If you like this article, tell a friend!      

Saturday, October 23, 2010

A money experiment - CP style!

I've been taking some cues from Neville's Financial Blog lately, including setting up goals and giving yourself a punishment (like donating money to the Chicago Bears charity) for not hitting it and getting a reward (like an iPhone 4) when hitting it. Read about it here.  I'm taking another cue from Nev today, and that's his Money Experiments, where the idea is you can make money with very little money. Nev's tried a few things, the most famous being enlisting a homeless guy to sell bottled water on the street.

My idea came on a recent trip to New Orleans. Walking down Decatur Street, where there are a ton of street artists, one particular piece of art caught my eye. It was a fabulous, slightly abstract painting of a jazz musician silhouetted against a lampost with "Bourbon Street" painted on it. It was painted on a wooden plank and looked like it would go great on my wall. And that's saying a ton, because I really don't care about decorating my house at all (the only decorations I had before cleaning it up to sell the house was a display of Univ of Wisconsin football ticket stubs from 1996-2000, a Yao Ming jersey, and a stadium chair from the old County Stadium in Milwaukee). The art was fabulous, so I immediately bought one for myself. I asked they artist if he had a website or if he sold his art on Ebay. He said no, it cost too much to ship, and something or other about someone else having a better website. I told him it was great and he should think about doing that.

A few days later we went back (the food is too good on Decatur Street) and I figured I'd buy one for my sister and one for my parents. Since he had a deal where if you buy 2 you can get the 3rd for half price, I thought I'd go ahead and buy a 3rd one and see if I could sell it on Ebay and make a profit. Hence, the beginning of my money experiment. I completed the experiment today, and I'm looking forward to showing you my results in the coming blog entries!


Share/Save/Bookmark

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Restarting the 5 hour weekly commitment

Well, it looks like @Timothy didn't quite make his 5 hours a week goal. To his credit, he fulfilled his promise and bought some pink Chicago Bears shirts from their charity. Read about it here. I'm curious to see where he goes next!

With that, I'm re-starting my 5 hour a week commitment after taking a week off on vacation. I'm still trying to brainstorm what my reward and punishment would be. I think I'll keep the $100 donation to Bears Care as the punishment. I've kicked around a few ideas about the reward. One was to buy one of my friends lunch. That way, they'd be encouraging me to make it work. Another idea was to offer up a $10 gift card to Amazon to a random commenter if I completed the goal. That way the whole community would be encouraging me! Thoughts?


Share/Save/Bookmark

The Corporatepreneur © 2008. Template by Dicas Blogger.

TOPO