Fearless Money

As I say on the sidebar, I used to be afraid of money. That was a bad strategy.
My own fears
Despite the fact that I’ve regularly earned six figure incomes over the last decade, I managed to amass a load of debt and basically no savings. I’m a smart fellow, I’ve done all sorts […]

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Despite my hopeful post a couple weeks ago, I’m pretty sure I’ll have to get another day job. Darn.One thing that’s been bothering me about the jobhunt is how readily and how early people ask about my "rate".

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Looking for a job isn’t so bad. The job market for programmers in Oregon is really very hot right now.
I had my resume updated already, of course. Once I let anyone know I was officially looking, the phone started ringing off the hook. Being connected up via LinkedIn helps with the searching […]

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Big news this week for me. My day-job company just lost more than half its business on one day. Two major clients went with another agency.

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This weekend in a book review on Amazon, I read someone who panned a book on startups, worrying about “gaps” in work history on the resume. The fear was that starting a business, and then having that business fail would look bad on a resume, since it would leave a “gap”. It would then […]

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…once you are about 30, you are pretty much done ascending the ranks. You’ll move at most one rung up or down from there. At that point “they” quit mentoring & teaching you quite as hard, figuring you’ve reached your level. So, that’s the perfect time to switch careers from business drone to entrepreneur.

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Steve Pavlina, one of my inspirations to get out and make my business a reality, has posted several times about the importance of planning. He suggests making a 90-day plan and I’ve been doing that. The process is very helpful to me as I start the new year. My primary focus over the next three months is going to be starting to develop an online income stream.Goal: $10/day from aggregate website income.I’ll reach that goal by experimenting with various forms of advertising on my blogs, as well as changing my Invisible Castle gaming site to begin converting its 100,000 hits a month into some money for me.Also, I will experiment with affiliate marketing, using my programming skills to serve great landing pages for my Google AdWords campaigns. I’m convinced that most advertisers do not know the first thing about programming, and that I have a large competitive advantage to leverage in that area.My secondary goal is to cut off the financial and time drain caused by the ongoing debit fraud I spoke about in a previous article.Goal: Change banks and close the Washington Mutual account by January 31.I’ve already done some research and I am fairly certain I will be moving to First Tech Credit Union. I’ve never heard a bad word about them, they provide everything I want, and they are neither Washington Mutual nor Bank of America, both of whom have thoroughly proven they don’t give a damn about “small time” credit fraud.Goal: Get $900K life insurance for me and $250K for my wife. The last attempt failed due to a missed deadline for medical records.

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