Posted by Tim Stobbs on February 4, 2011
So it’s been a while since I gave you all an update on the book project, Free at 45. So here is where I’m at now: as of this afternoon I will be paying my editor her final installment and picking up the files to upload to the printer. After I get the files I will be doing a last review on the book to ensure I don’t have any last minute edits.
Then I order a review copy of the book from the printer and ensure everything there is all right. Meanwhile I will get to work on the ebook version of the book. I technically have ‘prototype epub’ file at the moment, but it might be not be compatible with the ebook distributor I want to use. So that might be another weekend of hard work redoing the formatting to make it all work. Then after that I’ve got to start to work on the executing the marketing plan.
So all in all, things are moving along nicely and I hopeful I will meet my publication date of Feb 28, 2011. I’m also hoping to offer all of you, my readers, a special promotional offer on the book later this month. So stay tuned and I will release details later this month.
Have a great weekend,
Tim
Posted by Tim Stobbs on February 3, 2011
I finally got my account summaries for three of our accounts last week and I was a little surprised by the investment returns. You see my wife’s RRSP, my RRSP and my LIRA accounts were all setup with the same set of index mutual funds and same asset allocation. As such they should in theory produce the same return. Yet the fact was in 2010, that didn’t happen.
The variation wasn’t huge, in fact the accounts got 8.24%, 8.5% and 9.18% returns which is to be expected since both the RRSP accounts continue to get contributions while the LIRA account does not. So my RRSP gets even contributions all year long while my wife’s RRSP tends to be topped up in the last quarter. Yet here is the interesting part. Guess which account had the highest return? Come on now, give it a second and pick which account in your head.
Ok, are you ready? The account the got the highest return of 9.18% was the LIRA account with no contributions at all. Huh?! Didn’t Robert just have a post about funding flows and how the affects your returns? Shouldn’t putting in money during the last year helped the returns rather than reduce them? Well this is where things get interesting.
Since I can’t contribute to the LIRA account I tend to not look at it closely except during when I usually do my annual rebalancing. Yet last year the funds hadn’t shift that far in that account so I decided to skip rebalancing the LIRA account and rebalance only the RRSP accounts. This has resulted in a slightly overweighting in the Canadian index funds which was the second best performance out of the asset classes. Thus giving in the end the slightly higher return at the end of 2010.
So obviously you don’t need to rebalance every year and in some cases that might even help you out. While this wasn’t my intent, these results are making me consider if I should bother balancing every year or instead use a 5% shift rule where I have to see a drift of at least 5% off the original asset class prior to rebalancing (ie: if I’m trying for 25%, I would only rebalance when it hit either 20 or 30%). So what method do you use to rebalance and how has it worked for you?
Posted by Tim Stobbs on February 2, 2011
So can you really make money at what you really love to do instead of your current job? Well for Gary Vaynerchuk who wrote Crush It!: Why Now Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion
, the answer was: YES! So with some personal branding and social media work Gary managed to take his dad’s liquor store from a $4 million dollar business to a $50 million dollar business in eight years.
Impressive, but how does that help you? Well in this short book, a mere 134 pages, Gary outlines how to utilize your natural talent and passion in order to grow just about any business or even a blog. So regardless of what you are doing selling an actual product or just blogging about what you love he provides a clear cut method to get the most of your social media networks. Including a few tips that I found myself taking notes on since while I like social media I suck at using it (just look at my twitter feed if you don’t believe me).
While some of the advice in the book might strike anyone who has been around the internet as obvious, for example, that social media has dwarfed some other traditional media methods to reach people. He is still honest about running a business is a lot of work. My favorite quote in the book is:
Many are probably just sick of the killer hours and inflexible schedules and demanding bosses often found in the corporate world and think entrepreneurship will somehow be less taxing. I hate to disappoint, but if you’re looking for an easier time here, you’re barking up the wrong tree.
So should you read the book? Well to be honest it really isn’t for everyone, especially if your business has little to no internet exposure. Yet if you do have a Twitter and Facebook account it might be worth reading to get a few ideas on how to use both of them more effectively.
PS: I want to thank Frank Wiginton for bringing this book to my attention a while back with one of his comments.
