Last week at my work, we had a seminar on asset allocation. A guy came in from Fidelity, the company that manages our 401k’s and talked for an hour and a half.
The Fidelity guy started off talking about the things his company offers.
Then he showed us a chart showing the spectrum of annual return versus volitilty.
There was another chart showing the historical chance of loss 1955-2004
Stocks: 1 year 25%, 5 years 6%, 10 year 0%
Bonds: 1 year 9%, 5 years 0%, 10 year 0%
Short Term: 1 year 0%, 5 years 0%, 10 year 0%
Then he went over market timing and how it can be bad. He showed how just missing a small number of the best months could severely damage your return.
He went over Dollar-Cost Averaging. Then he showed us a chart called Callan Periodic Table Of Investment Returns. I want to do more research on this chart. It looked interesting.
He talked about the three asset classes. Then he went into the different market capitalizations of stocks (large caps, mid & small caps, foreign stocks). Next came investment styles growth versus value.
He discussed the different types of bonds: US Treasury Bonds, Corporate Bonds, and Municipal Bonds. He discussed how interest rates affect the bond market.
Next came risk versus time horizon. The longer you have, the more risk can be tolerated.
He talked about rebalancing your portfolio periodically.
He mentioned Fidelity Freedom Funds which have dates, and how the funds change over time, becoming more conservative as retirement approaches.
He talked about how Fidelity could help us via a Fidelity rep, or by the website, etc.
Overall, it was like an hour and a half sales pitch. I really didn’t learn anything new.
If you find an idea that makes money, thats great! If you find an money making idea that generates residual or passive income, that is even better! Even better yet is find something that earns residual or passive income that can be repeated over and over! That is why I love blogs! They moake money, and the model is easily repeatable. I have learned so much a long the way. I have money coming in from Google Adsense. I have money coming in from Amazon.com sales. And I just signed up for Kontera, and am awaiting approval.
Another thing I have done is set up yet another blog! My new blog is how-to-home.com and will cover work around the house. I already had a ton of posts that I had done in this blog. I have moved them over to the new blog in an effort to focus this blog more on making money and investing.
With anyluck I will be approved for Kontera, and I can play with those ads and see if they earn me any more revenue. I would love to have another source of revenue. As they say, multiple sources of income!!! That is another good reason to have multiple blogs. Each one gerenates a small (or not so small) amount of money. I have so many things going on that I can write about. And Google (and the other search engines) liked more focused web sites. This way if I do some work on my house, I can post about it at how-to-home.com, and if I buy/sell some stocks, I can post about it here. It will mean more money in the long run. And making more money is a good thing!
I love having multiple streams of income. Even better, I love that they are residual, and replicatable!!!
I have been building web sites for years now. It is a hobby of mine. I don’t play video games, I build web sites. And the web sites I like building are web sites that make money!
I recently set up a web site for a friend of mine. I basically cloned one of my blogs, and set it up for her. She will have to do the work of writing the posts, but she gets the benefit of my many years of experience. But I was inspired to build yet another blog. So I registered a new domain, and by that evening had low-fat-diet-recipes.com online. I love blogs because they consistently make money. Not huge amounts, but consistent small amounts.And they are low maintenance. I don’t have to spend much time on them. Posts that I may have written a year or two ago are still earning me money. Just yesterday I noticed a rise in revenue from one of my sites. I investigated, and saw that one page was getting a large number of hits. I did a google search and found that for a certain search term, I was coming up number one. Why this happened all of a sudden, I’ll never know. But if I had never written the post, I would have been making the money. And that post was written a year and a half ago!
And I can basically copy the way I have a blog set up to another blog. I am already investigating ideas for another couple new blogs. I am trying to decide if I have enough to say on the subjects. But eeven then, one of my blogs has abrely been touch for almost a year, and doesn’t have a lot of posts, but is still making me money! I should look at doing some more posts on that blog too.
But blogs are great for setting up multiple income streams. Each of the individual blogs see rises and falls in traffic, but overall they are relatively consistant. And the mioney keeps flowing!
I recently talked a friend into starting a blog. I convinced her that she could make money by doing a blog. She had a small blog over at MySpace, but I told her to register a domain, and get some webspace so she could have more control over her blog. So she did it. I worked with her on coming up with a name that would appeal to search engines, and would be a potential money maker. Her new site will be WeightLossMommy.com. The focus of the site will be for her to talk bout how she is working on losing weight after having two children. Seeing that I have about half a dozen blogs of my own, and all making money, I think I know a little bit about it. I am guessing that her blog, once it gets going, will make between $500-$2000 a year. But it could easily make more. The neat thing about blogs is that they are easy to maintain. Just make a post every day, or every week, or when ever. I have one blog that I haven’t posted on since last year, and it is still making me money. I have a travel site that really only gets posted on when I travel, and it is steadily making me money.
I am starting to think about what new blog I can set up that will have good potential to make money. Once you have one going, it is really easy to repeat the process and set up yet another, and another blog.
And since it is hard to write a lot about one topic, it is nice to have multiple blogs. The search engines like blogs that are more focused. So I will try to focus each blog on a relatively narrow topic. It also has the benefit that instead of writing 20 posts on one site a day, you can spread them around, and add a post or two to each individual blog.
One thing I noticed, is that my blogs ebb and flow. Sometimes one blog will be doing really well, and another will slow down. Then a couple months later, they reverse, and the one that was slow is now doing great, and the other has slowed down. So that is another reason to have multiple blogs, thus multiple sources of income!
Now that my wife is no longer working, she has started to spend more time working on her home business. She set up a business a couple years ago called Just Barrettes where she makes hair barrettes. I built a store site for her. Now that she has started working more on making her barrettes, I have once again started working on her website.
I added a statistics program to her website so we could more easily see where traffic was coming from. I was surprised to see she is not getting much. So I have been encouraging her to become more active in a couple forums that she has been a member of, and add a link to her webite in her signature line. This will give her website more exposure, and also the links will help in the search engine rankings. I have also worked on making a “light box” which will allow her to take better quality photographs of her barrettes. The pictures on her website are not very good, and don’t really show off her barrettes very well. If they look more appealing, they will hopefully sell better, and her home business will make more money.
If all goes well, she should start selling more of her barrettes. Time will tell how far she might take her small home business.