Imagine if you were presented with an opportunity to potentially expand into bigger things through a partnership of some sort where it would increase your presence and distribution power. However, the cost of this is that you would be receiving less money due to the deal as your new partners will be getting a huge chunk of what you make. Would that be worth it in your mind?

That was a scenario I was reading about and the views that were brought up were interesting. For example, for the people that purely looked at it from a financial point of view they mentioned that it was a dumb idea as the bottom line is you are making less where you would have o be a fool to take the offer. On the other hand, some people were saying that it would be a great opportunity to get out of a tank full of small fishes and into a big one where if anything the exposure can result in one being able to use that experience to create other opportunities that they normally wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

I would think ultimately it would come down to whether or not you are losing money or that it would be pitting you in a situation they you will be starving, so to speak. It kind of reminds me of a story I saw before of some company that was so happy to get a distribution deal with a large company like Walmart. However, to do this apparently Walmart demanded that the wholesale price must be low which was to the point that the company was making so little that they eventually went bankrupt. So in that sense it wasn’t a wise decision despite getting more expose and distribution for their product.

I guess a trickier scenario would be let’s say you currently make $50,000 a year selling flowers. There is then an opportunity where you could have your products in more places. However, after it is all said and done you are still making $50,000 except now your brand/company is definitely getting more exposure. Would you be inclined to say that is a good deal? That is a really hard question depending on what kind of mindset you are coming from.

I would be inclined to say if you are currently very small that an opportunity like that scenario to make your brand/business bigger can be a very good thing. I can only imagine that it will open bigger doors for you in other ways. Again though, I would say whether or not financially it is putting you in the red is a big factor.

I was watching this documentary today that basically showed the life of some people who pretty much work all the time as they are always on the road. While they make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, it got me curious as you would often hear them say things such as at times they have lost the passion for what they do but they need to continue working in order to support their family. You would think with that high of a salary you could pretty much retire whenever you want compared to most people.

It then started to show the things that the person was trying to pay for such as basic stuff for the family. The majority of the funds needed it seemed was for this two million dollar house as it was essentially their dream home as they called it. Ironically, even though they make so much more than the average person that dream home pretty much put them in a similar scenario to the majority of others who make way less.

In some ways it’s almost like the house is controlling them in this situation though huh? That reminds me of these stories I saw before of people who have made and live in these small houses that cost only about five figures to build and with that one change they said virtually any type of money problems went away. I suppose when it comes to things like this though buying what you can afford seems more of a hassle than a benefit to many as a lot of people treat a home as a lifelong investment and so they are more relaxed in spending way more than they currently can afford.

I think personally a dream home would be like a luxury car though where if you have the money then why not. In the meantime it should be more about the basics until you can put yourself in a position financially to get these things fairly carefree.

Interesting comment I heard today as a fairly wealthy person was pretty much discrediting so many businesses based on the sole notion that it doesn’t generate the type of revenue stream that he is used to. An over exaggeration would be a fortune 500 company saying that one guy’s part-time lemonade stand is worthless because he only brings in like $5000 a year compared to the other person’s full-time multi-million dollar empire.

I was thinking how this is an example of possibly being out of touch with the rest of world if you have been living the high life too much. As well, I wouldn’t be surprised if stigmas like this discourages so many people from even trying because they feel if you can’t bring in say six figures in a business right away then it is not worth trying.

I just known in this generation at least there are so many stories out there of people just trying something for fun or that it took very little hours where eventually they were able to make a living out of it. The point that they only made say $10/month at first didn’t matter so much as opposed to seeing if what they did was gaining momentum to grow bigger. You can’t always compare yourself to someone who is already established. People may not want to admit it, but I’m pretty sure most people started with peanuts or made almost nothing in the beginning too.

I think the key is as long as you aren’t continually financially and emotionally draining yourself expecting big returns to only get very little then you should celebrate any kind of success you bring in. They often say most small businesses fold for example and so if you have an idea that you were able to keep up with very minimal effort for example that is still a pretty good achievement I say.

You’d think that once you buy the latest electronic items that the previous models would be obsolete as nobody would want to use or need them anymore. Recently I saw an advertisement for a person who was looking for a camcorder that was able to take mini-dv tapes as they needed to transfer all of these old footages to a digital format and did not have one available. They were willing to pay about $20 just to use the camcorder quickly too. Strange as it is, I still have my old camcorder that accepts mini-dv tapes even though you’d think I would have sold it a long time ago.

Out of curiosity I just did some random searches to see how many people there were out there that were in a similar situation and mindset like the above. Sure enough, there seems to be a lot and in most cases these people’s old items have ceased to work and they don’t want to pay high professional fees to digitize the video. That made me think if someone could literally just spend a few minutes per week to find people to rent out their old equipment to where they can make a very decent side income with.

Today I heard a couple saying that they had to cut off so many household services such as the Internet and phone because the husband in the family has suddenly been laid off. Therefore, they needed to adjust non necessity spending immediately. I was kind of surprised at how fast they decided to do it as usually in that situation you would expect people to go into the savings and try to live off that until you can find another income source.

Apparently they couldn’t do this because they were already in massive debt and so this time they didn’t really have the flexibility to risk keeping a lot of non essential services with no income coming in. That made me wonder how different their situation would have been if they had this kind of urgency from the start in terms of adjusting their finances and spending as oppose to spending the same for awhile with the mindset that you will just pay it off as soon as you find new work.

That is usually the only advantage I see for people that are forced to go with a cash only budget as it requires you to adjust your spending right away as there is no credit to allow you to overspend in the first place. For myself though, just constantly keeping updated and looking at the raw numbers of how much money is going in and out of your account is enough motivation to make you adjust your budgets right away.