them a new product on the website. Additionally, the supplier was out of the standard 8" tattoos I ordered before, so they sent 5 1/2" tattoos instead which I had to make a new product for. So now on the tattoo page you can see the two new products.

For the smaller tattoos I decided not to sort them into individual products as that gets tedious to maintain inventory, but to sell them as an "assortment" which means you get random styles. I still had to photograph some of the different styles using the same method I did for the first tattoo experiment:

You can see all the final images on the 5 1/2" tattoo page.

Every time I get an order for a temporary tattoo I:

Get the "business in a box" from my room (aka the Aldo shoebox)
Address an envelope
Insert the tattoos (or sleeves)
Send the "package" when I check my mail.

Relatively simple yes, but it still involves work which is best suited for a properly prepared supplier with a warehouse. For example, if someone wants the tattoos with Express shipping, I have no way of doing this without a trip to the post office. Fortunately this doesn't happen often, but nevertheless I might remove these products at some point if I have to ship them myself, despite their (minor) profitability.

Improving HoR - Day 8

2008-04-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

Improving HoR today dealt mainly with making the Glowstick section more congruent.

I changed a lot of the prices (as they have been raised), properly calculated shipping prices and calibrated all the product layouts to the new top cart. I also added some new 10" high intensity and 10 " Ultra high intensity glowsticks to the section.

When I tell people about HouseOfRave they usually say, "Oh, so you sell a lot of glowsticks?" It's an understandable misconception...but in reality I don't make much money on glowsticks. However I do make money every once in a while on the big, bulk glow orders.

Another thing I started doing today was preparing for a HouseOfRave email blast. I'll be sending this particular blast out sometime towards the end of the month using Vertical Response. It'll be to 4,000 emails (a group of customers who haven't ordered in at least 6 months from the mailing list). I could send it to more, but this seems like a nice test size to run some numbers.

This will be my second email blast ever for HouseOfRave, the first one was a total disaster:

It looked horrible
It had a long load times for the images
If the address wasn't capable of HTML it just showed code
I simply sent it using Outlook
I put the addresses in the "To" field instead of "BCC" field, therefore IIFFFF the email was even opened correctly, it showed 5 long pages of email addresses before the content began.

Quite embarrassing! I also (understandably) got a lot of angry people emailing me back saying, "I can't believe you openly shared my email..." I've got much more experience with email marketing since then, and will hopefully send out a successful, nicely designed, customer friendly email. I'm curious to see the order impact it will have (if any).

Improving HoR - Day 7 - Getting Seasonal

2008-04-15T23:20:00.000-07:00

As a high school then college student running HouseOfRave I never understood anything about retail.

Later in life I learned that seasons can make or break retail outlets. It's well known that many retailers often clear half their yearly sales from November to December alone.

Luckily I'm with a supplier who's much wiser and long understood that, and plans retail holidays months in advance. About a month ago, for the first time ever on HouseOfRave, there was a seasonal based product section. That was the St. Patrick's Day section:

It's kind of annoying adding so many products just for a short holiday, especially since many of them don't tie into the "Light Up Stuff" theme of HouseOfRave....but I've found some other long-term value benefits to these sections:

It makes the site look up to date.
Makes the site look "bigger"
Holiday supplies are often good upsellers.

I realized most people ordering the St. Patty's day stuff ordered different items first, saw the St. Patrick's Day section then said, "Oh, that would be nice to have this weekend" and added the product.

----------------------------------------

With that said, Spring is here, the weather is warmer (Austin weather is unbelievably beautiful right now) and people will be doing more outdoorsy stuff.

Products I carry that are congruent with this are the Bubble Section and Fans. Apparently these items do really well this season.

So for improving HoR today I added some fans to the Play Stuff section...although it doesn't really fit there (just needed some place to stick em for the moment). I also added a couple of bubble products to the Bubble Section:

Improving HoR - Day 6 - Not So Much

2008-04-14T22:34:00.000-07:00

I didn't really do much to improve HoR today because I was primarily concerned with an all day doing-taxes-at-the-last-minute session. Actually it only took about 2 1/2 hours thanks to TurboTax....it made my day a WHOLE lot easier.

Ha! In the amount of time it took me to make that creepy TurboTax-love picture I probably could've upgraded something on HouseOfRave.

Improving HoR - Day 5 - HackerSafe Symbol

2008-04-13T16:48:00.000-07:00

A nice guy called me out of the blue one day, and did his sales pitch. It was good, I had been thinking about, so I took the bait and signed up.

He was selling the HackerSafe logo occasionally seen on larger websites, it looks like this:

He got me to sign up for a $187/month service plus setup fee on a business that costs a total of $350/month to run. Must have been a damn good sales pitch!

Anyhow, I'm on a cost reduction/improvement phase for House Of Rave, so right now I can't justify DOUBLING my monthly expenses to put up that logo. Kind of a mistake to sign up at this point....despite the wonders they claim the logo can do. I do like having the logo there, but the numbers simply don't work in my favor:

They gave me a free trial period, but so far I haven't seen any direct effect on sales. I'm still skeptical that simply showing this logo can increase sales (on a website this small). Rather at this point in HouseOfRave's life....product selection, improved usability etc. would be more effective at increasing sales. For a small business like HoR, I just don't think the HackerSafe logo is right at this time.

Now maybe if it were something reasonable like $50/month....

Improving HoR - Day 4

2008-04-12T20:52:00.000-07:00

One of the very unfortunate drawbacks to dropshipping like House Of Rave is the lack of your own marketing and branding materials that are physically sent to each customer in their order.

With my old supplier, each order had SOME marketing materials as they would simply print out my customized invoices and send orders based on that. It was easy to tweak information on the invoices. Now my orders are all electronically sent and things got a little more complicated.

Now when an order is received by a customer, they get an invoice...but it doesn't say "HouseOfRave" anywhere. That doesn't help people remember the name...and sometimes actually confuses customers.

To combat this I designed some front/back 4" x 6" flyers and had several hundred printed out:

So whenever an order is sent from the supplier on behalf of HoR they will toss in one of these flyers. This makes sure the customer remembers HoR, makes HoR look a little bigger, thanks the customer for their order and also contains return instructions in case something doesn't work.

I only printed out several hundred the first time since the text can use some modification over the next few months. I also might want to initiate a call to action on the flyer by offering a 10% discount or free shipping on the next flyers...see how it works.

In the future I hope me and the supplier can somehow customize my order invoices electronically as that would be the easiest and cheapest method to branding. Theoretically I can simply email customized packing lists to the supplier for each order, but this involves more work on my end and his end.

So come Monday I'll send these flyers to the supplier!

Improving HoR - Day 3

2008-04-11T16:45:00.000-07:00

Day 3 of improving HoR consisted of changing some more product image layouts like on Day 1, then some new things like adding cross-sell products to some of the popular items.

I still have a lot to do, but when someone looks at certain products, they see "Related Products" which they also might be interested in. So if someone's searching for high intensity glowsticks and lands on the House Of Rave search result, they will see other types of glowsticks they might be interested in like this:

Another thing I picked up again today was the Search Engine Optimization of HoR. I've done many contracts for larger companies on this in the past, but never applied it to my own stuff before. So I charted out some keywords to go after and have actively started tracking them using the SEO tracking software I used for other companies.

This will be a several-months-long project as SEO is relatively slow moving, however the software did make me aware I didn't have proper description tags on many of my section pages, so I went through and changed (or added) most of them.

Improving HoR - Day 2

2008-04-10T23:50:00.000-07:00

This is more of an obligatory post to say I've continued pretty much doing the same thing from Day 1.

Improving HoR - Day 1

2008-04-09T20:47:00.000-07:00

Day 1 of my effort to improve my online business HouseOfRave.com started with me re-doing a bunch of products with a new Add-To-Cart template.

Previous all the products on HoR had the shopping cart buttons at the bottom of the page, like this:

As you can see it's often not centered, different product image sizes throw it off, and it's just more confusing in general.

To cure this I had a top-right-centered template made for Shopsite, so I've been going through and changing product pages to this more standard Add-to-Cart layout:

In theory I can simply select all the products in the catalog and mass-edit them to the new template in one action...however many of the products on the old template required me to insert a lot of breaks so the formatting around the images was correct. This causes problems now since the layout is different, and if I blindly apply this template, it leaves many of the products with a lot of wasted space like so:

So there's the unfortunate job of going through all the products and removing that code. The upside is once this job is done, I can make new templates without worry about ghetto-ized code messing everything up.

So today I've gone through several product sections and cleaned up code, re-sized a lot of product images, added bulk pricing information to certain products as well as updated shipping cost information.

Improving HoR This Month

2008-04-08T23:37:00.000-07:00

For the remainder of April I want to dramatically increase the quality of my online business House of Rave.

I've decided for this month not to contract work out and simply focus on one thing. Of course lots of other things go on at the same time, but I'd like to pin-point my focus on HoR.

So for April I will post daily about progress I've made. I'll do this every day, even if the changes are relatively minute.

Some visual and content things I need to focus on:

Shopping cart re-positioning.
Header re-design and changes.
Footer Changes.
View Cart button re-positioning.
Shopping cart layout optimization.
Update shipping information.
Cross-selling items.
Upsell items at checkout.
Update return information and policies.
All over more professional feel to the site.

Some more "shopping experience" things I need to focus on (which I've never focused on before):

Checkout process.
Differentiate normal checkout from Google Checkout.
Order confirmation email and text.
Tracking number email and text.

Feel free to suggest possible upgrades and point out confusing portions of the site throughout the series of posts.

Inch by inch, it's a cinch.

Killing The BodyMonkey?

2008-03-27T13:15:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure what to do, so I'll write it out..

I've got two very similar online businesses:
HouseOfRave.com and BodyMonkey.com

Aesthetically they look identical, but they are geared towards different markets. I have HoR which is a niche website that caters to light up stuff, so the items sold are generally things that glow, blink or light up.

BodyMonkey goes through the same supplier as House Of Rave, but focuses on a broader product range. On BodyMonkey you can find all sorts of toys, games, decorations and things that appeal to a larger audience. The broader range of products is good, but online specialization is sometimes BETTER than selling items you can often find elsewhere. This has been a key to HoR's success.

House Of Rave has been the steady producer over the years which only recently I've been taking more seriously. BodyMonkey makes a small profit every month with a large potential, but I don't think I can maintain both stores. I've tried with very average results.

So my problem is should I keep both businesses or focus just on one? I've struggled with this question for a while now, and in my opinion I should get rid of BodyMonkey.com.

Focusing on just House Of Rave would allow me to improve it to awesome status, while focusing on both sites might leave me with two mediocre sites.

OPERATIONAL COSTS:
House Of Rave costs roughly $350 per month to keep running.

$100 - Dedicated server. Not bad, because I also host a slew of other websites from this server paid for by HoR.
$95 - Merchant account fees.
$20 - Google Checkout fees.
$50 - PayPal Fees
$45 - Vonage phone bill.
$5 - American Express acceptance fee
Other additional yearly fees which I amortize into monthly billing.

BodyMonkey costs roughly $85/month to keep running.

$40 - Yahoo Store fees
$45 - Merchant account fees

END GOAL:
The end goal for HoR and BM is to provide me with a steady monthly income so I can dabble in other projects while still having my bills paid. With the additional burden of BodyMonkey on my hands, maintaining the two stores almost becomes a full time job.

With this said, I think it only makes sense for me to kill the monkey. Sad, because I think it has lots and lots of potential.

Now the questions is, what do I do with it?

Sell it?
Let it sit there and generate a small income till it becomes obsolete?
Let someone else take over, share profits?

If someone takes over BodyMonkey, they would be sharing the same relationship with my supplier. This makes it very important that I can personally vouch for the person who takes it over (if I choose that route).

Any suggestions?

Car Broken Into - New Account

2008-03-25T13:03:00.000-07:00

Since I bought my Lexus last year I haven't had a single problem with it. It was due time something happened, but it wasn't Lexus' fault.

Someone decided to break into my car.

Passenger side quarter-window

Glass slipping into every crevice. You can see police fingerprinting dust on the seat.

Cops found a decent fingerprint on the door...unlikely it will lead to anything though.

I always keep my cars absolutely devoid of anything visible in the cabin, so they didn't have anything to take. The Lexus dealership is charging me $209 for the parts and labor....which actually isn't a bad price, however I quickly realized something: Where will this money come from?

I've got the money to cover it, but here's the breakdown of my regularly used accounts (sans the savings and stock accounts):

General Account - $1,000 balanced debit card. Money goes in and out from this account, but the balance always remains constant and isn't spent.
Bills Account - Pay rent, gas, groceries and other everyday bills.
Spending Account 1 - Money for going out.
Spending Account 2 - For trips & holidays.
House Account - Money for buying house.
Investment Account - Used for anything that helps me make money. Usually keep roughly $6k in here.
Permanent Savings - Accumulate money here to later put in various savings accounts.

If I have to get routine maintenance on the car like an oil change, tire rotation etc. I send it to the "Bills Account" but this charge doesn't justify coming from there.

What I need to do is open an unexpected situation account. I'm going to nickname it the "Oh Sh!t Account."

As I get older and have more stuff/responsibilities I have a feeling this account will prove to be pretty useful. This account will slowly accumulate money month after month that can be used for any of those unexpected things life throws...in this case, a brick!

Chicago Visit April 3rd - 7th

2008-03-21T08:18:00.001-07:00

I'll be in Chicago from April 3rd (Thursday) till April 7th (Monday). If you're in or around the area, hit me up!

Every time I go to Chicago I have a BLAST, and hopefully this time will be no different.

The purpose of this visit is A.) to have fun with friends and B.) to keep up with my goal of getting out of town every quarter.

This isn't a very long visit, but I'm always happy to meet new people over a quick cup of coffee, or meeting up Downtown for the nightlife. Call me if interested!