Simon’s Notes

Today I finally opened up my mutual fund portfolio. I’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time now, but somehow something always comes up. Now that I’ve done it, I feel very happy and slightly relieved, my only regret was that I didn’t do it sooner.

Some of you might be thinking ‘who cares, whats a few extra months anyway?’ In an earlier post entitled ‘the 8th wonder of the world‘, I talk a bit about compound interest, and I give an example of how wasting a few extra dollars per month could end up costing you thousands of future dollars. A habit that’s so much harder to break than wasting a few extra dollars is the habit of wasting time, procrastination. Yes procrastination can eat more money than your credit card. I’ll use myself as an example.

I’ve been wanting to open my investment portfolio for about two years now, but something always seems to come up (bad excuse, big mistake). I’m being debited on a monthly basis into my investment account for the equivalent of about 70 dollars and I’m sure I can grow my investment at 20% per anum at least. If I wanted to withdraw my investment when I turn 40, that means I would’ve had 20 years to invest if I started 2 years ago, but since I’m only starting now that means I have 18 years left.

So what do we have so far, I’m investing 70 dollars per month at 20% per anum, and I would’ve had 20 years but since I started late I only have 18. If I had started when I should have, which was two years ago, my investment would be at about $220,000 with a total investment of only 16,800 by the time I turn 40. But since I’m only starting now, by the time I’m 40 my investment will have grown to about $145,000 with an investment of about $15,120.

So lets see how much my procrastination has cost me. I would have made $75,000 more by the time I’m 40 if I had started 2 years ago, now minus the difference in how much I put in, it comes down to about $73,320. So in the last 2 years I’ve thrown away 73,320 dollars, thats 36,600 dollars a year, 3,050 dollars a month, or 100 dollars a day. If I decide to wait and take out when I’m 50, I will have thrown away 722 dollars a day for the past 2 years. And if I decide to wait even longer till I’m 60, my ‘throw away’ expense for the past 2 years will amount to 5,416 dollars every day, I just spent the last 2 years throwing away 3,900,000 future dollars. Now I’m sad.

Procrastination is expensive.

Simon

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Filed under: Money and Finances by Simon Rodrigues
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I’m generally quite an avid reader of JohnChow.com and for the most part I agree with his point of view. Yesterday I was a reading a post where he talks about a new blog that he’s thinking of starting as a sort of personal challenge. John wants to start from scratch, without telling anyone about it, and he wants to see how fast he can make it successful. I think this is a great idea as a lot of new bloggers find themselves limited to reading some lengthy and jargon filled posts when they’re starting out, but all they really want is for someone to just show them the way, and once John reveals his blog he will also reveal his steps to success. So thats something to look forward to.

That aside, this is not what this post is about. In the post where John is explaining a bit about his new project, he says that he’s going to pick a somewhat less popular niche but one that he’s familiar with, which is fine, but then he goes on to say that he can’t understand why bloggers would start blogs on something like making money online if they’ve never made a cent. At first glance this might make some sense, even if it isn’t what you want to hear, but I have an objection.

Firstly, I’d like to clarify that I’m not writing this as a personal defense, I think its pretty obvious that my blog is about business & money, and not about making money online, even though I do write about it sometimes. I’m writing as a blogger that maybe has a different opinion to John as to what a blog truly is.

Blog is short for web log. My impression of a log has always been a sort of journal or a place where you record important information, like a ships log, or maybe a personal diet log. So to get straight to the point, if I wanted to make some money online I might consider starting a blog to be able to log my progress, and my experiences and lessons. Does that make sense? A blog is not a place to show off how much you know about something, it is foremost a personal log where you can share your experiences with others.

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t blog about something you know, but more importantly you should blog about something that interests you. That, in my opinion is what will attract readers. I enjoy reading established blogs such as JohnChow, Problogger, and Shoemoney, but sometimes I get more satisfaction by reading the little blogs, or maybe the smaller blogs that are starting to have some success, because I can relate more to them.

If you had to be an expert in order to blog, then kiss goodbye to Simon’s Money Notes.

Simon

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Filed under: Blogging, Make Money Online by Simon Rodrigues
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