Minor Rant: What Happened to Effort and Commitment?!

For some reason, as we get closer to the Christmas season with only 2 weeks left before Christmas Day, the collective need for more cash is cropping up around the ‘net. People want cash for Christmas shopping. People want cash to pay down credit card debt racked up because of Christmas shopping. But something very strange is showing up along with this. . . People want the cash, but they don’t want the effort required to obtain the cash, and don’t seem to have the commitment required to get it either. This seriously has me scratching my head!

Pumpkin PureeAround this household, what you can’t pay for with cash, you pay for with effort. My health is not the greatest, so sometimes the effort needed to provide for myself or to earn the cash tires me out quickly. It isn’t fun to head up into the hills to go foraging and then come down to find myself zapped the rest of the day. But that is my reality. This past summer it was made worse by forest fire smoke in the hills. Allergic asthma means trying to filter out as much of that smoke as I can, but on hot Okanagan days, that means breathing in hot air and on a hike, that’s not fun. The long term rewards for my efforts however will last through the winter months and hopefully into the spring when plants start to grow again. We didn’t get as much as we wanted of some plants this year because of a) floods and b) forest fires hampering my breathing, but we got most of what we need for personal hygiene products, medicine, and teas. We broke down 8 large, heavy pumpkins into pumpkin puree to freeze as a winter vegetable, and roasted several tubs of pumpkin seeds which contain an ingredient highly important for managing my condition! My winter nibbles are more than welcome as a result!

BitcoinIn addition to writing about the family foraging lifestyle change, many articles over the course of 2017 related to another venture known as my bitcoin experiment. That experiment now has roughly just over $100 CAD in bitcoin sitting over at Freebitco.in. I can’t spend it just now because miners’ fees have skyrocketed to the point where believe it or not, that amount is just under the fee required to move those funds anywhere! So it sits there earning daily interest instead while I try to add to it. Faucet earnings have tanked with the stratospheric rise of trading value of Bitcoin. But I found another way to earn BTC back in August that I am amazed is having so much trouble getting off the ground!

For people like myself who are computer-savvy, but stamina and energy challenged, this particular venture almost seems like wasting one’s time for an hour while building a potentially-sustainable income! The simplicity of the system blows my mind, but what blows it even more is how difficult some people make it out to be!

For starters, EVERY computer or laptop these days needs antivirus software that’s kept up to date, whether the person is computer-savvy or not. Secondly, most mindful users will now need an anti-porn blocker on whatever browser they have chosen to use on their device. Having Spybot Search and Destroy’s Immunization feature updated on a regular basis further helps block out harmful websites from trying to access one’s machine via advertising. It doesn’t hurt to have Malwarebytes running either. Basically, have your system and your mind protected when you are online. Other tools exist for this task as well, but these are the ones I use.

But when those two things are looked after, the rest of the system seems to boggle people. I’m honestly scratching my head wondering what is so hard about two clicks every 15 seconds for up to an hour every day. So many people want the results of work without the work. When I was younger, it was a joke to tell each other you wanted to find a desk job where you got paid the big bucks to sit around and do nothing. This is almost THAT job! Seriously! You can even do something else while remembering to click that little coloured box and the rectangle “continue” button every 15 seconds. I do that. I have another BTC pay-per-click site up, well, two actually, that I click through while doing my 1hr per day. One of those PTC’s has paid me 3 times already. The second will pay me soon, but took far longer to get there. Having more than one monitor helps with the multitasking because I for one, don’t like sitting around bored. I need to keep my mind busy. To that end I even have a traffic exchange loaded onto my Blackberry Playbook and will click through it’s allotted 50 sites per day as part of my advertising efforts.

These tasks are NOT difficult! What makes them difficult is a combination of mindset, lack of willingness to self-educate and own the tasks at hand, lack of drive or reason to be involved in the first place, lack of commitment, and refusal to work! Clicking every 15 seconds can hardly be classified as work to be honest, but it is something that must be done if that particular system is going to work.

The system in question is InfinityTrafficBoost.

Earn 3.24BTC in JUST 51 Days!

They are a traffic exchange first, and have built a solid earning opportunity for those willing to put in the time and finger-clicking effort. I am looking for four people willing to put in that time every day. Just four. In an age where it seems work causes an allergic reaction, this shouldn’t honestly feel like work. Most people sit and watch ads on TV all the time and never get paid for it. This site pays you! But you have to be willing to put out even just a little work and a little time. One hour per day. Is there anyone out there who thinks they can even do THAT much??? Humour me for 51 days in a row. If after 51 days you don’t want any part of it, you at least completed the experiment.

I’ll keep trying to find these people. When I do, I’ll let everyone know what happened 51 days after that fourth person is found. Just four people doing one hour of clicking every day is all I’m looking for. I had no idea it would be so hard, particularly leading up to Christmas. I thought people would want to finish the season debt-free, but apparently not. At least, not if it even remotely sounds like work.

Black Friday: When is a Deal a Deal?

On my author blog a few years ago, I shared a few articles on managing home finances where I didn’t merely discuss savings or budgeting, but when to tell a deal from a ruse.  Those three articles are as follows:

I shared two examples in Part 3 that had been major learning tools in my children’s lives as they were learning how to manage their own finances as teenagers.

A few years later, I ran across a blatant example this very Black Friday weekend!  Not everything touted as a sale, actually truly is a sale!  Sometimes stores will merely place things in a sale flyer to get your attention, rather than have any real correlation to the sale featured by that flyer.  Other times, sales may offer some reduction in price, but only because prices had risen a month or two prior.  Then there is the issue of research!  In today’s example, it must be understood that many Canadians actually go south of the border to go shopping on Black Friday weekend.  To prevent this loss of customers, Canadian stores have begun offering their own Black Friday deals, door crashers, etc.

Staples is one such store to try keeping Canadian shoppers in Canada!  Unfortunately, Staples did not check all potential competing sources for prices before putting their flyer together, because I made the following discovery:

Their photo products mousepad, ornament, blanket, and puzzle at supposedly “sale” prices, are equal to or just a dollar or two less than the same items in my Cafepress store!  Check out these images:

 

The image to the left is the local Staples flyer for Black Friday weekend.  The image to the right is my comparison drawn between Staples and my store at Cafepress.  This image is taken from a clickable PDF where you can visit the following links:

Mousepads $1 USD more than Black Friday pricing

Ornaments $3+ USD cheaper than Black Friday pricing

Quail Throw blanket $2+ USD more than Black Friday pricing

Quail puzzle similar price USD to Black Friday pricing

The lack of research really shows up when you also consider Cafepress regularly has their own coupon codes across their entire site.  The current site-wide offer: Black Friday Deals! 25% Off* Your Order! Use Code: BLKFRI25 So this makes the above price comparison even more of a goof on Staple’s part!  Canadians can still shop south of the border without ever leaving the comfort of their living rooms!

You’ll hear with various sources that its important to compare apples to apples.  Therefore, I will point out that these prices at these two sites, are using the same feature:  personalized items.  At Cafepress, I have uploaded photos I have taken around my area and turned them into useful products people buy every day in housewares and office supply stores everywhere.  I even have jewelry items personalized for purchase.  Staples doesn’t get into the jewelry, but their photo centre is where their offers on this flyer page are coming from.  You can visit any Staples store, or their online photo centre and create these items to purchase.  You are also able to do that at Cafepress too.  Other online sites also exist for this kind of thing with a friend of mine selling her wares on Zazzle, while I’ve seen local businesses use VistaPrint.

As a consumer in a widely-fluctuating economy, even your Christmas shopping should be shrewdly managed!  Always do your homework before settling on where you’ll spend your holiday budget.  Failure to do so will hoodwink you into believing you got a deal, when in fact the store you shopped at was not really offering a deal at all.