Despite the current mortgage crisis in the U.S. and the fact that homeowner equity is at its lowest point since 1945, there are wealthy people buying multi-million dollar houses. As in $49 million for a 29-room townhouse. Wow.

Personally, I don’t know anyone with that kind of money but I have known a few millionaires over the years. In my mind, owning a million dollars in property is attainable, and it’s a starting point for more wealth. (My father used that base to build up to several million in property in the 1980s, though he overextended himself and lost a lot of it.) That’s my answer to “If I had a million dollars.”

But I wouldn’t buy a single home for a million dollars. Some options:
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One of the great benefits of the Internet is that small businesses focusing on a small niche stand a chance at success. That’s because, theoretically, it’s easier for them to find customers for their niche product, compared to, say, if they had a physical storefront in some small town. Or even a big city.

If their product is aimed at a relatively obscure market, then if the entire Internet-connected world is their potential customer base, it’s much easier to find enough customers. Enough to keep the business going, whereas a bricks-and-mortar equivalent might not make it.

How Many Customers Is Enough?

How many customers do you need, then? I can’t answer that and I won’t even try. But I will answer a related question. How many satisfied customers do you need to be successful on the Internet selling your product? Answer: 1,000. Or so says Kevin Kelly [via Business Opportunities, Performancing, Chris Garrett], in discussing how an artist can capitalize on the Long Tail phenomenon online. (That is, don’t try to please everyone. Focus on those who would appreciate your work the most.) [Read more →]

Think about it for a second: we live in the successes of those that came before us. Those of us that work for other people, even on a contract or project basis, do so because they’ve already achieved some level of success. If we’re employed by a company, it’s due to the success of the founders, who in turn could build on someone else’s success before them. It’s a chain of success.

So what happens to people who fail in an endeavor - even those surrounded by other people’s successes? What’s the missing ingredient? I don’t know. I believe myself to have the characteristics of a startup entrepreneur. But even after three or four failed startups, I don’t know what was lacking. My current business is doing okay, though this online work feels less stable than the offline consulting I used to do. But in most other ways, this is more enjoyable work. And I don’t have to deal with the negative peripheral factors: traffic jams, road rage by other drivers, backstabbing colleagues, bosses with personal agendas or even no discernible modus operandi.

Maybe that’s it. Even with all the entrepreneurial characteristics, including passion for the work I used to do, if there are other factors that negate the good, and if you cannot effectively deal with them, then success is unlikely. So my new theory is that happiness breeds success. Or at least, it’s a huge plus. I’m testing that theory this year.

Attaining prosperity isn’t necessarily about making loads of money, though wealth is part of it. Working in a career job might get you there, but launching your own business and making it successful will get you there faster.

Shannon Cherry over at Startup Sparks asks about the characteristics of someone who creates a startup business. She lists five characteristics: being a risk taker, being smart, being a leader, having inner passion for the business, and being honest and trustworthy.

While I’d like to agree, unfortunately I’ve met some successful startup entrepreneurs who were not honest and trustworthy. Let’s hope that it’s true for most startup entrepreneurs, though.

Bootstrapper just posted a monster list of job boards, most of which are aimed at web workers. The list puts job boards into the following categories:

1. Online-specific boards.
2. Brick and mortar firms.
3. Job boards on blogs.
4. Staffing services and recruiting firms.
5. Government resources.
6. General job boards.
7. Just for freelancers.

Personally, I dislike online job boards. Nothing beats taking the weekend classifieds/ careers section of a newspaper and a red pen, then narrowing down the job search. Even after ten or so years, I have yet to come up with a way to use online job boards as efficiently as a big city newspaper. (Correspondingly, I found it harder and harder to find a job that suited me.) But that’s just me. I’m kind of old-school that way. But if you’re more modern than I am, you have lots of job boards to search.

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), a demographer and political economist (according to Wikipedia), came up with a law of population dynamics. In a nutshell, it says that only natural causes and vice will keep populations in check. I believe that there’s another factor: the cost of oil and gas, which could start killing us if the price keeps going up.

Our societies depend so intrinsically on these fuels. Most of us are at the mercy of the $106+ per barrel of oil that was reached this week. And that cost affects pretty much everything. Our cost of living goes up significantly as a result. That includes food, the fuel we need to survive. In just two years, my weekly groceries - which I keep pretty constant for experimental reasons - have gone from about $30 to $45. That’s a 50% increase. And on top of that, the cost of the gas I need to get to the grocery store has gone up.
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The U.S. economy is in a recession, according to Warren Buffet and others. Home foreclosures were at an all-time high in the last quarter of 2007, and in some places such as parts of Florida, condos have been discounted down to 50%. If you’ve got the money and the patience, you could make a killing in real estate, buying when everyone is selling. That’s the prosperity mind, but it’s easy if you already have the money. (However, I don’t see this recession lasting long, espcially if a Democrat wins the Presidency. So if you have the money, you might consider some real estate.)

Having a foot in both the Indian and American worlds recently has given me what I think is a rather distinct perspective on the progression of western economies. It is beyond debate that over the past few decades the western world has progressively become more capitalistic, and in so doing the overall wealth of citizens has increased. But in this experiment we call western democracy we have, over the last 5 years in particular, started to see the cracks in the economic and social philosophy that the western world has adopted. These cracks are no more clear that when examining our western economies against the backdrop of India, a rapidly progressing democracy currently in a sort of limbo between the eastern and western worlds. [Read more →]

Every once in a while here, we cover an opportunity for earning money that requires relatively little investment. This time, it’s something called domaining [Aviva Directory], which amounts to the buying and selling of web domains in a manner similar to stocks or real estate.

I’m not going to get into it much here, as I’ve got a more extensive discussion of domain monetizing techniques at Performancing, but I do quickly want to discuss some of the ways to finance domaining:

1. Cash.
2. Partnerships.
3. Credit cards.
4. Balance transfer arbitrage, which takes advantage of 0% APR credit card offers.

The latter is an advanced method and only recommended when you’ve picked up some experience in domaining, as well as have good credit. Speaking of which, don’t forget to check out Brett Bumeter’s extensive series on credit cards, debt, and negotiating better interest rates.

For our readers that are interested in getting the low down on debt and debt consolidation, we have reviewed a very thorough and site rich with information titled DebtConsolidationLowDown.com.

Web Fundamentals Pointing to Credibility

The site has a Google Page Rank of 4 out of 10 and has archives that date back to June of 2006. The categories are short and simple and to the point including

• credit cards,
• debt management,
• helpful tips,
• laws and regulations,
• student loans, and
• your rights.
• Note - I have listed these here as they are very full with a great deal of valuable information. [Read more →]