NevBlog

Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain

Traffic Experiment

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Traffic has been such a problematic phenomenon in this country, but there have been few steps to prevent it. I want to change that.

I have long been interested in a project to get rid of useless traffic buildup on a stretch of I-35 that causes all the traffic by Downtown Austin. I’ve had a proposal and demonstration ready for years, but never carried through with it. I’m not doing this as a money-making venture just yet, it’s just something that interests me. If it works, who knows what may follow.

A quick synopsis of the experiment:

Traffic is usually “stop and go” during rush hour, causing slowdowns, unnecessary gas usage and frustration. It generally looks something like:

The Solution:
As one car stops, the car behind it stops and so forth, creating a “Traffic Wave.” To “eat” this traffic wave, simply place a slower moving vehicle that leaves plenty of space in front of it in all lanes, much like large trucks do. This effectively regulates the speed of traffic and eliminates the “stop and go” action. It also allows time for the traffic wave to be eaten. The regulating cars should theoretically create smoothly flowing lines of traffic behind them.

I got permission to take a couple of pictures and observe I-35 from three adjacent buildings: The Marriott, the Austin Municipal Water Works building and The Crowne Plaza Hotel.

All three buildings had great views of I-35, but the Marriot and Crowne Plaza offered the best view of the particular sections that cause the most buildup:

The best part about this little trip was the free stuff. Both the Crowne Plaza and Marriott were hosting business events, so I walked in like I belonged, grabbed some free food and a bottle of Sprite and walked out. I had a free lunch that day.

You can view a more complete proposal at:
https://www.nevblog.com/images/traffic/i35.html
Credit must be given to William Beaty for research and animations. Original Work

I will further pursue this experiment in my spare time. I’ve already done the experiment with friends and IT WORKS. Now I have to videotape it in action and convince law makers to pass legislation on it.
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On a more financial note,
I’ve started trying to build up my spending account for next week as it will be pretty expensive. I plan to do a lot of wining/dining, boating, 6th-Streeting, 4th-Streeting and traveling that weekend. I’ve gone into super-cheap mode in order to have sufficient funds available for the weekend.

My Stock Portfolio

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This chart shows the daily movement of my portfolio only.
I was asked about my stock portfolio several times lately. I enjoy having a long term portfolio which just sits there. I’ve tried active trading and it isn’t for me. I leave that up to Kirk.

Here are the current stocks I own and reasons I bought them:

Dynegy (DYN) – Got pummeled after the Enron scandal. I hold this as a long term turnaround stock. Dynegy deals mainly with natural gas. They keep paying off their debt which short term investors hate, but long term investors like. Has put me at 25% gains at times and at a 30% loss at times.

Syntel (SYNT) – An Indian outsourcing firm with relatively little media coverage. Healthy company with no debt and an ever-expanding operations. On days when the NASDAQ does well, Syntel does really well….but when NASDAQ performs poorly, Syntel performs very poorly. Who cares, I am in it for the long haul.

Fortune Brands (FO) – Conglomerate with a million different brands under their name. Company has balanced their portfolio of brands to survive in good or bad markets. I idolize this company and its great track history.

General Electric (GE) – Bought as a “rock” which moves neither up or down very fast. GE dabbles in jet engines, water treatment, appliances, television stations and much more.

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On another note, I’ve started preliminary research for my traffic experiment. I went to three different tall buildings adjacent to I-35 and got permission to take pictures of the rush hour traffic.

I’ll explain later.

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Even though the Fall semester is over with (I have one more summer to take and I should be done), I have been gallivanting across town trying to strike up some new business deals here and there.

I want to have a good amount of moola in reserve by the time I get out of college for good.

Owning A Business Can Be Worse Than A Job

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I have a problem with all these “Get Rich” books. They lie. They routinely say, “Working for other people is not the path to wealth” and owning your own business lets you “Do things your way”

What a bunch of crap.

I’ve run into so many people young and old who simply say, “I want to own my own business some day”. Have they really thought about this?

Have these people seen what owning a business is REALLY like? It’s not for everyone. People see certain wealthy people with businesses and see their luxurious lifestyle, but they don’t see what the majority of business owners live like. There are over 22,659,000 businesses out there, not all of them have founders that live like royalty.
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Some reasons why people want to run their own business:
1.) Freedom to do what you want, when you want.
2.) Loads of cash.
3.) Ability to choose which days you work.
4.) Choose who you work with.

It’s time to shatter some dreams. I want to share some of the less glamorous examples of business owners I have seen:

Business 1:
Mr. X was successful in the corporate and business world. He wanted a new venture so he invested in a large franchise chain. He bought the land, made preparations and opened shop. The store was a big success, land value skyrocketed and the money was flowing in. Then he sold it because he hated it so much. He had to deal with his employees who would constantly steal, outrageously obnoxious customers, very long hours, sexual harassment cases caused by employees, and tons of paper work and a boatload of accounting. If he wasn’t there, there store would probably fall apart.

Business 2:
Mr. B opened up a franchise restaurant. Money is good with the three stores he owns, but he is constantly looking for new employees, dealing with landlords, having to suffer bad months where weather effects sales, bad years where the economy is down. Mr. B has a pretty average lifestyle yet a large amount of responsibility with his three stores. He spends a lot more than 9-5 working at his stores. He could easily live the same styled life if he and his wife both worked. So instead of a regular 9-5 job, he has a 24/7 job with lots of stress and unpredictability.

Business 3:
An asian friend of mine owns with his family 2 successful gas stations. In his 20+ years of life, he has NEVER taken a single vacation with his entire family at the same time. His parents have not missed one day of attending their stores in 15 years. Enough said. He drives a pretty fancy car…and you know the only place he drives it? From home to his gas station and back.

Business 4:
On a trip to a football game in Dallas, we stayed at a medium sized hotel. The entire family worked AND lived there with no additional employees. The dad was the check-in host, the mom and daughter were the maids, the grandmother cleaned and the son did the janitorial work. We saw them all everyday for 3 days.

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So, with a business you may STILL have to:
1.) Work very long and unpredicatable hours.
2.) Accept low income at times.
3.) Skip out to attend to your business.
4.) Deal with assholes.

I ALSO happen know some people with very handsomely paying jobs. These people go to work from 9-5 and they are DONE. They save and invest wisely and are financially independent…sometimes fiscally better off than their business-owning friends.

So before you make a generic statement like “I want to own a business,” think about it first. It’s not for everyone.

My Failures

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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.

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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.

Selling Notes

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I have two classes where I take great notes: Marketing and Asian Studies.

My Asian Studies class has 60 people and my marketing class has 488 registered students in it. It’s finals time, and I decided to sell my entire semesters notes in each class for $5 bucks a pop.

I expected to make about $15 or $20.

Asian Studies Class:
I sent a mass email to the class, including this link as an example of my notes:
https://www.neville1.com/asia-notes.html

I got about 5 responses in two hours. Unfortunately, my Asian Atudies professor was one of the respondents saying:

“Dear students, I appreciate the entrepreneurial spirit shown here, but buying and selling notes is unethical!”

Unethical? Maybe. Illegal? Not at all. I knew I could win this battle, but she was a great professor and I decided to respect her wishes. I sent out another email retracting my offer to that class and apologized for any unethical behavior on my part.

Money Made on Asia class = $0.00
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Marketing Class:
I sent out another mass email including this link as an example of my notes:
https://www.neville1.com/marketing-notes.html

I got about 35 responses in two hours. Every time I checked my email after that I got even more potential buyers.

Some interesting responses though. I got THREE “fan-mail” letters simply saying

“I don’t want the notes, but you are very enterprising.
Goodluck on the test!”

My favorite emails however were the hate-mail letters I got. I got four of them. This guy could have effectively killed my sales if he had used proper spelling and grammar in his email sent to the whole class:

From: csonnier@mail.utexas.edu – Coby Jude Sonnier.
“i’ve got notes for free. the whole outline. hit me up and i’ll email it to you cause i could care less about makin money like this guy. its in word so make sure you have it. -coby”

Surprisingly, I still got 9 orders after Coby’s email went out. This next guy offered me one dollar for the notes. When I responded saying the notes were fixed at $5, he wrote back:

From: chillaxer0008@mail.utexas.edu – Jorge Eduardo Leal Jr.

“No deal, final offer is $2.50 for the complete study note. Considering your probably lack of sales with the study notes, here’s your chance to make a sail.”

My last chance to make a SAIL?? I was selling notes, not preparing for a Regatta. He then responded again:

From: chillaxer0008@mail.utexas.edu – Jorge Eduardo Leal Jr.

“You just dont get it man,selfish bastard, stop trying so
hard to make money,eventually everything will work out”

Yeah Jorge, NOT trying hard to make money will really rocket me into wealth. Good luck with your strategy. You better start buying lottery tickets buddy.

This next guy was not a man of many words:
From: h00ter_bill@mail.utexas.edu – Dustin Travis Jenkins

“go fuck yourself”

Very well said. Almost poetic.

SO after shooting a few fun emails back to my newfound friends in the lower echelons of society, I tabulated my results:

Not bad for one class. I also learned that if I had done the exam review and included it in the notes, I could have sold them for $10 a pop easily.

It’s finals time so I must go study, but I hope you enjoyed watching me SAIL my notes!
-Nev

Coby Sonnier, Coby Jude Sonnier, Jorge Eduardo Leal Jr., Jorge Eduardo Leal, Jorge Leal, Dustin Travis Jenkins, Dustin Jenkins

Keeping a Promise and Selling Notes

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I was cruising around the web one day when I stumbled upon ANOTHER financial blog. I’m not going to lie, I’m getting sick of these things popping up. I delete many off my list after 2 or 3 months.

Have a computer and a stubby protuberance on your body to type with???

Obviously many of these blogs are useful and interesting, and I do enjoy financial blogs from real experts in their field, or at least people who practice what they preach.

WHAT I REALLY LIKE are financial blogs where people keep track of their plans to make more money or outline their goals for success (whatever they may consider success).

Smarty runs a blog called Growing Money where he thinks of new ways to increase his wealth little by little. He did a whole series of money-making idea posts which I felt were “All hat and no cattle” so I challenged him to act upon one of them. Well, he did.

He Ebayed a bunch of his junk and will report the results. I told him I’d link him if he completed one of his ideas. Well here you go! Smarty, Growing Money, Smarty Growing Money
Ebaying is easy Smarty, your next challenge is to do something more gutsy! I am interested to see your results though.

On another ‘note’, literally…..I sold my class notes for two of my classes yesterday. The results were not what I expected! I will report full results by Friday.

Another thing, the Bottled Water Experiment continuation is not going well. I’ve met with Barry every day for the last week, only to be dissapointed by the weather. We need hot and swealtering….not cool, windy and gloomy like this whole last week.

Ciao,
-Nev

Stock Market Fluctuations & Water

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Yesterday morning I got a pleasant surprise as Dynegy (DYN) was up 12% in my portfolio after a steady, downward decline.

After learning to be patient with my portfolio, it has really paid off. Dynegy has for example has earned me a 25% profit at times and put me in a 30% loss at times….but that’s in the short term. I won’t even bother explaining why long term holding makes a lot of sense, I’ll let Ramit Sethi from “I Will Teach You To Be Rich” do all the work.

Water Experiment Update:

After going home for Mother’s Day this weekend (I actually forgot to bring any clothes to Houston!), I found Barry yesterday and loaded him up with the remaining 60 bottles of unsold water.

Once we unloaded the water from my trunk, the sky became dark and the air became cool. Not good for selling water. Needless to say, sales were extremely low, and we rescheduled the selling.

Despite the results, Barry was still optimistic about upcoming hot, summer days:

So far, this bottled water thing is NOT going how I expected. But with the low sales aside, you’ve got to appreciate the fact his shirt says “Water $1” and then “Captain Morgan“!

Roadside liquor sales?? Now THAT’S a good idea!

Artificial Deprivation

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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

After this Financial Times article, I am now mentioned in 4 out of the 5 news sources needed to meet one of my medium term goals.

Ripe, Emerging Markets – Mexico

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A lot of buzz is going on about China and their emerging economy. If it’s all over the press, it’s old news.

One emerging market I’ve been interested in (on the domestic and international level) is Mexico.

Some quick observations:

  • Hispanic Americans (wow, I’m so politically correct!) have the highest percentage level of disposable income in the United States. This means they are big spenders for their relative level of income. Appealing to this market will be big business.
  • The hispanic population is the fastest growing in America. In a few years, it is projected the majority of Texans will be Hispanic.
  • Strong trends that introduced new races into more mainstream culture are currently happening: Hispanic boxers, music artists, athletes, politicians etc. are rapidly on the rise.

States such as California, Texas and Florida can already see a very strong infusion of Hispanic culture. In fact, my favorite radio station in Houston is a Reggaetone station (Spanish Rap). That’s just on a domestic level. In Mexico itself things are starting to become more online, a great opportunity for anyone. So how do you profit from this?? EASY:

Take a look back at the United States and other developed countries before our full-blown internet age, and replicate the processes and new services offered.

One lucky lady who happens to be in the PERFECT position to take full advantage of this is Rebecca who runs a new blog called Trendy Tendencias. I have been reading her blog as she brings something fresh to the blogging world, and is identifying trends you can profit on. I’m keeping an eye on her as she brings all sorts of new trends in Mexico to my attention.

It would be wise to appeal to this market before the press jumps all over it.
-Nev

Bottled Water Experiment – Part Deux

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During my first bottled water experiment I learned how to setup shop and shamelessly sell a product. The next item on my agenda is to delegate that task to others while I do nothing.

During the first experiment I met a homelss guy named Barry. He has a can-do attitude and also likes to make money. What he does NOT have is Capital and transportation.

Well I do.

I recently tracked Barry down and gave him a proposal. If I set him up with several cases of ice cold bottled water and a couple of ice chests, he could sell the water all day (instead of simply begging for money) and we would split the revenue down the middle. Obviously at first I get the sour end of this because I will be paying for everything…..but I also don’t do a fraction of the work he will have to do.

SO LET’S GET STARTED:

The previous day I went to Walmart and loaded up my car with 5 cases of water and one ice chest.

120 bottles of water cost me $19.80 + tax. The cooler cost me $18.86 and tax.
Total Spent so Far: $40.22
Even if he sells all 120 bottles, I will barely make a $20 profit on the first run.

I then brought all the products home and began cooling them:

Each 24 pack case had 3 gallons of water and packaging:
1 Gallon = 8 lbs.
1 Case = 24 lbs.
5 Cases = 120 lbs.

I could only fit 3 of the cases for cooling overnight. The rest would be cooled in the ice chest later.

The next morning I met near the selling corner where Barry and I agreed to meet at exactly 10:00am. He showed up exactly on time (Seriously, the SECOND my watch hit 10, he showed up riding a bicycle). Unfortunately for us, it was gloomy and under 70 degrees (I’m in Texas approaching summer…what the hell!?!)

I gave him another shirt I made that said “Water $1” on both sides. I forgot to take a picture but it looked exactly like the last one I made:

Barry then immediately started selling the already-chilled bottles of water while I made an ice-run (I didn’t buy ice in case he didn’t show up). I went to 711 and bought 40 lbs. of ice, a sandwich for Barry and a spare box (box was free). The total came to $9.22 . Total cost of experiment so far: $49.44. The chance of making a profit are pretty much gone now.

We loaded up the ice chests with water and ice, Barry did most of the work.

I had got the spare box from 711 upon Barry’s request. He had an idea where he would place the box saying “Bottled Water $1” further down from his starting point, informing drivers of the approaching vendor.

Before I saw what he wrote he said, “Damn, I spelled ‘bottle’ wrong and I misplaced the dollar sign.” It was too late to change the spelling, and we both agreed the comedic value would probably increase sales!

Before I left for class, we took a pic together. A guy in a wheelchair took it. I accidentally had the camera on black&white mode. I only sold one bottle of water, and that was on accident. A taxi driver saw me carrying the “Bottel” box, smiled and pulled out a dollar. I sold a bottle before I even reached the median, without trying! Keep in mind the purpose of this is to delegate the grunt work.

Barry tried his best to look clean, I even brought him an old pair of shorts I no longer use.

FIVE HOURS LATER…..
I came back after he had been selling all day. He sold exactly 60 bottles, meaning we had 60 bottles left. The combination of cold + gloomy weather + Tuesday = not a great day to sell.

The fact that you can sell 60 bottles of water on a cold day made us look forward to the upcoming sunny, swealtering days!

We split the $60 in half.
Barry got $30.
I got $30.
So in the end I LOST MONEY. 49.44

BUT ALL HOPE IS NOT LOST. This Wednesday Barry will sell the remaining 60 bottles. It shouldn’t cost me anything as the bottles are still being chilled with the same ice in the coolers.

We also want to give Barry a “brand name” by making him the “Water Guy” that everyone knows and trusts. People are more likely to give money when it looks like you are working for it.

This water experiment might actually turn out to be a decently lucrative side income for me in summer. I will be in Austin over the summer, and Barry is willing to work everyday. I will keep posting updates on the progress!

-Nev