I don’t know why but I always get a little pensive during the holiday season. This is the time when I like to lie down, stare at the ceiling in total silence and reflect on my life for the past year. Holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving tend to amplify my mood. If I’m depressed, then I get more depressed, but if I’m happy, then I’m absolutely beaming with joy. This year, I’m fortunate to have many things to be thankful for. In just the span of 9 months, I feel like my life has finally come together.

For starters, I have become extremely wealthy. No, I didn’t suddenly get rich and I don’t have a huge amount of money. I don’t have a house yet nor do I drive a fancy car. But this is what I do have and why I consider my …

I admit it. I’m guilty. In a previous article I wrote on how to spend money wisely, I stressed how one of the keys to saving money was to avoid spending it altogether. One of the main tenets of the article was to avoid going to the mall for recreation and leisure.

Well today I couldn’t help it. It was an incredibly nice day (Mid 70’s sunny) so my family and I decided to go on a walk at this ritzy outdoor mall nearby our house. For all of you who live in the Bay Area, I went to Santana Row which is a street lined full of expensive boutiques and fancy restaurants.

This was the first time that I had gone shopping in probably about a year, so I was really shocked by the high prices and the abundance of wealth that surrounded me.
The Handbag

My wife …

When my wife and I decided to start our own online business together, many people advised us against the idea.

“You’ll fight all the time!”
“Business and marriage don’t mix!”
“Your business will drive you two apart”
“You and your wife need time to yourselves”

The above quotes were just a sampling of some of the many warnings we were given. But despite all of the contrary opinions, we saw our joint online business venture as a rare opportunity to create something special that we could share. We knew that we had an excellent chance of succeeding because our interests were intimately intertwined. Of all of the people to work with, why not work with someone whom you love and trust implicitly?

Photo By Nattu

Don’t get me wrong, we had more than our fair share of issues, but I think that ultimately, our online business improved our relationship. While I don’t advise …

Last Friday, an engineer in the office complex where I work brutally gunned down the CEO, VP of Operations, and the Head of Human Resources of his company before fleeing the premises. This engineer, named Jing Wu, had recently gotten laid off from his job and decided to take revenge on the executives who were responsible.

Because this tragic triple homicide literally happened within 50 feet of my office, I’ve been thinking a lot these past few days about all of the things that I’ve been taking for granted. I’ve also been trying to place myself in the same situation as Jing Wu to figure out his frame of mind. What possessed him to follow through with such a heinous act? What caused him to become so desperate to think that losing his job meant the end of his life?

Photo By B Hernandez

While I’ll never know the …

Everyone knows that starting and running a small business is glamorous. In the past few weeks alone, I’ve read at least a half a dozen stories ranging from “How I made $1027.53 in a single day!” to “How you can work 4 hours a day and be rich with a small business!”.

Clearly, these guys are living the good life. What’s funny is that these business owners never mention how glamorous their lifestyle really is. They don’t mention the power, the freedom and the luxury that comes along with owning a small business. On second thought, it’s probably because they don’t want to make their readers jealous.

Photo By Ginsnob

Fortunately, I don’t care if I make you envious. I’m going to tell you about all of the “bling bling” that I experience on a day to day basis. For all of you who are new to …

In a previous article entitled how to build wealth by saving money without sacrificing your livelihood, I discussed different ways that my wife and I save money on a day to day basis without drastically affecting our lifestyle. While finding good deals and extending your money is an important aspect of accumulating wealth, deciding the right things to buy and avoiding spending altogether is every bit as crucial. Because spending and saving go hand in hand, the ability to allocate your funds wisely coupled with a proper savings plan will exponentially increase your pool of wealth.

So how does saving money differ from spending money wisely? Saving money is the act of finding the least expensive method of making a purchase that has already been planned. Spending wisely

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pertains to the decision making process that goes along with making a purchase. …

Students often have to make certain sacrifices in order to earn good grades in school. I used to be a model student in both high school and college and I always thought that earning good grades would take me the distance in life. It was only when I graduated did I realize that my emphasis on getting good grades contradicted some of the fundamental principles of entrepreneurship .

First off, I just want to emphasize that the point of this article is NOT to discount the importance of getting good grades in school. My purpose in writing this article is to reflect on specific examples and experiences with my education in both high school and college where getting good grades had a negative impact on my entrepreneurial spirit.

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So how can getting good grades possibly be construed as a negative? How can getting an ‘A’ possibly …

Do you believe that money is the ultimate panacea? Have you ever thought to yourself, “If I just had more money, my life would be so much easier and less worrisome?” Most people tend to think this way until they amass some wealth and the opposite happens. Their life gets harder and more stressful.

During the dotcom boom of the 90’s, my stock portfolio did extremely well. I amassed a small fortune, got greedy and starting investing more and more into the markets. Sometimes I even used margin and other forms of leverage to increase my gains. Because I was risking so much money, I found myself obsessing over ever little up and every little down.

Photo By Kudumomo

I would wake up at 6:00am PST every morning and agonize over my real time stock quotes until 9:00am when I had to go to work. …

When I was a kid, I always wanted to buy what my friends were buying. I remember when the Reebok Pump basketball shoes first came out, all of my friends bought a pair except for me. I never was allowed to buy my own pair because they cost 160 dollars, enough to buy 4 reasonably priced pairs of shoes. I remember playing basketball and not getting picked to play because all of the “Reebok Pump” kids wanted to play on the same team. (I assure you that not getting picked had nothing to do with my basketball skills:))

My point is that your child’s spending habits are very heavily influenced by peers and other societal pressures. Take my Reebok Pumps story as an example. We all wanted the shoes because Reebok did an excellent marketing job. Kids who couldn’t afford the shoes wanted them even …

In a previous article entitled mistakes we made early on with our online store, we outlined 5 early decisions that hindered the growth of our business. While those mistakes slowed us down, none of them were showstoppers by any means.

In this article, I’d like to talk about decisions that nearly put us out of business. Sadly, most of these early choices were made due to greed and human nature. Many of our actions were downright stupid and I’m quite ashamed to even share them with you. I’ll try and start with the dumbest ones first and work my way up.
We Didn’t Accept Credit Cards Directly

Photo By Zach Klein

Have you ever heard of an ecommerce shop that didn’t accept credit cards? Early on, we tried to save money by using Paypal as our sole payment processor. Paypal basically offers 2 different account …

I’m not sure why but our online store attracts a large quantity of customers that are not very web or email savvy. We spend a lot of our time taking orders over the phone because people don’t feel comfortable ordering online or entering their credit card information on a computer.

While a good portion of our customers fall into this category, most of them are extremely courteous and polite. Usually, it’s a joy to walk them through the necessary checkout steps and teach them about the world wide web. In this particular case however, we had one customer who grossly misunderstood some basic concepts regarding email and spam.

Photo By Janet Galore

Customer: Hello? Hello? Hello?

Me: Hello? I can hear you. Can you hear me?

The lady was clearly on a cell phone and was calling in an area of poor reception.

Customer: Hello? Don’t …

Everyday as we slip further and further into recession, I’m hearing more and more complaints from my friends and coworkers about their job security and overall satisfaction in the workplace. The level of concern and panic is very real, even worse than I can remember from the dot com bust of 2002. Most of my friends depend on their day jobs as their primary source of income so they are very afraid of getting laid off. What’s worse is that some of them absolutely hate their line of work but are sticking to it because they need the money.

Lately, I’ve been fed up with listening to their complaints. Why? Because it’s one thing to complain and another thing to do something about it. You people know who you are. Why don’t you start your own little side business to make some extra cash?

Photo By …

Part of the reason most kids in America have no concept of money is because parents don’t share their financial information with them. Most kids have no clue how much their parents make nor do they have any idea how much it costs to survive in the real world. Because this information is not readily available, it is only natural that kids will make assumptions regarding their household finances. Most of the time, their assumptions are grossly incorrect. Next time you have the chance, talk to your kids and check to see if they have the following misconceptions.

Your Kids Think You Are Wealthier Than You Really Are
My dad is an electrical engineer and my mom is a biochemist. When I was growing up, I used to think that their combined income was around 300k a year. Why did I think this? I blame …