MakeMoneyFast.txt

So recently YouTube invited me to start putting ads in my videos. I figured I don't have much to lose since I can select which videos get ads, and switch it off whenever I like, so I'm giving it a try.

Since YouTube, AdSense and Blogspot are all under the same Google umbrella, I figured I'd enable it on my blog here too. Not that I get any hits here from anyone who doesn't use some form of adblock, but what the hell.

I initially tried enabling the suggested layout of sticking ads in the sidebar as well as between posts, but the between posts ones were a bit too much so I scaled it back to just the sidebar. I figure that's fairly unobtrusive.

I'd love to share with you all how this experiment turns out, but I think there's some crap in the agreement that says I'm not allowed to disclose revenue amounts. Even if it's 30 cents per year, it's still free money so whatever.

While I'm at it, I should note: don't spam-click the ads or I'll probably get my account suspended.

It's a good thing I check these things

While I was waiting for my Prob Theory class to start this afternoon, a classmate of mine brought up the subject of the academic proficiency scholarship, noting that he'd finally been credited with his. I checked the website to see if I'd got one myself, but it came up blank.

After the class I headed down to the awards office to see if I hadn't qualified, or if they were still churning through the list or whatever. It turned out that I hadn't got it because my program was still listed as "general studies" rather than indicating that I was in the 4 year honours program. After a quick trip to the records office to correct that oversight, I was awarded the scholarship.

Yay, free money.

Also, the full-time faculty is threatening to go on strike, which might throw a monkey wrench into things. I contacted the convocation office about making a contingency plan in case a regular graduation would be delayed, but it seems that they don't yet know what might happen in that regard, so while I'll be keeping on top of the situation, there isn't much to do at the moment except wait.

Death, lies and...

Taxes! Just worked out my US taxes for 2009 and I'll be getting $1223 from California and $2153 from the Feds for a grand total of $3376.

Like I was mentioning to Tyler the other day, it's like buying yourself a christmas gift and getting all giddy when you unwrap it later. It doesn't make any sense, but it's fun all the same.

Pleasantly surprised

When I was down in the states this past summer I was having a little trouble with cross-border credit card usage, so I took the opportunity to get myself an american credit card. Since credit history is apparently non-transferrable between Canada and the US, it turned out to be a bit of a battle to get one. Thankfully, living in the valley has its perks, one of which being that the local bank branches are quite familiar with well employed people with no local credit history.

To make a long story short, I filled out a form and got a card. The good news is that it was an american credit card. The bad news is that I didn't get to pick which one they gave me. I was aiming for a cash-back card that'd pay out 1% or so, but instead I got a points reward card. (Citi Diamond Preferred Rewards, to be specific)

Now I'm sure you all know as well as I do how these points rewards things work. You spend like a rabid consumer whore for 5 years, and finally after all that time you get to surf through their skymall-esque catalogue of useless consumer trinkets and find you've maybe saved up enough points for half a snuggie.

So, after 6 months or so of owning this card (and maybe only a month of using it, I only got it in august), my morbid curiosity got the best of me, and I decided to check out the points catalogue to see what was what.

The first surprise: their catalogue wasn't some low-rent skymall knock-off. In fact, it wasn't too hard to see that the majority of the catalogue was actually just a front-end for amazon.com!

The second surprise: I somehow managed to rack up roughly $60 worth of points.

Needless to say, I was quite pleased by these two discoveries. After surfing the site for a bit, I settled on buying a pair of harmonicas. I was originally planning to buy just one (a Hohner Special 20 in C) with some money I got for christmas, but with my new found "wealth" I decided to go all out and picked up one in C and one in G.

Of course, the one downside is that they can only ship to the US, so I had them shipped to Palm and hopefully they'll eventually find their way up to me.

This might just change my opinion of points rewards programs... maybe.

Free Money!

I just got myself a $500 academic proficiency scholarship. Woot.

I am full of money

Today marks a very special day for my stock portfolio. I made a bunch of stock shuffles back in August, just before the market really went pear-shaped, and today marks the first day since the bottom that one of my stocks has gone back into the black.

As I type this, my Palm stock is at $8.53, which is just over the buy price of $8.44. Meanwhile the rest of my portfolio is still down 20-60%, which should mean very, very good things for my Palm shares once things start to really bounce back.

It's good to be rich.

To be more specific

Now that I've got my stock slips I can tell you exactly what I've bought and sold, just in case you're so desperate to know what I'm throwing my money away on.

I sold 100 shares of Apple for 173.253, and 70 of Bombardier for 7.93. With these mad moneys I bought 460 shares of Palm at 8.439, 315 of AMD at 6.2082, 80 of Intel at 23.54, and 145 of nVidia at 13.139, then to diversify a bit I picked up 80 of Bank of Nova Scotia at 48.97, and 60 of CIBC at 62.88.

Of course, if you add up all those numbers you probably won't get a zero sum, the remainder has evaporated in commissions. A small price to pay for the gains to be had. That said, if I start trading a bit more I'll probably open up an account at some online brokerage with really cheap fees, but with the volume I'm doing now it doesn't really bother me.

Shuffling moneys

I finally decided it was time to trim back my holdings in Apple to something a bit more reasonable. I rode the stock up through about 1000% of gains and it was starting to completely dominate my portfolio, so today I went in and had a chat with my investment advisor.

I sold down about 90% of my Apple and bought up some Palm, Intel, nVidia and AMD, as well as a few financial company stocks to round things out. My portfolio still isn't the picture of balance and diversity, but it's at least a bit more spread out.

More balancing will have to wait until I have more money to invest.