I had a conversation with a person today on whether or not we should expand certain resources for this activity as it seems like it has been growing to the point where it would be justifiable. However, of course the issue of money plays a role and when presented with how much the non profit actually brought in a year he immediately reacted humorously in a way to imply that with those numbers for sure they can’t expand at the moment.

There were then some talks about how it sounds so little though in terms of how much we would need to expand the resources and so instead we should take a expand a now and worry about the money later approach. In a situation where funds are unstable this would remind me of say constantly piling up one’s credit card bills with like $5 meals as at the time it seems so little anyways. But eventually it adds up and not having a stable income flow usually results in more stress than its worth.

I personally still believe in situations like this you should budget with what you actually have. For example, if you want that new service that will be say $120/year, even if you are only paying $10/month you should make sure that you actually do have $120 in the bank so all you are doing is re-distributing the funds. In this case, do the fund-raising first and see if you can get enough as opposed to hoping you can get it later.

I heard a deal that went through today where someone was trying to sell their business and had two people who were interested in buying it. The funny thing was the person that offered less money ended up getting the sale. The reason was that the person who offered more had to go through a loan process in order to get the money to buy the business whereas the other guy had all the cash now and was ready to buy it. Sure enough, the seller was willing to take like $20,000 less solely for the fact that the guy had the cash for it right away.

I often see this a lot in markets usually such as people flashing their wallets and saying they can buy the item now with all cash as the main bargaining tool. Not surprisingly that works a lot of times too as the seller has less hassle such as having to deal with say credit cards. Sometimes you need to plant that point into people too where the fact that you have all the money now should give them an incentive to just sell it to you even if you are offering less as ultimately that can mean savings for the seller too.

Happy Chinese new years to everyone that celebrates it. It was kind of neat during a family dinner we had the other day as my uncle was telling me about this movie project that he had been funding and it lasted for over a year. The only thing he would tell me before is that when it comes out I would know about it. So today he did eventually tell me and apparently it’s that movie called I am Bruce Lee that is coming out. This was the trailer he told me to see:

That was so cool I thought as it was a subject matter that I have always been interested in. It’s kind of neat hearing it from a venture capitalist’s point of view in terms of how they are involved. Of course he couldn’t dive into specific details, but it’s just kind of funny when you hear it from an investor’s point of view as it is more of a “We just fund the projects” type of routine as opposed to the logistics of creating the business or project itself.

Makes me wonder if it is just as intense or nerve wrecking being the investor. Guess this will be one movie for the new years that I am going to try to see.

I was reading a piece of news recently that in the US they are planning to introduce coins to replace things like the dollar bill as they last longer which means less bills having to be printed and in the long term being able to save a lot of money. Of course this is one of those examples of something where you would pay more in the beginning and slowly the savings will be noticeable as time goes by.

I was just thinking that in this example it would probably take a while to realize the savings. As well, I was thinking how if I had that massive amount of debt if I would go with that route such as borrowing money to create something where I wouldn’t see savings until say ten years from now. I would imagine my debt would continue to climb so high with the interest that I will never see any saving in the overall picture.

Of course I guess with the above example a country doesn’t pay interest to like tax payers so it is not as relevant. Even personally I would probably opt to cut things that I am over spending on first as opposed to trying to spend more money to try and invent something new if you won’t see returns for that long assuming you are in a crisis situation. At most though, I would make sure that funding that new investment would be a result of say rearranging your funds to focus more on it so that you aren’t technically spending more.

A person was telling me today that they needed to save about $3000 this year if they intend to buy this new item that is coming out next year. As you can tell, that is a fairly large chunk of money for many. Therefore, in his mind this is not achievable as he doesn’t really have any money left at the end of the day as is.

That didn’t sounds like much though honestly. I then suggested that he break that down into days. With 365 days in a year, that means to save $3000 a year he would have to find a way to save a little over $8/day. When that number is thrown at him it even comes across to him in a way such as “Really, you can’t save $8/say?” That made him rethink how easy it can be achieved and what changes he could make to do so.

For example, he is a coffee drinker and so stopping the habit of buying a cup of coffee from a chain store versus making his own could easily save that much. Breaking numbers by day like this just makes it so much easier to expose your spending habits and how realistic it can be to save the money that you need.