Archive for July, 2009

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Where is the summer going?

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

Can you believe it?  It is already almost the end of July.  The summer has been flying by and with it more and more people are uncertain as to the direction of their future and their summer, their fall, winter and beyond.

The only thing worse than living on a fixed income is living on no income and the best advice I can give at this time is to keep plugging away, ask your friends for any job leads, look for any remaining programs that can offer some support and keep getting those resumes out there.  Overall business, according to one of the Fed regional heads, is suppose to get better in the last quarter of 2009.  As you already know, you still have to live, eat and have a roof over your head for this quarter and it has been brutal for a lot of people.

Some industries are hanging on- specific manufacturing and sales for hot items like the iPod and despite people bad mouthing different fast food companies, overall people are still eating out a lot.  The problem is that you can’t survive living in most places working part time in sales for iPods or selling hamburgers or tacos.

Keep training and if need be, go back to school and get your chops in whatever discipline that you need to stay gainfully employed. 

Here is a question from a reader: “What do you think of nanotechnology still as a category to make money in?  I want to major in it when I go to college in the Fall.”

My answer is that if you have a calling for nanotech, meaning you want to develop machines that work at the microscopic level, have great math and science skills, you should be able to do okay.  By the time you graduate, which should be four years from now, the economy will either be gone, flat or have recovered.  In all three cases there should still be a need to have delivery systems by machines, certain repetitive tasks or other processes working with nano tech.

A lot of people I met who had degrees in the field were doing research because for some of their applications, the actual technology wasn’t there yet.  That still is changing by leaps and bounds, especially if it leads to some very successful private industry profitable ventures.

Do you already know some people in the field?  Make it a point to try and talk to some other students, some professors and some actual designers of the technology to see if that is something that you will want to do for awhile.  I am not going to say for the rest of your life because as we all have seen, things can start to change overnight and throw you for a loop by the next morning.

I would start looking at some of the industries where you can work and see if the possibility of getting an internship with them exists or even a financial grant.   For some of the ‘hot’ industries, you may find some assistance (yes, there are still things like that out there if you keep your head above water and keep looking).  Keep your sense of balance when you hit your studying.  Take a check also to see if it is something that you want to do and if not, see with the courses that you have already taken what are some of the options that you are interested in.  For the most part if you are asking all this up front you already know the answers to those questions.

Also if you are planning on getting college loans or have college loans already, the government does expect you to pay them back.  I have done many a tax return where the client has freaked out because anticipated refunds were held up because the money was required for use as back taxes or reimbursement for student loans and interest that went unpaid for years.

You want to make certain that when you ultimately go into business that any debt or drama from previous summers won’t cause you to have a financial Fall. 

Be safe, healthy and happy, gang.

Footnote to the readers who were e-mailing me about swoopo.  I know, I know, I have been following the scam.  Basically, for people who are auction addicts, there is a site that has horribly leading auctions, iPods for $19.00 but what isn’t clearly understandable is that for every bid you make, you are charged 60 cents.  Wait, it gets better.  You are not allowed to jump bids like in ebay (you know, go from .50 to $5.00).  You need to go up in small incrememnts and for each one, that means that the site owners make .60 on each bid.  Wait, there is also more – once you bid, since the item being sold is from the site and not a true open auction, they add 20 seconds to the timer to let others in and bid.  That means there is no such thing as a last minute auction and that for example on selling an iPhone that you can pick up depending on the model for $299-$400 US, you may spend $600-800 and the site will make thousands.  Bottom line is yes, I would run away from swoopo and let the authorities now.

July 21 2009

Also, please  don’t quite go anywhere yet.  Having some tax issues or tax questions?  Any problems with trying to make it through the financial Depression we are in that is making you depressed?  Please read on.

I am expanding  my practice and taking on new tax clients.  If you are interested in having somebody who is a successful businessman and tax professional with integrity review your returns discretely and see if your tax guy or gal is doing a good or goofy job, please drop me an email or post a comment with your contact information and time.

I have experience in international business, small businesses, partnerships, multi-state tax returns (they can get complicated) and anything else you can probably think of.

I also do business consulting and have ran several businesses (still running a few) myself so you are in good hands.

If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.

Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.

Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

Where is the summer going?

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Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

Three Top Questions I Get Asked and Book Excerpt

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Among the top questions I get asked by posts to the site or e-mail are:

“Kim, can you find me a job?” 

“Kim, why am I paying so much in taxes?” 

and “What should I invest in or start to do to make money?”  

I also get a lot of special needs related questions.  I try to answer those specifically because they tend to be about specific situations.  I also get gaming questions about how to approach playing card games, video games and board games and for that I am working on an inexpensive book to get out to you.  Thanks and please keep the questions coming.  As you can see, search engines don’t have the answer for quite everything 

Today I will try and talk about the first question and give you some of my thoughts and ideas about the economy and ways to get your life back on track.  The advice is free so treat it accordingly.  Keep in mind though that some experts charge a lot to tell you a lot less. 

 The openings I hear about are pretty specific about their skill sets and your best bet would be to take some of the suggestions I have posted in my blog entries (search jobs, no job, etc) and check out my books as well network like crazy.  For the next year it is going to be tough but if you have skill sets that are in demand, you will find work.  You can also take a page from your peers and head back to college and pick up certification or degrees to add a level of cache to your resume that will help open some more doors for you.

Be ready to also take technical skill tests online or on computer based training (CBT) when you apply for jobs.  Unless you are taking a management position, and even those require testing these days depending on the gig, you will need to demonstrate or show proficiency.

Please write your Governor, your Congressional leaders and the President and tell them that they need to get money down to the grass roots level – and get it faster.  There have to be more jobs created similar to the New Deal economics that happened in the 1940s.  We need to get rebuilding our infrastructure (and again if you search my blog you can see I have been ranting for it for over a year now) and we need more projects going to get people working.

Our State governments need to either float more bonds or do something to generate a climate that we can draw inside international investing so we can have the funds put to good use in this country.  I have talked about different cities, like San Diego, and other states, like Texas, trying to steal our movie business from here in California.  We are in an economic climate that I like to call the live bearing fish climate.  That means that we end up eating our own young.

With a limited movie industry (yeah, I know some films are doing gangbusters but a lot of them flop) there are only so many films in development each year and everybody is fighting for the same small piece of pie.  It may be better to change local labor and resource laws so states can attract more industry in.

Getting back to you at the local level, make sure you are keeping some savings because it can be that as you have discovered, a very long time until you are working again.  Keep the pressure on our government officials to revisit their economic plans and have them get programs going to get more money down to the average American so that he or she will be able to survive.

We aren’t getting into a Mad Max- Road Warrior world quite yet with everybody fighting for oil (in our case it would be jobs and food) but it sure feels that way at times.

I still don’t get bizarre business models where I don’t see how people can become profitable even after several years of being in an investment chain.  In this day and age, heck, in any age, you should always look and analyze and deal or job you get into and see if you are really making money with it.  An example which comes to mind are investors in movies.  The investors get the bragging rights that they are a producer and they may get to date the star or lead actor or actress.  Generally films tend to not recapture their initial costs unless you have a great person setting up the deal to insure that you get video or DVD or any media rights before the business gets going.

The ice cold reality of today’s business climate is that you need to take whatever kind of work you are getting and you may as well take a job flipping hamburgers for minimum wage part time rather than working on “spec” (you know, speculation or in the movie business we call it, “free” or “without getting paid”).  Don’t get me wrong, if you have the time to work on spec and the project is something that excites you or you are an actor or actress, great.  For the rest of us though, we need to at least get an ironclad contract so that if a project that we worked on gratis actually takes off, we get some money from it.

Readers of my site and books roll their eyes along with me when I hear of people turning down work because it isn’t one hundred percent of what they are looking for.  You will never get 100% of what you are looking for most of the time – even in a booming economy.  The number one thing if you want to survive the rat race (and we are all squeaking along) is to make sure that you can pay for the cheese.  Take whatever work you can get and keep training yourself for what you really want to do.

For the college graduates out there I encourage you to get working with something if you can’t get a job in your field of choice.  Eventually, things will either get hopelessly worse or significantly better.  Notice that I said eventually.  For the next few years at least I see things as getting worse.  Plan accordingly.

If you know that it will be raining in the next day, you plan to go outside with an umbrella or rain coat, right?  Take the next logical step and plan to save some cash for a rainy day to prepare yourself for times when you aren’t so profitable.

Also make time for yourself each day to try and relax and review what you are doing and what your plans are to see if you are on track.  This is especially important if you have a family, are caring for special needs or just plain overwhelmed in life.

Everybody gets overwhelmed, and for some of us it is when we are working the hardest.  If you look at Michael Jackson you will see all issues aside a tortured soul who was constantly trying to get better at his craft and in entertaining people.  He loved life and people a great deal and even in his life he was battling a lot of health issues.

So don’t ignore your health.  Without it, you will have problems in securing work.

If I were to give an immediate, short term bit of advice to somebody I would say that they should go ahead and learn how to program for the iPod and iTouch and write an application that nobody has done before and sell it for a couple of bucks.  The exercise would be great because it would teach you how to develop something, implement it and then get it to market.

People may not have money to pay their rent but they sure find the bucks to buy their iProducts.

The other critical thing that I want you to rally around is getting manufacturing going.  Try and start a manufacturing business up and get commerce working again here in our back yards.

Thanks for being continual readers and to my international readers, how are things going in your countries?  I have had a few e-mails and been told that things are just as bad elsewhere.  Is that true for you?

Good luck to us all and be safe, healthy, get wealthy, and be happy and wise.

Here is an excerpt from a book I am working on for your pleasure and feedback.  Let me know what you think:

Excerpt from my upcoming book, copyright 2009, Kim Isaac Greenblatt, all rights reserved, no reproduction allowed without explicit approval from the author (that is me, gang).

Strategy and tactics type games are ones where you don’t control the game from a first person point-of-view but instead play the game as a general or overlord controlling armies of soldiers, orcs, or angels. 

Like playing as a general, king or god?  Strategy and tactics type of games are for you.  Strategy is the overall plan for winning a war, a conflict, a business deal.  The tactics are the actual implementation of the strategy – the movement of aircraft, deployment of troops, the beefing up of artillery installations, etc.

 From relatively basic strategy and tactics games likes tic-tac-toe, through complex games like Nim, Checkers and Chess and culminating with Internet team games where you control virtual troops who actually respond to your commands with responses of their own, there is a wide spectrum of choices and things to note when playing any kind of strategy and tactics game.  These games are also known as “Command and Conquer” games after the widely successful series of C & C games that have been on the market for decades.

 Warcraft started off as a C & C type of game and they are also fondly known as “resource building” games.  Without having the energy to power your tools, you cannot build weapons.  Without food for your troops, your armies will starve.  Generally the general who can manage resources (especially limited ones) can prove to be the winner more times than not.

 The levels of complexity are higher than first person shooting games (generally speaking) and the suggestions I am presenting now pretty much apply to everything you can find out there:

 Remember that to win the game, you need to hit your objectives.  It doesn’t matter if you build the biggest army but the timer runs out if you failed to protect the diplomat who was riding in an armored car across the screen in the last three minutes of the round.

 Resources, unless you are cheating, are limited and should be used effectively.

 Tiberium mines (from Command and Conquer) run out of ore, orcs (Warcraft and any other Fantasy resource based game) may empty out a jewel mine.  You may be half way in construction of your super army and find yourself without resources.

 This means that sometimes you really need to think and be creative in resolving your game needs in creative ways.  It may require you to capture enemy bases and start using the enemy’s resources to overcome the enemy.  Sometimes it may mean to sell generators, lower your power needs and fight your battles with fewer resources.  It doesn’t matter as long as you win.

 Learn the Rock, Paper, Scissors approach to winning the game.

 Each game and each level within the game has different units that can defeat other units.  Example:  Tanks defeat infantry, planes defeat tanks, and rocket infantry in large numbers can defeat tanks and planes.  You get the idea.  If there are super weapons that you can develop, see what is it that you can do to get your super weapon going as fast as possible with as minimum effort as possible.  Online team play means that you may not have time to develop super weapons and your best bet may be to do lots of rushing and destroying bases.

 If one player in team play is designated as the one who gets to try to build the super weapons (if they are even allowed), be a good partner and handle the defense and scut work of hit and run tactics to keep the enemy off balance and try to steal as many resources as possible.

 Many a game has been one where a spy or engineer has captured the enemy bases.

 Take the time in simulation or practice games to mix and match different unit types and come up with your own creative formations.  Generally in all video or board games, once a strategy works, it is published on the Internet and the whole world knows it.  Be innovative and you may be rewarded with winning many games and you may have a game level named after you.

 Be wary of some versions, especially early ones, where the game play is too one sided by certain units.  That happens when there isn’t a thorough job of beta testing a new game.  Certain classes of players (an alien race) or certain weapons ( Chinese super tank) may be unbeatable and it may be that the sure fire way to win the game is to always play as that race and have that particular weapon to win any game.

 Players tend to post (read: brag) about what they encounter and you generally find these things out yourself in online play as well as working your way through the different game scenarios.

So what do you think so far?  Post me a comment or drop me an e-mail and let me know what you think.

Also, please  don’t quite go anywhere yet.  Having some tax issues or tax questions?  Any problems with trying to make it through the financial Depression we are in that is making you depressed?  Please read on.

I am expanding  my practice and taking on new tax clients.  If you are interested in having somebody who is a successful businessman and tax professional with integrity review your returns discretely and see if your tax guy or gal is doing a good or goofy job, please drop me an email or post a comment with your contact information and time.

I have experience in international business, small businesses, partnerships, multi-state tax returns (they can get complicated) and anything else you can probably think of.

I also do business consulting and have ran several businesses (still running a few) myself so you are in good hands.

If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.

Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.

Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime. Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

Top Questions I Get Asked and Book Excerpt

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Make Small or Make Big? It Doesn’t Matter Just Make Something

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

I have been harping for at least a year on the benefits of the United States going back to a manufacturing economy and I don’t think it is too late for us to pull it off.  The important things to have to materialize the situation are:

 

  1.  Positive Government Environment – That means that we need tax incentives to jumpstart the battery of our local economies.  Don’t be fooled, we have plenty of talent and creative souls who are waiting to start, or in some cases jump back in, to their respective businesses but for them to be profitable, they will need to have the support of the state and local governments.  As of now, I see that sporadically in some states and sadly, California is lagging behind like the zebra that is falling away from the herd.  That means that lions and predators in the form of unemployment and continued financial Depression can gnaw deeply into our delicate bones.  Internally, some cities like San Diego are making a play to get more motion picture industry business into their area.   We are dropping the ball in the Los Angeles area and we need to not only pass legislation to keep whatever entertainment industry is left but to also get other businesses to start opening shop here in Los Angeles.  I get it that the city is underfunded but we need to get people to stay in the city and county and work legally so they can be taxed at a reasonable rate and they can grow.  At the current time of this entry, businesses are fleeing the Southland and even the US.    Folks, please write our Congressional leaders, the President, the Governors and get them to cut our local laws some slack to encourage business to stay and not flee.  I am not saying that we give away the farm in terms of tax breaks because I love paved highways, clean waterways and running water as much as the next person.  I am saying that we shouldn’t tax the poor businessman or woman to death just to raise revenues.  There are other ways of getting money and we really need to float more bond issues.
  2. Limited Robotics and Local Labor Employment – Most of manufacturing on a large scale, like the automotive business, is done with robots.  That does not employ a heck of a lot of humans so the type of work that we need to generate has to be a mixture of machines and men.  We may not have to go the pure Chinese model route, where you employ only human beings to hand make goods though that is an excellent way of working towards full employment.  The downside is that it isn’t efficient and employers would go broke with salary and hourly payrolls that they wouldn’t need if they had automated production for some of their work.  Pure robotics doesn’t work because they won’t get the average person working and making money.  Another factor when it comes to robotics is that they need servicing and you are going to need to have some local support in case your machines break down.  You will need to invest in local mechanics or have your staff trained so that they can be in a position to handle programming upgrades, repair robotic arms, fix wiring breakdowns and all of the little things that can and do go wrong with repetitive motion.
  3. Remember basic economics, gang.  You need people to make money so they will have it to spend.  That in turn will get people to start hiring and create even more jobs and create an upward spiral instead of the downward one that we are in right now.  Size doesn’t matter in what you are producing – Whether you are making socks by hand, pencils, or high tech circuit boards, the important thing in my mind and heart is for you to be manufacturing something.   Manufacturing of goods produces something in a very physical sense that cannot be stolen virtually and if it is something that people need and can afford at a decent price, you will be set.  There are plenty of companies who have been making pens and pencils for generations and they will continue to do so even though foreign competition has tried to undercut them.  If something is made of good quality, people will pay a little more for it.  In this case, it is worth spending fifty cents apiece for a pen rather than five cents if the pen will last a few months versus crapping out and drying out within two days of usage.  One of the biggest issues with a lot of Chinese made goods is that they were falling apart.  It was profitable to go ahead and buy them only until you realized that you lost money because you had to replace them sooner.  It never is a good idea to go with the lowest bidder if you constantly have to replace products.  It just doesn’t make good financial or common sense.
  4. Good relations with your business community and any chambers of commerce- It pays to make friends with the people in your community.  That is an important part in working with people to get them employed, getting permits to start your business and having the local climate work for you in getting your manufacturing business going rather than have it slog along and having to deal with committees trying to approve this and that for your gig.  You also can’t buy go word of mouth relations with your business because that kind of response spreads and helps the community and the world see what kind of great guy or gal you are in terms of doing business with, working for or buying goods from.  Even though the book value of good will tends to be over-valued, the real life value of the situation is that it makes life easier for you, your clients and the world at large if you are a decent, fair businessperson.
  5. Limited liability insurance if need be with your product.  In today’s society,  people are stupid and greedy.  They will spill a hot cup of coffee on themselves and try to sue the restaurant they bought it at because they scalded their privates.  You will need to protect yourself as best as you can with insurance.  The good news is that policies for certain things run cheap and as long as you have good training, good safety skills – especially if you have heavy machinery, you will be okay.  Take a tip from old factories and post signs that show how many days you had without any accidents.  Encourage and reward good business practices.  You can always punish the people who don’t practice safety by firing them or let them cut their own fingers off.  I am just kidding about the second half of that last sentence.  Seriously, don’t let your staff lose digits or limbs. 
  6. Make sure that you have a clear direction and a business plan for your product.  This should be the number one thing that you should be working on prior to spending a dime on your plans.  Have you looked at all the licensing and reporting requirements?  If there are food packaging issues, have you contacted the appropriate certification agencies or boards?  The last thing you want is to start up a great food manufacturing plant and have it shut down because you didn’t get the appropriate form filled out.  That sucks. 
  7. Hire and train people of all ages.  If people are in good shape, willing to work, don’t discriminate against them because they are too old or too young.  You get experience with older workers who will work without giving you grief and you will get energy and enthusiasm from younger workers who are trying to make a buck to buy their cars and houses.  Well, you probably have older employee candidates who are trying to do the same thing but you know what I am yapping about.  It makes for a better workplace than keeping it cliquish.   There is also a great benefit for getting people across multi-generations and groups excited about your business and your product.  There is a reason you see so many ethnically balanced web sites with people of many colors and religions.  We are all different and want to be respected.  If you can get a person’s respect, they will want to do business with you and purchase your stuff.
  8. Look for places to open up your factory where you can run all night if you have to.  You may have extensive automated machinery that needs to keep running all night with a skeleton crew.  If some of it is a little on the noisy side, look for parts of the community where you won’t hear the echoes of commerce at 3 am.  Where I live it is so quiet we sometimes hear the trains that run literally miles away.  Canyons and valleys echo like crazy.
  9. Use local manpower.  There is a lot of talent in every community.  I may be yakking too much on this but there is no shortage of trained and willing workers here in the United States, here in your state and here in your local city.  Get them working.  They will reward you with good, productive efforts and they will have the money to spend to keep things going in your neighborhoods.
  10. Scream to the world with press releases, Internet entries, celebrity parties, etc that you are doing business.  Get people to know that you are out there and you will make sales.  Your local chambers of commerce should help you get the word out and if you can get local celebrities or sports people to come by (especially for free or if they owe you a favor because you loaned them money when they were first starting out) you can create buzz.  Make sure whatever it is that you are selling works.  If you are making shoes, make sure that they don’t fall apart or off of your feet.  There isn’t a profitable thing about watching an attractive celebrity have her shoes fall apart for your business though the hilarity and Internet Youtube hits will make your company infamous for a few weeks.

 

So get busy.  Keep me posted as to how things are going and we can do this.  Approach your local banks for money with your successfully written business plan and start going with your gig.

 

Hey, don’t go anywhere yet.  Having some tax issues or tax questions?  Any problems with trying to make it through the financial Depression we are in that is making you depressed?  Please read on.

I am expanding  my practice and taking on new tax clients.  If you are interested in having somebody who is a successful businessman and tax professional with integrity review your returns discretely and see if your tax guy or gal is doing a good or goofy job, please drop me an email or post a comment with your contact information and time.

I have experience in international business, small businesses, partnerships, multi-state tax returns (they can get complicated) and anything else you can probably think of.

I also do business consulting and have ran several businesses (still running a few) myself so you are in good hands.

If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.

Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.

Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime. Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

 Make Small or Make Big?  It Doesn’t Matter Just Make Something

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When In Doubt, Gut It Out

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Question from a reader: ”Hello, Kim.  With this current economy, I am getting pretty disgusted and am asking myself if I should stay in business.  From a lifestyle point of view, the income I am making isn’t that great and I am ready for retirement.  Any thoughts?  Thanks.”

 My answer is if you don’t have any pressing health, family or other issues other than disgust, my motto is when in doubt, gut it out.   Your question was a unique enough one to get posted because I don’t generally get a lot of ones where people are making money and are asking if they should stop making it. 

 One of the first things I will ask is have you made sure that your lifestyle can adapt to the new changes in getting less money?  People always think they can live on less but one of the first things that happens when people are out of work is that they use all the free time they have and start spending.  Or they start to travel to all the places they wanted to go to.  Remember that travel costs money and if you are denying yourself the flow from the faucet of your business you may not be able to continue to live in the life style that you have grown accustomed to be use to.

 

Other questions you need to ask yourself are:

Is this feeling of disgust a temporary thing because of the economy or have the years, nay, decades finally increased their toll and you want to stop spinning your feet in the rat race?

How profitable in terms of income  are you in your business that you are willing to walk away from it?  Is there anything that you can do to maybe sell off a portion of it or have a relative help for awhile while you take a break?  If something is a success and you are tired from working on it, that isn’t always a good reason to want to dump it.

Have you ever taken a vacation from work?  If not, re-read my question above and seriously think about taking a break before you sever the cord with your income stream completely.  There are countless people who are basically workaholics and that is another serious problem with the Depression we are in.  These people have had to change gears and for some of them upon being laid off it has added years to their lives but they gotcha is that they still need to have money to take care of themselves and their families.  Mortgages generally don’t pay themselves unless you have paid for the emergency insurance thingies that they sell if you get laid off.

Do you have a list of hobbies or things that you have been dying to do?  If so, that is great and that can be something to keep you busy especially if you are a type A personality – you know, a go-go type of person who has to be doing something all the time.

Once an income stream is shut off, it may be very hard in this current economic Depression to get it back flowing.  You stated that your income that you aren’t making isn’t that great but it is still something and not knowing how much you have in retirement, I have no way of knowing how that is in relation to the rest of your finances.

For example, if you are making $100,000 a year with your business, that may not be great for somebody like Donald Trump or the late Michael Jackson because of the cash burn that they go through but that certainly sounds like good money (unless your expenses are $120,000 a year)  in relation to me.  That leads to the next few questions – and these are the same questions I would have anybody who is ready to retire or get rid of a business think about:

How are you in terms for saving and assets?  Are all your debts paid off or under control?  Are you able to hit your monthly bills or are they at a minimum and your savings and social security can cover it?

How are your loved ones, specifically your spouse or wife if you have one reacting to this?  Is she on board or will she want to tear your throat out after the two of you are home together for more than three days?  The general rule is that after three days with relatives or friends you need to separate for at least a few minutes to regain your center and sense of self.  The theory is also known as the Bad Fish Theory.  It means relationships, as loving and profitable as they are, tend to become stinky like bad halibut after three days so you need to go air yourself (or them) out.  When I took a vacation years ago with my sister to Italy we actually lasted five days in close proximity before we had to take a brief time out to get our batteries recharged.  Don’t get me wrong, some people and couples work super together 24/7.  I am not one of those people normally and most people I know aren’t either.

Now we come to some questions closer to the liquidation or distribution of your business:

Have you talked with a tax professional about what it would take to shut your gig down?

Is your business complicated enough where you still may need to plan a year or two in advance to cover license renewals, tax liability questions and any other issues that managed to keep you in the green for the years and in good graces with the IRS and any respective state, county or city taxing authorities?  A friend of mine discovered to his chagrin when he was trying to close his bagel store that because he was in a corporate entity he needed to keep the corporation open another year to completely insure that he clear his books and close out cleanly.  By staying open the extra year he was on the hook at the time for the California State minimum Corporation tax at that time and that was $800 among other expenses he was still having to deal with.

Make sure that you are going to recapture any depreciation that is outstanding and that you haven’t completely taken.  Remember all those great things in the business you were legally depreciating that helped keep you profitable by lowering your taxable liability down?  Well, you need to account for them when you shut down your business.  Have your accountant or tax guy/gal go through the items especially if you have a lot of items that you were depreciating.  You can expect the IRS and state taxing authorities to look through everything as well when you are closing your business.

Even though it goes without saying, you should tell your suppliers that you are closing the doors.  That is, unless you aren’t selling the business.  If you are selling the business, make sure that the contract states exactly and specifically what gets transferred over and what kind of support you will plan to do and for how long.  A lot of people (some of my tax clients in fact) have sold businesses and gone back on board as employees for their previous company because they still wanted to keep their hand in the business, wanted an income stream and realized that they would be bored in their retirement.

That is another point that I can’t stress enough.  Make sure you are busy.  Some people have tons of hobbies and there aren’t enough hours in the day.  The late television celebrity and former host of the Tonight Show, Steve Allen was a musician, writer and entertainer and he was still cranking out books even after he had “retired”.  Because of medical advances and overall good living conditions, you can expect to have a longer time alive so you will need more money to survive and need to keep busy for many more days.  As sweet as your grandchildren are, they may not want to be around you all the time as they get older and want to start dating..

The expectation for the future in terms of interest rates should be, based on what we have right now, that eventually, they will go up and that we should have some nasty inflation.  For the short term to intermediate term, my humble opinion is that for at least a few years, rates will be low because we have too much unemployment and any more slabs of concrete on the American worker’s back will pretty much bury our financial economy.  I wouldn’t count on high interest rates any more than a lot of millionaires who were living off their interest payments who are now finding that they are needing to dip into their principal to survive.

Make sure that you are adjusting your lifestyle to handle the loss of the income stream.  I cannot stress that enough.  Seriously.  I see too many clients who are back in the credit card trap or have maxed out their lines of credit in order to live a lifestyle that they can’t and shouldn’t be living because they felt that they were denying themselves their entire lives.  You can still live some of your dreams, just go about realizing them prudently.  Take some time and look for ways to cut costs and scale back some of the things that you wanted to do.  You can still scale the Alps or go paragliding through the Amazon but you probably don’t want to do both in the same year and you may want to space out the trips so that you can check your savings in between in case you end up needing the money.

Let us also remember to make sure that our medical insurance and any other policies are set up and in force before we stop working.  The worst thing that can happen is if, God Forbid, you get in an accident and are in trouble that you don’t have enough money in savings to cover your medical bills.  A stay alone in the hospital overnight can run into thousands of dollars and a lot more depending on the kinds of tests that need to be performed.  As we age we normally are not getting healthier and the chances are that sooner or later you may need a doctor visit on an emergency basis, if nothing else to take the shark off your foot from scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef.

Have I hammered home enough information and questions that you should be asking

Whatever you decide, I wish you the best and I am sure there are a lot of my readers who are envious of your situation.  Take care everybody and keep those questions coming in.  Remember that the search engines can get you an answer but it might not be the right one for you.

For those of you who have been curious as well, I am working on my next book.  It is coming along a lot slower than I would have hoped but I have been pretty busy with things lately. 

Remember my bees?  I still have some stragglers and I have moved the worm bins off to the side of the house, sprayed the bins and hopefully that will keep the few remaining stragglers (like 30 of them still) from hanging around.  There must be something in the air or the pollen that makes my property Bee Boulevard (no bee trucks allowed).

Getting back to the book.  This particular one, without going into too much detail yet is in response to readers who want me to get more into gaming again.  This time around I will touch a little on video gaming and board types of recreation.  In this current economy, people are turning to escapism more than ever to things that can completely make them forget their financial woes.  There is a resurgence in board games, home card games and of course, there hasn’t been a slow down in video games.  The lower end games and apps seem to be doing well (think iPod and iTouch downloads as well as the shareware versions of small, tightly written puzzle games and different twists on the FPS (first person shooter) games. 

For college age (or even high school age) readers, if you have the programming chops, you may want to get some development (dev) kits and try your hand at writing video games or apps.  It is a great way to make some passive income stream money and a fantastic calling card to have out there when you are looking for a job. 

I am still also on my manufacturing bandwagon.  If anybody has any manufacturing ideas or cash they want to get started in the Southern California area, please give me a call or drop me a note.  There is plenty of opportunity that is out here.  You don’t have to go to Asia or out of the United States to find places to make quality products inexpensively. 

 July 13, 2009

 Hey, don’t go anywhere yet.  Having some tax issues or tax questions?  Any problems with trying to make it through the financial Depression we are in that is making you depressed?  Please read on.

I am expanding  my practice and taking on new tax clients.  If you are interested in having somebody who is a successful businessman and tax professional with integrity review your returns discretely and see if your tax guy or gal is doing a good or goofy job, please drop me an email or post a comment with your contact information and time.

I have experience in international business, small businesses, partnerships, multi-state tax returns (they can get complicated) and anything else you can probably think of.

I also do business consulting and have ran several businesses (still running a few) myself so you are in good hands.

If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.

Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.

Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime. Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

When In Doubt, Gut It Out

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Sound Business Advice For Our Financial Depression Part 2

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

 Continuing on with our talks about running a business during the financial Depression.  We come to another interesting question:

Should you buy an existing business or start your own?

Let us say that you are either out of work, caring for a person with special needs, or simply looking for a part time gig, one of the fundamental questions you need to ask yourself, is do you want to start your own business or buy an existing one?

Questions you need to answer are: 

1.  Do you want something already in place that had been established like a franchise with a proven track record or formula for success?  If you have the net worth of several million dollars and want to open several of them, McDonald’s franchises generally do well in recession and boom economies.  No matter how bad things get, people who are tired still turn to fast food for snacks and meals for their kids.

On the other hand, maybe you have your own recipe for burgers and fries and want to  do it yourself from scratch to keep costs low.

2.  Franchises are good if you want a blueprint for making a profit.  For the better franchises, depending on marketing conditions, you can make a profit easier than starting something from scratch.  On the other hand, you pay a hefty premium at times back to the company you are franchising from for the service.

If you have the business skills from running somebody else’s business already, you can parlay them into your own job hopefully learning from your previous employer’s mistakes.

3.  If your goal is to make money, the larger franchises already have a track record for generating income.  You can talk to people who own them and they can frankly tell you the nuts and bolts of what they like and what they don’t like about dealing with the parent company.  In some cases it is the fees, in other cases there may be lack of marketing support or in even worse cases, the parent company may accidentally shoot the franchisee in the foot by offering the same product/service through a competing store.

Some supermarket chain stores were carrying Baskin and Robbins ice cream and that did not go well with people who were owning the franchised stores.

4.  If you are an independent person who likes to handle things for him or herself, you could do well starting your business from scratch.  The important thing is to still being able to listen to experts, competitors and the marketplace for making your decisions and trying to keep emotion out of the equation.

5.  If you like to work within a system, you may be better off either buying a franchise or an existing store.  The previous owner should share with you his or her secrets and recipes for success and being profitable.  Just bear in mind that past performance doesn’t always equate to future success, especially in the changing economy that we are all living through now.

 

We also haven’t talked about the issues that come with working for one’s self.  Let me spell it out for you here.

Getting back to something from a few posts ago, don’t forget to have a business plan.  That is your map of how you are going to make money.  It should also be something that you can take to potential lenders to try and get loans from.

In your business plan, you need to have what your start up costs are and what your monthly overhead will be for running the business.  This would be a good time to also take inventory of your monthly personal expenses because if you are planning eventually on quitting your dayjob (or making this new gig your new day job) you should know how much you need to live each month.

Whatever numbers you come up with figure anywhere between 10-35% extra padding should be added to account for emergencies, holiday expenditures and if all things go well, money for expansion of your business.

Let’s take one of my favorite examples of a small business, the remarkably fun and easy to get into business gig of running a portable hot dog cart.  You see them at Home Depots, in front of courthouses at lunch time and dinner, in fact, there is no place you may not have seen one except the inside of a prison but for all I know there are hot dog carts working in there as well.

So back to costs – I have no idea if these numbers are realistic but they are here to serve as an illustration of start up costs:

hot dog cart                           $3000

hot dogs                                 $200

buns                                      $200

condiments                               $75

business license                        $25

resale license                              $0

fliers                                      $100

sodas and chips                      $540

Total Start Up Costs:             $4140

and we will throw in 10% emergency cash of $414 to make our total start up costs a grand total of $4554.

Let’s say you need to replenish the hot dogs, buns, sodas and chips each month.  I know I forgot to add napkins so I can take some of that money from the emergency cash I allocated up front.

Our monthly overhead might include gasoline to drive to a location, say the front of the County Courthouse at lunch time – $300 a month.

Figure $1015 a month for expenses.

That is your monthly forecast for what you will need in the worse scenario cases if you don’t even sell one hot dog.  Are these acceptable costs for you and do you have the money to gut it out for 3-6 months till people see your cart and start realizing what a delicious hot dog really tastes like?  What if the weather is lousy and you are stuck with rain for three months?  How will you make expenses meet in the meantime since hot dogs won’t keep forever and you will have to re-buy new ones?

Again, please be sure to do your research in advance and make sure that the startup costs aren’t too high or that your expenses aren’t going to mushroom out of control and eat up all the profits that you will be making!

Let’s say that you have all the other elements for your imaginary hot dog cart business planned out.  The next thing you need to take into account that should be incorporated into your business plan as well is your competition.

What are you up against in your anticipated marketplace?  If you are selling hot dogs outside the city courthouse are there already three other hot dog vendors out there?  Are all of them swamped at lunch and it looks like that if they had a dozen hot dog carts that they all would still be swamped?

Just because there is a lot of competition that doesn’t mean that you should run away.  On the contrary, that could mean that there is a huge demand for the product or service that you are trying to sell.  You need to recognize though if the competition is seasonal or timely.

People won’t eat dogs (usually) at 7 am in the morning if they are going to work at the courthouse.  They might eat though between 11 am and 2 pm throughout the day.  Maybe between 4-6 pm you might get another bump in business. 

In the toy business, your seasonal sales in the United States are usually from October through December.  In India, you can sell gold for weddings generally before monsoon season.

Are you also different enough from the competition to draw business to you from your competitors?  Maybe you sell kosher hot dogs.  Maybe you have a cute girl in a bikini serving the hot dogs.  What is your edge that will differentiate you or your product from your competition?  Personally, cute bikini girls with good sanitary habits selling kosher hot dogs sounds like a win-win situation to me.  The problem is that I think a lot of people are already on that particular bandwagon and you may run into health ordinance laws about people being half-undressed when they are serving you food.  Health inspectors may not give you their stamp of approval.

By recognizing your competition and incorporating it in your business plan, you show potential investors that you know what you are doing or at least have researched your market enough so that they can see that you are taking yourself seriously and will be treating your job as a business!

Do you like to work long hours?  Can you deal well with aggravation and stress?  If you are planning on starting your own business you need to be able to deal with working ten to twelve hour work days initially.  It will be your business and it will grow or wither away depending on how much time and energy you put in.

If we go back to our hot dog cart example, you can figure that you will move your cart from place to place to try and maximize the amount of hot dogs you can sell in an 8-12 hour period of time.

Let’s say you need to open up your hot dog cart at the courthouse at 11 for the lunch hour rush.  You are there for two hours so plan on getting an additional two hours of preparation each day to get to your first destination.  From 2-4 you travel to some construction sites or to a stadium.  From 4:30-6 pm you go back to the courthouse or stay at the stadium.  Let us say that you move to an outdoor mall by the ocean to get the late night traffic.  You end up staying there till 10 pm.  You then take 1-2 hours to go home, clean up the cart and get ready for tomorrow’s day.

Ask most independent businessmen and you will find that they work up 10-15 hour days easily.  Most of them enjoy what they are doing so initially it isn’t a problem.

But if you want to have a social life and get back to your family, girl friend, boy friend or relative of choice, you need for them to understand that initially they won’t be seeing much of you because you are trying to start your own business.

Maybe that won’t be an issue as long as the income is streaming back in the house.  There are a lot of families that are split between states and some of their kids are living with relatives elsewhere just so they don’t get uprooted.  These are factors that have to be considered when trying to decide if you are going to start your own gig and even in working in general.

A great market for people looking to start businesses is to cater to the special needs community.  If you google “special needs” you will see there are all sorts of products, items for caring, devices to help to different types of blood testing, analysis, you name it, there is something out there for it.

That tells me that there is a large market for products for people with special needs or their caregivers.  A great example is a portable pulley that can carry a person from a bed, to a table or chair, and then lift that person to into a tub or shower.  As caregivers get older, they may not have the upper body strength to lift their charges – or themselves for that matter.  Anything that can make caregivers lives easier and is relatively inexpensive can be a gold mine.

These are the ways that I go about planning, researching and deciding whether I should start up a business or not and they are things you need to look into as well.

Please post your questions, comments, or any nifty devices for lifting people in the boxes down below. 

July 09, 2009

Hey, don’t go anywhere yet.  Having some tax issues or tax questions?  Any problems with trying to make it through the financial Depression we are in that is making you depressed?  Please read on.

I am expanding  my practice and taking on new tax clients.  If you are interested in having somebody who is a successful businessman and tax professional with integrity review your returns discretely and see if your tax guy or gal is doing a good or goofy job, please drop me an email or post a comment with your contact information and time.

I have experience in international business, small businesses, partnerships, multi-state tax returns (they can get complicated) and anything else you can probably think of.

I also do business consulting and have ran several businesses (still running a few) myself so you are in good hands.

If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.

Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.

Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime. Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

Sound Business Advice  For  Our Financial Depression Part 2

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Posted in Business | 7 Comments »

Sound Business Advice For Our Financial Depression Part I

Monday, July 6th, 2009

Sound Business Advice For Out Financial Depression Part I

Question from a reader:”You have made some pretty good comments lately about saving money, Kim.  I want to hear more though about making money.  What are the number one issues that you see that are things that cause problems when we start up a business (especially in this lousy economy where people aren’t spending)?  Thanks!”

My answer is that  it is important to save money and enter a business with the the same business rules that you have in your own daily lives. I realized over the years that most business people (or at least the ones I’ve dealt with their taxes) spend too much money on things that don’t need for their business.  They also in bizarre moves treat their business differently than their own finances and that has always been a source of sadness and amusement to me.  More on this later in the entry.

Let me give you an example from back when I was starting up my comic book delivery business. I had saved money and was ready to buy a cash register for a swap meet, a credit card acceptance machine and the wiring for it, stock up an inventory of every comic book, poster and pog (pogs were basically tiddly winks with cool, trendy designs or licensed characters on them-cheap to make and you could get a high mark-up on them) I could think of. After calming down and realizing that I would go broke in trying to get everything – not to mention to pay monthly fees for the credit card processing service AND a service charge for each transaction, I settled on the following:

1. Preorder of comic books of about $600 of merchandise, trading cards and posters at the retail level so my initial cost with a 50% discount (if it was that high) would be $300.
2. Licenses for selling comic books and working swap meets (my initial source of looking for clients who wanted me to deliver comic books to) – free.
3. Site fees to set up at each week at either Pierce College or the old Winnetka Drive-In swap meets – $10-20 a week for a table so in a month maybe $80.
4. A cash register – $250.

I mentioned this to a family friend and he said, “Why do you need a cash register? What’s wrong with a metal box or even a cigar box?”

He was right! I ended up saving another $250 which I could turn into trading cards which I ended up selling.

I ended up getting clients from the swap meets. Unlike a lot of other people who had jumped into the comic book business to make money, I did not go broke from over-spending with my start-up costs.

In your business, do you really need a plush office? Is image important to what you are selling? If you are an attorney or in marketing, you might need something for potential clients to see that you are serious. You don’t have to go overboard like some Century City attorneys use to and have  marble flown in from Italy and placed in your building!

Think of ways to start up or continue your business that don’t cost money. Be creative. There are plenty of one dollar, 99 cents and inexpensive stores where you can find goods to fill the gap that expensive stores sell. A lot of times the products are the same and you are just paying more for the name recognition from buying it from that particular store.

Little things like that may sound cheap but if you are starting up from scratch, trying to take care of a family of four, have a special needs daughter or any or all of the above, you want to make every penny count. It will pay off down the line as well because other business people will respect you for watching your money. Potential investors will see that you can be trusted with money and won’t blow it all for things that won’t help your business.

Another important point that business people tend to forget:  Nothing beats natural “word of mouth” advertising. The Internet allows people to voice their opinion and tell you about goods and services. Sometimes some of the feedback systems can be manipulated but if you read between the lines, take the time to e-mail people or just ask your friends, you will see that honesty in business is rewarded with repeat business!

If you make a good product or offer a good service, people will come back (if they have the money). Not only is it a great and profitable idea (like the great and powerful Oz?), it will happen without you spending a cent (or euro, etc)! For something that costs more than free, please check out one of my books from my site!

Earlier on in the post I mentioned that there was sadness and humor when I looked at people’s business management and their home finances.  People would be brilliant in their business finances and when it came to their home finances they would be in debt to the tune of thousands in credit card debt and they would be living way beyond their means if their income stream dried up.  I’ve talked about this before with girl friends, boyfriends, husbands, or wives who drain the life from the business in the form of draining the income stream.  You can take all the advice I suggest, use your own knowledge and still have a lot of problems if you don’t get everybody on board in your household to cut back on spending and watch their expenses. 

Look through some of my previous entries and you can see not only some of the celebrity mishaps (like with Michael Jackson and his finances) but with “normal” (whatever that means) people like you and me who buy into the hype and don’t believe in saving or wealth creation.

Wealth creation is setting up income streams, savings and enough money that you can have so much money that you can benefit communities, cities, states, nations and even the world because you have saved up so much money.  I hope all of us get to the point where we are wealthy and not just rich.

One of the ways people think they can get into instant wealth is looking for the next big thing.   I applaud the fact that there is a lot of ingenuity going on and Americans are leaders in the world of invention.  I don’t know though what is going to turn out to be hot or not.  One of the regular  questions I get asked is, “Kim, what kind of business should I get into?  What is the next ‘big thing’?”

If I could predict the next big thing I wouldn’t be consulting, doing taxes, writing, publishing, managing or coding.  I would be doing the next ‘big thing’.

Take a look at the television shows that are showcasing inventors who are coming up with their take on million dollar ideas or things that are labor saving or downright fun and “must have” products.

The cliché answer is unless you really have an innate ability for correctly guessing the fickle public’s taste, don’t bother trying to guess what the public wants next unless you have a lot of money to burn. The number one thing you should be looking at is whether or not you like the business you are wanting to get into.  It is a lot easier to do something you love than something you hate.  Millions of people around the world are doing jobs just to get by.  Here is a chance to do the one thing that you love.

You like to design rooms?  If you think you can make a living with it in the market you are in, go for it.  Bear in mind that you will have to figure out a business plan before you can actually start your business but make sure it is something that you love doing.

You may be pleasantly surprised that your business may turn into the next “big thing” and you will be there waiting to take advantage of it. The number two thing you should consider is what is your realistic income potential.

You may like to design rooms but if everybody else in Trenton, New Jersey or Ankara, Turkey is also interested in designing rooms the chances are that you will have a lot of people offering to design rooms for free.  You will have a hard time paying the bills.  Keep in mind that jobs (full or part-time) that are glamorous, exciting or fun have a lot of people wanting to do them.  Competition is fierce and the market reflects the income you can potentially make accordingly.

If you are starting something brand new, or something yucky (cleaning out people’s sewer lines), you will have less people (depending on the market in your area) in competition so you can forecast a better income stream.

Whatever you decide to do, take the time to make a business plan.  A business plan is a blueprint for what you are planning to do.  It should serve as a written document you can show others,  potential bankers or people with money to invest (if you go that route) that you know what you are doing and know the direction that you will be going towards.

Continuing on from where we left off, let’s say that you’ve decided to do the job of your dreams.  You really enjoy baking things at home. You think you would make a great baker.  Maybe you love to fix things around the house.  You’ve sat down and you have worked out that you think you could make a pretty good living doing this.  The next question you need to ask yourself is, how easy is for me to get started in the business?  This is called the ease of entry into the business or initial starting requirements.

You need to know or be able to research what the requirements are for doing business in the particular field that you want to work in.  A good place to start is to strike up conversations with people who are doing what you are doing and don’t live near your geographical location.  If you want to be a plumber, for example, you may want to talk to one that isn’t close to you so the person won’t feel threatened.  In the case of being a plumber, he (or she) probably won’t feel threatened because there is a specific path of entry into being a plumber – you need to apprentice with an experienced plumber, take classes, etc.

This is the type of information you need to figure out before getting into your business.  Do you have to have any specific licensing requirements for the city, county, state or national level in order to demonstrate competency for what you are planning on doing?  You don’t want a doctor who has had one year of junior college making a diagnosis on you and it is to be expected that different careers or businesses have different requirements.

If you don’t have the requirements now, your mission is to determine what do you need to do to get the skills,how long will it take and will it be worth my while to go through the process to learn the skill or trade or get the street credentials that you might need. 

That dovetails nicely into the next factor for consideration:

Is there a market demand for what you want to do?

You very well may want to be a plumber but if there are already ten plumbers in your area and there aren’t a lot of people, there may not be a lot of work to go around.  On the other hand in a large city like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston or Miami, you may not have to worry about finding work since there are enough people with broken sinks, toilets and water pipes to go around.

Here is where you take stock of your existing skill sets.  If you have always been handy since you were a kid and have read up on how to change pipes, love working with pvc, and already have connections in the industry – you are on your way.  The remaining aspect to this would be to demonstrate reliable work habits – are you on time for your jobs, are you honest, do you go the extra mile for your customers, things like that. 

If on the other hand you hate working with your hands, hate getting dirty and have a fear of dirty water, maybe plumbing isn’t the career choice for you.

Hopefully this answered the question we started with and then some!

July 06 2009

Hey, don’t go anywhere yet.  Having some tax issues or tax questions?  Any problems with trying to make it through the financial Depression we are in that is making you depressed?  Please read on.

I am expanding  my practice and taking on new tax clients.  If you are interested in having somebody who is a successful businessman and tax professional with integrity review your returns discretely and see if your tax guy or gal is doing a good or goofy job, please drop me an email or post a comment with your contact information and time.

I have experience in international business, small businesses, partnerships, multi-state tax returns (they can get complicated) and anything else you can probably think of.

I also do business consulting and have ran several businesses (still running a few) myself so you are in good hands.

If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.

Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.

Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime. Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

Sound Business Advice For Our Financial Depression Part I

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Posted in Business | 3 Comments »

Firecracker Service

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

Happy Fourth of July, gang.  As I write this, I need to talk about how our country was founded on life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and at one point, firecracker customer service.  Now, it seems more like a fizzle.  Have you been on a phone waiting to reach somebody on the other end who turns out not only to be unfamiliar with the type of problem that you are having but also having to wait twelve minutes till you get through?

I don’t know about you guys and gals but I make a note to try to avoid going back and buying products where the support lines are several hours to several days in trying to contact them through voice or e-mail.

It is getting worse instead of better and I blame it all on trying to save money and trying to pigenhole all problems into digetible e-mails or IVR recorded sound bites.  If you are running a business, please take the time to improve your customer service comunications.  Unless you are selling something that absolutely and positively has to be bought from you, if people encounter too many problems with trying to either get a question answered or trying to get a product returned, they just will stop buying from you.  Period.

Businesses forget that in times of financial Depression, they have to beef up the following divisions in their companies:

1.   Research and Development

2.  Sales

3.  Customer Service

Some may ask, why, Kim?  We aren’t going to be profitable if we are wasting money in divisions like that.  That is where they are wrong because when times are tough, customers have less money to spend, they get very discriminating and they tend to spend money on:

1.   The latest and greatest – look at the Apple iTouch series of products.  People may not upgrade to the highest end product but they will buy something if the perception is that it is cutting edge or makes them trendy at a reasonable price.  Even when people don’t have money a lot of them try to look like they do.  Personally, I don’t think people should live beyond their means but that is what makes freedom of choice and capitalism so wonderful, right?

2.  People need to know about your product and with the blaring of commericals, web ads and endless stream of sales pitching going on you need to make certain that people hear about your product one way or another.  Maybe your product is better served by word of mouth.  If so, all the more reason to get your human sales force out there and talking up your product.

3.  Killer customer service will sometimes negate the stigma of higher prices.  If you offer a higher price for your goods or services and people feel that they are getting value from you they will go ahead come back to do business with you if they feel that you can help them with whatever it is you were selling (televisions, food, tax preparation services).

In this day of contraction of businesses and destruction of resources, now more than ever you need to treat every customer as if he or she were your only customer.  I am not talking about the people who want to discount you to below your cost of the product but you should be willing to work with and negotiate – and pleasantly I might add – with your clients.  Competition is fierce in the global markets and money is tight.

It isn’t cliche or stupid in these economic times to try verbally and in text to be a little polite.  Back in the day, if you didn’t say “please” or “thank you” you wouldn’t get the time of day, a parent might hit you (yes, back then, they could get away with that) or if you were in the Old West in America (or even any city today), you might get a bullet in your head.

The coolness of being rude, ignoring people, one upmanship and all that jazz has no place in running a profitable business and frankly in conducting one’s life.  Sure, there are times to be hip and cop an attitude however most of the time people have enough attitude handed to them and the last thing they need is more people yelling at them or being rude. 

Parents must not have learned manners themselves or spend too much time thinking about themselves.  That must be the only way to explain it.  People today and their kids just don’t want to take the time for a little bit of courtesy.  Be honest with yourself, do you like it when people cop an attitude with you? Sometimes your rudeness might be interpreted as unforgivable.

So, before you cop the attitude, take a second and really think about what you want to say.  If you are guilty of not saying please or thank you, you may want to think twice because the next time you deal with a particular clerk, gas station attendant, fast food worker, grocery store person, plumber or Department of Motor Vehicle’s worker, you may find that you are either sent to the back of the line,  your product may be “out of stock”, your order may be “misplaced” etc.

Have a fantastic and safe July 04 2009!

Hey, don’t go anywhere yet.  Having some tax issues or tax questions?  Any problems with trying to make it through the financial Depression we are in that is making you depressed?  Please read on.

I am expanding  my practice and taking on new tax clients.  If you are interested in having somebody who is a successful businessman and tax professional with integrity review your returns discretely and see if your tax guy or gal is doing a good or goofy job, please drop me an email or post a comment with your contact information and time.

I have experience in international business, small businesses, partnerships, multi-state tax returns (they can get complicated) and anything else you can probably think of.

I also do business consulting and have ran several businesses (still running a few) myself so you are in good hands.

If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.

Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.

Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime. Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

Firecracker Service

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Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

Employee Depth

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

It is summer time and the weather is easy as the song goes.  It is also the time for some companies to have staff members take some of their accumulated vacation time as well as dealing with employees who are hit with summer colds.  That is the springboard for today’s topic, namely employee depth.

The hallmark of a good company and great leadership is when business can keep going even if you, the owner or manager, aren’t around.  The method of doing that is making sure that your staff, your employees, are well trained and if need be cross-trained.

Sure, there is a lot of concern about overwhelming staff members or fear that they may not be able to do the job and yes, we are in a financial Depression and they better know how to do the job or they will be replaced but that doesn’t help the day-to-day operations of your business and it can piss off your existing customers who are use to your great service if they suddenly don’t get it.  Even worse is if somebody blows a transaction that could be the loss of a large account or causes a great deal of money to be lost.

The way around the above referenced problems is to take the time and start cross training about half a season before you need the person to handle the coverage and once or twice before the vacations start to let the person do the job of for the person that he or she is suppose to be covering.  Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, due to budget constraints, companies large and small don’t have the time to spare the extra man (or woman) power to take the time to train somebody.  Folks, you need to bite the bullet to do this.  What happens if somebody gets sick while somebody else, the key employee is on vacation?  You end up with horror stories when the person comes back like, “It was chaos without you here.”

As exciting as it may sound to be a Most Valuable Player (you know, like in baseball, where it is abbreviated as MVP) you run the risk that your business may end up in the ground and you will have to say RIP (Rest In Peace).

No person, including yourself should be so valuable that you can’t step away from your business for a few days or weeks.  Fears of being replaced should be replaced with fears of losing customers, fear of having work backed up so high that it will take additional weeks to crawl out from it.  We don’t want to get into situations like that because it makes for a stress inducing work environment.

Don’t forget to document as well.  There are too many firms that rely on “Good Old Harry” who has been with the company for twenty years and knows the operation of the ice cream machine inside and out and knows just how to repair it.  The problem is that “Good Old Harry” probably doesn’t have his knowledge written done and if Harry wins the lottery or retires – or God Forbid, has a stroke from eating too much ice cream-you will be without an ice cream machine server or repairman.

Managers should bite the bullet and pay a little extra for staffers to stay a little late and document what they do or take advantage of downtime in this current Depression to write up and distribute their duties so people can have the knowledge what to do in case they aren’t in the office or store.

While I am on the subject, don’t forget to make a list of what to do in case of emergencies, contact information and phone numbers.  It is common that sometimes a very high level command decision is needed or you need to reach the owner to let him or her know that a bulldozer is outside the store waiting to plow down the store.  Things like that are important to relay to management.

Building employee depth is one of the keynote factors that business people need to stay proftiable and it goes hand in hand with keeping your contingency plans up to date.  As I talked about before in the blog, a contingency plan is what is needed to keep the business going or what to do if you have some kind of catastrophe.

Remember that employee and customer safety are paramount and you might have to be in compliance with local, state or national guidelines for whatever business you are in.  Play it safe and please play it smart.

And keep your staff cross-trained.  You will appreciate it when you are vacationing in Europe or Las Vegas and don’t want to get a call at 3 o’clock in the morning your local time asking what to do because the ice cream machine is broken.

July 03 2009

Hey, don’t go anywhere yet.  Having some tax issues or tax questions?  Any problems with trying to make it through the financial Depression we are in that is making you depressed?  Please read on.

I am expanding  my practice and taking on new tax clients.  If you are interested in having somebody who is a successful businessman and tax professional with integrity review your returns discretely and see if your tax guy or gal is doing a good or goofy job, please drop me an email or post a comment with your contact information and time.

I have experience in international business, small businesses, partnerships, multi-state tax returns (they can get complicated) and anything else you can probably think of.

I also do business consulting and have ran several businesses (still running a few) myself so you are in good hands.

If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.

Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.

Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime. Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

Employee Depth

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Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

Can I Write Off My Swimming Pool For Medical Expenses?

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

This was a question from several readers and I saw it also in Rett Nett (and I have gotten it before from clients):  Paraphrasing  the questions:   “I am using a pool for my bad hips and artificial knees, can I write it off?  The therapy helps.”  “We built a pool  for our special needs daughter’s well being.  Are we able to write off a portion of the building of the pool since she uses it 100% for therapy?   My daughter’s pediatrician says that she will give me a letter stating that it is necessary for her therapy but she was not sure if this is all that is needed to write it off on taxes.”  “My doctor is an expert in hydrotherapeutic techniques and suggests that I build a pool for me and write it off.”

Other questions I have had related to that are:  “I heard that you can deduct a swimming pool through interest payments on a 2nd mortgage if I used the pool on my primary residence.  Is that true?”

The following response is not an answer for your specific tax situation and should only be used as a basic guideline or springboard (appropriate for the pool talk since diving board means we will make a big splash, don’t you think?) for you to do your own research and due diligence. 

My answer is it depends though based on the way the pool was built, the chances are that the way you asked the question that the answer will be no.  Here is why:  If you were going to build the pool mainly for therapy you will need to take into account what would the value be proportionate to the total value of the pool and use by you and the rest of the family.  The IRS can basically state that prior to building the pool you should have taken into account what percentage of the pool will be used for your/ your daughter’s/your parent’s  medical condition and the rest for fun and frolic.  Chances are that it would be disallowed.

The bible for this is Publication 502 and that is available from the IRS website.  You can find out about medical related deductions and it can at least familiarize yourself with the information if you are talking to a tax professional.

What can be deductible is interest paid from a Home Equity Loan (HELOC) or refinance where you used the money exclusively for a home remodel that added value to your property.  A pool qualified for adding value in most places in the country.  If you use the money for buying other things (like a car, a boat, etc) that don’t add value to your primary or secondary residenc, the interest won’t be deductible.

You also need to break the 7.5% limit of your adjusted gross income (AGI) before the deduction can kick in.  Depending on your income level that may or may not be a problem.

The key phrases that you need to read, re-read and then consult with your tax professional on from Pub 502 are:

“Medical expenses are the costs of diagnosis, cure, mitifation, treatment, or prevention of disease, and the costs of treaments affecting any part of the body or function.’

“Medical care expenses must be primarily to alleviate or prevent a physical or mental defect or illness. They do not include expenses that are merely beneficial to general health, such as vitamins or a vacation.”

I am not going to tell you how the doctor should write the letter but it boils down to how the doctor feels the swimming will actually help the person.  In some cases it will work great.  In others, not so much and it won’t make sense to go against the grain by lying or stretching the therapy beyond reasonableness.  There should be a body of supporting medical evidence for the claim.   By that there would have to be a lot of well-known, thorough long-term studies where they found that swimming reverses aging, cures the common cold, etc.  If a doctor doesn’t think that a letter is enough to support a position, he probably deep down doesn’t think the therapy is viable for whatever condition it is prescribed for.  That is just my two cents and opinion.

The mindset of the IRS is that it has to be something that has documented – legitimately – evidence of actually making a person feel better or improving their quality of life. 

If swimming is prescribed as treatment or physical therapy, the cost of constructing a home swimming pool may be partly deductible as a medical expense. That initially sounds like good news, yes?  However, the IRS is likely to question the deductions because of the possibility that the pool may be used for recreation. Nine out of ten times if there is something that is used for recreationally purposes normally, you can be expecting a letter to question the deduction. 

If you can show that the pool is specially equipped to alleviate your condition and is not generally suited for recreation, the IRS will likely allow the deduction. For example, the IRS allowed a deduction for a pool constructed by an osteoarthritis patient. His physician prescribed swimming several times a day as treatment. He built an indoor lap pool with specially designed stairs and a hydrotherapy device. Not the sort of thing for having or holding swimming parties and orgies.  Given these features, the IRS concluded that the pool was specially designed to provide medical treatment.  So, if you are building the pool as a small, specific therapy machine you shouldn’t have any problems (as of now) with a deduction like that.  You of course, need to due your own research, consulting with a doctor and your own due diligence.  Sorry, you can’t pin the decision on me .  I also advocate honesty in all your deductions and expenses.

The IRS looks at deductions that are red flags like this on a case by case basis and they will scrutinize you very closely.

My suggestion though is that if you have a legit deduction or expense, you should take it if you can support your position in it.  Remember that there are other expenses for upkeep of the pool, chlorine, electricity, etc.  and you need to account for that in a real, practical matter and not just try to write it all off .  You will end up in the deep end of the pool with the IRS and it won’t be a fun place to float.  The take away is supporting evidence, a reality check for what you are doing and getting a good tax professional if you aren’t sure what you are doing.

Also—-just because somebody else had a deduction or expense that was allowed doesn’t mean that the same circumstances apply to you.  I have had clients who have tried to tell me that their neighbor took a deduction or expense with something and how come they can’t?  I didn’t do their neighbor’s return so I can’t comment one way or another.

Hope that helps.

July 02 2009

I am expanding  my practice and taking on new tax clients.  If you are interested in having somebody who is a successful businessman and tax professional with integrity review your returns discretely and see if your tax guy or gal is doing a good or goofy job, please drop me an email or post a comment with your contact information and time.

If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.

Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.

Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime. Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

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Posted in Business, special needs | 1 Comment »

Contrarian Investing A Go Go

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Question from a reader:”What is working for you in terms of investing in this market, Kim?”

My answer is that you should be flexible, not locked into one type of investment approach, do your own due diligence and research since I am not a financial advisor.  That being said, what has been working for me is being a contrarian in this particular market at this particular time.  For how much longer this will work and especially after this is published, who knows, but I give it to you freely because there is no magic about it.  It is common sense and you know from my approach in writing profitable and practical books that if you start trying to chase pie and the sky things you might as well be rolling dice or playing cards.  That reminds me that maybe my next book should be on wagering since so many people are looking for quick fixes and I need to remind them to keep their feet on the ground while their heads are in the heavens.

So what is my contrarian investing a go go approach (I have to throw in a little disco, right?).  When I start reading on the Internet, listening to the talking three quarter bodies on the business news cable channels and reading the papers,   If there is a lemmings mentality (lemmings, by the way, are the Northern rodents that have population booms and then disperse along the way and have been attributed in myth to following each other off of cliffs in mass suicide.  There was also a cool video game named Lemmings that I played on multiple platforms including the Amiga back in the dinosaur days of computing), I research the stock or fund that is being touted and I do the opposite of it.

My theory is similar to other investors of the contrarian cloth in this particular market.  We aren’t out of the woods yet and when everybody is saying how great things are or how wonderful a stock is they aren’t looking at the reality of the situation.  The wheel of income needs the American consumer to get back to buying 2/3 of things made – we are the uber-consumers and with people still being laid off there isn’t much of a chance that happening at least for a financial quarter or two and maybe even longer.  Even if a stock is blue chip, golden hued and iron clad, if the investing public gets skittish about the future, the money will flow away from the stocks no matter how highly they are touted.

I also don’t like so much touting because it screams to me that it is pump and dump time.  I have also noticed with minimal supporting evidence that highly touted stocks drop when you would think they should go up after all the hubris and discussion with them.  Go figure unless you start to think that people are selling off their shares or trying to short the thing.

In this economic time, the key things to watch for are change and real earnings.  If companies are earning real cash and not just “losing less money” as so many are, they can be candidates for investing.  They can also be candidates for avoiding or if you feel you need to short something but I really caution that you can get slammed if some bit of market news comes out that the public over-reacts to.

Look at the trend of the stock for the last few years as well if you can and see if there is anything cyclical about the business.  For example, income tax preparation stocks should be peaking now with earnings coming out after tax season and then they should drop until maybe Winter and then they should start going up again in Spring when it is tax time.  At least that is the theory and again, reality may be washing against the rocks of the river of commerce and taking your stock with it these days if you aren’t careful.

I also like to look at volume of shares being sold now because it indicates whether there is any kind of momentum going on, somebody (an institution maybe) is dumping shares or even loading up. 

Even with all this research it can still be just an educated guess especially if some news comes out, a natural disaster or medical finding that can affect the stock.  It won’t help a fast food company in the short term if there is a bad beef scare or if medical findings reveal eating french fries causes you to grow an extra nose on your arm, though that might be an interesting mutation to have I suppose.  You can honk your nose on your elbow or something like that.

Note that my suggestions are for short term plays, for this particular market and you still need to take the time and look at what information is coming out that may be editorial fluff and sift that through fact and downright horse sense.

Good luck and let me know how things are working out.  Have a great day and here is to a wonderful July gang!

July 1, 2009

I am opening up my practice to take on new tax clients.  If you are interested in having somebody who is a successful businessman and tax professional with integrity review your returns discretely and see if your tax guy or gal is doing a good or goofy job, please drop me an email or post a comment with your contact information and time.

If you are looking for a day job, part time work, suggestions for saving money or investing, please check out my book, Practical Money Making, that is listed right after his paragraph in this very post. There are some great suggestions and ways to survive the Depression we are in.

Practical Money Making-Surviving Recession, Layoffs, Credit Problems, Generating Passive Income Streams, Working Full Time or Part Time and Retirement

Interested in any of my books? You may want to make a stop over here. Please click through to purchase my books and some other interesting items that actually ARE on sale.

Have you read my book, “Bad Tax Idea, Good Tax Idea“? Please order it today. The tips inside can save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars! Tax planning should be done year round and not just two weeks into January or later.

Part of all the proceeds from the sales of that book go to Rett Syndrome research. One girl is born with Rett Syndrome worldwide every fifteen minutes. My daughter Arianna has Rett Syndrome and we are working to do all we can to make her life easier and find a cure in her lifetime. Boys born with the Rett gene generally die at birth.

Kim Isaac Greenblatt

Contrarian Investing A Go Go

Tags: , ,
Posted in Business | 4 Comments »

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