Can we just all win the lottery?

Sometimes i feel like rich people could do my dream a million times over, but instead they buy real estate or gaudy jewelry. And the people that want to live on practically nothing are unclogging toilets and serving coffee (hopefully not the same person)

Theres no chance of winning the lottery alone, but hey, if we had 1000 people playing together for $120,000,000 and those 1000 shared if one person won, thats 120,000 per person. I could quit my job and we could all buy land and found our own  ecovillage communties.

Seriously though, there should be an organization that does this.

1 would think 1000 tickets would still be a small decible percentage chance of winning. Odds of winning are posted on the ticket.

I never play the lottery. One time, when it was high, i justified the lack of playing to buy tickets. I reasoned that a guy spends $2 a week. So i bought a years worth in one shot. 100 $1 tickets. I won $0.00

I'd rather see a group stock market club. People pull dollars and buy stocks. Its still gambling but history proves it exceeds inflation over time. Its hard to buy one $20 stock when it costs $7 to buy it and another $7 to sell it. With a club you are spreading the $7 over $1,000 or more.

I win the lottery every year...because I have never play!

That saves me $2 a week. Figuring out how much I have "made" by not playing is pretty easy. I am 44 years old, so since I could have played since I was 18 years old, that is 26 years. At $2 per week, that is just over $2700 I have NOT spent so far. BUT I am just starting to see the benefits of that. Assuming that money is invested at a decent rate of 10% in something, at the end of my lifetime, that $2 a week will equate to 1,965,504.21!! That is almost 2 million dollars!!

The best thing a person can do at a casino is go in and change a dollar bill into quarters at the change machine. You will get the same chingling sound of dropping quarters, but will get 100% back of what you put in! Playing at any game inside is just a waste of your money due to the Law of Big Numbers.

wayne fajkus wrote:
I'd rather see a group stock market club. People pull dollars and buy stocks. Its still gambling but history proves it exceeds inflation over time. Its hard to buy one $20 stock when it costs $7 to buy it and another $7 to sell it. With a club you are spreading the $7 over $1,000 or more.

There are apps now where it doesn't cost that much.

Stockpile allows you to buy fractional shares

Many top stocks are pricey, which makes it hard to get started. Take Amazon, at $1000 a share. At Stockpile, you can buy fractional shares. Buy $50 of Amazon and get 0.05 shares.

Robinhood allows you to save up until you can afford a whole share, and I think might be a little cheaper than Stockpile; and also allows (some of) you to buy crypto-currencies.

We believe that the financial system should help the rest of us, not just the wealthy.

We’ve cut the fat that makes other brokerages costly, like manual account management and hundreds of storefront locations, so we can offer zero commission trading.

I haven't yet used either of these, but I am going to pick one soon.

Want more money? Here is how...do not get all concerned about how much money you are MAKING, pay attention to how much you are SPENDING, and then STOP!

I used to have a breakfast sandwich everyday at work. That was $2.25 per working day, 5 days a week.

Just eliminating that means I save:

$11.25 per Week. (5 Days)
$45 per Month (4 weeks)
$2250 per Year (50 weeks due to vacations)
$22,5000 Per Decade
$900,000 in a Career (40 years)

Just from eliminating something I should not be eating anyway; a $2.25 greasy breakfast sandwich. (Though it could be coffee, etc)

Paul Wheaton did a great write up on this with a fictitious woman called Girt.

There are 2 types of rich people:
Those that made it by using compound interest and sound investments. (A chainsaw can be a truly sound investment for example, it need not be a Manhattan Office Building).
Those that inherited wealth from those that did the first thing.

Travis Johnson wrote:
$11.25 per Week. (5 Days)
$45 per Month (4 weeks)
$2250 per Year (50 weeks due to vacations)
$22,5000 Per Decade
$900,000 in a Career (40 years)

I think there might be an order of magnitude error in that last bit...

My science/math teacher had told us that once in awhile some investment groups would buy every combination of tickets when the lottery prize had accumulated after not being won for several weeks. I'd say that's the only way to stack the deck in your favour when it comes to the lotto, and it's not really achievable with individuals.  

Johnmark Hatfield wrote: Sometimes i feel like rich people could do my dream a million times over, but instead they buy real estate or gaudy jewelry. And the people that want to live on practically nothing are unclogging toilets and serving coffee (hopefully not the same person)  

In this instance it doesn't seem logical to question rich people for the use of their money when the prize money for the lottery comes from the sale of tickets that the average joe decides to spend his money on. :)

---

To combine some ideas of the topic so far, how about this:

Instead of buying lottery tickets, 3 people use 1 year's worth of tickets to invest in a start-up. They have $312 to use.

They have decided their start-up will be mushroom production, as one of them is able to use a portion of a backyard as he rents a basement suite. Though the scenario could easily be selling seedlings in early spring or buying a chainsaw/trimming tools like Travis suggested.

This was a new year's resolution for them to manage their money in a wiser manner, so for January until February they spend their spare time planning and studying their new venture.

On March 1st, the $312 is spent on: 60 one quart jars ($50), 2 spore syringes($25), basic equipment such as small pressure cooker, vinyl gloves, isopropyl alcohol, etc ($100), 1 quart of organic honey ($7) and 50#'s of rye berries($60) and 14 square straw bales ($70)

Using honey+water+4CCs from a spore syringe, a 1 quart liquid culture of oyster mushrooms is created. 1 week later they use an empty syringe to inject their newly made liquid culture into 60 jars of prepared rye berries.

They leave the jars alone for 1 month and comeback to find 55 jars are fully white with mycellium while 5 have unfortunately have been contaminated.

The outdoor portion of the setup is under a tree where it's 90% shaded during the day and a tarp is used to control humidify. The 55 jars are used to inoculate 10 (pasteurized) straws bales

The biological efficiency, how many pounds of straw was converted to mushrooms, was 60% - very good for a first attempt. A square strawbale weighs about 40#. After 2 or 3 flushes (fruiting) of mushrooms over a 3 week span the straw is used up by the mycellium and they have collected 240#'s of oyster mushrooms.

Mushrooms are sold wholesale to restaurants at $4/pound, meaning $960 made during 2.5 months.

Not including the time learning the subject from January-February in their spare time, they each spend 30 hours over 10 weeks during their first grow.

In 2.5 months, each has basically tripled their initial investment. At this point a number of situations could occur:

They stop their venture and use the money to buy lottery tickets for the next 3 years

2 people want to continue the venture while one wants to start his own mushroom production with his brother. 1/3rd of the assets (jars/strawbales/rye) are given to the departing person and both parties go their separate ways.

They all decide to do 2 addition grows over the next 4 months while tripling their assets. They grow 1440#'s of mushrooms total in the next 2 grows, which results in $5760 in sales.

They decide they want a break from mushrooms and try their hand at setting up a garden in the backyard instead. They use the leftover straw as mulch and after some hard work they get a great greens/vegetable crop off. The leftover rye is used to bake bread and the jars&pressure cooker are used for canned produce which is all sold in October.

All 3 decide they've had enough of mushrooms and sell the business to someone else - recouping $200 of the initial investment. They then invest $1160 in a chainsaw, a few tools, advertising and hire out their services for the next 4 months on the weekends @$25/hour. A new venture begins.

Fin.

---

The only time I end up suggesting stocks or mutual funds is when people have no self-control over their money  - it's a way to lock it up in an investment and become untouchable for them. Travis' advice, which is great advice for lots of people struggling with over-spending today, is a starting point, but doesn't need to be the stopping point. $90,000 in 2058 will be worth $33,500 in 2018 money, it's better than spending $90,000 on sandwiches forsure, but imagine if YOU do something tangible with that money each year for the next 40 years. The above write-up was a realistic (but fictitious) 6 month adventure over a few hours per weekend - many more of those could happen over the next 40 years.

So, forget the lotto. There is no other person that can use your time and money more efficiently than you can. Invest in yourself and get an experience out of it. Have a good Friday.  

P.s I wasn't going to post this as it seemed off-topic at first, but then felt compelled to after thinking about "Group-Buying Lottery Tickets" being in the Financial Strategy sub-forum. hehe.

I love the idea of a cooperative to buy 1000 lottery tickets but the problem would be getting 999 other people you could trust if you did  win to share it out  without any disputes

Burra Maluca wrote:

Travis Johnson wrote:
$11.25 per Week. (5 Days)
$45 per Month (4 weeks)
$2250 per Year (50 weeks due to vacations)
$22,5000 Per Decade
$900,000 in a Career (40 years)

I think there might be an order of magnitude error in that last bit...

Yes twitched on one of the zeros as it should have read $90,000, but to my credit, I did not calculate compound interest on investment either.

Jarret Hynd wrote:The only time I end up suggesting stocks or mutual funds is when people have no self-control over their money  - it's a way to lock it up in an investment and become untouchable for them. Travis' advice, which is great advice for lots of people struggling with over-spending today, is a starting point, but doesn't need to be the stopping point. $90,000 in 2058 will be worth $33,500 in 2018 money, it's better than spending $90,000 on sandwiches for sure, but imagine if YOU do something tangible with that money each year for the next 40 years. The above write-up was a realistic (but fictitious) 6 month adventure over a few hours per weekend - many more of those could happen over the next 40 years.

People missed the point, you do not only do this to sandwiches from the local gut truck at work, but apply it to everything in life, a minimalist life if you will. I just showed what removing (1) breakfast sandwich during a career, and what it can do to impact a person's financial life. Now multiply that times a hundred other things, and people can see why I retired at age 42.

It is basically a mindset; I have this little tiny pile of cash, and realize everyone wants a part of it, but by only allowing what is absolutely necessary to be spent, keeps it in place. 99% of the population are trying to strive for a big pile of cash, but it is a worthless venture, because it costs money to make money, but it is a 100% return for every dollar NOT spent. It is always better to not spend than to try and earn more.

What a cynical way to live some people have said. I disagree...

That is because the interesting thing is, compound interest also works with time. The more time a person has, the more they can do for themselves, and with that, they can build, fabricate, and work so that they can spend even less money. Here is a case in point, I need a stick rake to move limbs in a field after some logging was done fouling it. A rake is $3000 used, I am building one for around $100 just because I have time to do so. That $100, and a few days in fabricating time, will save me weeks versus cleaning the area up by hand. It is not that at age 44 I am being lazy, but rather investing my time because that will enable me to have more time to do something else that saves even more time and money. Compound time...

But we all have only 24 hours in a day so I am no better off or worse; it is what is done with those hours that matter.

Jarret Hynd wrote:
The only time I end up suggesting stocks or mutual funds is when people have no self-control over their money  - it's a way to lock it up in an investment and become untouchable for them.

I don't understand this reasoning.  My mutual fund for instance, with the current amount I put in monthly and current interest rate, doubles every three and a half years.  It has nothing to do with having no self-control.  Its a great investment.  As far as being untouchable, money from stocks or mutual funds can be withdrawn any time.  It takes little more time than withdrawing it from your bank.

Jarret Hynd wrote:The only time I end up suggesting stocks or mutual funds is when people have no self-control over their money  - it's a way to lock it up in an investment and become untouchable for them.

I also don't follow this logic.  I recommend mutual funds, 401ks, Roth IRAs and other investment vehicles all the time.  My particular audience is often middle class, full time, white collar millennials.  They have plenty of self control over their money, they just don't know how to save for retirement.  Or they don't realize how early they could retire if they start saving young.  They don't have the free time to start a business with their excess cash (or maybe the know-how or interest).  While they are locking up their money for after age 55 (in the US retirement systems), that's a good place to lock it up.  

The lottery is just a tax on those who choose to pour their money into the lotto system.  If you could buy every combination of ticket numbers, your odds would still be less than 1:1 and you'd probably end up splitting the ticket with some bastard a few states over.

Oh man. I was kinda joking.

The owners do drive me nuts a lot though. I do maintenance for a property manager and just think about the owners while i work sometimes.

Parking garage with 30 spots and 150 a month each spot. Thats more than double what i make and im actually working.  And that doesnt include the 24 apartment units above that are probably 1200 each. I dont know the mortgage or maintenance costs tho. And they own a dozen properties.

I also have things like skill, pride, and a family that wants to see me. Ill take that any day.

2 more years and ill be a real permie.

The lottery is a tax on people that are bad at math.

As the others have mentioned, there is a better way to get rich, invest in yourself.  I got a late start on investing in IRAs and 401ks.  I think I started my first IRA about 20 years ago putting in $25 a month, I'm maxing it out now. Every time I get a pay raise, the bulk of the pay raise goes to retirement funds.  I now also max out my 401k.  I'm not a millionaire yet, but I will be when I retire in 10 years.

I know some people my age that have been playing the lottery for decades and they have nothing to show for it.  Sure once in a while they get a big payday, $2,000 or so, but then they got out and spend it.  They have virtually nothing in their retirement accounts.

Besides investing in your retirement, the other really worthwhile investment is higher education.  People with degrees make more money on average than people without.  A friend and I retired from the military at almost the same time, we were both the same age and had the same technical background, but I had a Bachelors in IT and he had no degree.  Right off the back I got a job making $20,000 a year more than he did.  I'm pretty sure I'm making at least 2x as much now as he does, possibly closer to 3x as much.
Even if whatever you want to do doesn't benefit from having a degree, there is a good chance that just taking some classes on your chosen career  can teach you something so you can make more money at whatever it is.

Bottom line, invest in yourself instead of voluntarily paying extra taxes in the lottery.

I'm kind of proud of working with illegal immigrants and uneducated people though.  I have my BA and ive continued my own track of education because i dont think schools are in it for the education.  My parents and siblings all have their masters or doctorate. Some of my friends and my mentor have their doctorate, but hoop jumping is not the thing for me. I think education doesnt always have to look like a traditional institution where you sell your arms/legs/soul. Especially because people are more dynamic than one vocational path. We are doers, but we are also husbands and fathers and music makers and friends and mentors and gardeners. I think a lot of the world has forgotten that.

Ira's and 401ks wont do much for anyone if the economy crashes. I dont exactly understand how they work. Not in their function or basic form, but how investments increase or get matched. Think about the first coin that was forged or dollar printed. They were traded for a good that gave barterers a more even exchange.  Makes sense. But then money became an abstraction to the product. Taxes, interest, inflation, stocks.  They are kinda fabricated from arbitrary measures and all driven by greed. So now we have created more money and bartering is extrememly rare in the global picture.  Money is even more non material and disconnected from product or service as we use digital forms. From an economic perspective, creating money from thin air devalues the money that exists and doesnt seem like a logical or sustainable action. the modern economy is too convoluted for me. Not that they confuse me, but that they are imperfect, yet create their own systems to correct their imperfections while further complicating and creating other imperfections. That creates an increasingly wobbly card skyscraper for me. Putting my money into them seems like digging into them while im trying to climb out and run away. I dont really ever want to retire, but i do want to stop working (for the man) as soon as possible.

I trust evolution only. Its been tried for billions of years and has stuck to the same rules. You all can save in your investment accounts, ill just save seeds.

Ps: ive never played the lottery nor will ever.

Jarret Hynd wrote:My science/math teacher had told us that once in awhile some investment groups would buy every combination of tickets when the lottery prize had accumulated after not being won for several weeks. I'd say that's the only way to stack the deck in your favour when it comes to the lotto, and it's not really achievable with individuals.  

I would also add that drawings where an investment group can actually do this are few and far between. It did happen at least once back in the 90s:
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/25/us/group-invests-5-million-to-hedge-bets-in-lottery.html

The main problem is that the jackpot has to be significantly more than the odds of winning in order to make a return. For example, if the odds of winning were one in a million, the jackpot would probably need to be $4+ million in order to be worthwhile since A) taxes have to be paid on the winnings, B) there is usually a penalty if you want the jackpot all at once rather than over 20 years, and C) there is a significant risk associated with having to split the jackpot with another entity.

I'm in the middle on higher education.  I definitely benefited from my engineering degree.  I'm not sure a fine arts degree would have helped me as much.  I love technical educations.  Good family supporting jobs while getting your hands a bit dirty.

Yes 401k's and mutual fund investing are a bit esoteric.  But if you are in a position to have some extra cash laying around, what are the options?

Invest in more education/learning for you

Invest in a business venture

Invest in a stock related investment

Buy seeds

Buy land

Buy fast cars and impress the ladies

Put it under the mattress

Buy lottery tickets

And many more options

Any of these may be appropriate for any given person and their current financial standing.  I mostly talk to people with full time and somewhat secure long term jobs.  They may have $5-10k per year that they could invest.  Only a few of the above options make sense and stock investments are a reasonable one.  If I talked to illegal immigrants and uneducated people I'd probably suggest different ones.  If a person has $100k the options are different from if they have $400.

While the Wall Street stuff is a corrupt house of cards, it has the advantage of being propped up by the "system" and the politicians.  Even in the great recession, where stocks lost 1/2 of their value, they came back in the next 10 years and are now higher than ever.  I'm sure it will crash again but it's been doing that for several hundred years.  

The less you understand the investment or the more risk it entails, the less you should invest or the more you should be willing to lose the investment.  Credit default swap leveraged junk bonds - I'd risk $5.  Ford Motor company stock - I'd risk $5000.  Diversified mutual funds - I'd risk half of my retirement.  FDIC insured checking account giving 3% interest - I'd max it out.  Mattress - I'd only risk $500

the immigrants i work with co habitate. I lived with 8 other single people in a house that shared many resources, dumpster dove, biked, bought in season, in bulk, preserved for the winter, and were all around frugal. I lived on 7 to 8k a year and that lifestyle stuck with me. I gained a lot of skills and got a full time job and When my wife was working also we saved 25k to 30k a year. We did this just enough until we could get rid of our private mortgage insurance. We now save a few hundred a month.

I treat money only as a short term item. It could all be worthless tomorrow. Probably not, so i have to respect its temporal worth.

Im the son of a math teacher, and i always had a knack for numbers. I independantly have taken up structural engineering as it pertains to timber framing and have learned about wood species strength and decay etc. this is an education that i hope continues to exist after the purpose goes away for modern structural engineers and architects. An education to design steel i beam and argon gas thermal paned windows doesnt have a lot of long term worth if we no longer are able to create or ship the materials to the construction site.

I was taught this a long time ago: Never count other people's money. It I a hard lesson, but once learned it saves a person a lot of grief. jealousy will get a person no where. Spent your time figuring out how to make money instead of worry about those that have figured out their niche already.

For me, my greatest investment has been a chainsaw. People laugh, but if I buy a chainsaw today, cut wood tomorrow, I will have paid off that $750 chainsaw in a single day...a single 10 cord load of wood. A year later, 600 cord of wood will have been cut, and that paid for saw will have earned me $42,000. That is a darn good investment from having spent $750.

Farm tractors are another great investment. My Grandfather bought a tractor in 1958 and we traded it in for the same money he bought it for in 1999. Factoring in all the work it accomplished in those 41 years would be mind blowing. Again, a great investment.

Of all the things I have read upon here, I think Paul Wheaton's post on Girt was probably the best I read. In a nutshell it showed how modest living made millionares. As I often joke, "I am probably the poorest millionare anyone has ever met."

I am just a dumb sheep farmer though.

Land is probably the best investment (they aren't making any more of it), however it's hard to buy a farm for $25 a month.

However, if you invest in an IRA for $25 (or $50, or $500) a month, eventually you will have quite a bit of money saved up.  One of the cool things about IRAs is that you can take the money out early(without penalty) to buy your first home, so that makes an IRA a great way to save up to buy a farm.

If your employer offers a 401k, many of these allow you to borrow up to $50k, or half the 401k value, whichever is less.  You have to pay it back with interest, but both the payment AND the interest go back into your 401K, so you profit from the interest you pay on this loan instead of some bank.  Most employers that offer a 401k also do some form of matching.  If your employer offers 401k matching and you aren't participating, you're an idiot.  That's like throwing away thousands of dollars a year.  At a minimum you should invest enough to maximize the employer matching funds.

You don't understand the stock market?  No problem, neither do I.  The easiest, and most reliable, way to invest is buy a mutual fund based on the Standard and Poor's 500 (S&P 500), these funds almost always have a very low load (the amount you pay to manage the fund) and historically outperform almost every other fund on the market.

Peter VanDerWal wrote:Land is probably the best investment (they aren't making any more of it).

I am glad you qualified this with the word "Probably" because I hear this a lot and a lot of people have been burned by buying land. Land has to have three things in order for it to have any value at all, much less be a great investment.

Utility
Scarcity
Transferable

In order for land to have some sort of value, it has to be able to be used for something. There are millions of acres of land on this earth that are completely worthless because they cannot currently be used to produce anything of value. There are many factors that go into that, like being too cold, having no rainfall, etc are just some. Sure, a person can buy this land, but it has no value due to the other factors that come into play as well. Unless the land purchased can be converted into something useable in the buyers lifetime, it will be a poor investment. Here is a case in point; my neighbor is squatting on a friend with permission, so they went out and bought an acre of land here in town. Great, but in this town, a person has to have TWO ACRES to build a home. One acre might be a lot in New York City, but here it is too small to even log the wood off, much less do anything else on. She is from Boston so she did not know that, she ASSUMED that she could build a house on that much land. She was rather swindled because what it can be used for is very, very limited.

Part of that is scarcity. Here in Maine, clear cut land abounds and so an acre is worth a mere $300 an acre. YET...as a land clearing contractor, if I take that same land, remove the stumps and brush and make the land tillable, it suddenly jumps to $3400 an acre? Why? Because forestland is 90% of the land base here and tillable land is only 10%. With the Amish and other farm entities here, there is a real scarcity for tillable land. But just having land does not make it valuable.

Finally there is transferability. This is pretty simple, land must be able to be transferred. As a Federal US Taxpayer I own the Washington Monument, but I cannot not sell it, nor could I even sell a portion of it. In that right the Washington Monument has no monetary value, even if it is priceless to a nation symbolically speaking.

...
How does all this relate to permaculture? Greatly!!

Permiculture is about pushing the boundaries. IF a person has little money, they can go out and purchase land that is deemed any of the first two things, but it always has to be transferable...meaning a person has to be able to get a deed for it. By using techniques such as greening the desert with swales, or using underground greenhouses in cold climates, utilizing wetlands, and other non-traditional farming methods, they can convert what is considered cheap, useless land that traditional methods cannot replicate, into something productive. So that may, or may not be a good land investment. No one can predict the future.

Who would ever thought that diamonds would be discovered above Yellowknife making that land suddenly valuable? Or Dubai being a mecca for tourism? As with anything in life, the more risk a person takes, the greater the reward if it comes to fruition. Again, no promise of fruition, but should it, the reward will be great.

Myself, am I rolling the land-based dice? ABSOLUTELY!! For me it is with wetland farming. I have a lot of wet areas on this farm that current laws do not allow me to fully farm, but those laws are based upon archaic methods of farming. By that I mean ditching and draining the wetlands...but that is the last thing I would do, I want that water, I just need to control it! So by using tracked equipment, 2 wheel tractors, and other non-traditional farming methods, I can farm that land and get a far better return per acre then I ever could growing forest. So I push for legislation that will change those archaiac farming laws. But that is not pushing the boundaries of farming all that far. Some Permicultural methods really do. Are they wrong...nope, not at all, but it does increase the probability of failure. For me...a 10th generational farm...I have to be cautious and hedge my bets; stepping out and doing new things, but not too far lest they fail overwhelmingly. For others who have no history, they can go wild and if they fail they just lose some sweat equity and maybe a little money on the land purchase. I say the latter because the value of the place might not be appreciated by an appraiser since they have to look at utility, scarcity and transferable situations.

Make sense? probably not, I often cannot explain myself well. Sorry if I haven't.

So what is the "Value" of land anyway?

For my farm, I bought it for $50,000, with a second and house, gravel pit, slate quarry, saw mill and barn. I also put a new house on it spending $40,000 and $4500 for the barn; so it has an investment cost of $94,500.

Appraised, it has a value of $850,000 dollars for a morgage loan.

The towns we pay tax in (there are 4) appraise it for $244,000.

I value it at $2,200,000 based on what it has for growing forest products, the buildings, equipment, gravel and slate.

Yet if they wanted to build a highway through here and take it by eminent domain, it would have a condemnation value of $650,000.

....

Which figure best represents what my farm is worth?

The reality is, all of them are accurate. EVERYONE looks at value of a property differently, and that is why there are often hurt feelings when a piece of property is appraised. There are just so many variables. Am I way off based at 2.2 million? Not at all because I am looking at an old junk car as if I strip the individual parts off it and sell it on ebay where as the bank is looking at the scrap iron price because they want a quick sale. The towns...they don't care, they just need to pay their bills and use property taxes to do it.

How does this relate to permiculture?

A lot of times it comes into play with barns. I know people that have better barns then their homes, and while that is their choice, do you know what that barn is worth here? A great one with heated horsetalls, a bathroom and a kitchenette is worth $10 a square foot, just as my sheep barn is worth that. An outbuilding, is an outbuilding, is an outbuilding. It comes down to appriasers having something to compare with called "comps" in the industry. That can play havoc on a person, because as I tell my class that I teach on farming, NEVER OVERSPEND ON A BARN, the return on investment is just not there: meet your needs and nothing more.

Still more than one potential buyer has had their hopes dashed by an smaller apprasal then what the seller was asking for. Unable to get a loan, and unwilling for teh seller to come down on the price, that dream was dashed. So knowing all this stuff before hand really clues permiculturists into what is really land economics.

Ron Helwig wrote:
There are apps now where it doesn't cost that much.

I use the free Intuit program Mint.com to track my money and keep myself mostly on budget. A year ago they told me about Stash and I have been using that to play with investing.  Don't have any money to put in, so my investments are tiny.  I really wish these type of apps had been available to me when I was in my 20s.

Winning the lottery is not a good financial strategy.  It's a good way to make the the owner of the lottery rich, but not so much for the investor.
Maybe getting a group of people together inventing and running a new lottery would be the best strategy for making money at one?
It'd have to be illegal, because the people in power would never let regular people run one.......but that's what underground gambling is all about.
I suggest a new forum on here for people who want to gamble, and the smarty pants on here can collect all the profits!

Personally, I went the stock market route.  I never made more than $25 per hour in my life and the last time I made that much was back in 2005 when I left San Jose.  
I invested in one stock at a time, bought a minimum of 1,000 shares each time, and sold it all when I did decide to sell.
I had absolutely zero knowledge of trading stocks other than having read that the way I was doing it was the worst possible way to make money.

So, I started with $5,000 in the account.  I bought 1,000 shares of a company called Adaptec (I worked as a contractor installing voice and data wires there, so I knew the company, and I saw how much work we were doing there, ie., how much business they were doing in a sense).  A week later, I'd made $1,000, and sold it.  I profited about $600 the rest went to Uncle Sam.

So in total I did about a dozen trades of different companies all of them profitable except one.  Ironically I lost money on a fortune 500 company I worked at doing the same contractor kind of work.  It was Applied Materials.  I lost about $2,000 on the one trade, and was stuck in it trying to ride out the loss, but I determined I was better off investing elsewhere at that time (again, all my money (about $20,000 at that time was tied up in that one stock.)).  I got to write the loss off my taxes, so it wasn't a total loss.

The last trade I ever did was in 2001.  I had put about $22,000 into a company called Covel (they took coke dust (coal dust), and invented a binder so that it could be made into pellets that could be burned).  A very odd investment, because every other investment I had made was in Silicon Valley technology stocks.  My mom told me about it.......that's it.  I did no research, I just bit the bullet and went "all in" as the saying goes.
It tanked, and went to a penny stock.
Gulp.  I think at one point (on paper, my $22,000 was worth a few hundred dollars).  Everyone told me to sell, sell, sell.  I said screw it, and held onto it.
Somehow......almost a year later it shot up to $120,000 (thank you epa!!!) and I sold it.  Paid $30,000 to uncle Sam, within a month had put $90,000 down on a $150,000 house in Pollock Pines, CA.  I had almost no savings again.
I overpaid my mortgage payment every two weeks (oh yeah, I went on a bi-monthly payment plan for the mortgage, and paid the house off in 2005) I sold that house for $208,000 in 2008 (it was valued at about $320,000 at its peak in 2005, so I did lose a potential $100,000 but I still did make a profit, which is the bottom line.)

So in 2009 I reinvested in a house in Washington County Utah, and paid cash for it outright.  (One of the fastest growing areas in the nation currently, but not then.  It was a foreclosure for $139,000.  
Zillow says it's worth $275,000 today.

I've only worked four out of the last ten years (depleting all the profit I made in the process.....and now I'm poor again savings wise).  I've not made more than $13.00 per hour at any job I've worked since 2005.
I only pay utilities, and am ultra conservative in my use of those (my electricity bill is $30 per month right now......105F outside right now......)

So I say it all to say if you're going to throw your money away.  Throw it into the stock market, and if you can into land/a home.  I think this is an illustration of hitting the lottery, by not playing the lottery.

or you could just enter a chili cook off with that special recipe of yours eh Scott Tenorman?

Mr. Blacksheep,

For some reason my posts always seem to bring people off topic.

If you read my post in the zombie apocalypse thread.......it all makes sense.  

Bwahahahahaha!



I'd call it Mr. and Mrs. Tenorman chili.......it's finger licking good!

I skipped most of the posts to see who resurrected this old thread.

I feel it is more fun to play with permaculture.

Dear hubby used to spend $5.00 a week until I told him that If he would put that $5.00 in the bank he would have $260 more than he had won.

It is about time to start planning our gardens so let's spend that money on permaculture.

The best pay out is to just go to work…

A lot of people discuss the stock market which averages 7% per year

Real estate is a bit better at 17% per year

But put $50 in your car and derive a $1500 paycheck and you make a staggering 2900% profit margin per week. Heck I am at work now reading Permies making that 2900%.

As Dave Ramsey says, “your job is your ticket to making personal wealth”. It is true, the math is right there to see.