Starve the Beast 2013

I've worked out my taxes for this year and it works out to be about ~$2,300 on about $30,000 of income.  That money compounded at 10% for 15 years roughly triples.  Lets assume for the sake of assuming that I actually can compound that money at 10%.  (No one believes this but me.)  Over the course of the next 15 years that savings will amount to 73,000 dollars.  This is 7% of the money I need to accumulate by 40.  This isn't the total million but it is a significant fraction.

Intel

I wish I didn't have to do this but surely someone who reads this and decides that what I say makes sense will invest money, lose it all, and claim that I am somehow responsible.  I'm not, be an adult, take responsibility for your own decisions.  Taking investment advice from a 24 year old is idiotic, especially if you put more money into the idea than the 24 year old did. (I really don't have all that much).  In fact, none of this is advice, I'm just talking about what I'm doing in my diary.  The fact that I let you read it doesn't mean that you should do anything I say, or anything you think I said.  I'm long Intel and I could be very wrong.

Budget Update as of October

We should take a look at a more recently updated budget.  Since our most recent budget we've cut our cable.  We no longer get cable TV instead opting for Netflix.  We have our most recent spending/budget:

Year 24 update

Hi all,

Apparently there exist people who have actually looked at this blog.  Now I of course feel terribly terribly guilty about not posting more.  (Could it be that in fact I am the least interesting man in the world, as it is in fact true that I used to be able to speak German.  Does that make me more or less interesting than Monroe's fellow?)  Anyway we passed over my Birthday recently.  I'm now 24, that means I've only got 16 years left to make it to a million dollars.  Fortunately the problem is also significantly easier than I originally surmised.  Oh man are you guys about to have your minds blown.  I have 3 websites that you need to run off and read the entirety of.  These basically set the framework.  They are:

JoshuaKennon.com
EarlyRetirementExtreme.com
MrMoneyMustache.com

While they have somewhat divergent results with Kennon becoming rich, Jacob of ere becoming independent, and Mr. Money Mustache becoming upper-middle class retired.  The common thread is that they all basically agree on how to get started. That is ultra-frugality.  Turns out Richest Man in Babylon had it right the whole time.  Without making a dime more I could apparently retire in 5 years (though I should mention I got a raise), if I could cut expenses down so that I was only spending 20% of my income.  (Important note: I so far have not done this). So this is our starting point.  From here on I'm going to assume familiarity with the above.

February Results

For February here is the result of my budget:

Tutoring

I'm heading out to New Orleans this week for Mardi Gras. (Taking too many vacations is a big part of my plan. So rather than more math I'm going to talk a little about tutoring.)

Savings adjustments

$550 is too much for one person to spend on food. This works out to about $18 per day. I eat out about 60-80% of the time. I think that I may be able to cut this to $50 a week by eating in nearly exclusively. This will save me about $300 to $350 per month. That money can go toward my savings and investment. When I change my starting point for monthly investment to $700 from $400 it makes some significant changes to the time profile of my investment. For example I only need to raise my monthly investment by about $43 every month rather than $47. Additionally, it reduces the maximum amount I need to invest to $3275.48. This maximum investment also happens 8 months earlier after 134 months of investing. This will happen in March of 2023. This of course motivated me to get curious about different methods for figuring out how much I should contribute.

Preparation is key

Last week I posted about the magic card selling concept I had. What I didn’t mention is that I had this idea months ago, but I hadn’t taken a look at the economics of it. Then when the opportunity came up I went home and worked on it. It took me some time to put together exactly what I needed to charge. I called a couple other singles shops to figure out what they’re monthly revenue from magic singles sales were and did a Du Pont analysis to figure out whether what I was doing made financial sense.

Opportunities

Sometimes opportunities drop into your lap when you least expect them to. For at least a decade I’ve played the trading card game “Magic: the Gathering”. I played it with my friends early in middle school. I picked it back up early in high school, and started going to tournaments. Then, I started playing again early in college. It seems I’m on a 4 year loop with this game as I started playing again at the end of this past summer. Anyway when I picked up the game again I didn’t really want to make a significant investment and thought that it’d probably be a good time to sell off the 5K+ or so cards that I had accumulated. I was able to sell most of what I had that I wasn’t using for about a total of $500. I still have more cards that I’m using that I could probably sell to stores or other resellers for about $200.

January Results

For January here is the result of my budget:

Candy Machines

If you google passive income you’ll find several articles, largely they spout identical advice.  Real-Estate, Invest (stocks/bonds), Peer to peer lending.  The trouble is that these are capital intensive.  Many of them make suggestions for less capital intensive projects, but they are mostly related.  One common suggestion is rental unit management where you convince rental unit owners to let you manage their property for a portion of the rental unit income.  Unless you have some compelling skills or experience in the area, its not really something you can just pick up.  If you can also convince people to let you manage their  investments, this works too.  (There may be some legal hurdles for both of these things).

How to be a millionaire by forty

I'm 23 (and a half) and I took a look at some arithmetic and found that with thrift, becoming a millionaire just isn't that hard. Over the course of this blog I'm going outline exactly how I make a million dollars. I will keep as much detail as possible in my attempts to make money. Insomuch as I can maintain my privacy (and make sure none of my ideas get scooped) I'll explain my business ventures, budget, investments, and savings plan.