Fred and Sally Financial & Business Update

Well, the road to financial freedom is not an easy one. It’s paved with bumps and potholes!

Recently we had disturbances with the one flat that was rented. The renter started fire to the bush in the backyard and had been playing loud music and causing general ruckus. The neighbors wanted him out. Sally usually gets really stressed about these things but even now she’s getting used to it. That flat has been a problem magnet!

We contacted his tutor and it seems things have calmed down. Our other flat was empty all spring, summer and early fall. We rejected a possible 3 month renter; I mean why pay all the agency fees for such a short time. Finally, instead of a student (this flat is right next to the university) the agency found us another ‘social case’. These are usually young people with problems and/or slight mental handicaps.

When they proposed this new renter we initially thought of the problems with the other one. But our second in thought was, at least the other one always pays rent (paid by the tutor) and he is been there for a while, he doesn’t come and leave every school year causing at least 3 months empty plus one month for agency fees. So we just laughed and said sure, why not, at least we’ll get paid. We’ll become a social housing company! So let’s hope both flats stay rented for a while and we don’t burn any more cash on this bad investment we made.

As for as our Internet Business, I believe I mentioned we got hammered by the Google Panda update. We lost half of our overall traffic and half of our income. We laid off a bunch of helpers. Finally, several months later one of our sites is showing signs of growth again but the biggest money winner is not. Google has it bottled up and won’t budge an inch. The site that is showing traffic improvements is a work in progress, as I’m attempting to totally shift user content with a new design and imposing new rules.

We can’t really save much of anything now, since we’re down to bare essentials. I never save much anyway, since I always wanted to invest every last sent. I managed to pick up some more silver as the price has gown down quite a bit. Now the whole market seems a bit confused, they don’t know where to put their money. Even Gold has stopped it ascent.

Once again we have put to rest the idea of acquiring properties from repossessed homes. The banks won’t offer decent flat rate interests rates. We would have to find owner financing or some kind of other financing. Anyway, the market will continue to rot and go down here so we’ll see how it unfolds.

We have started a second company and a new project. The partners are Fred, Sally and Cousin Jerry (that’s not his real name of course!) This strategy allowed us to pay cousin Jerry without all the social security and extra expense of having an employee and now he can be officially an entrepreneur too.

We spent a lot of time thinking about this project, trying to figure out a ‘blue ocean strategy’ where we could have a competitive advantage. A key think we wanted also was to build a well known brand, based on a Web site (and something else but I don’t want to give details yet) that people come straight to, something that has no dependency on Google. Basically we’re taking something people already do to a whole new level and doing it from an angle no one else has, it’s something no one has ever done before in this area. So we really believe in this project if we execute well our strategy.