Wealth and Wisdom

This weekend started off pretty uneventful. Just a basic projects weekend to get several things off my to do list. And compared to the last few weeks it was a cakewalk. No hurricanes. No hunting gasoline to fill the generator. No clearing trees and branches. No fences to rebuild.

At least that was the plan. What started as several hours of work ended up taking two days.

How does a post on my weekend relate to the title? No this isn’t a bait and switch article. It is just that the weekend showed me that we need more entrepreneurs.

Task 1

We mounted a safe to our floor. No, we don’t have massive amounts of cash or jewels. We just wanted a safe place (no pun intended) to keep our passports, social security cards, blank checks, etc. It is a basic identity protection measure to put these items in a safe. And if the safe is not bolted to the floor then it can be picked up. Not much protection if a thief can walk out with it!

None of the steps were beyond my ability. I just don’t do this every day. By the time I figured things out and factored in the rework a one hour task took me most of the day. Since I calculate my time at $250/hour that was $2K in time. An entrepreneur could make a killing if he marketed top notch handyman skills.

Note: this is a hole it the market. Most handymen highlight their price. Few advertise their skill and quality, often because their work is second rate. While I enjoy doing these jobs it isn’t the best use of my time. The main reason I don’t hire out the projects is that most professionals do substandard work. Basically I do a better job.

Task 2

We switched from MS Money to Quicken. Simple right? Not even close. I’ve used MS Money for years because I comes with Tax Cut (and Tax Cut is comparable to TurboTax but for less). A month ago I got a surprise. MS Money stopped updating online. While the software still worked it would require me to manually enter everything. After a bit of research I found that Microsoft builds in obsolescence. Your license only includes two years of online service. After that you either need to pay $20 a year or buy the version.

Unacceptable!

The challenge is that Quicken has no easy way to import MS Money. The version I bought (starter) was bare bones as I don’t need the silly tools the deluxe version throws in. Why pay more to bog down my computer? Silly me. The simple version doesn’t track investments. It also doesn’t allow you to import you accounts from MS Money (or Quicken for that matter).

A quick upgrade (and $30) later and we were in business…or so I thought. Importing MS Money requires a separate program. While it was free it was cumbersome. Go to MS Money. Clean up you accounts and categories to make sure none were more than 15 characters. Also make sure there are no repeats (major pain in the @$!%). Do the same for your investment accounts. Create a transaction report (requiring extensive setup) and download to your desktop. Do the same with your investments. Click the import button. When the error message appears go back and spend half a day figuring out why it won’t play nicely.

Then the fun begins. You need to spend another day getting your accounts cleaned up. The nice (reconciled) MS Money accounts are now a mess.

So what does this have to do with the post title?

Both tasks represent great opportunities for the right entrepreneur. In fact, this is what entrepreneurship is all about. Look at your market and identify a need. Talk to your customers to refine the basic idea. Work with your customers to develop a product or service.

In fact this is what brought Wealth and Wisdom to life. We were watching Dave Ramsey one night and someone asked if there was a Dave Ramsey community. What a great idea! However we quickly found was that:

• There are a lot of people focusing on personal finance 101
• While we know a lot about the topic-heck, I used to counsel people on person finance-it wasn’t our passion.

We took the feedback and adjusted our product. We shifted to an area under served: what is the next step? Now that I am debt free and have my finances under control how do I grow it? This question is made harder because the traditional investment models don’t seem to work. Every crash drives home the point-in several weeks the market has given back the gains of the previous few years.

Our view is that the key is to start your own business. But owning your own business can mean endless work for the same (or less) pay. How do you balance your life, business, and wealth? Hence the slogan wealth and life balance through entrepreneurship.

As we listened to our customers (readers) we have slowly adapted. We have several changes coming up. In the next few weeks look for our first special report, a couple widgets, and more orderly posts (schedule and topics).

What do you think? What changes would you like to see? Let me know as I believe in building my business around my customers.

This post was written on Monday. As we were still without power or internet I was not able to post until today. One thing I learned is that I need to figure out how to post by email. My blackberry was partially functional and I could have had a couple post up earlier!

Wow, the last few days have been an emotional rollercoaster ride. Friday night I went to bed with a catagory 2 hurricane on track to bulldozer right over our house. Saterday I woke up to a huge mess but minimal damage. I have friends who lived further inland than I do that were directly hit. The damage was significant.

It is the aftermath that will stick with me forever. It warmed my heart to see so many people pull together. I was dissapointed to see several neighbosr refuse to help but they were by far the minority. The funny thing is that I was not friends with them before the hurricane. I now think even less of them.

Today we got to my neighbors back yard. We leld up because I was hoping to have my chainsaw operational (the tree was big!). Unfortunately repairs are taking too long so we cut it up by hand. The part I’ll always remember is the tears running down my neighbor’s face. It is a profound feeling to touch someone so deeply.

Wile we are still without power life is coming back to normal. About half of the area retailers are back in business. It was nice to go out to dinner and eat something that wasn’t cooked on the grill! Perhaps the biggest shock was to see the mailman.

As things settle out and we have a more steady supply of gasoline our ration of electricity is improving. Right now three houses are sharing one generator. While it isn’t enough to run our air conditioners it will allow us some lights and fans. We even were able to watch tv for the first time tonight. It was surreal to see the aftermath. As the pictures of Houston and Galveston rolled in it hit us hard. These are all places we know.

Galveston is a perfect example. We go to the beach every few weeks since Galveston is so close. In fact, we were there last weekend. It is strange to think that it may never be the same.

We still have a long road ahead of us. There is a ton of cleanup and repairs. As you move closer to the clast the damage becomes more profound. Areas near Galveston are decimated.

This post is an article I wrote the evening after hurricane Ike hit my home. Unfortunately I did not have power or internet and was not able to publish it until today. I will be following up tomorrow with a post I wrote a couple days later (again without power or internet).

Last night I was hit by a category 2 hurricane. Ok, it wasn’t quite a direct hit. The eye of the storm shifted about 25 miles to the east instead of right over my house. This dropped the top wind speed by about 15 MPH and that was just enough for us to escape serious damage. We personally were lucky. We lost part of our fence and a few shingles on our roof. A couple screens were ripped off, wadded up, and thrown at our house.

All in all this is not conducive to a good nights sleep!

The winds surged and at times roared. When it was at it’s peak I could hear my windows straining and I’m stunned none broke. Like I said we were lucky.

Not all of my neighbors were so lucky. One lost most of their shingles. A good friend just a few housed down the street had a tree resting on his roof. Several neighbors had leaking roofs. The number of branches on the ground was prodigious!

A further complication was the loss of power. 3.5M Houstonians (metro) were in the dark. As I write this only 100k have power back. Most will be in the dark for a week or two. The worse hit areas may be down for 3-4 weeks.

Yes, the damage is amazing.

But there is a positive

My mind has a need to find a purpose or a lesson in any situation and tends to go into overdrive as things get worse and worse. Several business ideas popped into my head and started fleshing themselves out. Solutions to problems magically appeared. These should start showing up in Wealth and Wisdom over the next few months.

W are also now closer to many of our neighbors. Our friends are now proven and closer than ever as we cleared branches and debris. For the neighbors we don’t know well we are now friends as we helped each other recover.

8 Lessons Natures Wrath Can Teach Us

1) Preparation is critical: We had a full supply of the necessities. We filled up our gas tanks. Our propane tank (and a spare) were full so we could grill for a week or two. We had several days of water, candles, and batteries.

As a result we are not desperate. The lines of people looking for food and water are mostly due to lack of preparation. This is what is flashed across your evening news!

2) The best laid plans: No matter how well you plan life still happens. In our case it was my chainsaw. It worked fine a couple of months ago. Today was a different story. Gas started pouring out when the fuel lines failed due to old age.

3) Have a backup plan: Once the chainsaw went down things got more physical. A good old bow saw is a godsend when your chainsaw stops working!

4) Who needs to workout when your chainsaw is broken? Clearing downed trees is a hell of a good workout.

5) Thank god for neighbors with generators: While I won’t be watching American Idol – not that I did when I had power – I was able to run my refrigerator and freezer. This will keep our food from spoiling for a week or two until we get power back.

6) Most people are good: It warmed my heart to see everyone pulling together. It also reminded me that friendships are formed and tested in times on need.

7) But some people are bums: Several neighbors strolled out after all the work was done.

Don’t think this wasn’t noticed by everyone else!

7.5) Karma: My bonus lesson is that karma is alive and kicking. We spent several hours working with a few neighbors clearing the storm damage. We did it to help our friends and neighbors while expecting nothing in return.

It turns out our neighbor has a generator. Guess who has extension cords stretched to his house? Suess who is not worrying about his freezer?

Karma.

This may be my last post for a while. As things stand today Ike is on a crash course for Houston and it’s path is currently projected to pass almost right over my home. I’m inland and probably won’t sustain too much damage but it is likely I will be without power or internet. My hope is that it will be over quickly (or it veers to the north). Then again hope is never a strategy. If Corpus Christy or Baton Rouge are used as a standard to predict power outages then it may be two or three weeks. Or it may not go out at all.

I’ll let you know how we fared when the dust-or water-settles!

Wow, I have to admit my weekend didn’t go as planned. For the last week I’ve been doing some cleanup on our blog. Some of it is installing plugins to help with broken links, to make the blog load quicker, and to help improve our ranking on websites. I also had several minor changes to make before we started pushing this business to the next level. All told my plan was:

• Added plug-ins to help:
  • notify me of broken links
  • Improved cache so the blog loads quicker for my readers.
  • SEO optimization to help improve our search engine position
• Moved my adwords to a more prominant spot. Hopefuly this will help with the click through and generate a bit more revenue. Yes, I know it is so capitolistic of me to mention this but let’s face it…this blog is a business about business!
• category clean-up: We shifted to several key categories. This should help us stay focused and to make it easier for you to find information.
• Shifted our website menu items (Wealth/Life Balance/Entrepreneurship) to the above catagories.
• I developed a favicon. What is a favicon? If you look in the address bar you should see a red/blue yin/yang emblem. That is a favicon. Why did we do it (besides it looks cool)? Because it kept coming up as a missing/broken link!
• Update from WordPress 2.5 to WordPress 2.6.1

All went well until we updated WordPress.

I thought I had it all together and went to show it off to my wife (yes even adults like to puff out their chest to impress women!). I had apparently checked the bolg on an older cached version on Firefox because it all went haywire when we pulled up our site on my wife’s computer.

Long story short…I spent a couple hours trying to fix what shouldn’t have been broken! At the end of the day I put it in as good a condition as possible and walked away. Hands off. Don’t even think about it.

And finally the solution popped into my head. Instead of fighting WordPress I should embrace it and go with the flow. I had made major changes to my theme making it look exactly the way I wanted. In doing this I had to bypass several files and features. Apparently version 2.6 doesn’t like to play this way!

Why it was so complicated

I don’t just run a blog on WordPress. As good a platform as WordPress is for blogging it falls short on the web design front. I built my website using XSitePro (a fantastic web design tool) and made the WordPress blog theme match. All in all it is pretty seamless and allows me the power of WordPress for my blog and the power of XSitePro to build our site. And since it is far easier to make XSitePro look like my blog that is the route I took.

And the added benefit

I had considered going to a wider format (what I have now), but didn’t want to spend hours making it happen. This gives me a cleaner sidebar (on the right hand side). It also allows me to use widgets on the side bar making adjustments and additions much easier.

For those of you who hit our site durring the chaos I appologize. Luckily it happened over the weekend which is typicaly a low trafic time.