Category: Money Making

When your market runs cold and you can’t catch a break, keep your chin up.

When your market runs hot and you’re winning, don’t let it go to your head.

I’ve just come out of a very hard month.

August felt like it would go on forever.

Not as many deals as usual. In fact, it was very quiet.

I couldn’t find much to buy which meant that I also couldn’t sell much either.

Compounding this was my city’s government mandated lockdown.

It’s illegal to travel further than 5km from your home.

No one wants to sell, cause they’re all stuck at home too.

So no one will sell, and even if they did no one would come to buy.

But I kept faithfully digging through my markets.

Diligently offering on the goods I could find.

Even when it felt hopeless, I still checked twice an hour.

This is what I meant about hot streaks and cold streaks.

When you’re playing a statistics game, you don’t get even breaks.

Say your model gives you 1 win per 10 offers. An outrageously successful model.

That doesn’t mean you’re going to make 9 offers and then the 10th is always the winner.

It never goes like that.

You might get 3 wins and 27 rejections.

Followed by 2 wins and 18 rejections.

Or in my case, 20 days of rejections followed by 4 days of accepted offers.

The randomness of the markets will break you if you let it.

None of this is ordered. There are no patterns except those that you imagine.

But you must never give up – this might be the final few yards before your victory.

Your lucky break might be moments away.

But if you give up, I assure you that your luck will never change.

The only way to win is to keep going.

Stay the course.

These last four days, I’ve bought about $1900 of goods to sell.

Based on experience, these will get me $600 of profit.

If I’d quit before I reached the break, I’d never get that profit.

So can you see why persistence matters so much?

If you made $100k but you spent $101k, you went backwards. No matter the income you must manage your expenses. If you don’t, then you will find yourself holding less than when you started out.

Do you feel that you’re not making any progress in your bank account? You need to look at your income and your expenditure. To put it simply – your offense, and your defense.

Financial defensive measures are things like savings and spending cuts. Set yourself a savings target. If you don’t have one, 10% is a good starting place. Not too painful, and not too ambitious.

10% should be manageable for anyone who has a steady income. In order to reach your savings target, you might find benefit in making your own set of budget cuts. We all know there are things in our lives that cost money while returning minimal, or even negative benefits. A lot of people today pay for vice and entertainment.

By forgoing such entertainment, it would be easy for them to save 10% of their income. How do I know this? Because for a long time, I earned a very low wage. During that time, my wife and I bought two houses.

So I know, prioritizing income is of huge importance.

Here are some ideas for lifestyle items you can cut from your budget to achieve some savings.

>Alcohol
>Gambling
>Subscription services (Netflix, Xbox Live, ect)
>Pay credit card debt before interest EVERY TIME
>Memberships you don’t use (quit gym & workout at home)

Once you’re on top of your defensive strategies, you will find that further savings are of no great benefit. Cutting $3 from your grocery bill, for example. Big deal. What are you gonna do then? You’re gonna need to get on the offensive. You need to raise your actual income.

When I wanted money to invest in physical precious metals, I went to mow people’s lawns after my day job. I worked very hard. Across a summer, I was able to buy an 1 ounce of gold and 200 ounces of silver. This is the power of increasing your income.

When I wanted money for other investments, I began flipping. I still have my day job, and I flip goods in my spare time. By targeting profitable goods, and knowing my market back-to-front, I make a decent side income.

In my spare time I wrote a book about my exploits in the world of flipping. I used free tools – Google docs and Gumroad – to create and sell my book. I used free time – my commute to and from the city for my day job.

These are just examples from my life.

Others I know have their own stories, and their own ways of increasing their income. There’s no reason for you to get stuck on your journey. Keep your eyes and mind open. Save what money you can, but focus on raising your income. Choose a field in which you can excel on your own merit – don’t wait for you boss’s permission. Get started today and Get Paid More.

Are you walking past treasure every day without knowing it?

In early 2013, a Californian couple discovered a hidden stash of gold coins right on their own property.

The discovery was made on a walking trail they’d walked regularly.

After finding a can of gold coins, they returned to see what else was at the site.

When they’d fully explored, they found a total of 1427 gold coins.

After the initial shock had worn off, they got their coins valued at around $10,000,000 for the whole trove.

Some of the coins are rare enough to receive a $1m valuation each.

The coins had been sitting in the same spot for over 150 years before being discovered by the property owners.

And because gold does not rust or spoil, they were as good as new when they were found.

I tell this story to raise a point, and ask you a question.

Which opportunities are you walking past today?

There could be metaphorical gold buried right beside your figurative walking trail.

You might have walked past it regularly without even noticing its value.

For me, I found a great deal of treasure hidden in other people’s classifieds ads.

People who don’t know the value of their goods, or are in a hurry to sell.

I buy their stuff, and sell it back at market price.

This year I’ve spent about $45000 on goods to resell.

I’ve made $16000 in profit, which has allowed me to make some investments.

You can do this too – I’ve recorded my full system in my book Garbitrage. No talent required. Just follow the procedure and earn money. Garbitrage: The Flipper’s Textbook

Start learning how to make money today. Don’t keep walking past your buried treasure. See the world clearly and seize the opportunities that are all around you.

We live in an age of unrivaled opportunity.

Never before has so much been available, for so little.

It reminds me of a traditional Chinese folktale – The Magic Paint Brush. It goes a little something like this –

A poor young shepherd named Ma Liang loved to paint.

One night, Liang dreams of an old man who gives him a magic paint brush.

“Anything you draw with this paint brush will come to life,” the old man tells him.

And when Liang wakes up in the morning, there is the paint brush right next to him.

Liang explores the great potential of his new, magic paint brush.

He brings great prosperity to his village by painting a river to bring them fresh water,

and a herd of buffalo to till the soil.

The rest of the story doesn’t matter that much to the point I’m trying to make here.

If you’re reading this, you have been gifted with the potential of the magic paint brush.

You can literally write your fortune starting today.

The internet gives you access to the whole world.

You could learn programming from free tutorials on youtube and elsewhere. That’s free. Then apply your lessons by building an app to sell. That’s also free. Apps are made of lines of code – there are no material or logistics costs. Programming is a magic paint brush.

You can build a twitter audience for free and sell them other things you built for free. I do this with a book that I wrote. Twitter has cost me $0 so far. I wrote my book on the train, on google docs, on my way to work. This is another example of a magic paint brush.

Don’t just sit there wasting time reading twitter. Create a product using the free systems and platforms that are available to you today.

Sell your product leveraging the power of the interconnected population.

Write for free. Sell for money. Get Paid More.

Did I ever tell you about the time I got an iPad Air 2 for $18? That’s right – eighteen dollars and zero cents. It doesn’t happen often, but when you trade for a while it will happen.

How does it happen? It takes an unbreakable set of rules that I use to mitigate risk. Every trade carries with it the risk of losing money. Rule number 1 is never lose money. When you trade without ever breaking your own rules, you stand a chance at making money out there.

Anyway back to the iPad. I was on holiday in Taiwan. I lose my mind on holiday, and always end up picking some wild project to complete. This time though, all I wanted was to get deals. I had just come off my best trading month ever – the lead up to Christmas. It was $1000 profit per week. Real nice stuff.

And then, all of the sudden, boom. Nothing. International holidays meant that I can’t make deals, meet buyers, or do anything.

…or did it…?

Internet is everywhere these days, so I logged back into my favourite online classifieds looking for deals. And you know what? The deals were still there, even though I was on holidays 9000km from home.

I messaged my brother and asked if I could use his house as a mailing address while I was out. And then I was back in business. Long story short, among other things I picked up an iPad Air 2 for $180 inc. postage while I was on holiday.

The seller listed no defects. At that price, I expected to be able to resell it for closer to $300, aiming for about $100 profit in the end.

I got home a few weeks later and picked it up from my brother’s house. All good, except. EXCEPT!! The iPad had been shipped in a single layer bubble wrap bag. I’m like come on. When in the hell would a single layer of bubble wrap ever protect an iPad from the cruelty of postal physics. When??

Never, that’s when. Of course, when I turned it on and started browsing on it, the iPad had a weird display issue. The shadows of any image were filled with negative rainbows. I lodged a PayPal claim for it, and PayPal refunded me after a couple of weeks with the instruction to return the iPad to the seller.

(note that you must always pay your seller by PayPal, for this very reason)

When I returned the iPad, as an extremely passive aggressive FU to my seller, I bundled it up very nicely with bubble wrap, in a proper box, and sent it using signature on delivery. The total cost to return it via post was…you guessed it: $18.

I posted the iPad back to its owner, and that was that. A full refund, minus the return postage. My fingers were slightly burned. I’m not accustomed to losing. In fact, my model keeps me from losses so well that I have only recorded losses in less than .05% of my trades. That’s fewer than 1/200 trades closed unprofitably.

Anyway, I THOUGHT that was that. But you know what happened? Three weeks later, I’m sitting at my desk and the mailman drops me an unexpected parcel.

I keep a spreadsheet for tracking my business. Buys, sales, dates, margins, the lot. I wasn’t expecting any parcels though, so to find the iPad inside was quite a surprise. It turns out the seller had not communicated at all with PayPal.

PayPal had told me to return the item to a dead address, and because I’d sent it with signature on delivery, the parcel had sat unsigned-for at the local post office. The post office got sick of looking at it, and returned it to the sender – me.

Funny thing is, after the iPad came back to me, the display issue vanished. I played for a while, imagining the iPad would join the ranks of other great productivity tools I have. My computer, my phone, and there in between would be my iPad. It didn’t work out that way though, and after my iPad had sat for a month I’d had enough.

I listed it for sale and dumped it for $280. That’s $262 of profit for anyone who’s counting.

To learn my full system from buying to reselling, including my best negotiation and risk management strategies, pick up Garbitrage: The Flipper’s Textbook.

I’ll take you from zero to deal making in 90 something pages. By the time we’re done, you’ll be ready to hunt in the second hand markets like a wolf. I’ll show you how to start earning a steady non-wage income. You’ll love it.

At the start of last year, I decided that I wanted money for investments.

I am a man of very modest means though.

I have a wife, a couple of mortgages, and a very unimpressive 9-5.

Where would I get money for investments?

Firstly, I looked around my house for items of value that I wasn’t using.

My camera, my midi-keyboard, my kindle.

I listed them all for sale, and turned them into money.

When all of my goods were gone though, I had nothing else to sell.

Not only that, but I actually suffered deep losses on all of that stuff.

I’d bought it at retail price and sold it into the second hand market like a total chump.

I needed more stuff to sell. But what?

If you know me in real life, you will know that I am a nerd.

A nerd disguised as a 90kg heavyweight punching machine. But anyway.

My nerdy ways kept me in the second hand market for Nintendo games.

I was always watching to see if I could get some Mario action on the cheap.

What I noticed though, was that Mario never got any cheaper.

Even when he was from a superseded generation, Mario held his value.

So did all of his buddies – Zelda, Pokemon, Donkey Kong, whoever.

None of them ever really got cheaper.

So I wrote my own valuation for these games, and applied it to bundles that included consoles.

In my model I bought consoles at a higher price, and games at a lower price.

The consoles earn only 10% profit, but are still easy enough to sell back.

The games earn 100% profit, and thanks to their strong brand, are also quick to sell.

The thing I noticed here is what Warren Buffet describes as a “moat”.

The strongest businesses have a moat around them, protecting them. That moat is their brand.

The cultural capital of the business. The goodwill and identity stored within the brand.

These are the things that the consumer uses to value a brand.

And Nintendo’s got it in absolute spades.

Other brands you might know that perform similarly: Apple, Rolex, Disney.

You don’t think of the brand. You think of how you feel about the brand.

I took these observations and applied them to my favourite niche – video games.

Then I picked my niche-within-a-niche: Nintendo.

Lastly, I wrote a profitable pricing model that allows me to win every time I play.

Every time my offer is accepted on a bunch of games or whatever, my profit is already priced in.

I am guaranteed profit.

So how did I turn $40 into $25000?

Time, hard work, and dedication. Oh, and using credit cards for liquidity without ever lapsing into interest.

Before the virus changed everything, I worked every day in a city office.

In my city, 120000 people wash in and out every day for work and entertainment.

This gave me access to a huge number of people right where I was every single day.

They would message me, ask to buy, and then I’d bring their goods in to trade at lunch break.

You should have seen me those mornings – running to the train station with my backpack on.

In each hand, a grocery bag filled with consoles and games.

Maybe my fellow commuters had a name for me. Giant Nerd or something.

I couldn’t care less – most days I made $100 in profit just from carrying some extra things into the city.

I did this all year, turning $25 purchases into $50 sales.

This is why I urge people here on twitter – don’t disrespect a $20 profit.

You’re a sucker if you look past the potential of a small profit that you can repeat.

I realise that $25000 is not a fortune, but I made a starting point out of nothing more than my own wits.

You can do the same, with some dedication.

For a full and clear roadmap of how to do what I do, get my textbook

In it, I share my full procedure for trading second hand goods.

My procedure mitigates risk entirely – follow my instructions and you will only make money.

You don’t need talent, you just need a system to follow. Read Garbitrage and learn my system today.