A friend from our previous church sent me an e-mail tonight. Because we’ve been buried in 1.2 miles of snow for the past few days, she had the opportunity to pile through some projects. She had just gotten to a pile of stuff she had been meaning to sell for quite some time, and e-mailed me to ask for help since I had offered before.

I explained how she could get an estimate of market value through eBay for the things she wanted to sell, then gave some suggestions on when to sell on eBay and when to sell on Craigslist.

Some kinds of items, especially big ones, can do better on Craigslist.  For those items, I told her how I would go about selling them there:

1. Prior to listing the item on Craigslist, I’d sign up for a Gmail account, or use one that I didn’t mind getting passed around the Internet via Craigslist.  Like MbhuntersCoolItems4Sale@gmail.com or something like that.
2. I’d write a fairly detailed description of what I was selling.
3. I’d take pictures of the item(s) and put them up on Flickr someplace that allowed me to post items for sale.  These would be linked to in my description.
4. I’d use the Vacation Responder feature in Gmail to deliver my description on demand.  To get there, go to the Settings link in the upper-right of the main Gmail screen, and go to (almost) the bottom of the General tab.
5. Then I’d put the ad up, which would be an attention-grabbing headline of some kind, plus the following:  “Send a blank e-mail to MbhuntersCoolItems4Sale@gmail.com for instant details, plus contact information.  Your e-mail address will be used only to send you this information (once) and will not be sold or rented.”

What are the advantages of doing it this way? There are several:

1. It screens out many who aren’t serious about buying the item. Providing an e-mail address is a barrier.  Not everyone will do it.  Serious buyers will.  These are the ones you want to hear from, not the tire-kickers.
2. You can answer common questions in the auto-reply. There’s a surprising amount of space available in the Vacation Responder.  If you answer questions there, they won’t call you up to ask them.  Saves time and screens out more would-be non-buyers.
3. You aren’t posting your phone number on Craigslist. You’re posting an e-mail address, but not your phone number.  Heck, you don’t even have to post your phone number in the autoresponder message:  Ask them to e-mail you with more questions.  More screening.
4. By the time people get on the phone with you, they should be pretty serious about buying the item.
5. Once the items are sold, you can delete any personal information you put in the autoresponder.  Or replace it with this message:  “Thanks for requesting information about this item, but it’s already been sold.  Have a nice day!”

Craigslist is free, but free comes at a price:  your time.  Following this kind of selling process will reduce the time you spend screening out people who aren’t really serious buyers.

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(This is a guest post from Kris Bickell. For more tips on getting out of debt and turning around your financial situation, visit www.debt-tips.com. You’ll learn the actual debt elimination tips he used to get completely out of debt.)

If only money grew on trees … life would certainly be easier! But of course, it doesn’t. So when money is tight, what can you do to relieve some of the stress?

Well, some people start buying more lottery tickets. But the odds of winning are so small that you might as well throw your money out the window. Others start using credit cards. But someday you’ll need to pay those credit card bills, so making them even bigger will only make things worse.

There are some real ways to make your life easier without doing anything drastic or illegal. So here are five hidden ways to find extra money – even when money is tight:

1. Sell stuff. As they say, one person’s junk is another person’s treasure. So look in your basement, your attic, your bedroom drawers. And sell anything you don’t use. You can go to your local consignment store to sell clothing and household items, or a pawn shop to sell other valuables. Or use Craigslist.org to sell your stuff online (it’s easy and it’s free!)
2. Write down a list of all your expenses and cross off all the “extras.” Then take the list and stop buying all of those extras, things like coffee, lunch (bring your own), snacks, magazines, newspapers – be creative and you can probably save yourself between $50-$100 a month. Maybe more!
3. Start a business or get a part-time job. Even if you don’t want to work long hours at a second job, you can find something “light” to give you a little extra spending money. Like working on a Saturday at a local store you like to visit. Or finding one lawn to mow or house to clean in your neighborhood. Or start a tutoring business. Or even start an online business you can do in your spare time.
4. Shop around for all monthly bills, insurance, etc. You might be pleasantly surprised at how much money you can save by shopping around. And not just when you need a new coat or pair of shoes. You can shop around for cell phone service, car and home insurance (if you’ve been with the same company for more than a few years you might save a few hundred dollars), electric service, credit card interest rates and annual fees, heating oil delivery. Or you can switch to cheaper plans for cell phone and cable TV, and raise your insurance deductibles.
5. If you got a tax refund, have your employer take out less. It definitely feels a lot better to get a tax refund than to owe Uncle Sam money. But if you get a big refund year after year, something’s wrong. Do you realize you’re letting the IRS hold your money throughout the year? You might be losing out on a nice treat come refund time, but it’s usually better to get your money sooner rather than later.

The good thing about these tips is that they can help you later even when money is not tight. Just like credit card debt that seems to sink you deeper and deeper into a hole over time, these strategies will help your savings account grow bigger and bigger!

So don’t get discouraged – get to work and before long you’ll be in much better shape financially!

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This economic downturn hasn’t been kind to a lot of people.  Jobs that haven’t been taken away from people have had their hours cut, their workload increased, or their cost of living allowances taken away.  Jobs that people used to be able to count on are on very fragile ground.

If this US Debt Clock is accurate, we’re getting a new person on the unemployment roster every 17 seconds now.

What can you count on in this economy?  I think the only thing that you can absolutely count on in this economy is that you can’t count on anything in this economy. Retirements have been upended by plummeting 401(k)s and IRAs.  Nest eggs have been cracked by crashing home values.  Many people, all of a sudden, won’t be able to retire.

It’s foolish to take anything for granted.  There’s far less within our control than we probably realize, and proposed solutions that aim to make things better will almost certainly just make them worse.

When you think about “preparing for the future,” think instead of “hedging against the future.”  How?

• Cushions, cushions. Bolster that emergency fund to buy time in the face of job loss.  Bolster your food supply in case price controls cause shortages.  (Price controls are another solution that will backfire.  Think gas station lines in the 1970s.)
• Diversify your investments. If you’re heavy in anything (or only have a couple of asset classes) look around some more.  And don’t forget to invest in yourself.
• Diversify your income streams. Only have one income stream?  Start working on another!  And then another.  Your one income stream can go bye-bye at any time.
• Retire into something rather than just retire. It would be great if one of your new income streams involves something you really enjoy, and can do well into the traditional retirement age.
• Take care of your health. I’ve recommitted to this. The less you need health care, the better, because it will be more expensive, and you’ll wait longer to get it.
• Pray.

Thanks to The Censible Life for including this post in the Carnival of Personal Finance.

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Once in a while I’ll peruse the eBay category Internet businesses and websites for sale to see what people are buying.

To speed up the process I sort by price + shipping, highest first, set the number of listings per page to 200, and scroll down quickly to see what people are already bidding on.  (I miss a lot of gems this way, and of course I miss all of the good Buy It Now items, but I get a good feeling for what’s good value.)

Someone was selling a Twitter account.  There were 16 bids, and the price was over $200 already with five days left.

Here’s the account that’s for sale. (I just tweeted from my Twitter account to see if this person was aware of it — they might not be!)

As of right now, the first tweet on the account was April 8th, 2009, and there have been between 237 updates since then.  Currently, there are 15,155 followers of this profile, and the user is following 14,880.

The content is benign enough: a few responses to tweets and tweets with a interesting facts stuffed in them.  I’ve certainly seen more tedious update streams.  I initially scanned the entire history and the only service I noticed was WeFollow.

Under the categories business, market, and internet.  Hmmm, that’s a blip on the radar.

Then I saw this update:

If you are looking to follow some people, these follow back! @romashkaaaa, @katiel777, @anna7777

I visited these Twitter profiles, and it was basically a re-mixed version of the @bepositivebud tweets.  More profile pictures with good-looking women, same innocuous, mildly-interesting feed content — and they’re all from Minnesota!  What an incredible coincidence!

Yeah right.

I suppose what tipped me off was the 7’s in the other names.  The seller’s eBay ID was “77se7en”.  It’s likely the same person doing all of the accounts.  It appears to be all engineered, and probably not even that much work!  It probably goes something like this (give or take):

1. Set up a Twitter account.
2. Tweet on the account a few times a day.  Maybe follow a few people to get things moving.
   
3. Somewhere along the line, buy a package (or two) of 5,000 followers from eBay for less than a penny per follower.  It’s better to do it this way than to use a free service like a follower exchange because these services will inject extra tweets in your updates in exchange for the free followers.  The latter is a strong giveaway.
   
4. Follow everyone immediately so that they’re less likely to unfollow you.  (These followers that are bought are probably just following people so that they’ll get followed back, as in a follower exchange.)  It may even be possible to auto-follow people.  I don’t know.  That would make this process a piece of cake.
   
5. Unfollow those who drop you. If the follower/following balance goes too far toward “following,” that’s a red flag.
   
6. Keep up the regular tweeting to encourage more to stay and build up a brand.
   
7. Rinse and repeat.  Cross promote as in the tweet above to goose up the follower account.  Maybe even throw a few sponsored tweets in there for a little extra money.
8. Sell the account when the time is ripe. (And, apparently, get a good chunk of money.)
   

I checked Twitter’s terms of service and there wasn’t any explicit rule against this kind of thing, but it still seems like there are better ways to make money than to tweet as a bunch of good-looking women from Minnesota.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with good-looking women from Minnesota!)

What do you think?  Legit, or not?

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“Turn up the signal; wipe out the noise.”  -Peter Gabriel

Too many of my projects are laughing at me.  Here’s how I’m trying to shut them up.

The analogy is signal processing. With only a few important projects and sources of information (signal sources) it’s straightforward to handle them all.  But bring in dozens, or possibly hundreds, of other signal sources, and some filtering is needed to avoid going completely insane.

Some of the signal can be blocked with a filter, or it can be separated into components with another filter.  But filtering the signal changes it, and some of the information is lost.  Maybe some of the important information.  No filter that lets anything through is perfect.

So on to my e-mail signal processing.  I was taming my e-mail beast by setting up rules for shuttling the incoming messages into different folders: affiliate newsletters, bloggers, Carnival of Debt Reduction submissions, blog comments, other newsletters, MyPoints mailings for free gift cards, traffic exchange e-mails, notifications for my list of money forums, and on and on.  Things went where they we’re supposed to go, most of the time.

But a tamed beast is still a beast.

The beastly part of my e-mail stream was that now some important e-mails could be stuck in a place I didn’t expect.  For example, Lazy Man and Money was helping me with a friend’s site that had hidden ad code injected into it somewhere, and his e-mails got sent to SPAM because they had the word “pharmacy” in the subject line.

In the end, all of my filtering was making me numb to all of the projects I had going on.  I dropped some pretty important e-mails over the past few months, including e-mails from some potential advertisers and other bloggers.

Most of my e-mail stream was coming off as noise.

So how am I trying to tackle the problem?  I shut off almost all of my e-mail filtering rules, and I’m going to do my darnedest to keep them off. Just about every piece of mail now comes directly to my inbox. This forces me to deal with each message instead of pretending to deal with it by shipping it into storage.

I’m treating almost all of my e-mail as signal now. I’m already seeing that this is helping me to identify the noise.  At that point, I make a decision. Since filtering the e-mail isn’t really an option anymore, do I tolerate the noise, or do I destroy the source of the noise?

My membership to traffic exchanges has been a big source of noise.  These sites send tons of e-mail and force you to pay attention to them or else you’ll lose what you’ve earned.  (Safelists are even worse.)  I used them initially in 2004 to promote this site, but the site has long outgrown the need for these, and some of this site’s advertisers won’t let me use them to promote the site anyway.  At the same time, I was reluctant to get rid of them, as I had substantial downlines in a few of them, and had put quite a substantial bit of time into surfing on them to build up credits so others could view my sites.

Well, I finally cancelled membership in the first one tonight, and it didn’t hurt nearly as much as I had thought it would.  I had to confirm three times that I really, really, no joking wanted to delete my account and give up all of the free promotion and blah blah blah.  Now the other ones will be easy to cancel.  I know that I won’t miss those e-mails one bit.

What I’m hoping is that my pain threshold for e-mail noise will go down and I’ll get rid of more and more low-payoff projects just to stop the e-mails from being crowded out.  Then it will be a pleasure to grab those projects that are laughing at me by the throat and send them off screaming.

The noise reduction will be such a relief.  This will let me pay more attention to things that have importance.  Life is too short to waste it on unimportant stuff that pretends to be urgent.

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My wife is designing, and making, a quilt for a competition. A couple of days ago she did a wholesale change of the design. When I asked her if it what she had planned to do was just too difficult, she told me, “Pretty much everything I did, the quilt was laughing at me.”

She’s a great quilter and makes great quilt designs, and this about-face wasn’t because of lack of effort.  She’s cutting her losses, and the new design is working much better.  (She showed me some of the stitching she did, and I couldn’t find where the stitches were until she pointed them out.  Really slick!)

I find that some of my projects are laughing at me, but they’re saying, “You took me on, and now you can’t finish me.  Hahahaha!”  I hear them laughing at me each time I’m driving to work and one of them pops into my head at a time when I can’t really do anything about it.  Having too many goals is like having none and what ends up happening (I’m finding out) is that none of them really flourish.  The projects grow so closely to one another that they choke each other out.

Cutting the losers out of your schedule is hard enough, but backing off from winners to pursue something even bigger must be harder still.  Those projects are laughing with you rather than at you.  J.D. Roth of Get Rich Slowly is looking for a staff writer in order to pursue some publishing deals, and he admits that it “feels like [he's] crossed a threshold into a strange and scary world.”  He is trying to avoid being laughed at by his blog as he pursues these other deals.  He knows the time commitment involved and is willing to risk adding a different voice to his 65k-subscriber blog in order to leave time to pursue these other ventures.

I run across ideas every day but still find it difficult to keep up with the ones I already have.  Too many of my projects are laughing at me.

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I saw that Five Cent Nickel recently received his CashCrate check.  I didn’t earn quite as much as he did but I do remember reaching the $10 threshold including the signup bonus in under a couple of hours, without signing up for any free trials that I might forget to cancel.  Not too shabby.  (The payout threshold has since gone up to $20.)

The reason I signed up initially was because I heard on Plurk that  Bible Money Matters had his car broken into, and had a bunch of rather expensive stuff stolen, including an iPod, a camera, and a GPS receiver.  Not fun.  Well, I signed up for CashCrate through his referral link, and he got a kickback of whatever I earned, and whatever my referrals earned as well.

I got paid, and he got paid.  What’s more, the bounties I received for signing up for some newsletters and the like were the same as if I had signed up directly with the site.  And my referrals get the same deals I get.  Works out for everyone!

I got the check, bought some General Tso’s, and forgot about it.

Recently, I ran across an application called RoboForm.  It’s been around for a decade; I checked on archive.org.  It’s legit.  Some of the functionality is duplicated in Firefox but the real value is that it can fill in sign-up forms pretty much instantly.

There is a free download.  There’s also a pro version that I haven’t had need for yet, though it does give you the ability to have multiple users and more than two separate identities.  The Firefox plugin is good.  I entered pertinent information that survey sites would ask me for (name, address, zip, e-mail address, phone, etc.) once, and then with a single click of a toolbar button on a sign-up page, the form would be filled, and I could get on with life.  Roboform makes mincemeat out of these forms.

So, that’s my CashCrate story.  Had I had RoboForm I would have made payout even faster.  The free version has been quite a time-saver.

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If you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, don’t worry.  I’ll explain.

If you do, then obviously you’ve heard of the wonders of the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt.  This shirt from The Mountain in Keene, New Hampshire, is now the #1 selling item in the Apparel section of Amazon.com.  An ABC World News piece on the phenomenon mentioned that The Mountain is selling around a hundred of these shirts per hour and that it is now out-selling everything else combined.

What started this feeding frenzy was a tongue-in-cheek review of the shirt by Brian Govern, a law student in New Jersey.  I don’t even know if he actually bought the shirt or not.  I can’t do the review justice; you’ll want to read it for yourself.  Good Amazon reviews on popular products might have a couple hundred people saying that it was helpful.  At last count, over nine thousand people found Mr. Govern’s review helpful.  What’s more, over 900 other reviewers have picked up the ball and ran with it with their own spin.  It’s hilarious reading if you have a few spare hours to burn.

It’s refreshing to see a business that is running with this somewhat dubious success and not taking the high ground to fight the masses who are filling its coffers.  Mr. Govern got some face time on ABC for the review and all, but I really, really hope that The Mountain took care of him after what he set off.  His review touched off a best seller in an economy where people are finding it harder to locate two dimes to rub together.  This is taking care of the people who took care of you.

Even if Mr. Govern wouldn’t touch that t-shirt with a ten-foot torte, he’s the prime cause for The Mountain making a heck of a lot of money.  The Mountain would be wise to at least send a thank-you note.

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Businesses need to do everything in their power to weather this downturn.  It should be a great time for customers to get great deals because of this: they need to keep the cash flowing in.  Customers should expect deals, and they should be treated with respect, because customers can go to a competitor.

Some businesses just don’t get it, though.  It’s as if they are in the business of chasing their customers away.  I fully support their right to do so, but I also fully expect to be able to exercise my rights not to be a patron.  Here are six things I’ve experienced that make me wonder about people’s business acumen:

• Don’t honor your coupons. Or change the rules when it suits you.  One Sunday we were going to have lunch at Sunset Thai.  We had an Attractions Book and Sunset Thai had a coupon available that had no restrictions for Sunday.  When we got there, there was a sign on the front door saying that they weren’t accepting coupons today.  Bad move.  Fortunately Camille’s Sidewalk Café did accept our coupon, and not only that, printed out another one good on our next visit later in the month.  One guess which one did a better job of keeping us around.
• Don’t honor advance purchases made when the store was under previous management. Taking over a business means taking over the entire business, including the customers.  We had some tickets from a while back for Fun-Land, and I had intended to use them for miniature golf with my daughter and a friend, and thought that I could, because I was told they didn’t expire.  Well, those tickets were no longer any good.  Apparently, coupons that never expire actually can expire if management deems it convenient.  The guy at the ticket counter just shrugged his shoulders.  Well, I paid for the new tickets because I had promised my daughter, but I probably won’t be back there again.  Fun-Land blew it.  Had they let me change in my tickets, I would have told other people that they honored the old tickets.  But they didn’t.  Their loss.
• Actively show disinterest in what your customers are saying. A while back I went to Advance Auto Parts to get oil filters for one of our cars.  I had just found out that you have to check to see that the rubber gasket didn’t stick to the car when you removed the old oil filter.  When I went to buy the new filter I started chatting to the guy at check-out about it as he rang it up.  No one was behind me in line.  He made it really clear to me that he didn’t care, and cut me off mid-sentence.  Regardless of whether my story was interesting or not (I at least thought it might be helpful to someone), it’s a really bad idea to essentially tell a customer to shut up when there’s no one else in line.  Sorry for wasting your valuable time, buddy!  I’ll just crawl back into my hole now.
• Make it a chore for people to spend money. I used to be a big arcade fiend.  One time when I was home visiting my parents, I went to the mall and had about 30 minutes or so before I met up with my family to go back to their house.  The arcade was still up and running, so I went in to play a game or maybe two.  I didn’t have any change, and the guy changing out the tokens wouldn’t just give me two tokens and two quarters back for my dollar.  (This was after he tried to kick me out because he thought I was still in high school, and it was during school hours.)  So, I bought a soda (to get some quarters) and then the guy chased me out because I had a soda.  I was the only customer in the place at that time.  How hard did he really want me to work to spend money there?
• Charge them whatever the heck you want, and don’t fix the error when they point it out. One time, before Borders Books and Music outsourced its food and drink services, the cashier rang up a drink with the wrong price.  I pointed out the error.  The cashier just looked at me, and continued to hold her hand out to take my credit card.  Since there were people behind me, and the price difference was insignificant, I paid her price for it.  I overheard the cashier say that she charged different prices for the drinks all the time.  I later told the manager about it, and she ended up giving me the drink for free, but I still shake my head at what that cashier did.
• Slam the door on them.  Literally. I was about to enter a Ritz Camera, near closing time, just to check a price on something.  As I approached the door, I saw one of the employees pick up her pace to lock the door before I opened it!  And she looked me in the eye as she did it!  Oh well.  Apparently I’m not the only one who chose other places over Ritz Camera, as they’re now bankrupt.  That location and another one in our area are gone.

It might be easy to say that this is the employees’ doing and not the owners’ doing.  Not true.  Business owners are responsible, and accountable, for how their employees treat customers. Owners should not keep employees that pull these maneuvers.  With unemployment pushing 10% now, they shouldn’t have to.

It also might be easy to say that I’m just asking too much and that I’m not worth keeping around anyway.  In better times, maybe.  There are certainly bigger spenders than myself.  But people on average have less disposable income available than they did a few years ago.  Things are tighter.  There will be more people with my kind of spending levels than with higher spending levels.

Any other ways that a store has slammed the door on you?

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I have a lot of respect for this guy.

He’s probably not getting paid that much.  He’s working a job that just about anyone can do, but most of us wouldn’t want to do.  If it’s like the guys doing the same thing in Fredericksburg, he’s cold, and he’s breathing exhaust fumes.  (This picture was taken in Richmond, VA.)

Who knows what series of events brought him to this place.  It doesn’t really matter what they were, but it’s clear that those events brought him to hold up a sign for Circuit City’s going-out-of-business sale instead of, say, owning the company handling the liquidation.

Again, it doesn’t matter.  He’s working. Circuit City had a need for extra publicity, and their lease (or their local laws) may forbid them from putting up temporary, free-standing signs on the surrounding property.  But there are no regulations against someone holding a sign, so they seek help to do it.

This guy said yes.  It’s encouraging to see that people will say yes to this kind of work.

Circuit City is but one business casualty in this monster recession.  Our local store’s final day is this coming Sunday.  Many of these employees — cashiers all the way up to store managers — are already gone, and the rest will go shortly after.  They’ll be looking for work.  If they can’t find similar work, then what?  One thing that helps is to be more flexible, and that usually means lowering standards: doing something they probably wouldn’t do if they had the choice.

It isn’t going to be the bailouts and stimulus packages that will get us out of recession.  It will be people working, saving, spending, and investing either in their business or someone else’s that will get the economy healthy again, rather than merely fueled by easy loans against inflated home prices.

For a while, the jobs people work at may pay substantially less.  (For all I know, the guy holding the sign could have been a homebuilder.)

But work is work, and I respect anyone who is working.  Hats off to you.

(Photo: F33)

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