There was a lot of news today revolving around a particular book that was presented as non-fiction but as it turns out a lot of information presented in it was made up. The book in question is called “A Million Little Pieces” which is written by a man named James Frey. The book is supposed to be a memoir about James Frey’s struggle in life as he is an alcoholic and drug addict. Although I have never read it personally, apparently there are gut-wrenching details in the book such as a loved one committing suicide by hanging herself and having to go through dental surgery without the use of anesthetics.

The main reason for all of the drama is how Oprah Winfrey, a famous talk show host who is considered as one of the most influential people in world, just happened to read the book and was extremely touched by it. Because of this, she recommended the book to everyone which catapulted its popularity and according to news reports it has sold about 3.5 million copies to date. Just recently, a website called “TheSmokingGun.com” did an investigation on the legitimacy of the book and found it to not be entirely true. You can find the report here:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0104061jamesfrey1.html

After the story was exposed, James Frey went on public television to defend his book and Oprah Winfrey continued to stand by James Frey and the book. Unfortunately, just recently James Frey has admitted that he did make up a lot of the details in the book. This lead to Oprah dedicating a day on her talk show to hopefully get the truth out of James Frey in regards to the details in his book as she felt disappointed and embarrassed about the whole situation. It was evident that she was taking it very personal as often times James Frey simply had a blank stare on his face as she kept poking him for answers.

Some interesting debates have risen because of this with the one being the most intriguing to me is how it was expressed that if this book was labeled as a work of fiction from the start, not many people would buy it. I don’t know many people that would disagree with that. It was then elaborated that the bottom line is that this is a business and that the goal is to get people to buy your book in this tough business. Some people tried to justify the half truths in the book by saying it is still a good piece of work and that fiction is usually based on reality anyways and so people are being too harsh on the author. In my opinion, that’s a pretty deceptive act as he manipulated people’s sympathy and emotion by portraying it as something real to get support for his book.

This reminds of all the times I have seen where people lie and mislead others into believing their hardships and misfortunes that turn out to not be the truth in order to get ahead in life. I often find that people who create fabricated stories about their situations tend to do it in a way that paints a picture that they are an extremely helpless victim that absolutely cannot do anything to fix it. Unfortunately, this technique often works on most people as I’m sure everyone has been in some type of situation where it seems like you are helpless and so hearing about a similar scenario happening to someone else will naturally cause you to emotionally defend them.

I think the key point in these types of situations to help prevent yourself from being duped by others is to use your analytical skills instead of allowing your emotions to take over. We were all kids once and I’m sure we all did something similar along these lines such as crying like it was the end of the world to try and get your parents to buy you that toy. If someone tries to deceptively use pity or sorrow to sell you on something, try your best to put the pieces together with facts and if it turns out that the story was convincing but not completely true, at least you know some good candidates to star in a TV soap opera or some good recommendations for fiction writers.

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While reviewing my credit card statement recently, I thought it was odd as I noticed that one of the items was an interest fee from an apparent cash advance. Seeing this “interest fee” on my statement was a real shocker as I am one of the last people that would use this kind of service considering how disciplined I am in handling finances. Upon further investigation, it appeared that a company had billed my credit card as a cash advance as oppose to a normal sale. I am still waiting for a response from the company to hopefully clear it up, but I’ll save that for another blog entry if things get interesting as I’ve never seen that kind of a practice used by a merchant before.

The interesting thing is that this error definitely gave me a glimpse on how people who actually use cash advances could drive themselves into debt with the fees that come attached to it. If you have to pay 1 to 4 percent to receive a cash advance, it might seem small for low figures, but like everything else it could easily add up as you continue to withdraw more money through it. From doing some further research on the matter, another factor is that interest charges are calculated immediately once you withdraw the funds with no form of a grace period. I can only imagine how many people each day use cash advances without reading about all the fees and strings that are attached with it.

In my opinion, using something like this for convenience to pay off a certain debt can counteract your efforts in reducing it as the accumulation of fees can drive you further into debt in the long run. As an over exaggerated example, if you had a $1000 debt, would you offer to pay $1200 instead? That is kind of what you would be doing if you factor in the fees for taking a cash advance option. Try to think on what would be best in the long run when using these types of services and you’ll probably help yourself save a lot of money.

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In the midst of the extremely rainy whether, there are a lot of people getting sick around here. The interesting thing that I have noticed personally is that in a lot of cases people who are extremely successful seem to go through everyday without a sign of slowdown whereas people who constantly complain about their current direction in life are always getting some kind of symptom that prevents them from working or achieving their goals. Is it just a coincidence? Some people tell me that I just have a very good immune system and others joke that I’m a robot. I’m not a doctor or a scientist, but I wonder if there is any truth to the saying that it is all in your mind. Obviously if you got hit with some kind of infectious disease you’d probably be down for the count, but maybe one’s attitude in life also play a role in staying healthy.

Let’s see, is there anything that I do differently than others in terms of lifestyle? I think one thing that always shocks me is how many pills people take when they feel the slightest headache or cold. While I’m sure in certain cases you would need the help of some strong medicine to combat life threatening symptoms or vaccination to protect yourself from future threats, I personally think that your body will get stronger in being able to fend off common symptoms as it gets used to combating against viruses. I often see those antibiotic campaigns running on the TV and their slogan is something like “Not all bugs need drugs”. I guess I’m one to agree with that. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should start intentionally trying to get sick as a way to train your body.

An interesting thing that I also started a few years back was juicing. I thought to myself that if I had to constantly be working 10+ hours a day, then obviously that meant I should also try to include something new to help me get that extra ounce of energy each day. Otherwise in my view, it would be like trying to drive an extra 10 miles with a car that has the same amount of fuel as before. Juicing sounded like a good idea, so I gave it a shot. I can honestly say that it has helped me greatly. For example, if I had a very busy day, in the morning I would be very tired and almost reluctant to get up. However, what I immediately noticed is that if the night before I did some juicing with items like carrots and apples, I would still feel great in the morning. Keep in mind that even before this I still felt healthy, so I hope no one thinks that this must be the secret answer to staying healthy and becoming successful.

In general though, most of these things sound pretty average to me as I’m sure there are people who do the things that I do and others who do other things to accomplish the same goal. I wonder if there are any surveys or statistics out there that specifically try to analyze people who are successful and at the same time have a good health record. As I mentioned though, I’m not a doctor or scientist who has a large database to show the relation between a confident/successful person and one’s physical health. From what I have seen though, many people who are confident in themselves and their direction in life also seem to be constantly healthy and active. So before you worry too much on how to reach your next big milestone, be sure to take care of yourself first.

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When I read this caption in an online article today, “A Homeless Millionaire”, I was immediately interested in reading more about it as there is so much to learn from other people’s experiences to help you make the best decisions for yourself. For those who are interested in reading the entire article, it can be found here:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/story/382577p-324827c.html

The article was about a man named Alexis du Pont de Bie Sr. who happens to be a decedent of the wealthy DuPont family. The article goes on to explain how he initially had a trust fund worth about 7 million dollars and due to various mismanagement of his money it is now worth only 2.7 million dollars. Since his money is in this trust fund, its current value limits his allowance to $3000 a month. Considering the wealth of the family, this would probably be considered almost poverty-like by their standards. This $3000 a month also turns out to not be enough and Alexis is literally surviving by living with friends as he doesn’t even have his own house and is apparently struggling to get by with that kind of a monthly allowance.

I know the first reaction from most people would probably be that this guy is crazy and that $3000 a month is more than what a lot of working class people make in general. While I suppose that I am a bit more understanding as I am assuming that he has never really been required to seriously earn his own money and to manage his own finance, the incredible thing that I see in all of this is how he has all of this money and yet the company/firm that is responsible for managing it is holding back funds like a parent refusing to give their children an allowance.

I’ve personally never been too big of a fan in these types of investments where you lock in your money in some type of long term retirement plan which then places all of these restrictions on what you can and can’t do with your own money. For example, if I was to use the $3000 a month example from above, you are basically telling me that I will have to keep investing X amount for 20+ years to receive a $3000 month allowance for when I retire. Maybe my way of thinking is just plain different than most, but that just feels very restrictive as my idea of a retirement is that I should be able to use the money that I worked hard to earn in whatever way that I please and that all those years of hard work and experience in life should have taught me how to manage my own finances. Even when I think about it from an investment point of view, rather than getting only $3000 month with a plan like this, if by that time I just placed all of the money that I have instead into a high interest savings account that is fully accessible, I could be spending and still earning money even when I retire.

Once again, I probably think a little differently, but $3000 a month for all those years of working doesn’t sound like a lot of money and so I would be more concerned about how to increase my financial portfolio to make sure that I would be able to live the lifestyle that I wish to live rather than locking myself down into some kind of plan that will delegate what type of lifestyle I will have to live. While locking down your money into a plan with some type of firm is probably great for those who just can’t seem to save money on their own, teaching yourself how to save and manage your own personal finances will help you in the long run. In my opinion, the person who knows best on what to do with your own money should be yourself.

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An interesting thing came up today when a small company approached me in an interest to transfer their web site responsibilities to me as they were unhappy with the service that they are currently receiving from a certain company. At first I tried to visit the site, but it appeared to be down as I was unable to access it. After briefly looking at their current situation and status of their web site, it appeared that they overlooked the fact that they had to renew their domain and that their company domain address had actually expired. To make things worse, another person had registered it and considering the name is rather specific to the company, there isn’t really any valid reason for another person to have it. Although I hope everything will work out, I hope the person doesn’t turn out to be a cybersquatter who is going to try and demand a lot of money to get the domain back.

A cybersquatter is basically a person who registers domain names using well known company and product brand names and then attempts to profit from it by selling it back to companies who legitimately owns rights to the product brands and name. Although I haven’t really seen too many incidents of cybersquatting nowadays, it was very rampant before, since there were so many domain names that were available for registration, with the most common scenario being adult site operators registering popular names of companies and cartoon characters so that when a person decides to type in the name to see if a site exists, the unsuspecting Internet surfer would be redirected to a page filled with pornographic media and other adult only material. Fortunately, there are now laws that prosecute people for doing this.

While this wasn’t cybersquatting, one of the most famous examples of users typing in popular phrases and finding something irrelevant was with the domain extension “whitehouse.com” which was originally registered by a person named Dan Parisi. While most would assume that it would be government related such as “whitehouse.gov”, it actually led to an adult site which contained pornographic material. There were some extreme examples that I read such as a teacher in school that was attempting to show the class on how to use the Internet and upon entering whitehouse.com the entire class was greeted with all of the unsuspecting adult material. As of today if you go there though, there are nothing but generic ads. An interesting bit though was that the original owner of the site was making about one million dollars US a year due to the amount of site traffic that it generated.

Is it all worth it? Well, in the case of cybersquatting I would hope that all of the laws in place will prevent these types of things from happening. For people who redirect popular phrases to adult sites, I guess that comes down to ones moral beliefs. I personally think these types of methods are like spamming which affect too many people in a negative way to justify doing.

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