Moneydiet

State of the economy

Since a couple of months I finished to have a paper delivered at home. The New York Times went open for public online, and I was hardly reading the delivered bunch of papers.

Now, the same New York Times came with a great article of what I already would happen, consumers are changing their behavior based on a different wallet they have to their disposal.

In Ohio, Holly Levitsky is replacing the Lucky Charms cereal in her kitchen with Millville Marshmallows and Stars, a less expensive store brand. In New Hampshire, George Goulet is no longer booking hotel rooms at the Hilton, favoring the lower-cost Hampton Inn. And in Michigan, Jennifer Olden is buying Gain laundry detergent instead of the full-price Tide.

So if you have to save some money to save your budget, what would you think of to spend less on? A couple of free tips to get started:

• Spend less on coffee on the streets. A Starbucks Late is around $3 a pop. Getting rid of this habit will save you some serious money
• Eat at home, instead of going out to diner. Trust me, I love going out for diner, but making myself a good meal with the help of a cook book, is a great way to save money
• Stop home delivery of your newspaper. You can buy it whenever you feel the need to read the paper, but in all those other cases, just read the news online
• Go only one time per week to the supermarket. The less you are shopping, the less you buy stuff you don't need
• Always, but always make a shopping list at home, before you go to the supermarket. This will avoid unnecessary

There are so many free resources to learn to get your finances in order. Just start at The Simple Dollar, and just keep on reading...

Some other great sites are:

• Get Rich Slowly
• The Working Dollar
• Generation X Finance
• The Digerati Life

Financial sector is the ugliest girl in the room

Investing stock is always a tricky business, but who would have thought that the bears would hurt the financial sector as what happened the last couple of weeks.

Week after week there are news items of lay offs, big write offs on equity and even possible bankruptcy.

What's going on here, and how much value is whipped out? Boy am i happy I did not had any more in that sector...

Overall I've scaled down my exposure to the stock market, as uncertain times are here to stay for a little longer...

Earning $10/day while on the beach

Every man's dream. Spending time with the family on the beach in the Caribbean, while making money. If only live could be so easy!

I'm spending some time with the wife and kid on the Riviera Maya. I'm totally enjoying it. Off course writing is slow these days, as I'm spending most of my time at the beach. Writing at the beach is a no go for me...

The advantage of having a couple of websites still getting traffic, is that you still earn some money. In my case not yet very much, but in the coming weeks more to come.

But still, this month, which is almost ending, I made some decent extra pocket money. While spending my time on the beach, kite surfing or drinking a beer watching my daughter play in the sand, I made a little bid more than $10 per day... Now that's sweet...

One more week, and we are off back home, where I'll have another 2.5 weeks to play around. I intend to spend that time on my projects, which will bring more money in...

Good times are here to stay!

Quick win, Yahoo stock sold

It took me some time to report the profit, but after I had picked up the Yahoo stock for around $19, I was able to sell the position within a week with a +50% profit.

This was exactly what I had intended. I was planning to buy the Yahoo stock just for speculation for a take over. I truly think that the parts of Yahoo are more worth than the stock price was representing. It was just a matter of time that there would be somebody asking to buy them. This came actually faster than expected.

Wow, that was a rush... Why don't I get the chance to invest more time into the stock market. Here and there a good placed bet, or just good stock picking... Who knows.

Rest me to say, that after a couple of years working harder than the average worker, I'm off on my Sabbatical this Sunday. I hope this will give me the chance to think, and to launch a couple of new projects which will be sustainable.

We will see...

Technorati tags: Yahoo

Yahoo stock a steal...?

Technorati tags: Yahoo

Just picked up a small amount of Yahoo Stock at $19.06.

Now I will wait until the promising web company of yesteryear is getting stuff back on track.

Warren Buffet on Greed

"We simply attempt to be fearful when others are greedy and to be
greedy only when others are fearful."

 

I guess at times like this, it is time to Buy, Buy, buy....

But what would you buy at this moment? Google, that has taken a nose dive, Yahoo, which is under $20, or eBay which is trading at a very low Future price/earnings.

Let me know what you think...

September income - Again growth

The months of September showed again a strong income months from my sites. Although the growth rates are slowing down, it is still real money that is coming in.

As you can see I started experimenting with payperpost and Blogvertise. So it is not a real shocker that income has risen. Blogvertise brought in $10, while Payperpost brought in $47.50. I try to limit the number I take on, and I always am picky.

Again Sugardaddy.com has been THE biggest driver of income the last month. But at least I'm diversified pretty good, and Adsense is not dominant in my portfolio. If you would like to make some extra money on the side using the affiliate program of Sugardaddy.com, sign up here: Partner program.

Talking about Adsense, after last month of big growth, I still managed to grow the revenue coming from Google Adsense.

Main reason I think is my new design on one of the sites. This has caused a big jump in clicks on that site.

Projects for next months:

• New designs to optimize Adsense revenue 
• Build out my newest project: Black-Coffee 
• Write more on Moneydiet.org, as this is a great niche to build my site 
• I'll be taking a holiday after a business trip. Should still give me plenty of material to write about, which will generate traffic.

My objective: earn $1 per day for 30 days with Google Adsense, has still not be achieved. So no new objective yet.

In the mean time, check out my Stumble Search.

 

Technorati Tags: Internet income

Sold Yahoo stocks... at a loss...

Yesterday I sold my Yahoo shares at a minimal loss @ $27 through a limit order. I want to limit my risk and exposure to the volatility of Yahoo, as I believe they will report bad results for Q3 on October 16th. Several reasons for this:

• When I opened the beta email inbox a couple of days ago of my Yahoo account, I was not able to read any email. The page froze up, and there was nothing I could do than close the browser. I've still not been able to read my 9 waiting emails. Email is one of the core products for Yahoo, and has significant switching costs for users. But when a product is just not working, these switching costs become much lower all of a sudden.
• From several sources I've heard that Kelkoo in Europe is for sale. Yahoo bought the shopping comparison engine three years ago for $575 million. Selling the department now, could mean two things: a) Kelkoo is not performing well b) Yahoo needs to focus their recourses and attention on other things that need attention.
• Yahoo is still loosing market share in the search market in their home market the US. A large part of Yahoo revenue is coming through their search advertising platform Panama. With the shrinking market share in search, you can expect less revenue.

Sometimes you just need to take your loss and pull the trigger on a stock you own. The last couple of weeks Yahoo made a good comeback, and I thought it was time to take my losses. Now I can invest the money into places where it does make a good return.

So Yahoo closed today at $27.17, if only I had waited for one more day...

 

Technorati tags: Yahoo

Sirius in play...with Google?

Last week after short research I quickly picked up a bunch of stock of Sirius (NASDAQ: SIRI). Sometimes I just like to gamble. With a purchase price of $3.46, every rise is putting significant profit on the board.

And guess what. Over the weekend there is this rumor started that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) would be in play to purchase Sirius. That would bring Google radio advertising game more in play as well.

Some people mention that the proposed merger between Sirius and XM could get in the way. My response is, why can't Google buy both of them... Hell, Sirius is only $4.8 billion!

Technorati tags: Google, Sirius, XM

My stock picks...from two year ago

I have been trying stock picking something like two years ago. I was trying to use the techniques described in the book: How to make money in stocks.

I was doing a lot of research on stocks I thought were potentials. Next to that, I picked some stocks out of my industry, which I thought were high potentials.

The list include stocks like: AAPL, BIDU, GOOG, SIFY (All Technology or Internet stocks). Below you can see the whole list of stocks that I put in a virtual portfolio and kept them there for just over a year or two years.

I guess the return of 83% in two years is not bad at all. If only it was real...

Only one serious loser in the whole pick, AVID, which I owned in the first place, but sold after a couple of weeks with a small profit just before the stock crashed 40%.

Technorati tags: virtual portfolio, stocks, investment