Making money with passive income

I haven't written in a while, and I haven't managed any of my passive income stuff for just as long. When the market started going sour, I lost motivation to put effort into my projects. If there's one thing I've learned from this period, is that passive income requires work. It might not be continuous work, but you need to put in quite a bit of effort in it to reap the rewards.

I recently reevaluated all my passive income projects. My portfolio income is pretty much crap now. ING Direct has cut interest a lot, but so has every other bank. Propser was in a quiet period while they register with the SEC to offer a secondary market for loans to be bought, sold, and traded. They came out recently, but now they have to register with the individual states. Most states are already done, but as luck would have it, my state is not done yet. So I still have my 6 loans (I had 7, but the one with the A credit defaulted...go figure). They're active, and my return looks pretty good considering my Sharebuilder stinks right now. I just hope Prosper will allow me to reinvest my funds into more loans.

As for Sharebuilder, most of my dividends were cut. Then I made some poor choices. You should know the stories behind Sirius, Freddie Mac, and Fairpoint Communications. I bought knowing they would go up, then I didn't sell when they did go up. And now I'm holding. I vowed that if I did that again, I would sell. Not so! I bought American Apparel a while back. It nearly doubled with an 80% gain after a few weeks of holding. Did I sell? No. I thought they would continue to go up. Then the market had a dip. Consumer spending went lower. Confidence went down. Now I'm holding. To make matters worse, I went to an American Apparel store and didn't like their stuff. I want to sell now, but I want to at least recover my commissions. Oy.

As for my passive income ventures. Adsense for my blogs is doing nothing for me. I'm not as active with my blogs as other successful bloggers are. I'm not as aggressive either with pushing the marketing for my blogs. Then there is Hubpages. I wrote one hub a while back and left it at that. But after reading some stuff about being more active, I wrote four more hubs this past week. I saw my traffic jump a bit, and may have even made $0.10 (I forgot to add the hubs to my Adsense tracker so not sure if that's where they came from). Anyway, seeing some activity has motivated me, so I aim to have 25 - 50 hubs by the end of the year. Epinions still pays occasionally depending on page views on my reviews. I haven't been able to write any new ones; mainly because I haven't bought much stuff lately. And I notice the biggest paying reviews are on electronics and gear. Not a lot of people look up reviews for knives, which I wrote 3 or 4 reviews on. So I'll write more when I get more stuff.

I really need to devote some time every week to improving my passive income situation. Unless you have a really superior blog and/or product, you really need to put in some work to get the benefit. And even then, the earnings eventually taper off and you have to work a bit again. It's almost cyclical.

Well, I'm still brainstorming a lot of ideas, so I hope to be in a better place in ther near future.

Sirius gets a lifeline!

Liberty Media, owner of DirecTV, has agreed to loan Sirius some money in return for some shares. This should keep Sirius afloat for a bit. We'll see how it goes. Check out the articles at MarketWatch and Washington Post!

Well well well...what are you doing Sirius??

Well, I logged on last night to see find out that Sirius is looking at bankruptcy. So the shares I've been holding has dropped 31% so far. How much did I lose because of this report? $3? Haha. See the thing is I bought these shares pretty cheap. Then I lost 70-80% of the value when news that Sirius will have to work very hard to make 2009's debt obligations. Normally, if you don't think the stock will recover, you sell and take the loss. But I didn't own that much, so the proceeds from the sale would've amounted to nearly nothing. I held on to the shares just in case they do manage their debt well and the stock would recover. Cost of holding was nothing to me as I already lost most of the initial investment.

So now, with my 100 shares at around $7 total, I'm just gonna let it sit and watch it go to zero. That or wait for Charlie Ergen, head of Dish Network, to offer to buy out Sirius again (he made an offer earlier but was rebuffed). So what was the lesson we learned from this experience? Don't just buy a stock because it's cheap and you think it might have potential. Do some research, because there's a reason it's so cheap. But I must say that for a while, it looked like Sirius might pull through with the cross-platform receiver they were receiving and the life-subscription offer before the rate increase. If Ergen hadn't bought some of the debt Sirius owed, making it harder for them to refinance, they might have pulled through.

REVIEW: Really really LOUD!

Bionaire BFH3520 Heater

Product rating: * (out of 5)

Pros: Sleek, thermostat, LED temperature display, 16 hour limit for timer

Cons: VERY VERY LOUD

The Bottom Line:
Since the fan is so loud, I would only recommend this for use in industrial areas. And only if you really need the temperature readout.

Background

I just moved to a new apartment where my main heater is in the kitchen. To keep me warm at night I had small space heater someone gave me, but it had no thermostat or timer, so I usually wind up pretty hot when I wake up. I was out at dinner one night, when I noticed the restaurant was using a Lasko Tower Heater (#5115). After that I knew I wanted to get one. I went out to a hardware store and picked one up, but as I was about to pay, I saw the Bionaire Tower Heater. For some reason, I thought the Bionaire was a better brand so I purchased that instead.

Appearance/Design

The Bionaire Tower Heater looks very sleek with smooth lines and a "pedestal" extension. It came unassembled, but it was very easy to add the extension on the bottom and then put on the base. At the top of the heater, there is a space to put the remote when it's not in use. Pretty thoughtful. The front has a metal covering. The only difference between my model and this one I'm reviewing was that the casing was black.

Operation

The heater was fairly simple to use. I plugged it in and it beeped to acknowledge power. LED display showed the current temp. Pressing the power button would cycle it through HI, LO, AH (Auto-high), AL (Auto-low), and OFF. With HI and LO, you can't set the temperature, but with AH and AL you can. There's also a button to toggle the oscillate mode. Pressing the temperature buttons will bring up the timer where you can tell it to shut off is X amount of hours, or turn on (when pressing while it's off) after X amount of hours up to 16. Pretty cool feature.

Unfortunately, as feature-laden as the heater was, the fan was very loud in operation. I laid in bed wide-eyed wondering to myself how anyone could even use this heater. There was no option to adjust the fan at all! It sounded even louder than my air conditioner fan! After trying to convince myself that it's not really that loud and to try to treat it as white noise, I shut it off and used my old small heater. I returned it the next day for the Lasko.

Conclusion

Great design, lots of features, but execution doomed this product. People won't use this if the fan sounds almost like a kitchen hood vent. I'm very surprised no one at Bionaire thought otherwise and stopped the product from going out.

Recommended: No

See my other reviews at Epinions.com

Reviewing at Epinions

I've been buying quite a few items lately, so I finally have a chance to contribute a bit more at Epinions with my reviews. I'm going to start posting them here as well to see if search engines might pick it up.

Aflac expected to report 20% rise in Q4 earnings

Caught a little blurb on MarketWatch.com:

"Meanwhile, Aflac (AFL), which provides supplemental health and life insurance products, is expected to report a 20% rise in earnings to $1.01 a share in the fourth quarter, according to analysts surveyed by FactSet Research. Its shares gave up 1.1% to $22.97 during the regular session."

With the market down today, this is pretty good news. I expect AFL to jump a bit in after-market trading and tomorrow when their announcement hits the rest of the news outlets. Meanwhile, Sandisk is going to report a loss, while Macy's just announced layoffs and a dividend cut. Boy, this economy stinks.

Amazon beats estimates

So Reuters and the New York Times both have articles for Amazon (AMZN). Amazon posted some nice Q1 numbers late in the day today. Net income is up 9%. AMZN closed at $50.00, and according to the articles, it's already up 11% in after-market trading. Pretty impressive. I'm going to say it'll go up some more as the results hits the rest of the news circuits. This is pretty exciting as the market was actually down today. So Western Digital (WDC) yesterday, and AMZN today. Not all's dark and gloomy.

(Note: I do not own any shares of AMZN. I do own some shares of WDC.)