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I’m keeping a careful eye on my general accounts because I’ve been (and will be) burning money at a crazy rate:

Currently my general accounts look like:

General Account: $4,002
Spending Account: $194
Spending Account 2: $304
Investment Account: $2,605
Bill Account: $79 <-- !!! At least I don’t have to pay rent.
Permanent Savings: $3,768
Charity Account: $338
Stock Portfolio Value: $11,066
Roth IRA: $6,912
Emigrant Direct: $5,015
Total Liquid Assets: $34,283

Credit Card Balance: $0
Business Holding: $6,657
Total On Hand: $40,940

As the old saying goes, “When it rains, it pours.” Right now it’s pouring expenses:

–New laptop hard drive
–New laptop bootable DVD drive
–New car on the way + Registration + Insurance
-Need new camera (Screen half whited-out after being crushed)
–Traffic tickets
-Unexpected $500 phone bill
-Paying programmers
–Buying sample products for photographing
–Defensive Driving
-Food (I haven’t had a proper meal in about 2 1/2 weeks).
-Incorporation
-Trip to Boston
-Spending money – I still gotta have fun ;-)
-etc. etc. etc.

Luckily these costs are still manageable, but still….lots of expenses!

(I had to make this picture with PaintBrush….no Photoshop on these Law School computers!)

I was checking back to September 2005 in my blog to see what was going on, and I would have completely forgot about this stuff had I not written it down!

Sept 2nd: I tried to make more $$$ from House Of Rave.
Status: HoR is now making about $2,000+ a month. Thanks again Rob for hitting me over the head with the obvious.

Sept 7th: I tried to Get a picture with the Dalai Lama.
Status: Didn’t happen this time. I did however get to see the Dalai Lama sport a visor.

Sept 18th: I was mentioned in the New York Times.
Status: That was pretty nice to have. I’ve got three copies of the Sunday Times rolled up in my archives. My parents found out about this website after the article (Hi!!). My photo shoot was supposed to be the main image on the article, but apparently Jim is more attractive.

Sept 28th: I sold pixel squares on NevBlog as an experiment.
Status: So far that sale brought in $2,300 (minus 2.40%) in one year. I’m taking them off the site in a few days. That whole pixel thing was the epitome of a fad.

Come 2007 I can technically move anywhere, as I have no physical ties to Austin, TX.

I had no plans to move, but I wanted to see what my potential city candidates were before I completely knocked the idea.

Asking some mentors, I was advised that any city I lived in would be most beneficial to me if it has the following things:

-Strong educational resources in the university environment.
-Strong relationship between science and business.
-A strong and established business incubator.
-High tech companies all around.

There are areas in the United States that fit these criteria:
-Silicon Valley in California (San Francisco & surrounding area)
-Route 128 in Massachusetts (Boston, MA.)
-Austin, TX.

There is simply more opportunity in these three places for a startup company than anywhere else in the United States.

Go to an internet store, any store, and it’s mostly the same thing. Click through products at different stores and with a few subtle differences, it’s mainly the same thing. It’s getting very difficult to differentiate one’s self with an online store.

I’m working on another ecommerce store and instead of being the designer/creator of the store, I’m officially becoming the photographer. I’m taking my own product photos to differentiate the store from the distributors website, but mainly to give the site personality. I have already begun the process of ordering all the products (About 20 at a time) and taking pictures/video of them.

Sometimes the promotional photos provided by the manufacturer is good enough to explain the product, so I won’t take photos of EVERYTHING….however I want a good majority of the site to have the photos taken.

FOR EXAMPLE:

In the pranks section of the site, there is a novelty fake cigar. Here is the provided photo for the fake cigar:

Now here is an “action shot” picture I took with the fake cigar:

Goofy! But explains the product much better. Notice the lack of photo editing. I’ve been purposely making these photos very amateur-ish. I’ve been taking 3 added photos of each product which will make it amusing for customers to browse the site, and give them a better sense of the product they’re buying.

I am hoping to build a popular feature much like ThinkGeek.com’s “Customer Action Shots” feature.

One problem is I’ve been finding it difficult to take unique pictures without the assitance of someone else, so I bought this awesome GorillaPod which is a tripod with bendable legs:

Since I usually take these pictures in spare time, I can’t always have someone around. However I can clamp this GorillaPod thing to the side of a door, fan, guitar…you name it and get a great shot!

I found out I couldn’t get out of a speeding ticket the way I hoped. Apparently the law concerning delaying a trial has changed in favor of the courts.

The plan was to keep delaying the court date until both officers involved in clocking and catching me didn’t show up. I asked several employees of the court, a lawyer and a judge how the process worked, and I got the same conclusion.

What makes it hard now is:

1.) You may ask for a continuance of the trial on a later date, but it’s at the discretion of the judge to grant it. I was told by the judge herself that she RARELY grants continuances on the same day unless for a VERY VERY good reason, which I most likely didn’t have.

2.) If the officer(s) provide an excuse for now showing up (basically they just have to say they’re on duty), the trial may still proceed even without them. This is probably better for society as a whole, because while I’m just trying to circumvent a ticket, I’m effectively taking a law enforcer off the street.

The court clerk told me they’ve basically shut down that particular loophole in the system.

So $160 later, I’m taking deferred adjudication. Now I must take defensive driving again and avoid a ticket for the next three months.

For the remainder of this year my goal is to increase the income of my existing small businesses, create a few new ones and by years end have them making a combined total of at least $7,500/month on a consistent basis.

The foundation of that income will be House Of Rave, the business has been a constant money maker since high school, so it’s much less volatile than newer ventures.

For June, HoR brought in over $2,500 in profit (about $7,900 in gross sales). If this continues, I am halfway to my HoR goal of $5,000/month.

Interesting Fact: Last year in June, House Of Rave brought in $718 in profit. So from last year there has been over a 300% increase in profits.

Next Steps: Of course doubling income for HoR will be a difficult task, but I’ve already started to prepare for it. I’ve upgraded my shopping cart software which by Monday will support the BRAND NEW Google Checkout feature, and I’m working on allowing visitors to comment on the highly popular video section. I’ll also be visiting the supplier I’ve worked with for so long in California.

——————————

Judging from this post, my June 2005 account balances totaled $26,374.

My current account balances are:

General Account – $ 1,700
Spending Account – $ 200
Spending Account 2 – $ 811
Investment Account – $ 3,523
Bill Account – $ 1,202
Permanent Savings – $ 2,828
Charity Account – $ 338
Stock Portfolio Value – $ 11,073
Roth IRA – $ 6,674
Emigrant Direct – $ 5,015
Total Liquid Assets – $ 33,364

Credit Card Balance – $ 0
Business Holding – $ 3,692
Total On Hand – $ 37,056

I always like experimenting with cool little widgets. I was thinking of putting this one on FacebookProfile.com as kind of a gimmick, here is a LIVE test version which can be freely written on by anyone:

I like this little widget because it allows visitors to instantly post comments, links, insults or any funny thing they can think of. It’s also funny and interesting to see the ridiculous things people write when they are completely anonymous!

View the history of the messages here:
https://www.nevblog.com/yshout/yshout.php?history

I am really cheap, and hate spending money. However, I also like to go out and have lots of fun, which generally costs $$$.

After I turned 21, I realized the sheer amount of money people waste at bars. Here in Austin, TX. we have a thriving Downtown nightlife, consisting of several streets of busy clubs and bars…needless to say there are tons of places to throw away your money.

From about 9pm till 2am, the main product being sold all over Downtown is alcohol. Clubs/bars make almost all their money from alcohol, restaurants make much of their money from alcohol and even cruise boats make much of their money from drink sales. It’s actually pretty ridiculous how much money is made from alcohol sales.

To combat these high prices (and allow me to be extremely cheap), I will sometime bring a flask out with me. This thing cost me $20, fits perfectly in my back pocket and holds roughly 5 oz. of liquor.

What I can’t stand about drinks are their extremely high margins. Liquor is ridiculously marked up almost everywhere. Another thing I begrudgingly have to do every time is tip. If someone simply opens a bottle of beer for me, does that warrant even a $1 tip?? I tip, but don’t like it. After a tip, an already expensive drink becomes even more expensive.

If I know I’m going out, but don’t want to spend a lot of money, I’ll fill the flask with a liquor of choice, for example, rum. This way I can ask the bartender for JUST a Coke with ice. I’d say about 70% of the time they’ll give it to me free. I can then secretly mix in some rum, and have a Rum & Coke.

Ghetto? You bet!

The most I’ve ever spent on a single drink was at an upscale club in Miami – $17 for a Vodka & Red Bull. Imaging my surprise when I pulled out a $10 bill to pay, but was quoted $17….and then I had to tip $3!! TWENTY DOLLARS for a small drink in a plastic cup filled mostly with ice!! OUTRAGEOUS. I can buy 20 Double Cheeseburgers from McDonalds for that money.

Another thing I do when going out is use CASH ONLY. I NNEEEVVERRR charge drinks to a card. This way you can SEE how much money you are throwing away, and I can control my spending much better this way. A $20 bill can generally cover an entire night (Generally which I end up spending mostly on Pizza :-) and leave me with some money the next day.

I’ve being doing enough work to get by.
I have NOT been doing enough work to set myself above the rest.

Quite frankly,

This has to stop right here, right now.

I bought a new Palm Treo 700w smartphone in order to help boost my productivity.

I’ve never been really into cell phones, but this is a whole other category. It has all sorts of features which will hopefully make me more productive….or less…I’m not sure yet.

What I really wanted was the ability to check my email on the go without a laptop and have a to-do calendar I can carry around with me at all times. It has Windows Mobile which can play media, use Microsoft Office and all that other junk too. By far the best Treo 700w review is here.

In order to take advantage of the nation-wide broadband internet, I had to move to Verizon Wireless. I am also paying a hefty price for the convenience.

I haven’t played around with the Treo too much as of yet, but everything is very simple to learn. It’s based on a Windows platform, so any decently tech savvy person can get used to it with relative ease. For now I’m happy I can send text messages 10 times faster.

The phone itself is a very cool piece of hardware, ranking relatively high on “wow” appeal. Whenever I attend conferences with lots of busy people, almost everyone in the room has some sort of email capable device like a Blackberry….so now I can fit in by pretending to be busy on my phone :-)

I’m hoping this purchase will actually help me become more productive like my tablet PC did. I’ve been using it for only a few days, and I’ve become fond of the phone already….but $112/month??

I paid a lot of money to get this phone up and running:

Hopefully I can utilize this Treo 700w to its full potential and make it a valuable business tool.