My new e-book, How to Eliminate Massive Debts with Tiny Payments is online! I know a lot about this subject, as it happens, so I thought I would distil my experience into a quick guide to getting out of debt as fast as possible, even when you can’t afford it. Indeed, especially when you can’t afford it. So many people are, in effect, conned into taking on debts they can’t afford that now the whole world’s economy is busy choosing between a new Great Depression or massive inflation as the best way to eliminate the systemic financial toxicity.

Well, my Zazzle shop is starting to fill up with goods now, so maybe, one day, I'll make some money from it! http://www.zazzle.co.uk/tucana* My wife has a great Zazzle shop too, featuring her own artwork: http://www.zazzle.co.uk/artymind*

Well, I'm getting around to putting my images online gradually. I've put a few into Zazzle, a website that allows me to put images on products for people to buy. I'm starting with ipad/iphone covers, mousemats, greeting cards and posters, but may go on to t-shirts and whatnot later.

When the USA gets a cold, the rest of the world gets the ‘flu… so the saying goes. Well, it seems the USA is about to get the (economic) ‘flu… do we get a cold? I doubt it somehow. This documentary from 2008 shows firstly the terrifying state of the US government debts, and secondly, why it is important (they state it mildly - the US will be under the thumb of its bankers, mainly China. This effectively means that their ‘empire’ will end and by extension the Western empire will end; US citizens will be in hock for a generation or more; poverty will be commonplace).

Putting it more strongly, it means US citizens (and others) will end up effectively as slaves, working to pay off irredeemable debts all their lives. In short, freedom is good, but you cannot sustain freedom without financial responsibility. To me, that is just the way the Universe is constructed. Money represents freedom of action. Without the one, you can’t have the other. Debt equals slavery.

The West has a demographic time bomb as well: the average age of the population is increasing so much that not enough workers are available to pay for pensions, healthcare and so on. Clearly, governments in Britain and the US are dealing with it, secretly, by allowing huge numbers of young immigrants from Eastern Europe and Mexico respectively to enter the countries (while pretending to be tough on immigration). Well, fine, but it will alter the cultures of these nations. And anyway, the debts in the USA look too big for this to work too well. But… maybe they’ve done their sums. I’d like to see them. The video doesn’t address this possible solution, mind you.

We are semi-blissfully going about our daily business thinking that maybe the ‘Credit Crunch’ wasn’t so bad after all… a little hiccup maybe, but not so bad. But, actually, there are a lot of problems lurking, not least of which is the massive debt both governments and individuals around the world are contending with.

The problem with debt, basically, is that it needs to be paid back, or, it is necessary to default on it. Either solution messes up the economy. Either solution messes up your and my finances. If we divert funds to paying it back, that money isn’t being spent on productive capital, or even on goods. It is money down the drain. If we default, well, our creditors have money shortages instead. Either way, we all lose.

Economies historically deal with huge national debts in one of two main ways: economic recession (or its extreme version, depression/panic), or inflation (or its extreme version, hyperinflation). Recession sees prices falling, jobs getting lost as businesses can’t make a profit or jobless consumers can’t consume, and so on. Inflation sees prices rising rapidly and consumers not being able to keep up, and, after a time, jobs getting lost as businesses can’t make a profit because they can’t afford the raw materials or customers can’t afford the high prices… Depression and hyperinflation are extreme versions of these and can be quite terrible.

After the Credit Crunch (caused entirely by slack regulation of the financial markets by governments around the world, encouraged by free-market economic theories (not that the alternatives work so well either)), governments had basically two choices: stand back and watch the economies of the world slump into depression, or print money (sorry, euphemism of the day: “quantitative easing") to try and cancel out the collapsing money supply as shares and banks tumbled. Well, they chose the latter and printed money (or, really, sold treasury bills and reduced interest rates - effectively the same). In the UK they only did this enough to cancel out about half of the slump, however. That is one reason why our economy isn’t recovering much yet the recession hasn’t been so intense either (on the surface). Nevertheless, this amounts to a huge debt which is going to have to be paid or defaulted on. In the US they’ve gone further and the outcome is much the same so far. This video suggests the outcome is going to be hyperinflation. The video makers have their own political free-market axe to grind (and as I mentioned free-market theories led us into this mess in part), but the evidence that the economic ramifications of this mess are still working out seems pretty good. Oh, and if, unlike me unfortunately, you happen to have some spare cash, it might be worth investing in silver, apparently…

Credit cards. We all know how expensive they can be, but many people find them very convenient. What people don’t know is how the card companies trick people into permanent debt. It isn’t simply a matter of people being irresponsible (although it has its part to play): credit card companies vary their terms, at will, to trick the poorest people into the most debt. Why? Because people in financial difficulty are the best source of money. If you pay off your card every month you are no use to the credit card company because they can’t charge you any interest or any delinquency fees. They make no money out of such customers. The best customers are people who pay the minimum payment every month, or, better, miss it sometimes and pay late fees, over limit fees, and more. This video, ‘The Secret History of the Credit Card’ (just under an hour long) from the US Public Broadcasting Service, explains how it works.

How long does it take to pay off a card? This calculator lets you work it out, but a couple of sample calculations are given below. They assume the minimum payment is 2% of your balance.

1) First, a basic example. You have £100 on your card and the interest rate is 14% APR. It’ll take you 23 months to pay back £100 if you only pay the required minimum of 2.00%. Over that period of time, you’ll pay an additional £13.05 in interest.If you could afford to pay an extra £10 a month towards your credit card debt, it would mean you’d repay it in 7 months and you’d save yourself £9.58 in interest. In fact, if you could afford an extra £25 a month, you’d repay it in 4 months and save £11.82. Not too scary perhaps.

2) Now, take the same figures as above, but you owe £1,000 instead. It’ll take you 236 months (that’s over 19 years) to pay back £1,000 if you only pay the required minimum of 2.00%. (maybe you think you won’t pay just the minimum for 19 years - but things can change. You lose your job, or get ill, have an accident… and suddenly minimum payments could be all that are possible, for a long time). Over the 19 years or so, you’ll pay an additional £1,123.41 in interest (in other words, you’re paying twice over for it). If you could afford to pay an extra £10 a month towards your credit card debt, it would mean you’d repay it in 68 months (just over 5 years) and you’d save yourself £763.10 in interest. In fact, if you could afford an extra £25 a month, you’d repay it in 34 months (just over 2 years), and save £943.84.

3) Suppose now the credit card company has given you a more typical APR of, say, 20% on your £1,000 outstanding credit. It’ll take you 483 months (that’s over 40 years) to pay back a mere £1,000 if you only pay the required minimum of 2.00%. Over that period of time, you’ll pay an additional £3,622.71 in interest (you’re paying over 3.5 times for whatever you spent the money on). If you could afford to pay an extra £10 a month towards your credit card debt, it would mean you’d repay it in 80 months (just over 6 years) and you’d save yourself £2,983.72 in interest. In fact, if you could afford an extra £25 a month, you’d repay it in 36 months (just over 3 years), and save £3,337.53.

4) APR 24%? It’ll take you 3780 months (that’s over 315 years) to pay back a measly £1,000 if you only pay the required minimum of 2.00%. Over that period of time, you’ll pay an additional £38,752.57 in interest!! If you could afford to pay an extra £10 a month towards your credit card debt, it would mean you’d repay it in 92 months (just over 7 years) and you’d save yourself £37,831.47 in interest. In fact, if you could afford an extra £25 a month, you’d repay it in 39 months (just over 3 years), and save £38,383.04.

5) If the APR is 25% or above, the debt is unpayable with the minimum payment as the interest adds more than the minimum payment to your debt each month!

The motto? Either don’t use credit cards at all, or if you must, then pay at least £10 more than the minimum payment, ALWAYS. Indeed, the recommended system for paying them off is to pay AT LEAST the minimum payment PLUS the interest charged each month. Count THAT as your ‘minimum payment’. If you can’t afford to pay all your cards like this, then pay off the one with the highest APR first. Then destroy it. Then pay off the one with the next highest APR, etc. It can be handy to set up a standing order for this ‘minimum payment’ (the one that includes the interest) and always pay this same amount - even though the interest will go down each month (other things being equal), if you can afford it, keep paying as much as that anyway until the card is history. But… what do you do if you can’t even afford to do this much? If you can’t even make the standard minimum payments? Well,  there are various official methods, of varying efficacy (voluntary arrangements, bankruptcy) but which are not really much use to many people, as is the way with official methods generally. I’m looking on the web for a better solution; I’ll put a link here if I find something.

As mentioned previously, I don't know whether there is any global warming going on, or whether we humans are responsible for it. The evidence as I see it is too mixed: any search on the Internet comes up with wildly differing views, out of date evidence, hearsay, scaremongering and more. Real, hard information is not really available to Joe Public.

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…or how the ball got dropped this time around. The government *always* drops the ball in the end, or, as Bob Beckman used to say (paraphrased) “What we learn from History is that nobody learns anything from History.”

People keep asking me to fix or create their web sites for them. Well, OK. Maybe that will be my new mode of income, apart from the film work at the Studio. So I shall be a web designer. The www.shortletbudapest.co.uk site has since gone, so um... here's a picture of it.

 

 

I've done others recently too, now I think about it. I guess I can be a web designer. And, since people keep asking me, I don't think I'll have to search too hard for business. And as people typically ask extortionate prices, I can be more reasonable, I think. After all, I have a day job to go to too.

Well, I know I’ve been off-air for a bit now, but I’m back today, as I slowly get over the flipping flu. My latest money-making scheme, i.e., the domain names thing, isn’t producing any results, so it is suitably abandoned unless something comes of it before they expire. Probably I need to be more persistent with schemes, but they are boring when they don’t work. My next plan is to try doing some paintings and selling them (online, ideally). The first one is here:

Those wavy Moire fringes you may see running from right to left in this rendering do not exist on the original. They are an artefact caused by the texture of the canvas mixing with the pixel system that computers use. Possibly I need to upload a lower-resolution photo or something; I’ll have to experiment. You can click here to see a larger, relatively fringe-free version. The colours are reasonably accurate in the photo, except I would say that the blue is a noticeably darker shade on the actual painting. Anyway, the painting is acrylic on mounted canvas, 406x305mm (16x12 inches), 38mm deep. Looking around online and in shops, things like this go for around £150 which seems about right to me.

Now for something more serious. These people are letting themselves be beaten at Wii tennis… by their dog (video). The poor animal will never learn to respect them! I don’t really ‘get’ tattoos and piercings. They just seem bizarre to me. So this blog has the top 10 of them. Prepare to be grossed out. Or bizarred out, I suppose. Well, I guess that’s enough Western culture for the moment. Now for a bit of culture from the East: the Thousand Hands Goddess Dance. We may not know what it means, but we know quality when we see it, I think. Finally, for those people who are savvy enough to use ‘hijack this‘ to clean the junk programs and spyware from their computers every now and then, a log auto-analyser to suggest to you which of your start-up items may be worth eliminating. Just paste the saved log into the box, press the button and hey presto! No guarantees or warranties, E&OE, yabba dabba doo.

One of these days I really am going to Get Rich Quick ™. My latest scheme is to dream up three really good-sounding domain names, which I hope to eventually sell. I have added links to them in the side bar:

* www.yourstarsdaily.com
* www.howtochatupgirls.com
* www.worstchatuplines.com

Now aren’t those great names? My plan originally was just to put them straight up for sale, maybe on Ebay or somewhere, but then I thought: perhaps I should monetize them first. That is, a) get some money from them somehow, and b) demonstrate to potential buyers how valuable they might be, before selling them. So I have put some content in them and will add them to various search engines…

Of course, if they make enough money I won’t want to sell them, I suppose. But, at least for the last two, I doubt that they will make much for me directly as I have no plans to sell related products. I shall probably just put Google AdSense on them. I can do tarot readings for the first one though.

Update: scheme got nowhere… No sales, and I got tired of doing tarot readings and typing them up each day, after about a month. Sigh. Probably 3 good names isn’t enough anyway. And they certainly do have to attract a lot of traffic - I did not invest in promotion, having no money to do that with…

Actually, quite well. The question is, though, how do I figure out how much is still to be done? Today I reached 30,000 words, i.e., 50% of my original estimate of 60,000 words.

However, I am certainly more than halfway through the story. Counting scenes in the script, I am up to scene 86 of 116. That’s 74%. That seems more like it! I think I had better count it that way in future. So, I am almost three-quarters of the way through the first draft. Excellent!

Yes, it’s get-rich-quick time again. I have been looking at the so-called “Secret Law of Attraction” as pushed on the Internet in books, programmes and videos, and thinking to myself… Hmm… it is a sales pitch. Here is an example:

You see, on the one hand, the authors have a point - the idea of it is true as far as it goes, I believe: that you attract to you what you think about, so think rich, think happy, etc., and you will become rich, happy, etc. But my problem with it is that they are mystifying the subject rather than clarifying it, in my opinion, to get you to purchase products from them - that is, to attract money from you to them.

I think it can be explained more clearly and will write a little about it today. But first… a word of warning. I am not rich yet. At least, not in Western terms. OK, I have a roof over my head, a nice bed, food in the ‘fridge, clothes in the cupboard, and so on, so that makes me one of the richest 20% or so of the people in the world. But as a Westerner, seeing all those TV programmes and movies showing much better lifestyles than mine in material terms, I do not feel materially rich yet. Besides, I still have plenty of debts to pay off. If I measure my net worth the way accountants do, it is negative - so actually a person starving in the Third World somewhere with a net worth of about one penny is technically better off than me, financially - but that just shows what can be done with statistics! :-)

Anyway, in short, I am not rich in my terms: no country mansion, lots of travel, life of leisure, etc. So, who am I to suggest the so-called Secret Law of Attraction could be explained better if I haven’t made it work for myself yet?

Well, I think I am making it work, but it is something that is taking time. The “Secret” is plain and simple. Implementing it is hard. It is hard because you have to work on yourself. But first, a little about this mystification of the idea that I mentioned earlier.

In a way, the problem is with the name. Firstly, it is no secret. These ideas have been around for literally centuries. There have always been successful people who have figured it out for themselves, or who have had fortunate upbringings, or who simply, naturally, think the right way, and who have the energy and courage to take action to get things done. If you want a non-sales version of the secret, try getting a book on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy from your local bookshop (for example, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies is very good).

Secondly, by using a passive word like “attraction” these authors are making it look like you just have to sit there and riches will fall in your lap. This is a mouth-watering proposition to the get-rich-quickers like me who, in reality, don’t really want to actually do anything much to make their fortunes. These hucksters make it look like they can explain how you can become some kind of natural magnet for wealth (or whatever it is you are after). But they don’t explain it, as far as I can tell, anyway. They talk all around it, make it sound good, then sell you product after product (because the previous one hasn’t worked yet, you buy another, then another - like diet plans: it is the same marketing idea to sell you plan after plan, tip after tip - this one really works! Except it doesn’t because you have to do something).

All right. Let’s get to the point. What is the “Secret"? It is this: the way you think about things, about life in general, affects how life turns out for you. There is nothing mysterious in this. If you think miserable thoughts, if you feel inferior, if you are afraid to put yourself out there and meet people, then how are you going to get anything much done? How can you make your life better when you cut yourself off from your own enthusiasm and energy (by thinking badly of yourself) and from other people who could help you? If someone speaks to you, maybe they say, “Hi, that’s a nice pair of shoes!” you could take that as a compliment or as an implied insult. It is up to you. What they actually mean matters much less than what you think of it. So, the point is, getting your thinking in order is the difficult part. Your inner thoughts can very easily sabotage your plans in so many ways and at the same time you can be completely unaware that it is happening. Get a Cognitive Behavoural Therapy book and see how to sort your thinking out. Take control of your own verbal mind (you could also look at my enlightenment page for much more on this general idea and a selection of books that could help you). Only by sorting out your own thinking can you get anywhere. To see how not to think about life, well, just watch East Enders or any other soap opera. They are full of characters ruining their lives through bad thinking skills: people driven by greed, fear, and the convenience of the moment.

Then, having got your thinking straight… you need to do what Tony Robbins always advises: take action. Yes, you have to get out of your comfort zone and do something. You have to meet people. You have to start a business or whatever. You have to find something you like to do and do it. You also have to be realistic and start from where you are: little baby steps are best because trying to do too much before you are ready can undermine your confidence. But do get things moving, within the limits of how far you are capable at the time. And don’t punish yourself for being less than perfect or for being incompetent. That is human nature. What is good is that we can achieve things despite our general uselessness. In fact, that is what is great about us. As the Buddhists say, we are perfect in our imperfection. That is, like a dog or a cat or a child, none of which can do anything particularly useful except be a perfect dog, cat or child respectively, we, as adults are also perfect adult humans. Accept that as applied to yourself, and you have understood Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and you are on your way.

I know I haven’t made a blog entry for a while now… but the writing is continuing, albeit slowly. I am up to about 21,500 words now anyway. So that is about 4,000 words in the last month. I would prefer it to be more, but life has to be dealt with too, sometimes (nothing too bad concerning me directly, fortunately).

As well as that, I have been enjoying the early Spring weather and taking photos, some of which can be seen at my Picasaweb Gallery, particularly in the Hampstead Heath and Flora and Fauna galleries. I have also begun attempting to upload photos to some commercial photography web sites to see if I can make a bit of money from my hobby. I might as well get some free money if I can, I suppose!