Archive for September, 2007
The Importance of Patience
Patience is a virtue, we are always told, but its value goes beyond mere quality of character. In matters of wealth, patience is often the one factor that separates the winners from the losers. As they saying goes, bulls make money and bears make money, but hogs get slaughtered.
Why do I bring this up? Because I am at a somewhat awkward stage of the game. On the one hand, it’s far easier to find ways to multiply tiny sums such as the ones I have dealt in thus far. On the other hand, each transaction tends to take up my entire stake, so if the one transaction takes a while to complete, I must wait.
And that is where I find myself now. With my $3 stake I purchased another book, a hardcover this time, and listed it for sale. It has been up for several days, now, but no buyer has appeared. I begin to wonder if I picked the wrong book this time around.
Still, a few days is not all that long. I still have the lowest price up, and the book was recently a mega bestseller. So I will continue to wait — and scan the ground for change, should I get stuck with it. The one thing I will not do is give up, even if my stake is lost. And neither should you. If we have to start over, so be it.
Whether you’re on step 5, step 15, or step 23, always remember that it all came from one dime lying in the street, and any step that can be taken once can be taken again. In order to succeed, we must be willing to risk failure.
And now to take stock: I have multiplied my money 32 times over in just a few days. That’s a pretty good run for any investor. Onward…
Dime Sells for $1.9 Million
Regrettably, it wasn’t mine. Some day, perhaps. But just think, if I’d found this dime lying on the street, I’d be done already!
This sort of story always makes me wonder. What exactly is it about this particular dime that makes it worth almost two million dollars? Its rarity? Certainly this particular coin is fantastically rare. Only nine of them are currently known to exist. But is rarity alone so valuable?
Consider this: yesterday was September 23, 2007. I wore only one pair of socks yesterday. That means, in all of the world, there exists only one pair of socks worn by me on September 23, 2007. In that sense, my socks from yesterday are even more rare and unique than this dime. So why aren’t they valuable as well?
I know I’m not a celebrity (yet), and that if they were the socks that (say) Jessica Alba wore yesterday they actually might be worth something. But why? Either way, they’re just a pair of socks. And the dime that sold for almost $2 million is just a dime. Just a tiny hunk of metal, of no practical use to anyone.
The truth is that the only value that any object has is 100% in the minds of people. Diamonds are only valuable because people think they’re pretty. Money only has value because people have agreed to assign value to it. The concept applies equally to apples, cow excrement, gold, my socks, and multi-national corporations. None of them are worth anything at all unless people believe that they are.
In short, money is just a state of mind. Wealth really can be created out of nothing. It happens every day. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself this: How much money is Stephen King’s next novel likely to be worth? The rights to it would surely be an enviable asset to have, a small fortune in and of itself. Yet where did all this wealth come from? Poof! Out of thin air.
As George S. Classon
I Doubled My Money Again
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With my $2.21 in hand, I visited the local Goodwill store. There I found a very clean copy of George Orwell’s 1984.
Half.com to sell my book this time around. I was pleased to see that its commission was much more reasonable. However, its shipping allowance for sellers was also lower, and, as I suspected, the site doesn’t get nearly as much traffic as Amazon, so the book took a bit longer to sell. Here are the details:
#15633537101
1984 : George Orwell (Paperback, 1990)
ISBN-10 : 0451524934 ; ISBN-13 : 9780451524935
Condition: Very Good*Very clean copy.
Price: $2.23 | Shipping Reimb: $2.64 | Commission ($0.33) | Total: $4.54
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By the way, if you’re a fan of used books (as I am), you might want to check Half.com out. They charge less for shipping, and charge a lower commission to sellers as well, so the result is that books tend to be a better deal there. (After all, Amazon’s $3.99 shipping charge alone is more than most used paperback books sell for at brick-and-mortar stores.) You can search Half.com’s used book inventory, and support this site as well, by using the widget to the right.
Shipping cost me $2.13 this time around, so I netted $2.42. With the dollar I found a few days ago, that brings me to $3.42 total. That puts me at step 5! Only 19 more doubles to go until a million.
The used book strategy seems to be working well for these small amounts of money, but as you might guess, it will soon reach the point where it will take too much time out of my day to hunt them down, post them online, pack, address, and ship them.
I’ll stick to Rule 6, though, and not worry about that for now. For the time being, I can buy at least three more books with my $3.42, and I see no reason not to continue my present strategy.
How to Make Money From Nothing
At the risk of violating Rule 6, check out this post from money smart life. It discusses using leverage to profit on eBay. The strategy need not be limited to eBay alone, though. Using this method, you can profit while putting zero (literally) of your own money at risk. Like my first sale, the trouble with this strategy is time. It works, but it’s hard to scale up to make serious money with it. However, it’s a great way to build up a stake for more lucrative opportunities. Food for thought.
Fortune Favors the Bold
 One more dollar in the kitty |
Walking down the street today I found a crumpled dollar bill. I guess the goddess Fortuna has smiled upon my efforts. Or something. In any event, that brings my stake up to $2.21, which puts me past Step 4. Only 20 more steps to go.
You may scoff at my tiny victory of trebling my 40¢ stake, by the way, but consider this: vast fortunes are made every year on such tiny profits. McDonald’s makes billions selling 99¢ double cheeseburgers. Much of 3M’s success came from selling cheap, tiny Post-It pads. The only thing separating my one profitable little sale and a multi-million dollar business is finding a way to repeat it enough times. It’s all just a matter of scaling up. As the Bard would say, there’s the rub.