Liberty Unchained

Since I have decided that I am going to shoot for being a vegabond for a while once I move out, I have started doing some of the things mentioned in “The 4 Hour Work Week” such as:

• Limiting checking my email to twice per day
• Removing unnecessary distraction from my life
• Deciding on a few initial things I want to accomplish within the next six months to a year
• Mapping out what I will need to do those things
• Doing two important things each day to move towards accomplishing them

Required Cashflow
To do what I want to do, I realistically need about $500 per month for myself and another $800+ per month to send back to my family to help make ends meet.

The problem of course, is how exactly does one make money while wandering about and pursuing ones dreams? While $1300 per month is not a lot if you have a day job, coming up with a way to make that without a job while traveling might seem to fall under the “yeah, right” clause for most.

Well, $1300 per month breaks down to just over $40 per day in a 30 day month.

Since I have one month before I head out, I started brainstorming and came up with a couple of initial ideas.

Vegabond work idea #1: Remote sales
The first is simply to get a mobile job where I don’t need to be in any particular place. To that end I went out and picked up a job telemarketing to businesses…which I start this coming monday and will involve two or more hours each morning. If it goes well and I don’t find myself pulling my hair out, I’ll stick with it for at least a while as I build up other things in between wandering and studying things I am interested in.

Vegabond work idea #2: Door to door affiliate sales
Since I plan on wandering about and seeing different places within the states to start with, I decided to take something that works online and adapt it to the outside world…affiliate sales.

I figure as long as I can find something that is of general interest to your average joe, package it properly so as to catch their attention and not end up in the trash immediately, and give them ways to take advantage of the deal offered, then I can simply spend an hour here and there doing door to door affiliate marketing.

No, I’m not going to knock on peoples doors and try to sell product. I don’t much like it when people come knock on my door and try to sell me things…so I won’t do that to others.

However, over the last four days I have done the following:

• Found a product that there is a lot of interest in
• Found an affiliate program for the product
• Created door to door sales materials for the product
• Came up with a clean quick method of distributing over a hundred per hour

Today was my initial test. During the fifteen minutes that the rain let up I delivered my first 45 brochures. If even one results in a sale, I will have made well over $200 per hour for my time.

It is true that I live in a depressed area and that few people have the extra money to buy random things…which is part of why I chose the product that I did.

If you were short on spending cash, what kind of product would you be willing to buy?
How about one that will obviously give you more spending cash?

Now I’m off to work on my second important task for the day…and look forward to see if my initial six hour time investment (research, product selection, sales material creation), my initial cash expenditure ($10.00), and my initial fifteen minute selling experiment (door to door time spent) results in any sales.

It’s kind of funny how things sometimes work out in life.

For many years, I have half-jokingly noted that when I grow up, I want to be a gypsy or a vegabond.

Recently, I happened across two books that have gotten me to seriously consider taking up that idea.

The first, “The Four Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferriss, speaks of using modern technology to make money without working constantly and use that money to follow your dreams, arguing that it is not to wise to grind and save all your life to finally have time to (hopefully) enjoy life once you are old.

A lot of the points he makes are very nicely made and well worth considering. Of course, a lot of people note that the idea of setting up streams of income and then living the high life is merely a dream…but somehow I am thinking that it is more than that, if one is willing to get creative.

Anywise, I found the book to be excellent, though I cannot say that I would recommend it to most people I know as a “how to quit your day job” type book, not because it doesn’t deliver, but because I doubt that most people I know are at a place where they can realistically digest what is being offered.

The second book, “Vegabonding”, by Rolf Potts, covers the idea of walking the world from what many would consider a more down to earth standpoint…owning little and trading off work and travel ( or working in foreign lands while traveling ). Vegabonding is more geared towards conveying the idea of how to be a world traveling vegabond. An excellent read that might give those reading it glimpses of an alternative lifestyle that is rarely ever spoken about here in the states.

As for me, I need to be sending a minimum of $800 per month back home, so I am applying the ideas presented in the 4 hour work week and seeing where they take me. So far, so good.

My interests in technology, frugality, and other areas might just be a perfect blend for taking a leap that I have wanted to take for quite some time…and one month from today will be the perfect time to do so.

I was a bit unsure as to whether or not I wanted to add my thoughts on frugal living and saving money to this site or not.

After some further consideration, I decided that I would create another site for those particular types of articles and return the focus of this site to considerations on my study of law and our insane legal system.

So, going forward, my writings on law, conspiracy, status, and such will be found here while my writings on saving money in order to work less and live more will be located on a different site, which I will link once it is setup.

I started smoking some seventeen years ago when I tried to get a good friend to quit…only to find I kind of enjoyed it myself.

Over the years I have stopped and started again for various reasons, but today I simply can not continue to smoke cigarettes. My reasons, in descending order of importance are as follows:

I don’t condone coercive government
With this most recent tax hike I donate over $4.00 to the cause of government with each pack of cigarettes I buy within the lands claimed by the local/county/state/federal corporate governments. This wasn’t a huge problem historically as I could simply go to a local indian reservation and pick up a pack of cigarettes for $1.80 a pack instead of the $5.50 they wanted in towns.

Now, with the new federal money grab ( popular with those who like to force their religion/personal ideas of good/bad upon others ) which is forcing reservations to donate to the fed as well, the only other option is to buy online.

From a moral standpoint, I simply cannot continue to buy cigarettes ( or other tobacco products) sold in retail/government registered establishments. Doing so is akin to paying for the graft and corruption I see perpetrated by those who call themselves our governments every day willfully.

Health
Most cigarettes are, in fact, bad for ones health.

That being said, I am not convinced that tobacco, unmixed with all of the chemicals that cigarettes are packed with, is all that bad for someone.

Combined with the above, the proper solution for those, like me, who enjoy tobacco, would be to grow my own and smoke it in a pipe. Alas, I don’t hold much hope of being able to grow tobacco ( even in a greenhouse ) up here in rainy washington.

Second Hand Smoke
Just as an aside, if you really believe all the BS about second hand smoke being worse for you than smoking itself, you need to pry some of that propaganda away from your eyes.

Many, many deaths attributed to “smoking” are caused by other things. In fact, most peoples diets are killing them faster than smoking could ever hope to do. Before you start screeching your non-sense at smokers, please…do us all a favor and be sure you aren’t munching down a McBurger while chastising someone else about smoking. Some peoples children…

Addiction / Time
The regular smoking of cigarettes leads to addiction for most people, be it physical, mental, or both. The fact that I get grouchy when I have gone too long without a cigarette tells me that I ought to suffer through the three to four days of headaches and other withdrawal symptoms and quite.

So, how to quit?
Personally, the most effective method I have found to quit smoking is to do the following for a few days:

Start drinking a lot of water
Hungry? Thirsty? Drink some water.

This helps to quickly cleanse the remaining tobacco from your system. Yes, it hurts a bit more, but the agony is over more quickly.

Keep busy
Find a project that you enjoy and keep at it. This keeps ones mind distracted from that nagging in the back of your head telling you that it is time for a cigarette.

Keep your focus
Keep your reasons for quitting in mind, whatever they might be. If you are quitting just because people pester you about it, you should find a way to phrase it so that you are quitting for your own benefit. If you enjoy tobacco and are quitting for reasons which are not your own, the path can be difficult.

The free market
When the price of goods is artificially inflated to benefit some at the expense of others, all people need to bring back parity is to stop buying those goods.

When money grubbing politicians stick an extra tax onto something under the cover of morality to milk one group and give the benefits to their constituency, then fighting back involves not voting at booths, but voting with money.

In many cases, you can defend yourself from stupid laws by abstaining or finding alternatives.

Let them find some other cow to milk. If their “voters” want some more “free” stuff, they can find some other sucker to milk. I’m done.

If you have never given much thought to money, think that the green paper we call money is good money, are unsure of how money works, or confused about why it is that you seem to work more and more, but find it harder and harder to make ends meet, then you might want to check out “Whatever happened to penny candy?”.

It is a short, quick read and will provide a lot of things to think on. You can find my full review on associated content: here.

In addition to the link above, I also carry a copy in my store from time to time.

If you enjoy television, but are looking for possible ways to watch what you want and save a bit of cash, there are quite a few options out there today.

Between your local cable company, satellite tv, renting the shows you want to see, watching them online, and buying entire series of your favorite shows and reselling them, you can save quite a bit even if you live in a tiny little town…provided you have an internet connection.

I compiled a bit of information and put it up as a squidoo lens: Getting satellite and cable television service in Grays Harbor Washington. While it does contain local rental information, the majority of the information within it can be useful anywhere.

When it comes to having a larger amount of cash on hand at the end of each month, saving money by cutting down expenses is more effective than earning more.

Primarily, this is because of the way that the tax system works. If you cut your expenses by a dollar, you increase your cash flow by the same amount as if you had earned at least another dollar and thirty cents.

For more information, check out my new lens: Make more money by learning to live the frugal life.

LibertyUnchained Comics, Roleplaying, Books, and more is a Squidoo lens I setup to showcase and talk about my Bonanzle booth.

I put it together to promote my booth as well as show others how a Squidoo lens can be setup to provide a good deal of useful information concerning ones store.

It is still a bit ugly at the moment as I really should reduce the size of a few of the images in it.

If you have a Bonanzle booth of your own, feel free to add a link to it on the link voting plexo I placed near the bottom of the lens!

Tweaking an item to sell better is a Squidoo lens I recently put together to provide a concrete example of improving a listing in my Bonanzle booth.

In this lens, I cover why I chose to revise the item in question as well as my thought process as I made revisions to each main part of the item in question: the title, the pictures, and the description.

I also made sure to display everything about the item both before and after all revisions were done. The final result is 50 old value comic books - marvel, dc, heroes - you pick, a listing which lets people choose fifty comics of their choice and have them shipped to them for $20.00 + shipping.

Overall, I believe it looks a lot better now and am waiting to see if sales improve or not.

Creating better item descriptions to improve views and sales is a Squidoo lens I put together to talk about how I think of things when I want to improve the sales of various items on my store.

I cover how I view the stages of a sale, from someone searching for things on the internet to viewing your items listing in order to decide if they want to buy from you or not.

I also cover a couple of tools I use when I want to make revisions to an item.