The Million-Dollar Dime

I live in San Francisco, so my local representative also happens to be speaker of the House: Nancy Pelosi.  As you might imagine, I am 100% opposed to any bailout plan for Wall Street.  Like many other Americans, I have written my representative to oppose the bill.  The ratio of letters and calls has been on the order of 100 to 1 against any bailout.  Yet our “representatives” seem poised to defy the will of the overwhelming majority of the American people and bail out the Wall Street hogs anyway.  What does this say about the state of our Democracy? Nothing good, that is for certain.

The letter I wrote is below.  Feel free to copy it in any portion and send it to your own representative.  We must do everything in our power to defeat the bailout.

Dear Speaker Pelosi,

Last week’s defeat of the bailout of Wall Street was a victory for the American tax payer.  You know well that the overwhelming majority of the American people, more than 90%, are dead-set opposed to any bailout of any kind.  Recall that you and your colleagues are supposed to represent the will of the people, not defy it.

The Senate’s passage of essentially the same bill is a major disappointment, and indicative more of the fact that not all of them are up for reelection than anything else.

It would be the height of arrogance to assume you know better than the people you have been elected to represent.  The drafters of this bill are asking for $10,000 from every American family to prop up the corporate hogs that got us into this mess in the first place.

Recall the dire predictions made when the first request for a bailout was made: the sky will fall overnight if we don’t pass this bill right now!  Many days have passed.  The sky has not fallen.  Nor will it.

In a free market, businesses must be allowed to fail if the market is to remain healthy.  A massive deleveraging, while painful, is exactly what this country needs. Our over-reliance on easy credit and massive debt has pushed the entire country to the verge of bankruptcy.  We need to take our medicine and pay the piper now – delaying it will only make it worse in the end.  Yet proponents of this disatrous bill are only asking us to go still further into debt.  You must not allow this to happen.

Please do not succumb to the pressure from Wall Street hogs and bankers with ulterior motives.  You know the right thing to do: follow the will of the people.  And the people say, NO BAILOUT.  Period.

So I just got back from a nice vacation back home to Mississippi. I visited family and friends, went to my cousin’s wedding, went fishing, and had myself an all-around great time.

Meanwhile, my passive income projects kept plugging away, unconcerned with my absence. In fact, earnings from Renewable Wealth had a big jump — so big that I almost couldn’t believe the totals when I added them up. I had to re-check the figures two or three times to be sure.

During my month off, my stake more than tripled, to $210.10! It all came from advertising earnings from this site and RenewableWealth.com — 100% passive income. My humble little dime has been multiplied precisely 2100 times, in just a few short months.

My stake is starting to grow to the point where it’s time to consider opening a separate bank account for it, so that I can add interest to my collection of income streams. It will also serve to help keep up the barrier between my stake and all my other finances. I know that as the stake starts to grow, it will be more and more tempting to dip into it for one reason or another. Better to separate it completely, and keep it working toward my goal.

I’ll be posting the latest complete accounting of advertising earnings in the reports section soon, so you can see how revenues have slowly crept up as more people have found my sites.

In the meantime, have you started the game, yet? If not, there’s no better day than today.

I checked my statements today and learned that my stake has grown to $63.20! The earnings from MillionDollarDime.com and RenewableWealth.com keep tricking in, while I’m busy working on other things behind the scenes.

I will soon announce my next investment from the stake. Pulling in a stream of passive income is lovely, but that $63 needs to be put back to work. Stay tuned.

Good news: I have just added forums to the site. I’m hoping they will encourage folks to give the game a try themselves, and share their experiences. We can learn a lot more about achieving financial independence together than any of us could alone.

I have kicked things off with a post of some resources for folks who are just getting started with passive income online. These are free or very cheap resources to help you get going on a tiny budget.

I’ve also set up a revenue sharing program for the forums. You might have seen similar programs on sites like Digital Point. In brief, you’ll be able to earn a share of ad revenue from the forums just by posting there. It’s a great way to start your stake for the Million Dollar Dime game — and there’s no need to hunt for change in the street. All you need to do is join the conversation.

I hope to see you all there.

I’ve added a bunch of content to Renewable Wealth over the past few days. I had been neglecting it for a while because I was busy with other things, but even the small amount of content that was there brought in a trickle of passive income the entire time, so my stake continued growing behind the scenes.

It was never my intent for Renewable Wealth to be a static “fire-and-forget” site, though, so now that I have some time to come up for air I am adding more content. (Static sites are a great way to earn passive income online , though – we’ll be discussing them more down the line.)

There are Opportunities for Leverage Everywhere

This is a good time to mention the concept of leverage again. You see, green investing is a great interest of mine, and I have been spending a lot of time trying to shift my investment portfolio to being as close to completely green as possible without sacrificing performance.

So here I am doing all this investment research for my own portfolio, which hopefully will produce a nice return for my retirement account as well as my soul. But all of that work can be leveraged to benefit me further if I write about it and share it with others. So, that is exactly what I am doing. I am simply writing about the stocks I have chosen for my own green investment portfolio, with a brief discussion of why I chose them.

The time spent is negligible compared to the total time I have spent on this research, but it allows me to profit further from my own work in several ways: 1) More traffic to my site; 2) When having to make my case for these investments to others, I am more apt to make doubly sure my logic is sound; 3) I can get feedback form my readers which might point out flaws in my thinking; 4) I can get others involved in Green Investing, which is one more tiny contribution to the future of the planet; 5) I can connect with others in the Green Investing community. Not bad for an extra few minutes to write up research I am doing already. Now ask yourself: is there anything you spend a lot of time on that could be leveraged in this way?

Leverage Your Passions

If you have a personal passion that takes up a good chunk of your time, there’s a good chance that other people share it. Consider how you might leverage the time you spend on what you love to help you progress toward financial independence. Put up a site and share your knowledge and experiences. You’ll enjoy it, and chances are you’ll profit as well.