I never buy anything with cash. For the last 5 years, I have tried to make all of my purchases using a credit card or debit card. This requires me to enter the transactions into my personal finance software (I use Quicken). If a transaction is in Quicken, I can easily run reports to view where I’m spending my money.

Since I never use cash, it does me no good to have it. If cash is on me it gets wasted on something like:

• vending machine candy
• gas station food
• girl scout cookies
• etc etc etc

About three years ago, I emptied a huge “Orange Juice” bottle. The orange juice bottle sits in my closet and every day when I get I home, I dump any spare change into it. Now, when I say spare change, I’m talking about any literal change or dollar bills that happen to be laying in my pockets. Sometime I drop ten-dollar and twenty-dollar bills, but typically its just singles or change.

Last month I decided to empty it and take it to the bank. I dropped the change in an automatic change-counter and deposited the bills. It worked out to almost $300.00. Now that isn’t a ton of money but it was a nice surprise. I didn’t work for it; It’s like reaching into your pocket and finding $300.00.

You Should Try It
This is an easy task. Just go out and purchase a nice piggy bank. If you don’t want to purchase a piggy bank, do like I did and empty a big orange juice (Sunny Delight) bottle. I know a lot of people like to have cash on hand but the truth is: you don’t NEED cash. It is almost an unspoken rule that businesses must accept credit cards (or debit cards) and even if they don’t, you always have an ATM near by.

      

Audio File for SEC Bans Short-Selling
(1 minutes 37 seconds)

Last night the SEC put a ban on short-selling 799 financial companies. Read the Official Release Here (PDF).

From my understanding, here is the SEC’s reasoning behind banning short-sells:

Due to a horrible real estate market more people are foreclosing on their homes. This has had a tremendous ripple effect. We have seen financial stocks lose a ton of value.

As traders noticed the uncertainty in the financial markets they freaked out. When people freak out, panic rules the stock market, not fundamentals. Short sellers take advantage of the sell off by selling stocks they don’t own. This causes the stock to lose even more value.

To put a halt on this, the SEC ruled to freeze short selling on 799 companies. This freeze will allow the market to stabilize and THEN they’ll turn short-selling back on.

Although the move by the SEC to ban short-selling has had a positive effect on the market (up over 1,000 points in 2 days), it also comes with some horrible side affects or at least some BIG questions.

1. Short-sellers make money by realizing that stocks are over-valued. If they aren’t in the game, the stocks could be WAY over-valued. What is the real value?
2. When you re-initiate short-selling, there is no guarantee that the market has stabilized. What happens when you allow short-selling?

My Predictions

1. Although short-selling is due to start again on October 2, 2008, it will be extended due to the political effects of a down market (It looks bad on the president if the economy is in the gutter).
2. Stocks will rally and continue to rally until short-selling is allowed again.
3. When short-selling is turned back on… we will see a major sell-off.

Due to surge in stock prices, options have become a very popular investment strategy. View my “Options” post here.

Personally, I can’t wait for short-selling to be allowed again… I’m going to be short a ton that day… I’ve already got my shopping list ready.

      

Audio File for Feedburner, Wordpress, and the RSS Feed
(1 minutes 37 seconds)

For you Wordpress and Feedburner users:

I’ve been a long time fan of Feedburner. But one day, my feed magically broke. I recreated the feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/RjMartinosWebLog) and pointed it (rjmartino.com/wp-rss2.php).

Then, as I started creating new posts, I realized that nothing was being sent to feedburner. When I viewed my feedburner page, it was BLANK. When I logged into Blogline, my feed was blank.

I checked the Original Feed Validity. It checked out just fine…

I checked the FeedBurner Feed Validity. It checked out just fine.

I even re-synced… nothing.

I searched forums and found a guy named Rajasekharan at http://www.mtherald.com. Rajasekharan had fixed the same problem but he didn’t list the fix. So I visited his medical transcription blog, found his email address, and shot him an email.

He was really helpful. He explained that when he setup his feedburner feed, he gave the URL of his original feed (ie http://mtherald.com/blog/wp-rss.php). As he later found out, that was the blunder.

After changing the RSS feed to the correct URL, http://mtherald.com/?feed=rss2. It was solved.

I did the exact same thing. I set feedburner to look at http://wwww.rjmartino.com/wp-rss.php. The feed should have been set to http://www.rjmartino.com/?feed=rss2.

After changing the setting, I “pinged” the page using http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/ping, and a few minutes later, my feeds showed back up!

      

A typical day In our business… Replace “Boss” with “Client.”

What is your favorite Dilbert strip?

To view Dilbert Cartoons, go to http://www.dilbert.com.

      

In July I rented my house to a family and since then, I’ve been living in Bryant about 30 miles from the Little Rock. The drive takes about 30 minutes and its been killing me.

I’ve purchased a few

I finally found a house here in Little Rock… Its off of Hillsborough and its in the process of being remodeled… a process that I swore I would never do again… but this time it’s different… this time people are getting paid to do the work… it goes a lot faster, its better quality, and it keeps the stress off of me. I don’t think I’ll be there for a long time but it is a step in the right direction… I’m excited to see the property after the work is done.

      

Well… I’ve started a new project that involves real estate… specifically – single family homes in Michigan, South Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, Georgia, Illinois, and Indiana.

Its been a lot of fun and I’m learning a ton about other state laws, other markets, and meeting new people. This opportunity has great timing, great planning, great vision, and a lot of potential… But, I still feel like we’re missing something.

Its something I talk about a lot… great people. They’re hard to find…

When I find good people, its hard for me to share my vision… its hard for me to get them excited.

When I find great people, they just get it… Sometimes they get me excited. Sometimes they see it before I do!

I love working with great people… but they’re hard to find.

I’m looking for partners in the states listed above… Or you must be willing to relocate there

If you’re interested, let me know.

      

So, we’ve purchased a new apartment complex in Jacksonville, AR. It’s 46 units and is currently full (no discounts given to facebook-friends). It should be a good deal. I’m 100% confident that we bought it at a great price, the cash flow projections look good, the management is solid, and the occupancy rate is high.

We’re doing a good job at aligning our properties such that they are relatively close, the management is getting better as screening tenants, contractors are more understanding of our terms, and most of the properties have similar goals.

With any organization there is a “culture” that everyone buys into… that includes the owners, contactors, employees, management and even the tenants/customers. If you can’t get everyone to buy into the culture, you either have to change the culture or change the people.

The guys at the top typically define the culture… the guys at the bottom have to buy into the culture… if you’re at the bottom and you want to change the culture, you get repromanded… thats why turnover is so much higher at the bottom…. thats why you hear of so many employees that “just didn’t work out.”

If you want to change culture, the guys at the top have to change… and I mean they have to be replaced. Changing people is too hard to do.

      

From Feb 7, 2007 until February 13, 2007 – 8.5 Hours
So, as some of you have seen, I’ve registered www.RJMartino.com and moved my blog to a different server. One thing that I’ve done is registered the name for 10 years. Search engines recognize this as a more “permanent” web site. This helps with “natural” search engine ranking. Registering and Setting up the domain was the easy part.

After the domain name was setup and the server was configured, I spent 8.5 hours moving the files and the database over to the new server. I also upgraded to the latest version of wordpress and upgraded all of my plug-ins.

Currently I’m using the following plug-ins:

1. Akismet - SPAM control
2. Feedburner Feed Replacement – Help users find the RSS feed
3. Related Posts – posts related posts at the end of each post
4. Text Link Ads – to publish ads from text-link-ads.com… CLICK THIS LINK IF YOU WANT TO USE TEXT LINKS
5. WP-ShortStat – to view short statistics on my blog

After the upgrade my permalinks didn’t work correctly. I found out it was because the .htaccess wasn’t moved correctly. I removed my old SPAM control plug-in (it wouldn’t work with WordPress 2.1) and started using Akismet. From the articles I’ve read, it seems pretty sophisticated.

And lastly, I’ve removed my photo gallery (Gallery2 is what I was using). I’ve decided that I’ll start using flickr. I was a flickr user back when it wasn’t cool to be a flickr user.

This is another article in the “Monetize Your Blog” category and although we haven’t done a lot to make more money (we have only inserted an affiliate link for Text Link Ads) we are now up-to-date with our software and we can use the latest plug-ins with no problem.

We’ve also registered the domain name to increase visibility and awareness. And we’ve moved to a more stable server.

Any technical project requires a stable infrastructure… and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve stabalized our infrastructure. After 8.5 hours, we have a stable infrastructure.

      

I’ve been making changes to my blog for a number of reasons. But one of the reasons is because I’m going to try and monetize the blog. Currently it doesn’t make any money, not directly. I hope that some of my “technical” articles have resulted in new service contracts for iProv, but either way, I haven’t personally seen a check for this site.

I’m going to keep everything public and feel free to ask any questions, I’ve making RSS feeds more visible. I’ve always been a big advocate of RSS feeds but I’ve never really “advertised” the ability.

I’ve also added the ability to leave a donation via paypal… really… EVERYTHING HELPS… It takes time to write a blog and I’m hoping my blog isn’t going to be so much of a “journal” but more about information and a knowledge base. Just click on the page that says “Donate to RJsWeblog”

I’ve added Google Adsense to show advertising to my main links. I will get a small royalty each time the link is clicked… SO CLICK THEM.

I’ve added “Recommended Amazon Stuff” so that if you order from that link, I’ll make a small referral fee. Yeah, small. But I get to choose what is “recommended.”

And lastly, I’ve added text-ad-links.com to the right hand side, these ads will also be published in the RSS feed as soon as I do the WordPress upgrade. I recieved $100 in free advertising just for signing up as publisher as well

I’ve reorganized some of my link categories too. I like to think I’ve organized them in order of interest.

I’ve got a list of other changes I’m going to make but I’m only spending about 2 hours a week on making the changes. The other time is going toward writing and my “real job.”

I’ll try to keep track of how much time I take as well.

Hopefully this weekend, I’ll upgrade from Wordpress 1.5.2 to Wordpress 2.1. Wish me luck.

      

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