Investing and the web.
Monday, October 20th, 2008I got in an argument with my wife this morning. It’s all about “college” for the kids. We have 4 kids so the odds of us paying 100 percent of all their colleges is pretty slim. They are going to have to get scholarships and work.
Even if I’ve got a million sitting under my mattress they are going to have to earn their own way, help (or buy) their first cars, etc.. I did it when I was a kid – they can do it too. It builds character – or at least not kids who think they “get” everything handed to them.
Anyway – shortly after the kids were born my mother and I opened up savings accounts for them. Pretty much every “birthday” my mom puts some money in… and I put a couple hundred into one of their accounts every month.
About a year ago I stopped doing that – no more money went into the accounts. Instead every 3 or 4 months I’d spend about 800 dollars or so buying an established website. Set up accounts and direct deposit on them for the affiliate commission. I bought the first two – but their accounts keep buying the new ones.
So what’s the fight about? She noticed the withdrawal slip sitting on my desk.
Now we all know a ‘man’ can’t ever win a fight with a woman…. it’s just a given. They take that RIB and beat you with it 
Still I think this is one that I can’t lose. So it’s time to face the music and make sure my “accounting” is right on.
I’ll just deal with the two older kids for a minute – they each had about 2,600 in their accounts.
I’ve pulled a total of 4,000 dollars out of their accounts – after spending 1600 to buy the first websites (out of my money).
So let’s just keep it to the lowest performing college account.
It had: $2600.
I added: $800
I spent (over time as more came in): $3200
It currently has over $5,000 dollars in the account and 5 websites that I can sell for about 5 or 10k.
Remember – I’ve just been doing this for a year and I’ve doubled their college savings accounts – a 100 percent return. Plus I can SELL the websites and turn it into a more than 200 percent return.
Now I’m not advocating that you should spend your kids college money – I didn’t. I started with MY money – and just used the money that came in to buy new sites, links, etc.. No matter what I did I left the original 2,600 in there.
Worst case scenario Is that I would have lost the 2 percent interest the bank account would have brought in.
I’ve got a lot of options and there are some GREAT buys in the stock market right now. Still I don’t know ANYTHING that pretty much has a 100 percent return on your investment in a year – and if you do your homework and buy GOOD established sites and then put a little more effort into them you really can clean up. There are times I’ve bought a site and it’s flopped (because I didn’t research – and got burned) and other times where I’ve returned my investement 4 times over in the first year.
Once you have a good network of sites going – with foundations, white hat sites, and a nice link network going you can just plug in links to anything – why wouldn’t you do this? Set up your network – then start turning those profits into long term value beyond your network. Ohh wait – the new sites you buy ARE part of your network.
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