Work From Home! (You Can’t Possibly Think This Is Legit)

May 4, 2012

As a model, the woman in this “work from home” ad is far too hot to actually work from home

(UPDATE, February 2014: The site in question here no longer exists, go figure. The URL now redirects to Build.com, which is a subsidiary of UK building materials giant Wolseley. Build.com is basically an online-only equivalent of Lowe’s or Home Depot.) 

If you still watch conventional old TV, as opposed to Hulu or something similar, you’ve seen the ads. Generally speaking, the further removed you are from the major networks and from primetime, the more the ads promise.

Work at home. Work from home. Make $6000 a month, putting in just a few hours a day. Or if you prefer, make unlimited money. Obviously this is too good to be true, but exactly what are these companies offering beyond a vague promise at financial freedom? What do they require you to sell?

Your humble blogger recently donned his protective headgear and dived into one heavily promoted site representative of the genre, Internet-Wealth-Builder.com, because multiple hyphens in a URL are a sure sign of an upstanding business.

The landing page requires you to enter your name and email address before proceeding. Once you do, you’re led to a different URL, that of something called the Monitium Marketing System (pronounced “moe-nih-tee’-um”, like it matters). A 10½-minute video starts automatically, which makes one wonder whom Monitium is trying to appeal to: people who are too impatient to commute to a job every day, but who are willing to sit through a interminable series of graphics?

Both the video and the supporting copy are relentlessly vague. The company offers

one of the best business models available for today’s entrepreneurs, a business model with low risk, low overhead, great tax advantages…

What’s not to love about that? How about the next 5 words:

and a low start-up investment.

More on that in a moment.

“Membership platform.” “The latest tools.” “Wealth creation blueprint.” Co-op marketing, member support, network of partner companies…fine, but why the secrecy? Will we be selling cat toys? Anthracite coal? Spice racks? Outboard motors? All of the above?

The generalities continue unabated. 4 minutes in, there are still zero details given as to what this business entails. “Win-win situation”. “Leverage”. And the especially verbose “industry-changing proprietary platform.” There’s more layering here than at the Fairbanks Outdoor Beauty Pageant.

The site features a picture of a smiling man whom you’re supposed to contact if you want more details. He has a Broward County, Florida phone number that’s also associated with various limited liability companies, and these include a real estate office that sells foreclosed houses in the adjacent county.
After watching the video, the sales pitch finally begins. You’ll receive a “wealth creation system” for only $50 a month, if you don’t cancel before your 2-week trial expires. The company discloses neither the form nor the content of the wealth creation system. For all you know, you might need a VCR to play it.

To get past the landing page I gave a fake name (Jerry Sandusky) and email address, but figured it’d be prudent to stop short of giving a fake credit card number. Fortunately, I had enough time to read through the company’s privacy policy and terms of service, each of which was more gripping than the 10½ -minute video.

With a little more research, we find out that our “all of the above” guess from a few paragraphs ago wasn’t too far off the mark. We’ll spare you the sausage-making details and the ordeal of reading through the press release, but if you pay the $50 a month, you get to sell and distribute products from Monitium’s “partners”. These include eXfuse, Monitium’s açai berry juice and meal replacement shakes arm; SoZo, which bottles a coffee-based energy drink; Wow Green, a line of cleaning products (bonus: WowGreen.net is currently inaccessible), and something called Smart Media Technologies, which makes a browser toolbar. If you have the aptitude for selling enough of these products to cover your expenses and earn a comfortable living, more power to you. But it seems that spending 40 hours a week in an office or on a job site would be less grueling and offer a better return.

Other network marketing companies – Amway and Avon are the archetypes of the industry – are more blatant about how they operate. But to the marks of the companies that tout the wonders of working from home, “unlimited income” sounds far more appetizing than does “sell cosmetics to your friends”.

The good news is that there are plenty of legitimate, less dramatic ways to work from home. (Just ask the blogger who commutes from his bedroom to his dining room table every morning.) There’s a quiet army of virtual assistants who handle the clerical busywork, data entry etc. that some businesses need to get done but can’t justify hiring a full-time person for. More web developers work at home than in a formal office, for the simple reason that a computer and an internet connection are the sole requirements for the job beyond one’s expertise. And one of the great seismic shifts in recent employment demographics is the movement of advertising art directors and copywriters from in-agency to at home.

Unfortunately for the less industrious among us, working at home requires you to have marketable skills; ones that you could use in the real world if you so chose. The trick, if there is one, is to start with the job and then take it home instead of the other way around. If you really want to, and you plan accordingly, you can indeed work at home and enjoy all the resultant benefits. But if you think that working at home can consist of nothing more than sitting idle and watching the checks roll in…well, you might be sitting idle for a while.

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Filed Under: Bad Examples, Making Smart Choices Tagged With: , ,

Nothing Is Your Fault Or, Student Loans Are Killing Our Economy, Part CXXV

April 25, 2012

 

This picture was taken in 1992, right when the loan balances were at their highest. No word on how much the wedding cost, or if the betrothed paid for it out-of-pocket.

 

We’ve got a fantastic investment idea for you, one that you’re a fool if you don’t take advantage of. It’s a no-brainer, really. Refusing this investment would be like turning down matching funds from your employer for your 401(k). In fact, it’s even more fundamental than that. Refusing this investment would be like turning down a raise. “Do you want more money?” “No, I’m good with less, thanks.” Saying no to this investment would be like simultaneously spitting on the flag and tearing up a Bible. (Note: On the first draft that showed up on the page as “tearing up a Buble”, which would be awesome. Thank you, Mr. Qwerty, for putting the “I” and the “U” keys next to each other and making such comedy possible.)

And if you need more incentive, the President himself does it.

The investment? Student loans! Yes, they come with a mandatory interest payment, but who cares? Investment! In your future! (As if you could have an investment in your past or your present.) Keep repeating buzzwords as necessary!

If you needed any further proof that our economy is doomed and that you should save yourself and your loved ones first, read this quote from the chief executive himself:

We only finished paying off our student loans off about 8 years ago. That wasn’t that long ago. And that wasn’t easy–especially because when we had Malia and Sasha, we’re supposed to be saving up for their college educations, and we’re still paying off our college educations.

To recap: the President of the United States has a B.A. (from Columbia, which is not inexpensive) and a law degree (Harvard, which is less so). He started attending Occidental College in 1979 before transferring, and received the law degree in 1991. He financed at least one of the degrees, and paid back the loans in 2004.

So it took him somewhere between 13 and 25 years to pay off his education. Let’s split the difference and call it 19.

Also, while paying off the loans, he and his wife decided it’d be a good idea to take on more expenses – in the form of a couple of children. Those children, by the way, now attend an elementary/middle school that costs them a combined $64,920 to attend every year (includes hot lunch).

Let’s take the last part of that quote again:

We’re supposed to be saving up for their college educations, and we’re still paying off our college educations.

“We’re supposed to be saving up for their college educations”, as if it’s a moral imperative on a par with “we’re supposed to feed and clothe them.” No one even questions the value of this anymore: going to college is at least as important as anything else you can think of.

The above quotes come from a speech to, appropriately enough, a bunch of college kids (at the University of North Carolina); none of whom spent the previous weekend passing around the bong and sleeping through lectures. President Obama didn’t get into the financial details of his and the First Lady’s loans, but we do know that they took somewhere around 2 decades to pay off.

But that’s OK, because a college degree enables you to earn more money, right? It should be obvious that whatever increase in salary these borrowers enjoyed because of their educational status, it was more than negated by the price of the loan. 19 years is practically half a regular working life, and it’s being spent committed to paying down the debt incurred to ostensibly enrich that life in the first place. How much further could we take this? Would it be OK to work for 42 years, and spend 41 years paying off student loans? Why not? Investment (in your future)!

Some of you wags are bringing up objections. We can hear them already. Let the debunking begin:

1) “He was a law professor. An intellectual. The smartest man alive, in fact. What was he supposed to do, drive a truck?”

So by virtue of being smarter than someone who began working sooner and accumulated no debt in the process, the smart person…incurs obligations that take 2 decades to pay off? Fine, you lead 1-0.

2) “Well, he ended up as President. Therefore incurring student loan debt was the right move.”

By that logic, you can defend everything he did before the 2008 election. Snorting coke while organizing the community? +1. Attending a church presided over by a lunatic preacher with insane opinions? Another +1. Kids, put down the shovel and instead pick up the mirror and the straw. Then join the Westboro Baptist Church. Ticket to success, right there.

Finally, for fairness and balance, let’s include another quote about tertiary education from another man running for president:

When I went to school, we didn’t have a federal student loan program, and I was able to work my way through college and medical school because it wasn’t so expensive.

Never mind. Those are clearly the ramblings of a crazy person.

Seriously, why was college so much cheaper when Ron Paul was studying?

1. College hadn’t been rammed down our throats as mandatory. It was perfectly acceptable to brag that you were going to learn a trade after high school.

2. The government wasn’t involved.

The costs are allowed to skyrocket because you can keep kicking the can down the road. When no one has to pay the bill for decades, why even think about it? The same applies to healthcare: not post-2014 healthcare, but healthcare as it’s currently constituted.  When a 3rd party – the government, an HMO – gets between the provider and the payor, who knows (and who cares) what things cost? It’s not your problem. “My insurance is handling it.” Sure, insurance is supposed to reduce individual risk, but it increases collective risk. Give 100,000 people the same policy, same coverage, same premium and same benefits, and many of them will take risks they wouldn’t have otherwise. At that point, why not smoke and/or ride a motorcycle unhelmeted? Again, it’s not your problem. It’s someone else’s.
Furthermore, if you declare bankruptcy, the courts won’t discharge your student loans. From the lender’s perspective, this is great. If you can fog a mirror and have a Social Security Number, they’ll lend you the money.
But if the government got out of the picture, and the lenders risked losing money, they might start asking tough questions: like, “How will you pay this back with a B.A. in women’s studies?”
Would the government get out of the picture? A lot depends on who’s in charge, and what his own experience is.
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How Are We Still Having This Conversation?

March 28, 2012

 

Speaking of children working in inhumane conditions, how much did he pay the 5-year-old who created that sign?

 

Sometimes, avoiding the first-person voice on this blog is impractical. But we try, and will continue to. Here’s a recent conversation with a Lexus-driving business owner who lives in one of the ritziest gated communities in town, if not the ritziest:

Him: You shop at Walmart? (harrumph)

Yes, he harrumphed. An onomatopoeic expression that sums up his indignation with our choice of grocery purveyor far more effectively than any words could. Our relationship will never be the same.

It doesn’t matter what the low-cost provider is. Could be WinCo, Food4Less, or whichever discounter in your town sells in bulk and doesn’t waste money on décor. But Walmart gets most of the notoriety, and will serve as our example. It’s notorious because it isn’t unionized, and was founded in a part of the country that some people equate with a punchline. Boiled down to their essence, the reasons most commonly given for not buying groceries at Walmart (and passing judgment on those who do) are:

  1. The people who shop there are comically unfashionable, which should make it obvious to you that the food itself is awful.
  2. The company exploits workers, somehow.
  3. It runs mom-and-pop stores out of business.

 

Grocery shopping is not a social statement, or at least it shouldn’t be. It’s simply something you do to avoid starvation.

Given that Walmart has the most employees of any corporation in the United States, and doesn’t keep any of them shackled, is there any chance that maybe the employees don’t feel they’re being exploited?

You could argue that they’re too dumb to know it, as many a wag does. At that point it becomes less about the principals and more about the observer.

Day-to-day buying and selling of goods and services in a relatively free economy like the United States’ is a series of voluntary exchanges. Ideally, the cheapest provider not only ought to win (in a logical sense), but should win (in a moral sense). You take possession of whatever it is you wanted regardless of whom you buy from, but when patronizing the lowest bidder you end up with more money in your pocket. You’d think this is so obvious that it doesn’t warrant mentioning, but it does. Again and again and again. In the same respect, when selling something – and what most of us sell is ourselves, on a regular schedule 5 days a week – we’re looking for the opposite and will only do business with the highest bidder.

When buying anything, and we used groceries because they’re as much of a necessity as anything, you’re welcome to pay a premium for proximity, for perceived quality, or even for guilt. But the sensible thing to do is to buy as cheaply as possible. When operating as a seller (see above), you’re again welcome to offer a discount. But you’d need a compelling reason to. Two jobs with the same requirements, equidistant from your home, but you’d choose the one that pays less? Maybe if your ex-spouse sits by the door at the better-paying one, but it’s hard to think of many other reasons why you’d refuse an opportunity to make more money with no incremental effort.

Back to the buying side. Clearly, the Cheerios and celery at Safeway are of much higher quality than those sold by the Bentonville Bruiser. And the canard about running family businesses out of operation doesn’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny. How Kroger, SuperValu, and the Delhaize Group stores (Food Lion, et al.), each multibillion-dollar concerns, managed to avoid that same accusation is a mystery. The “mom-and-pop” grocery store is, to almost all of us, laughably inapplicable and obsolete. Family-owned food merchants are as much a part of 2012’s landscape as dry goods stores and blacksmiths are.

There are trillions of ways to waste money, and future generations will find further ways that we could never conceive of. But with respect to gambling, smoking, drinking, taking out permanent life insurance, and incurring credit card debt, it’d seem that paying extra just for the sake of paying extra would be an easy one to omit. For many, it isn’t.

Speaking out of self-interest, we can make an argument that that’s good: when other people are willingly spending more than they need to, it makes it easier for the rest of us to make offers on assets. After all, there are now fewer viable bidders in the marketplace. On the other hand, a society full of financial dimwits is a weak one. There are two major reasons why China went from economic wasteland to powerhouse in barely a generation. One is a government policy of economic liberalization, the other is a cultural propensity to bargain and save. (Cf. Mark Steyn, “Culture trumps economics.” When you’ve got both on your side, seismic shifts occur.) Westerners who do dumb things with their money indirectly hurt all of us, their cumulative effects making our society that much weaker.

Maybe the economic truths that we hold to be self-evident, aren’t. Buying an item at Store X when Store Y sells it more cheaply means putting your own financial interest in a position of relative unimportance. Caring about the plight of the non-unionized Walmart employee is a job for…the non-unionized Walmart employee. Respect that, and we won’t tell you to eat your vegetables and straighten your tie.

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