r0dman.com

If you can’t tell by now, I love the word sustainable. It can be used in so many contexts. Today, I’m ranting on how sustainable your actual day to day life is.

My fiancee is a primary school teacher. While she does like the work, the workload is just ridiculous. When people complain about the amount of holidays that teachers receive, I get quite frustrated, as the majority of holidays that she takes are spent marking, or planning for the next term. It’s a 8am till 10pm job most days for good teachers. Full on!

Take last night for example. It’s a pretty standard night – we both get home at around 5pm, prepare dinner, eat, then clean up. By 6:30pm she is off in the study marking and planning until 10:30pm, then we go to bed. This isn’t out of the norm at all – it’s just day to day life. She has said herself, “I just can’t do this forever”. While I have spoken to her a lot about it and have encouraged her to entertain the idea of changing jobs, it’s nice to hear her actually saying, rather than me.

While she could technically teach forever, she would never have any hobbies, our lives will continue to be very separate, and in my opinion she would live a life of working and working only. No time for kids either!

The hobbies point has always struck me as interesting. I ride my bikes, I work on them, I dig trails, I work on computers at home, and so on. I’m always up to something, it’s what keeps me sane! Turn that around, and my fiancee has none of this. Obviously I don’t expect her to have the same hobbies that I have, but surely you need some sort of outlet for enjoyment and stress relief?

Next year is going to be a year of exploring. We are exploring the world, exploring our career options, and essentially exploring our lifestyle choices. With any luck we will end up in Whistler, Canada, working in jobs that are completely different to our current jobs. While they might not be our dream jobs, they will be different, and allow us to compare them with what we are doing now, and explore the options that we have for our lifestyles.

So have a think about it when you get some free time, can you keep up your current lifestyle forever? Are you giving much thought to where you want to go?

I’ve come to the conclusion that a passive income has to be the best way to live – set yourself up now, and reap the rewards later!

For instance, I run a few websites at the moment, this one included. The goal is to see (it’s just a test) how much money you can actually make from having a few Google AdSense advertisements around the place. In around two months I have made a whopping US$13.01. I tell my friends about it and they just laugh at me, “It’s not worth the hassle” they say.

For $13.01, sure, it’s not. But what about after a year? That $13.01 becomes around $80. Now quite obviously I’m not going to be able to survive on $80 a year any time soon, but I think this is where most people give up. This is residual income – from time to time I need to add some content or do some maintenance, but essentially when I’m not directly working on making money, the content is still working for me.

Share dividends, interest on your savings and so on – there are plenty of ways to generate small amounts of income that can one day build up to a considerable amount. For some people, it’s all about investing money and supplementing their current income, whereas for others it’s about investing a small amount of money and time, to just earn enough to get by.

It’s typical of people nowadays to discount the little things. They discount the small amounts that they spend as nothing. $5 a day is easy to spend, but after a year that is $1825! Smokers for instance, have a real financial benefit from quitting, if nothing else. Turn it around, and imagine running 5 websites making $5 per day – that is over $9000 a year! I could invest that money into shares and use the dividends to generate more income too. It’s ongoing, but there is real potential in it.

What I need is an idea. The world is full of them, but unfortunately my head isn’t. I need to make more websites, I just can’t think what I should make them on and how I can make them different from everyone elses.

This blog is pretty much the exception to the rule. While I do have an ad on the page, it will never really generate much, if anything. Everything I am reading now is about Search Engine Optimization, page rankings, and so on. You really need to push the content towards the viewers, then almost manipulate them into clicking your ads. My blog has too much random content to actually get a high page ranking, and as a result it will never really receive the hits. This is “my place” on the internet, and what is say here is as biased or unbiased as I want it to be – it is just my honest thoughts, and there is nothing more to it.

Do some reading up on it some time – passive income is great, but it’s probably the hardest income to earn!

Every Australian knows what a first-home buyer is entitled to by now. A heap of free money! But is there really such a thing as free money?

According to a recent report by market research firm Brandmanagement, young home buyers’ loans have jumped an unsustainable $52,000 (23%!) in the past two years.

From February 2008 to February 2009, first-home buyers have flooded the market, up 9.6% now comprising 26.9% of the market. It’s almost as though there’s something they don’t know!

Here we essentially have a boom within a boom. The increased madness of first-home buyers rushing to get into the property market before they lose their “free money” or “before the next boom” has pushed prices up, despite times of economic doom and gloom. This “mini-boom” in itself gives first-home buyers more reason to commit earlier than they should. In the belief that property will only increase in value, they want to enter the market as early as they can at any cost.

Andrew Inwood, from Brandmanagement is quoted saying:

“What the government incentives appear to have done is transfer the money from the people who are borrowing money to buy their first homes into the pockets of those who are selling at a more attractive price.”

The issue for me is the short sightedness of this whole situation. Anyone who has taken the time to do the research knows that Australia is not in a sustainable economic situation right now, and propping up the bubble with grants like these is just prolonging the inevitable. Why give people a false sense of security and then screw them over?

It’s hard to make a comparison, and this example is probably a little extreme, but during a war what would you prefer? To have your country bombed and suffer considerable damage in an instant, and then have the attacking country leave? Or to have troops attacking nearby, tormenting the families and fighting for five or ten years? The way I see it, instant annihilation, while hard for everyone, allows the country to be rebuilt immediately. People will realise what is actually important in life, and pull together to reconstruct their homes, hospitals, and so on.

It’s amazing how this whole situation is only centered around money, not life or death, and yet people still want to believe that everything is peachy, while all they are really believing in is a slow and painful death of the market.

Last night I volunteered to speak with some kids from my old school about the work that I do. The night is a careers “expo” of sorts, and most fields had a representative or two. I represented “Information Technology” on my own. Crazy, since it’s such a broad industry but I was up for the challenge.

My school, a private school, really pushes it’s students into university. Since it’s become the status quo for “successful” families nowadays, the parents really want their kids to go to uni too. It gives them status to be able to brag to their friends about. Back in the day, I too went down this track, and after six months actually quit uni and joined the workforce. It was the best decision that I ever made for my career. Out in the workforce I realised that those with a degree usually end up with the same issues of finding work as someone without a degree – a lack of experience. Experience is king in IT, and often a degree may make finding work easier, but without a degree you have a four year head start on everyone else! Now while this obviously doesn’t apply to all industries, it certainly does in IT in Australia.

Telling parents this was received in a number of different ways. One parent said “but surely nowadays you HAVE to have a degree”, adamant that her son needed a degree. I wasn’t telling her that her son shouldn’t go to uni, just that he should explore his options. Most of the parents were happy to hear my story, and in some ways happy that there is indeed more than one way for their son or daughter to get into the industry.

What struck me so hard was one parent. His son was the most keen kid that I spoke to for the whole evening. You could tell that he had a really strong interest in computers and really wanted to get into the industry. The father on the other hand just wasn’t interested and quite obviously didn’t want to be there.

It was amazing that I was sitting there, trying to give his son all of the help that I could to send him in the right direction, yet as a parent, he just didn’t care less about what was going on and obviously wanted the night to end so he could go home.

When I quit uni my parents weren’t happy at all. At 18, they didn’t believe that I was able to make the right decisions for myself yet and as a result they didn’t support me in my decisions. Seeing this kid last night, and seeing his dad’s display of “couldn’t care less” parenting, it has just reinforced my beliefs in how I will raise my kids one day.

While I understand that children, and even adults are never going to make the right decisions 100% of the time, I’m going to support my kids in whatever they want to do. Life’s too short to push them into something that they aren’t interested in.

Support peoples’ dreams, and help them to become their true self. Help them to break away from the norm and beat mediocrity.

If there’s one thing that will get an office full of government employees out of their seats, it’s coffee.

Recently our social club organised a coffee machine so people in the building could buy cheaper coffee than the cafeteria supplied. While I applaud their reasoning for doing so (the cafeteria jacked up their prices), I can’t believe how much attention the thing has picked up.

I find myself forming strong opinions on things that aren’t really that important to me. For instance, since selling my car and riding to work more often I am in disbelief when I hear about people driving 8 minutes to work rather than riding or walking. I end up labelling them all sheep and just disregarding their opinions from then onwards. Ok so maybe it’s not that bad, but I guess you could say that it “fuels the fire”, the fire being my hatred for lazy car drivers. People that could be walking, riding, jogging, and catching public transport and usually have no good reason not to do so.

Coffee is fast becoming my newest and biggest gripe. I’ve always been in tune with my hydration. Right now as I’m typing this I know that I need more water, even though I’ve had a good 5 pints of water already today. It’s only recently that I have realised the affects that different foods and drinks have on my hydration, and how important it is for myself to be hydrated.

Up until about a month ago I used to have the occasional black coffee. I actually like the taste of it, but recently my “stand” is more important than my need to drink coffee. I’ve quit (until I go to Italy next year). There are a huge number of people in my office, and obviously worldwide that start their day with a coffee, have another coffee for morning tea, then have a coke with lunch, and later have another coffee for afternoon tea. If their body is lucky it will finally get some water with dinner! Living like this is terrible for your body, but it’s so accepted that I’m the freak for not having a coffee in the morning, and for going to the toilet every hour.

Anyway, this is my gripe and I’m sticking with it. Now do yourself a favor and drink a glass of water!