Last night I went to Studio Movie Grill because I had free tickets. It’s a movie theater/restaurant where they serve you surprisingly delicious food while you watch your movie. The moral of the story is I had a great evening with my girlfriend Tag and didn’t have time to write a blog post. So I want to make it up to you today.
I took a vacation day off work and have the entire day to myself. Here is a list of some of the things I want to do on my day off:
- Pay My Rent
- Finish Buying Stocks in my Roth IRA for 2011
- Potentially Hire a Virtual Assistant
- Write a Song
- And Finally, Talk With My Readers
I’m going to be at or near my computer all day, so ask me a question in the comments and I’ll answer it pronto.
I’ve seen Ninja do this at his blog, and I thought it would be a good way for me to connect with some of my readers on my day off from my real job.
You can ask me almost anything. I’ll tell you anything about my blog or give any personal finance opinion. I’ll tell you my favorite color, why I haven’t cut my hair in over two months, or what records I have in my high school weight room.
The only rules are: I won’t tell you where I work or exactly how much I make (sorry, but people I work with read this blog and it’s against company policy for them to know), and everything else has to be PG-13 or better. Anything else is fair game.
So ask away. I’ll be around all day so just post a comment here and I’ll reply with an answer in a few minutes.
P.S. If you’re reading this and don’t see a single question in the comments, please please please just put something so I don’t look like an idiot who got no questions. Thanks. Love you.
Kevin McKee is an entrepreneur, IT guru, and personal finance leader. In addition to his writing, Kevin is the head of IT at Buildingstars, Co-Founder of Padmission, and organizer of Laravel STL. He is also the creator of www.contributetoopensource.com. When he’s not working, Kevin enjoys podcasting about movies and spending time with his wife and four children.
Hi Kevin!
It’s great of you to spend the day off with us. I’ve got 3 questions for ya:
1. You mentioned you lease your car, and said you’d never again “make payments” on a car w/o a bumper-to-bumper warranty. Curious: why do you lease cars rather than owning, and why are you willing to make payments on a car rather than buying in cash? This isn’t a criticism disguised as a question (I’m not one of those arrogant-type PF bloggers!), it’s an honest question because I can see that you think very carefully about your spending choices and you seem to act very deliberately with regard to your money.
2. On the subject of cars: are you buying shares of Ford today?
3. And on the subject of your girlfriend Tag: does she share your passion for personal finance? How do you approach/handle that topic in a relationship?
Well, this should be enough questions to distract you from the more-important work of funding your Roth IRA! 🙂
Hey Paula, thanks for being my first question asker!
1. The choice between buying and leasing was simple. I could either buy the car, have a higher payment, and take a chance at the car losing a lot of value in the next few years. With the lease, my payments were lower (I have a 0% lease). This way, I just pay my $230 a month and I don’t have to worry about how much the car is worth. I have a guaranteed buyer (the dealer) at a guaranteed price (about $14,000) when I want to get rid of the car in two years. Now imagine the car is actually only worth $12,000 and I still want it. I can turn it it for $14,000 and then come back the next day and buy it for $12,000. A lease takes all the risk (or theoretical reward) off me and puts it on the dealer)
2. I do like Ford right now, and am holding some currently. I think they are a strong company at a good price. I’m no stock expert, but they look good to me.
3. She was never really interested in personal finance before we started dating, but she is starting to get into it. She’s fully funded her 2010 Roth IRA and has a budget (although she’s two months behind on updating it). We’re actually talking about paying off her student loans so she can be debt free and potentially pursue a lower paying but more fulfilling career. She doesn’t have a passion for it, but she understands it well enough and is fully supportive of my passion.
Oh, and I just bought a dividend ETF (DLN) for the last $800 of my 2011 Roth IRA. 🙂
1. Hooray for dividend ETFs! As my posts show, I’m a huge fan of those. 🙂
2. That’s really interesting about the lease; I’ve never thought of it in those terms (having a guaranteed buyer at a guaranteed price.) I’d still personally never do it — I’m firmly in the pay-in-full-for-a-car category — but it’s interesting to hear your take.
3. I agree with you about Ford; I think that stock got beat-up in the general anxiety about the Detriot Big Three. I expect Ford stock to rise. I considered buying it, though my individual-stock-picks money is tied up elsewhere right now.
As you know my dear American friend I am from Canada. We are having elections next month due to the Conservative party (currently in power), being found in contempt due to not releasing information about their recent financial statement as well as other acts of secrecy. They neglected to disclose info about lots of dollars going to prisons and such. The Liberal and NDP parties therefore found Prime Minister Stephen Harper to be in contempt of our parliament. This is the first time a party has been found in contempt EVER, in all of the common wealth countries (the main ones you would know are Australia, South Africa, Britain, India & many African nations).
Now, Canadians are up in arms about the money being spent on the actual election (could be up to $20,000,000 per party), and not on the fact that we are living in a democratic society where our country is allowing us to have a say on a subject (should Stephen Harper be re-elcted).
Now, I know your expertise is in personal finance and I know my information is vague, but in your opinion do you think we should be mad at the fact that our tax dollars are being spent on the election, or on the fact that our government has been found in contempt!?
First of all, I don’t really know what’s going on, but I’ll give my uneducated opinion.
$20 million is a lot to you and me. To something the size of the Canadian government, it’s nothing. In fact, $20 million out of the 2010 $280.5 billion expenditures is about 0.0071%
If my government was found to be in contempt, and it cost me 0.0071% of the annual budget to vote them out of office so they don’t continue to do contemptuous things, I say that’s more than worth it.
hey whats up?
Nothing. This is one of the most relaxing days ever
Why did you take the day off?
Why didn’t you invite me to this awesome movie theater?
I had one leftover day from last year, and it had to be used by the end of the first quarter. So it was either today or tomorrow off. I took today because I didn’t have any important meetings.
You’re welcome to check it out if you want. I was very surprised at the quality of the food. My meal was delicious.
One more:
If you were making 80% of your day job income on the blog, would you quit? Would having the two incomes going at the same time be too tempting or would you enjoy the freedom while giving up a huge amount of money?
Great question. If I were making 80% of what I make now with this blog, that would mean my blog would have gotten seriously popular. If that were the case, I think I could pretty quickly translate that “fame” into making more money off personal finance, be that speaking, writing a book, or other things. So if I were making that much, I’d probably do this full time.
With that being said I still haven’t made a single penny from this site, so I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Keep in mind that if you do start making serious money, it won’t happen all at once. First, you’ll make $1,000, then each month you’ll get to about $2,000 and slowly it will increase to a point where you’re making 80% of your real salary. Would you jump ship? Why not continue both if you could?
Because if I were making 80% of my day job salary, I would be very confident that I could turn that into 200-500% of my day job income within a relatively small period of time if I left my day job and spent more time on the blog and videos.
In regards to the convo above, my job must pay way less than yours. I made about 20% more blogging this month than I made GROSS at my day job. Yep, I make $2960 a month before taxes and benefits at work. I made $3550 blogging so far in the month of March. I will totally be giving up my day job as soon as I can make $2500 a month 4 months in a row – when I feel like I can consistently not run us into the poor house by blogging full time. 🙂
Anyway, my question is what are your long-term plans for Thousandaire? I personally can’t see videos from work (where I usually catch up on blogs between work waves), but I love your writing style. I was hoping this was a long-term hobby for you…
I won’t say my specific salary but I will say that it is a good amount higher than what you make at your day job before taxes and benefits.
Right now this website is a hobby that I love. There are two potential career directions I am considering for the future of this site. I may take one, or both, or neither.
The first would be to get popular and start speaking at middle schools, high schools and colleges. My main personal finance concern is young people, and I’d love to devote my time to helping young people get their financial lives started right.
The second idea is a budgeting website (think Mint.com) but with a twist. I have a great idea on how to improve on the Mint.com functionality and make it more engaging, especially to young people. The problem is, it would take time, money, and hardcore development skills. Right now I don’t have either the time or the money, and I definitely don’t have the development skills (I could pay someone to do it, but that would cost even more money).
If this ever becomes a career, it would probably be because of that first option. However, I am happy at my job and if one of those options never becomes a reality, I’m happy to just write here and use this as a creative outlet.
Finally, congratulations on being so successful with generating revenue from your blog. I hope you get to the point where you can quit your day job soon!
How’s your workout routine going?
I took a few days off over the weekend to let my tired muscles rest, but other than that I’m sticking to the schedule. Last night I ran 8 miles. It sucked. I’ll be glad when this half marathon is over. Then I can just workout to stay in shape and forget about the crazy long runs!
My workout is going bad this week. I haven’t been in the gym as much as I should. I did, however, sign up at the gym at work so I can get a workout in when I’m having a slow day. It’s gonna get better! Good luck on your half marathon!
How are you going about hiring a virtual assistant? Specifically where are you looking, how are you evaluating if they will be useful?
I got the idea from the four hour work week, and I’m not sure if I want to do it or not. I’ve looked on www.odesk.com and it looks like there are some good candidates there for cheap. I just don’t know if I have enough work to justify the cost. I’m going to put some more thought into it this weekend and will write a post about it if I do actually hire someone.
Some tasks I’m thinking about include submitting articles to carnivals, finding blogs for me to comment on, research for my articles, sending youtube friend requests, and other things. I think I could fill about 2-5 hours a week, so I’ll need to find someone willing to work for that short a period of time.
Excellent, I look forward to it. I don’t think you will have trouble finding someone willing to work that few hours. How you find someone that is good without wasting a huge amount of time is maybe going to be hard. And whether you have much turnover, I would be interested to learn.
I was curious about the virtual assistant myself. What does one do as a virtual assistant? I was going to ask a question about marshmellows but that sounds way more interesting.
As long as you find the right one, they’ll do whatever you ask. Some can help you with social media, some know development, some will do data entry or research, some will do all of those things. The goal is for me to pay someone less than $3 an hour to do the time consuming tasks that need to be done but I don’t want to do, so I can focus my time on creativity that can’t be outsourced, like writing blogs and making videos.
enjoying your day off?
We have theaters here that serve beer & food, heh heh. They only show second run movies though, but ticket price is pretty cheap.
Now that you’ve been blogging a while, do you think you will stick with it? Any sign of burning out? What happens if you still don’t make any money in 6 months?
Right now I’m not in it to make money. I could have loaded up my site with advertisements and tried to turn a profit, but right now I’m just enjoying a creative outlet and working on differentiating myself from the 10 billion other blogs in the world. I don’t see myself stopping any time soon. 🙂