Archive for the ‘Income Streams’ tag
The Sixth Day of Christmas – Research & Development
You haven’t forgotten that you’re your own little company have you? How’s your Research and Development department ticking along? Have you managed a break through this year? Why not?
There’s been plenty written lately about the past year, reflecting on personal events, milestones and goals achieved. Soon enough we’ll be into New Years resolutions. You can pick from your standard range: get fit, quit smoking, save more money, be nicer to people etc. Why not resolve to do something that can benefit you in the long term and open up your eyes to a world of possibility?
I’m talking about learning something new: experimenting with additional income streams, setting yourself up as a small business, anything that’ll help you get out of the rat race!
You’ve spent more time figuring out which bank would give you 3.75% pa on your $5,000 term deposit than you have even thinking about getting out of the rat race! (By the by, making your money work for you this way would net you a whopping $187 profit for the year before tax)
I’ll cut to the chase, you can get your tax rate down to the low 10 – 15%, increase your net worth & asset base, get involved in the stock market, have a look at an eBay store… the list goes on!
If you went to college or university you’ve spent anywhere from $20,000 upwards on a qualification that’s going to tie you to a job until you retire, but you might turn your nose up at a stock market seminar that’s charging $1,000? Think about it.
The Sixth Day of Christmas is going to be short and sweet; if you haven’t already you should kick your Research and Development department into gear in ‘10.
Make your New Year’s resolution count for 2010, maybe turn off your TV and learn about drop shipping a product online? (Turning your TV off will give you an extra week and a half of time to lead your own free world)
What’s your resolution? Leave a comment below, follow me on twitter, sign-up for the RSS feed or join the facebook group? If you’ve got something to say that’ll help us all lead our own free world contribute and write an article for the site!
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The Fourth Day of Christmas – Who’s In Control?
Did you sit there as a kid watching Dan Aykroyd & Bill Murray catch ghosts and wonder how much their annual salary was, what their 401k (superannuation) fund was like or how many hours per day they worked? Me neither. I wanted to be a ghost buster because it looked like fun, plain and simple.
Where did it all go wrong? At what point did you go from wanting to be a fireman, a life guard, a deep sea diver or a pro surfer into giving in to being a corporate mule?
Focus
I recently read a great article by Ash at The Middle Finger Project that touched on the subject of working at McDonalds in your teens. Working at the Big M isn’t a bad thing, you’re focused and work equals money. You don’t work there because you have a passion for the Big Mac Secret Sauce* or that you really admire the hamburglar. Our first jobs are often the most care free, you go to work to make money to enjoy your spare time, seems quite simple but as we’ve moved on we’ve forgotten what money is ACTUALLY for. Now it’s for paying off our new plasma television, the new car we didn’t need or our credit cards.
Life moves on from being completely carefree and slowly but surely you acquire responsibility. With this responsibility of supporting yourself brings the need for an income, with the income comes the overtime and spending on life’s little luxuries. Before you know it, you and everyone other man and his dog are running along in the same never ending race.
Who’s in Control?
What would happen if we all quit work tomorrow? I love a good ‘conspiracy’ at any time of day, and one of my favourites that I’m always involved in is the whole ‘working, paying taxes and being in the governments ‘rat race’.
It goes like this: you go to school and you’re told to get a well paying job, you then head to university to get a qualification for said well paying job, you start work, pay tax, get a house, suffer the wrath of interest rate fluctuations, watch TV and soak up the media and are easily influenced and under control. Is there a way to step outside of the rat race? To run your own race? Maybe to not even run in the race at all?
What if you didn’t have to pay tax? Or if you could minimise your tax and build some wealth & assets? Maybe start up a few alternate income streams? Or you knew how money worked, how to acquire it and make it work for you? That’d be brilliant!
If only we were taught things like this? Say for example, in a…. school? Who benefits from our tax dollars, controls the school syllabus and has the final say on what we’re taught? It shouldn’t be too hard for you to figure out! 
So luckily we know all there is to know about plate tectonics, we learnt an obscure language that we’ll never need and we can calculate the circumference of the world. But we don’t know anything about how to handle our money, reduce our tax or stand on our own two feet?
Let’s forget money & control and reminisce about a simpler time: playing basketball all day, poking your tongue out, shaving your head bald, wishing you were black and insisting your were going to be Michael Jordan when you grew up.
P.S. *Big Mac Not-So-Secret Sauce = Mircale whip, sweet relish, french dressing, sugar, pepper & powdered onion (in case you were wondering)
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On the Third Day of Christmas – US Options Trading Part 1
On the Third Day of Christmas My True Love Gave to Me, $1,200 Credited Into My Bank Account Last Night!
I’m very excited to be able to write about this today! I initially had ‘US Stock Options Trading’ as the 6th Day of Christmas to keep you in suspense, but last night’s windfall was too much to contain!
One of my Free World income stream experiments is US Options Trading. It’s one of the online streams of income that doesn’t involve blogging, building a reputation, getting subscribers or trying to sell anything. The results are based on you and you alone and is one of the primary ‘location independent’ revenue opportunities.
So this isn’t going to be a get-rich-quick scheme, there’s nothing to sell you at the end, but the idea is to show you what I’ve been tinkering with on the options market and that I’ve been able to make some small (but significant %) profits. (And that you can too)
I’ll explain a bit about Options Trading (it’s not daunting, don’t worry) and then about how to find profitable stocks and what tools you can use to kick things into gear. There’ll be a few links at the end of sites you can check out, sign-up for free online brokers and do some ‘virtual’ trading on your own. (not real money, but it uses the real results from the stock market).
Things might get a bit confusing as we go along, but I made $1,200 last night without lifting a finger so it’s worth you getting a cup of tea, having a good read once or twice, following the links, and if anything doesn’t make sense then either drop a comment or send me an email. If you’re viewing this post via the email subscription or RSS feed, it’s probably better to head to the site as some of the images enlarge if you click on them.
Introduction to Stocks & Options
Late last year I attended a seminar on shares, options and CFD’s (ignore the last one). This piqued my interest so I read a few more books and found that most of the information was readily available for free in books, none of the theories were new or top secret and what wasn’t available in books was available online. I got hold of a good course of DVD’s and CD’s and studied away, eventually starting up a free account and experimenting, reading more books and found that the whole game was about learning, getting some experience, risk management and not putting all your money on the table at once.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about the stock market, stocks or shares and all that jazz. The words ‘company’, ‘shares’ & ‘stocks’ all represent the same thing, if Ford Motor Company came out tomorrow with the flying car then their share price/stocks/company would increase in value. If their flying car crashed when you drove it then their share price/stocks/company value would decrease.
What is an Option?
So anyway, what are these options I keep going on about? An ‘option’ is based on a stock. An option has three components; time value, a premium and a strike price. Confused much?
Time Value
Like car insurance, you buy an option to last for a set amount of time; one month, two months, six months, a year, it varies. (Consequently the more time you buy, the more it costs) You’re not actually buying the ’stock’, in essence you’re taking out a policy that will give you the ‘option’ of buying the stock at a set price further down the track.
Premium
This is the ‘premium’ you pay for the option, similar to the cost of your car insurance. The backbone of options is that the premium is more often than not only about 10% of the cost of buying the actual stock. (Think about it, $10 stock that you control for $1, if it goes up to $12, you’ve made 100%).
It’s worth jumping in here to give you the textbook definition of an option to help clear things up; “An option gives the buyer have the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell the underlying stock at a specified price (strike price) until the 3rd Friday of their expiration month (Time Value).”
Strike Price
From above, the ‘strike price’ is the price at which the buyer can buy the stock for. So if you buy an option on a $10 stock for $1, and your stock moves to $15, you have the right to buy that stock at $10 (and here you’d have $5 profit as the stock has moved to $15).
Hopefully you’ve just had a light bulb moment from the above paragraph and probably asked as I did “surely that’s not possible?” I probably haven’t done the greatest job at explaining all of this so head here when you’ve got the chance to read up on it.
Sales Pitch
So if you do a few google searches or even attend a seminar or two, you’ll hear/read a few of those gimmicky sales pitch catch cries to reel you in. Here’s a few I’ve put together that ARE true and should make you stand up and want to get into this for yourself;
Options Trading will take a whopping 15 minutes of your time per day- You can double or triple your money rather easily
- You can profit hugely from stock going down
- You can make money if stock goes sideways (neither up or down)
- You don’t have to know which way the stock is going to make money
Ok that’s the gimmicky sales pitch crap out of the way, and I’m not even trying to sell you anything!
The whole options trading thing is full of strategies, you can; buy, sell, make money on stock going down, all sorts of stuff, but to ease you into it I’ll work through some real examples that I’ve used myself.
If you missed the two screen shots within this post scroll back up and check them out. The first screenshot is of the daily account email I receive which outlines my overall position and the second screenshot is when one of my orders gets filled and I make a profit! If you want to learn some more right away you can google ‘options trading’ or go to one of the many online brokers and sign up for a virtual trading account, I’ve used optionsxpress and they were fine.
In US Options Trading – Part 2 I’ll show you a behind-the-scene’s look at how I find trades (companies), what to do with them once you’ve found them, and how to place trades.
Receive the Twelve Days of Christmas (and Part 2 of Options Trading) delivered directly to your inbox here. If you’ve got twitter it’d be great if you would retweet the article. 
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