after my first day of poor, i raised my total to $192. but had no direct income. i had some other items-- like $20 to delivery.com, which has since been spent. and a beer token, which was spent during an outing and conversation with jim. we discussed the idea of investments and i thought it may be a good place to start here.
i'm sure the average person would say, "if you're looking for investments, perhaps you should stop quitting jobs and start saving money." and that's great advice for anyone with a time-traveling delorean, but not very useful for someone who is already in a situation of brokehood.
actually, it's not even great advice for someone who can time travel because there are way better methods of making money when the time-space continuum can be tweaked.
that aside, my first step at staying financially afloat was to peruse my "investments".
unfortunately, a day after i wrote the first post i was cornered into doing a large load of laundry and had to pay my $45 cell phone bill. i think i was much more upset about the laundry part even though it only costs $3. i loathe laundry.
do you remember the math problem from third or fourth grade where you're meant to find out how long it would take a slug to climb a four-foot wall if he slipped backward one inch for every three he moved forward? sometimes pulling money out of nowhere is a bit like that.
the main difference is that while the slug likely knows he sucks at climbing walls, he is incapable of planning ahead in the case that he might have to climb one. you know, the little guy might have wanted to install some kind of grip-tape or a little pulley system. he just can't.
if you were ever been broke during the three years i was what i would consider "rich" i either paid your rent or offered to help pay it. that was me preparing in case of a wall. besides trying to help out, that was-- on some level-- an investment.
that may have come across a bit more like the mafia than i meant it to.
the point is, i lent travis about $800 so that we could move to this apartment during the summer. he'd been paying me in installments and happened to come by with the last hundred dollars directly after i caved and paid my cell phone bill.
boom: $244. down and inch, up two inches.
even aside from lending friends money, i could argue that a solid 30% of my every day activities are secret investments in case i wind up broke again. so generally, my first day back in poorland tends to go rather smoothly. in fact, if it weren't for steve jobs i would be doing a whole lot better right now. because he stopped hosting macworld, the [smaller] company i worked for stopped presenting at macworld. because of that, i can no longer count on making $1,100 as a brand ambassador at macworld. and i can no longer bank on the fact the boss would've given me a new eyetv hybrid which i could be selling on ebay for $200 right now.
that was one of my favorite annual investments. it cushioned christmas quite well.
oh, by the way, never save an expensive hard-drive to sell later on. later on that hard-drive will be absolutely worthless.
anyway, without my yearly eyetv gadget, i went to check if anyone else owed me money. and, as it turns out, loving doodle owed me $55 for illustrations-- which is now somewhere between paypal and me, and will put my new total at $299 once it's in my hands.
in the situation that i just can't snag a job this month, my money-pot needs to be at a total of $800 by february 5th (not including food).
oh, and the reason this post's title parenthesizes "accidental and purposeful" is because a good majority of the time i'm in need of money, i find what i think is compost is what someone else considers magnificent potpourri. i like to scour craigslist's wanted section to see if i might have any of those finds-- any accidental investments-- laying about, waiting to be sold to someone who actually wants it.
in this case, there were two:
2. a muni-only fast pass for december and november of 2010 - $10
the only reason i had the xbox was because beau was going to throw it out and asked if i might want to save it because i have a fairly large box of old electronics in case of one of those days when i'm laying in bed and suddenly realize i'd really like to make some robots.
it's been sitting on my shelf for over a year now, so perhaps i haven't been in much of a robot-mood. but the man who'd posted a wanted ad for any and all broken xboxs paid $10 to see if he could take it home and fix it before selling it at near full-price.
we were both investors. though he woke me up at 9am to pick it up, which i could've done without.
the two muni passes were wanted by an artist who was making a fairly large piece out of all the collected fast passes she'd acquired over the years. when i found out, i tried to sell her my box of hundreds of used muni transfers, fast passes, and caltrain tickets-- i have an unusually high number of boxes filled with random things in case of emergency-- but she declined and paid me the $10 for just november and december.
this put me at $319. and i didn't have to spend any money the entire day, courtesy of my leftovers from the $20 delivery.com dinner.
but my kind of investments are not meant to save the day: they almost never will. they're just meant to buy me one or two days to relax my mind and rethink my situation-- to draw out my chaotic battle plan. going from $79 to $192 to $319 in two days definitely helps calm my nerves enough to think, but not so much that my thoughts are weakened due to comfort.
for me, the next step in battle tends to be PHASE II: Pretend I am Someone I am Not.
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