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bigskydreaming · 4 years ago

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Hey friendly reminder that I honestly do not want anyone to follow me unless they actually WANT to which means they are free to unfollow, refollow, leave and come back and leave again or WHATEVER as many times as they want, for any reason whatsoever. Including if my posting styles of the moment get to be too much for them or are not to their liking, etc?

BUT I have been seeing a surge in comments in notes and stuff on various posts of mine about the length of my posts or the rambling of my posts and like....I know? This is not new information to me? But I post the way I post at any given time based on the resources I have at any given time and the fact that its often a matter of I can post a long rambling post or I can make no post at all.

Like, I really truly do not like going into specifics about my situation more than necessary or when not necessary, because like, my situation is boring to me, I don’t particularly care to dwell on it any more than I have to. But the fact of the matter is its still a thing that exists so here goes: yes I have physical issues like near constant migraines and pain and also vertigo, and yes I have neurodivergencies like C-PTSD and ADHD and yes I have circumstances that include near constant stress from eternally being in the negatives, financially, as well as being almost constantly hungry from a lack of money and limited options for eating due to the physical constraints of my jaw as well as being consistently sleep deprived because there’s only so much sleep you can get when there’s no such thing as a physically comfortable sleeping arrangement for you currently, all while existing in a constant limbo of I literally have NO idea when any of this will change for me because haha fun fact WE LIVE IN A PANDEMIC.

My point is like......all of these are things I’m not shy about, but they don’t exist as bullet points in a checklist of identity or circumstantial traits, they all exist at all times as points of fact that influence and inform and interact with each other.

So my financial situation and limbo of not being able to move forward with my surgery because of the chaos of the health care industry during a pandemic directly informs both the way stress impacts my mental health issues, but also my ability to treat my mental health issues by way of medication, nutrition, rest.....ie, almost every cent I make via work, etc, goes right back out the door to keeping up my insurance premiums of $850 a month, because even though my surgery is paid for, there’s still elements like hospital stay fees, anesthesia, etc, that won’t be paid until the day of surgery itself, and which I will not be able to pay without my insurance remaining current and active. Which means that I had to prioritize an insurance package that would net me THOSE benefits, which means I had to sacrifice parts of insurance that are no longer in that package, but which previously made things like my medications, refill appointments and therapy more affordable for me.

Which means that I have to prioritize my medication and therapy etc and maintain my therapy and PTSD, depression and anxiety meds as the most important to upkeep, while my ADHD meds are pretty much priced out of accessibility for me at the moment. Like, the specifics of my metabolism and various trial and error with different meds over the years and the way my body rapidly adapts to various meds and plateaus to a point where they cease to have any real impact on me means the only ADHD medication that’s consistently effective for me is Vyvanse, which there isn’t a viable generic form of that I can take, meaning a monthly refill of it is $350 without insurance, which I flat out can not ever afford anymore, which means its been roughly two months since I last popped an ADHD pill.

So yeah, that directly impacts things like my ability to self-edit, make a point briefly, or refrain from circling back to the same point several times over and over because I literally forget that I made it.

Now of course ADHD medication is not the be-all and end-all and its not like there aren’t various other life-hacks and coping strategies for working around ADHD even without it, after all, I didn’t even get diagnosed until I was 26. But these various other adaptations rely on things like good nutrition (which I can not regularly afford, or even consume....most leafy green vegetables for example, or fruits other than berries, are literally nonstarters for me because I don’t have enough leverage with my one-sided jaw to CHEW them in the first place, and the ingredients for making smoothies regularly are again, expensive). So nutrition as a hack for ADHD management is pretty much out - I’m too busy prioritizing eating anything I can, whenever I can afford to. Other adaptations involve getting lots of rest: something that again, physically isn’t all that viable for me these days, even leaving aside the effects of constant stress on attempts at getting meaningful rest, along with the constant stress and constraints of trying to work as much as humanly possible in my circumstances, in order to keep bringing in income to go to insurance, rent, and food and meds. Then there’s also the stabilizing effects exercise and physical activity can have on the brain and various neurodivergencies like mine, but the migraines and vertigo make most forms of exercise a nonstarter for me, with most of the rest invalidated by the fact that I’m pretty much always hungry, tired, and in chronic pain.

Now let’s examine work and the viability of obtaining more sources of income to help with all this. Well, my options are limited there too due to the ecosystem of factors in play. I’ve been trying for awhile to find even a part time job in my area I can do, but the problems are even though I can make myself mobile and active through my pain issues and migraines, and am even good at gritting and bearing it and acting like I’m smiling and laughing and happy even while in excruciating pain (yay, perks of childhood abuse making a career in retail viable even while practically dead on my feet, lololol)......there’s the simple physiological limitation that I just can’t stay upright RELIABLY for more than a couple hours at a time. Eventually, dizziness knocks me on my ass. Downside of a jaw that’s constantly hanging with all its weight from one side of your face, fucking with your ability to even stand up straight, not to mention causing inner ear and equilibrium problems at random whenever you open or close your mouth in the wrong way (or mere approximation of ANY kind of way).

So, standing upright at any kind of customer service or retail job is one issue. Stocking stuff, that sort of thing.....not really an option when you’re likely to drop all of it at any given moment. But then there’s bracing myself at cash registers, something like a job at Starbucks or hell there’s a Jamba Juice nearby, that’d also get me an employee discount for smoothies I can drink regularly. Course, there’s the whirring of blenders and such, which pair great with constant migraines. Etc. Etc.

BUT. I’m a well-rounded person with lots of skills....which lead to things like my freelance graphic design business as a book cover designer, as well as various writing endeavors, etc. And all of these are things that I DO do, currently. They’re how I make my income as is. There’s absolutely more jobs out there, but the fact is as a freelancer, FINDING additional jobs is a time consuming and spoon consuming process, that is additionally impacted by factors like ADHD, so not only does looking for work require time that’s not already being spent working, it also requires the management and expenditure of mental resources that I have to prioritize FIRST towards applying them to what work I already DO have, given the absence of ADHD medication and minimal coping or regulatory habits allowing for me to be all that productive WITHOUT said meds.

Not to mention the strain sitting in front of a computer all day for work in venues like graphic design, etc, puts on migraines, so there’s only so many hours I can devote daily or in one sitting to doing things like cover work. Much of my writing time is spent not actually writing, but me just dictating into notes on my phone and then copying and pasting all that into the appropriate formats for fiction, nonfiction and just random posts. Of course here then I have to prioritize applying my mental resources to first making sure the stuff I write to make money gets edited or properly pared down to size and isn’t repeating the same shit over and over and over, then doing the same to stuff I write fic wise as one of my few escapes from Real Life BS so I can at least point to having SOME kind of life (as this has been my daily existence for years, and uh.....people having things they like or like to do, as much as is humanly feasible, only becomes MORE of a necessity the more stress involved in their day to day life, not less).

Meaning by the time I even get to posting, like.....as much as it may look like I do a lot of it, the speed at which I write when I have any kinds of spoons to apply to posting or composing thoughts at ALL means I actually pour out a lot in a little span of time.....BUT that’s not like, a Skill so much as its a Fact. Its just the way I am and it comes with its downsides as well as its upsides....Im good at banging out a lot in a short amount of time, but ONLY when I just....let it go, versus try and regulate it all or squeeze it out bit by bit. I’m a sprint poster these days rather than a marathoner, even if the length of my thoughts makes it LOOK like the latter.....the reality is for me it tends to be all or nothing, its whatever I can get on the page BEFORE I lose my breath or train of thought. So that’s why it looks the way it does, because that was the only form it was coming out at the specific time and space when I had the energy and brainpower TO get it out, and going back in hindsight and editing it for clarity or brevity AFTER I gasp it all out requires energy and breath I do not have PAST that point, so it becomes a simple equation of well do I want a post to exist here at all or not at all.....and I err on the side of posting. This isn’t a defense because there’s nothing to defend, mind you, I’m simply explaining my way through my thought process, approach to things, and realities of my day to day existence for you to do with whatever you want. Its just a perspective you may not have had before. Whatever.

Of course, even this doesn’t exist in a void. Something that’s always a factor in my awareness when posting is like......I’m lucky enough to have a large enough following that cares enough about what I have to say for whatever reasons or puts enough value in what I have to say or the things I write and create, that I’ve been able to supplement my financial needs when absolutely necessary at times, by way of donation posts. I try not to lean on them more than necessary because I am keenly aware that they are a gift from people, many of whom I do not know and will likely never meet, and as such, not something I have any form of expectation for. I make donation posts when and where I do not in the anticipation of getting them met, but simply for a lack of any other options whatsoever. I’m limited in the work I can do, and the time and energy I can devote to finding more of that same work. There’s not a ton of other career paths I can pursue even from behind a computer due to my lack of a college degree, and the fact that even when I’m qualified skill or knowledge wise, I lack the specific credentials for verifying that I possess those skills or knowledge in a way employers are inclined to recognize and/or validate. Going BACK to school to get said credentials is an expenditure of time, finances, and other resources I do not have to spare at the moment or any time soon, especially not in the name of shoring up a lack of all that in the present term.

I dropped out of college freshman year after my gaybashing and rape. I never went back to it for a variety of reasons that were only half about resources and half about intent. My family is not a presence in my life and hasn’t really been in any significant way since I was eighteen, so college in the first place was something I had to be entirely self-sufficient about....I was only able to afford to go the year that I did go by way of academic scholarships that were dependent on grades I couldn’t keep up in the wake of what happened to me, and that I couldn’t exactly ever get back without a foundation to build upon, like high school and my initial academic career. Then in the half that was about intent, I eventually moved into pursuing my actual interests like writing, graphic design and acting. One of the things I’ve always loved about those is that output and portfolio nets you more than credentials most of the time....they ARE your credentials. I was actually pretty damn successful as an actor for years, not in the way that leads to being someone that people would recognize, but in the way that leads to being able to support yourself doing what you love. All the skillsets that I have but could not back up with things like a diploma were still useful to me as an actor in a way that they’re not in terms of getting things like tutoring or teaching jobs.....I speak multiple languages but I’m self taught, I have a black belt in karate, I’m a classically trained pianist, I know a whole lot of shit about random shit that I just learned because I wanted to, and all of that got me the kind of work that I was looking for and meant I COULD work and make a living off those things for years throughout my twenty....work that I would not have been able to get if I had been back sitting in a classroom instead. The primary currency of my years as an actor were life experiences and I had those in spades, and I was very good at what I did, if I do say so myself, and the reasons I never advanced further career wise tended to have less to do with whether or not I booked the roles I auditioned for and whether I got the auditions at all......

I’m getting a bit off topic here but I’m just saying there’s definitely a convo to be had at some point, about the roles and opportunities I turned down because I wasn’t willing to sleep with someone or put up with their advancements in order to do so. Something that’s a dime a dozen in Hollywood and the thing is.....I was a sex worker, for years, before I moved to Hollywood and started working as an actor. But there’s a distinct difference between the way people talk about, interact with and perceive someone who’s gotten roles because of sex, advanced up a corporate ladder because of sex...versus, gotten paid because of sex. I didn’t turn down offers of roles for sex because of my hang-ups about sex but rather other peoples’......I had a problem with various parts of the industry that would have thought nothing about me getting a role because a producer wanted to sleep with me, but would have turned up their nose at me because I slept with someone to get money for groceries before. Basically I’m just saying the specific bullshit Hollywood has not just about sex but predatory behavior got in the way of my career advancement because there were some games I just wasn’t willing to play....which hails from the very life experiences that oftentimes made me so good as an actor in the first place.

Which brings me back again to my main point......none of this exists in a vaccuum. Being the sum of our life experiences and variables means being the SUM of that, at ALL times, both in large and small ways. We are never just a LIST of identity traits or experiences. They all constantly loop back around and feed into each other and inform where we are at every second of every day and where we GO in each second, what we DO with our days and the choices we make.

Which is where so much of my discontent with fandoms, on social media in general, with PEOPLE in my day to day life comes from: this desire people have to compartmentalize, to ZERO IN on specific factors or variables or instances and act like it even CAN be divorced from all other influences. Its not that you can’t FOCUS on one thing at a time, its just even when you do that, that doesn’t like....snap all existing connections that thing has to everything outside of your area of focus.

As an example, my attitudes on being a survivor and various kinds of fiction get me a ton of pushback from various corners, and its all geared around the same premise: don’t like, don’t read. Put a wall up between you and it. Focus on just what you’re doing and forget what everyone else is doing.

But it doesn’t work like that. It CAN’T work like that. And this commitment people have to pretending it does just because that pretense has been working for them, THAT, I’d argue, is the true wedge in fandom spaces.

Everything about me is connected to something else. I’m a childhood abuse and incest csa survivor. When my therapist asks me to picture a moment from my childhood when I felt safe or protected, I got nothing. I don’t have that resource. I don’t know what that feeling is meant to feel like, because I never felt it. And that connects directly into the fact that when I was gaybashed in college, after they dumped me in a fucking park, bleeding and covered in writing, I didn’t even think about going to the hospital, the police, let alone calling anyone like my parents, I just picked myself up and walked back to my dorm, cleaned myself off as best I could, and went to class next Monday morning. That’s fucked up, I shouldn’t have had to, but its what I did, and there’s no divorcing that from any of the contexts of WHY that’s what I did, and why I didn’t think there was any other logical recourse or option for me then. Just like all of that also links back to growing up in the closet and entering high school the same month Matthew Shepherd was attacked, and then when he ultimately died two months later, and watching everybody’s reactions to that informed the fact that I did not remotely feel safe in the aftermath of my attack, disclosing what happened to people around me, or just like I didn’t take it on face value that even if they said appropriately sensitive things to me to my face didn’t mean that like when I was a freshman in high school and everyone was reacting to that, they wouldn’t revert to callous jokes about fags the second they felt a little less out of the spotlight or in the right company for those jokes.

And all of that directly links into my feelings not just when people write rape and gaybashing scenes that make no attempt at any kind of catharsis but rather only appear to exist for the fetishization, the glamorization, the VALIDATION of the idea that in the right context, those kinds of scenes can be hot to the right audience rather than demoralizing to the figure who’s pain and humaniliation is required for everyone else’s entertainment....but it also additionally plays into the reactions and attitudes I have when people look at me going “wow, really don’t like the lens you’re using here or the environment you’re creating around an experience that is never anything BUT painful and traumatic for someone who lived it, like I did” and choose to respond to that by saying things that amount to “well you’re basically just like conservative southern assholes who hate free speech when you say stuff like this,” cuz y’know.....that’s describing my literal oppressors. That’s lumping me in with the actual literal kind of people who are the SOURCE of my trauma there, all because you felt butthurt and defensive about how I said I wasn’t comfortable with the kinds of jokes and output you were making about scenes that aren’t that far divorced from my own personal reality, and that I shouldn’t HAVE to divorce from my own experiences just to exist within certain fandom spaces.

And just like the fact that being an incest survivor is directly relevant to the fact that my stepmother always made an effort to keep me at a distance because not wanting to admit to what happened to me and how it played into our family entanglements was directly linked back to the fact that she and my aunt were both incest survivors who never got the opportunities to deal with what happened to them, which in turn directly plays into the fact that ultimately my aunt ended up taking her own life a few years ago, which also very much informs my attitude towards people interacting with incest ships as something cutesy and uwu, as my aunt was literally the only person in my family I ever WAS close to or comfortable with. And there’s no divorcing any of that into nice neat little compartments that make it easier for anyone on the outside looking in to just peek through ONE window to see what they might see, and try and act like it doesn’t matter what’s in any of those other boxes because it has nothing to do with the only one they want to concern themselves with.

And my lack of resources and emotional state post gay-bashing led directly into my sex work for various reasons, which led in various ways to better things for me in some respects, while compounding certain traumas of mine in other respects, and there’s no divorcing any of that from the rest either. There’s no ‘my time as a sex worker was good’ even though some of it was and there’s no ‘my time as a sex worker was bad’ even though some of it really was. And a lot of the attitudes of some of the rich assholes who paid me for sex and viewed me as a plaything they could do anything to directly informs my resistance to letting powerful assholes in Hollywood hold roles over my head in exchange for sex, even though the latter could have advanced my career in huge ways and led to me being a lot more financially stable and self-sufficient by the time my physical issues emerged due to the jaw joint on one side of my head eroding through and snapping completely just like that in turn was a long-building repercussion of not just my gaybashing, but my decision to never go to the hospital and get checked out after it.

None of this can be cut away from the rest and trimmed into neat little pieces that don’t color outside the lines or impact anything else. Just like my gaybashing itself can’t be divorced from my white privilege, and the fact that it played into the fact that I survived that night in the first place. Something I say not in some weird white guilt kinda way like people try and project onto others for even acknowledging white privilege, like no its not like I fucking wish I died to prove some kind of weird point, what I’m talking about is just the simple basic AWARENESS that multiple and even contradictory factors exist in even the most extreme of situations. And its never anything BUT self-serving to pretend that you can frame it as otherwise.

And so when I talk about being a survivor, just like with all the rest of this, I’m not talking about some arbitrary status of survivorhood that exists in a specific point in time and is only relevant to some singular event I survived, its applicable to everything about my life big and small. I’m a survivor every single day I’ve survived, every day I wake up and keep moving forward despite the pain and stress and lingering trauma of what was done to me one night sixteen years ago, I’m surviving what they did every bit as much as I survived it that night and in the morning after as I dragged myself back to my room. Just like my status as an abuse survivor stemming from childhood directly informs everything about not just my coping mechanisms but my entire freaking worldview as someone who grew up throughout childhood learning to view the world through a lens in which he was simultaneously not safe due to the presence of victimizers in his own home, while at the same time still having certain protections that others don’t have in life in general due to not just again my white privilege but my male privilege, my cis privilege.

And that’s what makes it so laughable and so offensive when people act like I’m defining myself by being a survivor as some kind of singular identity trait whenever I raise it as something of relevance in fandom discussions that have EVERYTHING to do with stances of abuse apologism and homophobic ideas that directly play into why I was so unsafe in certain parts and times of my life, because who the fuck is anyone else to tell me how my experiences as a survivor and how they shaped me are or are not relevant to ideas pertaining to those very things, when brought front and center and face to face with me in various fandoms due to the insistence of fandoms at large on KEEPING these things front and center in almost ALL fandom discussions? Like, the hilarious irony of people who have so wholly centered certain types of ship and content in terms of their own personal fandom identities that they can’t help but feel personally attacked when someone so much as says “I don’t like the ideas you’re broadcasting alongside your choice to amplify and signal boost this kind of content because you’re not JUST signalboosting the content itself, but these specific perceptions of it and ideas in support of and in apology for it.”....like, turning around and saying IM too defined by my views stemming from my existence as a survivor. The call is coming from inside the house, lolol.

Again, none of this can be divorced from the rest. It can be focused on one piece at a time, but its connections to everything else that informs it in various RELEVANT ways, can not be made IRRELEVANT just because you don’t like the picture that forms when you’re forced to look at the WHOLE picture instead of just willfully condensing the frame to just the part you like or want to talk about.

And to bring it all home, looping back up to what I opened with:

Do you know how often I hear people say shit about the length of my posts or the rambling nature or in various ways act INCONVENIENCED by various things about how they have to interact with my posts when that interaction itself is still completely voluntary?

Taking in everything I said in this post, the way it all interconnects and informs other things, I’d like to ask anyone who has ever objected to some post somewhere or derided one because of something as ultimately nonconsequential as the length of it, something where its literally just like....scroll a few more seconds......do you apply the same energy and scrutiny to posts that cross your dash that are filled with various things like racism, transphobia, rape or pedophilia fetishization or abuse apologism, or do you let that slide by without acknowledgment before looking at a post that makes you sigh because of how fucking LONG it was and think...this, THIS is what I’m gonna choose to speak up about?

Because that’s ultimately what this is all about. Here’s the kicker with everything I said....my life could be better, I want it to be better, from the biggest aspects of it and pain issues to stuff just like.....the fandom communities I immerse myself in for my own attempts at having something to counterbalance real life stress. But at the end of the day, there’s no my life sucks or my life rocks....its still just...my life. And it has its good as well as its bad, and that ultimately hails from my choices, and the fact that like....even while there are choices I literally CAN’T make, I can be comfortable with the ones I DO make.

And so like......would my life be easier in some respects now if I’d gone back to school and gotten a diploma and had more job opportunities available to me? Yeah, for sure. But that awareness doesn’t mean I regret my choice NOT to go back to school when I DID have more opportunities for that, because the acting career I had at those times instead was the choice I made, with intent, and its one I’m still glad for making. Those experiences still matter, still meant something and still mean something to me.

And do I wish that I’d coped with what happened to me in college in different, healthier ways that would have given me more tools for how I interact with my trauma and who I became after that, rather than how I did? Yeah, sometimes, for sure. But not without losing my awareness that the choices I did make at the time were not made in a vacuum, and can not be edited in hindsight....there were reasons I made them, reasons that were informed by everything that had happened to me previously and stemmed from a lot of things I still didn’t have control over and as such always placed a cap on the range of choices that were available to me back then, because there’s a difference between choices that exist in theory versus choices that exist as something that might viably be chosen at a particular place and time.

The world is big and complicated. Life is big and complicated. WE are big and complicated. And nothing about understanding any of that is IMO benefited by putting most of our effort into SHRINKING our worldviews, constructing artificial frames that don’t just focus us in on specific aspects of it for finite periods but attempt to then treat that as its own individual thing utterly disconnected from anything else that might be going on OUTSIDE that picture frame.

So if you’ve read this far and you’ve taken anything away from this big long rambling post that could be a lot shorter, could be a lot less rambling, but could also just not have been posted at all and I’d rather have it exist in this form than let everything in it go unsaid.....

My request would be that your takeaway be this: to look at your choices in regards to some specific finite interaction in even just one of your fandoms, and see what happens when you open the frame back up. If you widen the scope. If you let other things into the picture. Are you still comfortable with the choices you make or don’t make in light of THAT image, are they any different from the ones you made or would have made when keeping things as small and contained in your awareness as possible, just because that was easier for you to conceptualize, easier to navigate around, just....less COMPLICATED?

Because things aren’t made less complicated just by the mere fact of WANTING them to be.

And if your choices are more born of what you’d say or do IF the world were as finite or as limited as its sometimes easier to pretend it is......is that really the approach you want to go with and the reasoning you want to stand by?

And similarly, if there are choices you make and that in ORDER for you to feel comfortable making them, you feel a need to tighten your focus or shrink your worldview around one specific element or area and leave out all the rest and only then are you truly comfortable with doing or saying something, like......

Its important to remember that this isn’t the only option you have for making yourself more comfortable with things you say or do or think, or even just have in the past.

The other perfectly viable option exists: you can simply....make different choices.

#this is a post #im not entirely sure how else to describe it #just that it is not necessarily the post that it looks like beneath the cut that it looks like above the cut #so all I've got is: this has been a post #make of it what you will #lololol #its....whatever #ANYWHO

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datawyrms · 4 years ago

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Dannymay2020 Day 31: Free Day (ghost sword fight lets go)

It was for science, a good cause. His life would be so much better if he didn’t have to hear his parents gleefully discuss ripping apart some mindless ectoplasmic scum molecule by molecule. Right now though, he was remembering the other reason he flinched in horror when having to take his parents anywhere. Complete embarrassment. One extra downside to ghost powers: knowing you actually can just have the ground swallow you up in shame, but knowing you really, really shouldn’t. When your dad is sitting with sodas strapped to his head and waving a foam finger with your friend’s name on it, it got very tempting.

He’d almost prefer dealing with an ecto gun. “Dad, you’re actually going to pay attention, right?”

“Course I will Danny-boy! That goth friend of yours will kick that ghost right back to its own dimension, and I’ll be watching.”

The half ghost groaned, crossing his arms. “Dad.”

“And totally see if it’s actually a fight with rules. I did listen, son! It’s just good to see young people taking up ghost hunting!”

“This isn’t ghost hunting!”

“Right. Your friend is just going to clobber a ghost with a sword. For Science!”

Well he wasn’t wrong exactly, but it wasn’t helping him not regret every second of this stupid plan. “It’s more Sam’s doing the ghost a favour, and Sam’s doing me a favour by letting us watch. Sooo don’t go calling the ghost scum or anything. Please.”

“Hmmhm. I did read your notes son. You think I’d come with no weapons if I thought your observations were shoddy?” he clapped the boy on the back, who had to struggle to not fall over. “Still gotta root for your friend kiddo!”

Yes. Yes he did, actually. Yet asking his dad to maybe be a little less enthusiastic was like asking the sun to maybe be a little less bright. Pointless, and possibly amusing to anyone overhearing you. “She manages without a cheering section most of the time,” he felt the need to point out before heading down the hill to check in with Sam.

“I don’t know what I expected. Not that, that’s for sure.”

“Tell me about it. I didn’t think he’d do anything but scowl from the hill because he’s worried about a dastardly ghost. Sorry.” he rubbed the back of his neck, eyes flicking between his friend and the bright orange blight on the hillside.

“Nah. Arlas will probably get a kick out of it anyway, she likes having an audience,” Sam shrugged, fiddling with the lightweight wooden sword. “I have a few new tricks. Who knew Star of all people would like fencing?”

“Did she swear you to secrecy?”

“Bought my silence by being a pretty good practice partner,” her grin faded somewhat “Guess I’ve been buying into their ‘popular’ shtick too. She’s not that bad.”

“Then I’ll pretend you didn’t tell me. You don’t think she’ll try and talk to Dad, right? That could get ugly real quick.”

“She might. She knows to keep the whole met in the ghost zone thing quiet, but I can’t promise much else,”

“Well I can’t promise he won’t call her putrid protoplasm so we’re totally doomed.”

“Maybe we can make it sound like good natured ribbing?”

“With what ribs?” Danny smirked in spite of himself

“Oh shut up you. Go worry about not turning invisible trying to hide from your dad or something. I’ve got this.”

He nodded, backing off to head back to his expected spot. He wasn’t meant to know the ghost well, after all. He did notice the ghost showing up before anyone else, but forced himself to act oblivious.

“Oh, there’s the spook! You mentioned the heavy leg armor, these ones can’t do the leg shapeshifting thing, right?”

Danny blinked. He’d actually read and paid attention to all of it? “Yeah, that’s right. It can be pretty heavy since they don’t have to walk much with the whole flying thing, apparently.” his eyes flicked to his Dad’s face, trying to figure out how the man felt about Sam and this ghost greeting one another in friendly terms. He didn’t look angry, so maybe it was a good sign?

“First to three hits is what you said, right?”

Man this felt weird. Answering things about ghosts without constantly worrying he’d be called a ghost for it. “Sam’s pretty sure five would take too long. Either because she gets tired out, or a ghost hunter barging in.” Something he had almost done three times, but he couldn’t mention that bit.

Jack kept his eyes fixed on the two, leaning forward even as he slurped from the ridiculous soda contraption. “That’s how she wins, right son?” he pointed as Sam blocked a swing and danced backwards, forcing the knight to give chase. “She outruns em and can go for smaller openings.”

“How did yo-yeah. That’s usually how, since she can’t just fly after her…” How could he pick up on that and not his son literally falling through things for a month?

Arlas looked as if she might have caught on to Sam’s usual plan as well, backing off instead of pursuing after another failed clash. He honestly had zero idea what to do in that situation that wasn’t ‘shoot ecto blast’, but his friend seemed to have a decent idea, feigning a left swing before jabbing forward at a much greater speed.

“Ha! Lookit that, already winning!”

“You’ll distract her if you cheer louder.”

“Nah, your little friends are tough!”

He did seem to be right, the boisterous cheering when Sam had the upper hand not earning as much as a glance from the fight. Sam did shoot Danny a look at the boo his Dad made when Arlas managed to turn a block into a strike Sam couldn’t defend against in time, and he could only shrug. Hopefully the knight wasn’t too annoyed at the blatant favoritism. Or maybe she expected it, being a visitor and all.

Still, making it through the combat without having to stop his Dad from trying to capture or hurt the ghost was pretty good. Even if it was still really weird to have him just watch. He personally didn’t even need to watch the fight, watching Jack was more than enough indication on how things were going. Okay, maybe he was a bit paranoid, watching just in case he had to do some split second overshadowing. Moreso now that the ghost apparently wanted to say hello to the watching human, to his complete dismay.

“Oh, so it is a family thing! What interesting armor.” Arlas said, looking at the bright orange jumpsuit.

Jack did seem a little surprised at the possible complement, hiding it with a nod. “Always need to be prepared!”

Danny manared to peek out from behind his fingers. Dad hadn’t threatened her. That was progress. That was good! Him possibly wondering why she thought jumpsuits were a family thing was not good! Sam’s advice of remembering not to turn invisible suddenly seemed very useful.

“Still I hope it was a good show. Sir Manson is still a bit too fast for me, but I’ll figure out a way around that soon, you’ll see.”

“You could just lose the armor, you’re way better at planning than I am.” Sam pointed out, earning a laugh from the ghost.

“If I plan to work in it, I must be able to beat you in it! The extra preparation can only be a good thing. That, and I can use the same trick on the others if they get overconfident.”

“So you consider being a knight as a job? You could do something else if you got bored of the sword swinging gig?” Jack asked, hand on his chin as he watched the floating knight.

“Of course! There are plenty of things to do back home, but who wouldn’t want to help protect the Queen? It’s not like I cannot retire when I no longer wish to do it.” she paused, looking up at the sky as if searching for an example. “I suppose you do not really have proper communities of ghosts over here, just the stronger sorts or the occasional animal?”

“Nope. We just get the town attacking beasties”

“Ah, well who doesn’t? Troublemakers will be troublemakers.” she shrugged easily, apparently not considering herself a ‘beastie’.

Jack considered the answer, the loud slurping sound rather at odds with the pensive look on his face. Surely he didn’t think this ghost would make up an entire fake backstory, or be perfectly fine with losing to a human in a fair fight while being ‘mindless’. “So the Fentons are known over in your world then?”

“Well I wouldn’t say unknown. The outfits are pretty memorable! Yours more than your son’s. He is your son, I think. That’s the right term?”

Of course she had to bring up his jumpsuit. That he never wore. Because it was on his ghost form. Sam’s wince in sympathy did not help.

“See Danno, even the ghosts think you need more colour! Even Jazz’s is blue, maybe we should get you an orange one.”

“Maybe. Mine’s fine, thanks.” he managed to speak, hoping he didn’t sound too much like he’d been internally choking.

Sam took up damage control before her friend managed to be more suspicious than a wolf in a sheep pen. “Well, I’ve got stuff to do, and Arlas does too. See ya Mr. Fenton.”

The ghost did seem a little put out to not continue to chat, but took Sam’s lead, turning invisible before making her way back home.

“Not even going to try and scare anyone while she’s here huh? Interesting.” Jack commented. “Certainly a lot to think about kiddo! Our little researcher,” he ruffled Danny’s hair, earning a grunt from his son. “You think you might be able to arrange talking to some of these other ‘non-violent’ ghosts?”

“Oh. Yeah. Probably? Not right away, but sure.”

“Great! I want to see for myself if the stories line up. If they do, then we’ll need to figure out why only the blobs and animals showed up before the portal.” he got to his feet, apparently wanting to go write things down in the lab right away.

“Because they were the only ones dumb enough to leave the ghost zone without a portal to go home with.” Danny muttered “The smart ones wouldn’t risk it,”

“Right, you scrawled that on the back of your folder. Which ghost told you that again?”

In truth? Frostbite. Yet he didn’t have a way to explain that. “Phantom.”

“Well you can’t use yourself as a primary source son, that’d be considered speculation.”

Danny could only stare. Whoops.

#dannymay2020 #Danny Phantom #Jack Fenton #sam manson #my stuff #i think the burnout got me #today was hard #even tho i kinda knew what i wanted to do #so the fight is lameee #oh well #I DID IT 31 DAYS WOO #...now what am i gonna do :v

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transwrongs · 4 years ago

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yeah i need to leave my job asap. it’s not the WORST job i’ve had but it definitely has its downsides that i can’t take anymore

i seem to be one of the only people on our team of like 8 who understands the health code and actually cares about following it thoroughly. my efforts to keep the place clean/organised has fallen thru so many times.

i get paid $14.25/hr (which is min wage in LA and can barely keep me afloat) for basically an shift lead/assistant manager position because it’s a very small family owned business. and i GET why the owners can only afford min wage employees and one manager on salary(their daughter). especially bc of the pandemic hitting their business pretty hard (disconnecting postmates took a lot of business too but they started taking like 33% commission which was just way too much) and they opened a second location march 2020 right before we went into lockdown which really fucked them up a bit.

but it doesn’t really matter their reasonings. i cannot afford to keep working 25 hour weeks when my rent is $900 a month. i’ve essentially dropped out of school until this sit clears up and i can go back to going on campus bc my brain will not let me do online school. and having “so much” free time to myself doing nothing but thinking about how shit my life is isn’t good for me. i need a stable/well paying job at the VERY fucking least. i can’t keep doing this. i cant.

i’m also not out to anyone at my job bc when i started i was about to be homeless and i sacrificed my sanity in order to get any job i could so That Wouldn’t Happen. i’ve been here for about a year now and i don’t know how much longer i can take.

it’s literally affecting my mental health(and physical) feeling responsible for so much. i have top surgery that i force myself to not think about bc i know it’s something i cannot financially get thru in the near future. i need a car to get a drivers license. i need a drivers license to get a car. but it doesn’t even fucking matter bc i cant even afford to save up for a car with the pennies i have leftover after paying my rent. i close more than anyone here which automatically means i do more work than anyone else. on top of that i actually clean shit and follow the health code so i’m doing more work on top of the half assed shit everyone else does during closing shifts. and i cannot just.. Not follow the health code or that would weigh on my conscience too. it’s too fucking much. living is way too much fucking pressure and i am barely hanging on by my fucking fingernails

#leo.txt #rant #i’m sorry #please ignore this #i feel like i’m going crazy bottling all this up

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smarterincomesystem · 4 years ago

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10 Legit Ways To Make Money And Passive Income Online – How To Make Money Online

youtube

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#email marketing tool #all-in-one video creator #earn money from home #legit way to make money from home

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moontaeilll · 6 years ago

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ALL ABOUT SM GLOBAL PACKAGE & NEO CITY: SEOUL EXPERIENCE

by twitter user @sugnsook // @yudotaeil

Hello~ so i am not that good at explaining/vlogging or writing stuffs but in this thread? or blogpost or wherever u guys reading this, i will try to describe my experience as much as I can. Also for now, I am dividing this post, FAQ-style according to several topics, and I will put a separate detailed post on my own Neo City: SEOUL experience. I hope this will help for u guys deciding to splurge a bit on concert/global package!

Disclaimer: In the past, I got a few ccs complaining about my fangirl related-expensive expenses, I just want to note earlier here that as the whole prior to the actual concert, I was a part time student & working 30+ hours a week, working every chances I get. It was also my last semester of undergrad studies & I have been wanting to attend NCT’s first ever concert since 2017 and been really saved up since then, so I consider the large expenses is pretty much a treat for myself.

Tl;dr: if you worked hard enough and really wanted to attend your faves event, just go for it, as it was really worth it.

— General

What is included in Global Package?

Concert ticket (depending on days u wanna go), a good quality hotel for your stay, return transportation to & from the concert venue - hotel, preorder access to official merchandises, NCT 127 theme global package-special merchandises, NCT 127 theme snack boxes (after the concert), One themed lunch, a half day tour with tour guide before the concert, special event (varies according to what concert) - for NCT127’s we got a photoshoot session with NCT127’s life-size standee in SM’s infamous practice room itself.

How much does Global Package cost?

All i can say first thing first is….it IS costly. The ones I am paying is $949USD for Superior Single (Course C) as shown below:

The difference between the prices & packages are it depends on which hotel they will locate you & your seating in the concert. They also have Course A, Course B & Course C which depends on the concert days you are attending. Because I am flying out to Seoul just for the purpose of concert so why not just buy the two days ticket? And yeah that is why I chose Course C.

When does the ticketing open?

Usually the global package ticketing will only open at least one month prior to the actual concert, just like the concert announcement itself. Basically right after SM announce the concert, just be prepared as the ticketing will be shortly after it, right before the general ticketing starts. My advice is just, save up save up and save up as it is really well-known super costly.

How competitive the tickets are?

It is less competitive than general ticketing for sure, but pretty competitive in between ifans itself. When I bought mine, I initially planned for just economy ones but the ticket sold out WHEN i clicked “payment”. So, be quick or you might need to wait a bit more. I’m the type to be anxious if I dont have my ticket yet so I really want my ticketing matters to be settled up as soon as possible so-- when I figured out the economy package got sold out I quickly clicked on superior option - impulsively hehs.

During that ticketing, SM allows you to hold your payment up to 2 hours, as for twin package buyers can split payment. So if the tickets sold out, you might be able to get it after 2 hours. NOTE THAT: SM changed the policy from 2 hours to 30 mins now.

Eventually SM will release more packages and you CANNOT change your options once you have buy it. The packages will be available up until a week/or two before the concert, but the type of packages is really depends. I would say, Course C - Economy package sold out pretty quickly because that is what most people aiming for.

*also, keep refreshing the page if you are buying at the exact ticketing open time! The ticketing for mine opened 3 mins before the actual time so yeah….

How is the payment made?

Paypal only. Just be sure you have signed up to smtown travel account, and link you cards or have paypal balance to get your payment completed smoothly. Your package will only be confirmed once you get the payment confirmation so, having a working payment method is important. SM’s cancellation policy is ridiculous so I recommend everyone who is interested to join GP to do a thorough research beforehand.

Can international fans join general ticketing?

Yes, but not really feasible, as Yes24 sites require verification, unless you have connections with korean verifications or buy from 3rd party. The downside of 3rd party is you might get even more expensive ticket collectively compared to what Global Package has offered.

How good the seats are?

It depends on your luck as you will only draw your ticket basically the day before the concert. The more you paid for the package, the better the seats. For standing you might get a better queue number and in korea concerts you strictly go in by queue number. I chose seating, so for luckily one of my seat was right next to extended stage, and another seat was on the other side but center view. Also i luckily got both sides of seating so I can enjoy the concert with both views.

It is possible to trade your ticket between other global package holders tho - bcs i saw people did this at my hotel lol but you cannot ask sm to change your ticket. The concert ticket will be written as “해외팬투어” (intl fans tour), instead of your name.

My seat on the first day

My seat on the second day, center view

My seat on the second day, side view

Is there a customer service page i can rely to?

Yes. If there is one thing i would applaud SMtown travel for, it is for their customer service. I used a lot of their “Q&A” page and they typically will reply you within one business day. If you ask on weekend, they will respond to you as quick as on Monday. So if you have any like literally, ANY question about your package, just send a question to them and they will reply personally as soon as they can. And it is in english.

— Logistics

After you have bought your package, SM will update the logistics & schedule 2 WEEKS before the concert. So don’t worry if they ghosted you out before that 2 weeks lol.

Technically, they will divide the hotels according to the package type (dlx/superior/econ), then they will divide you into bus numbers, according whether you are seating/standing. Also your schedule will depends on the bus number you get. And this is non-exchangeable, as they prepared everything according to the list that they grouped you out.

How is the hotel?

For me, i got located at Ibis Styles Ambassador Hotel in Gangnam. Because I got single package, i got the whole hotel room for myself, lol what a new experience, as for my solo travels i only go for budget hostels 🤣. The hotel location is only 15~20mins subway away from the venue, and it is walking distance from COEX. There are a bunch cafes & convenience store nearby so it is pretty easy to get something. The only thing is SM’s booth opens at 8pm, so because I arrived early, I just roamed around until the booth opens. At SM’s booth, it is where you pick up your preordered merchs, sm’s merchs and most importantly draw your tickets. Also I took the chance when gathering with fellow global package goers to trade anything i needed to exchange while everyone is there.

I dont know where to put this under, but for GP, We were given a greeting card from the boys, bunch of stickers, a letter set (with colour pencil), L-holders, bunch of posters and nct127’s moodlight. For the letter set, you can decorate and write fanletter to the members and hand it to your tour guide at the time they ask you. I bought some masking tape and stickers beforehand to decorate my letter, u can prepare it ahead too and transfer it to the letter they give as the time frame is really short.

Can I go to the concert by my own?

Yes you can~ Be sure to tell your tour guide so that they dont waste time waiting. You also have to tell them whether u want to go back to hotel with them or not, as that is when they will hand you the snack boxes. If you are not certain of travelling alone in Seoul, i recommend to travel by the bus they provide, because the tour guide will bring you right until the concert entrance. For me, I wanted to join fan-events and roam around the venue more, so I decided to go on my own. (Best thing about it was when you’re in a train with fellow NCTzens they just airdrop you a lot of nct related stuffs — including the selfies they airdropped at the venue!).

— Itinerary

How tight the schedules are?

It kinda not as tight as I thought? Except for pretty early schedule on the first day, also Maybe because I got a seating ticket so I dont go to venue after the tours right away (standing fans had to queue right away after the tour)

And for me, this was my schedule —

25th 8pm: pick up merchs, ticket etc from SM booth 26th 10am - gather at hotel lobby 10:30am - depart for lunch (at Bulgogi Brothers), it was NCT127-theme and they play nct’s songs! 11:50am - depart to COEX artium - u get 1 hr to roam around there, I chose to roam around smtown museum 1pm - depart to SM C&C building in cheongdam, for special event Around 2~ish - depart back to hotel

U get free time in between and gather back at 4:30pm to depart to concert venue as concert starts at 6. As concert ends around 8:30pm, they give you about 45mins~ to get back to the bus if you wanna go back with them. 27th Bus departs at around 2 pm if i recall, as concert starts at 4pm. I went out at 10am lols (also tell your tour guide!) and bus departs around 7:30pm after the concert. 28th - check out around 12pm.

Detailed itinerary will be updated in my experience post.

The best thing about the concert period was they give you discount on some SM-related stuffs. For example, they give 30% off (?) for beverages at sm cafe for ticket/GP holders, and also discounted smtown museum admission. There were also new merchs got released that time, and some other promotions going on.

Snack box after the concert!

Merchs I collected from kfans giveaways at the venue

The best part was NCTZens spreading out the fanproject - sing Paradise during Encore; using Airdrop. NEO indeed 😎

The amount of memes & stuffs being airdropped - lol

— Budgeting

General budgeting for my trip:

Flight - around 1.6K MYR return trip with 20kg luggage & meal (AirAsia)

Hotel - i only went during my GP stay period so it was all inclusive (hotel + concert ticket) with that $949 USD

Other expenses (tmoney, food, additional merchs) - about $250 usd is enough for me for 4 days, considering I spent on buying cosmetics & merchs a lot. My own preordered merchs was separate amt too, it depends on what u do/willing to spend around that period.

— For Muslim Fans

Do they provide halal meals?

They dont provide halal meat, but you can request for vegetarian option or seafood. During lunch, I got vegetarian bibimbap set. And for the snack boxes, too bad SM provided ham/bacon in the sandwiches, which I am not confident in removing it so I decided to not eat, just eat the cookies. Also they offer late-night meals after the concert (separate pay), but I didnt opt for that one and only went to eat at nearby places.

Can I pray before the concert?

Yes~ as I mentioned earlier, there are a few hours gap before you depart to concert so you can pray at your hotel beforehand. Or if you dont mind, like I did as I went to venue early on the 2nd day, I went to pray at Olympic Park area itself, there are a lot of benches or u can walk a bit further to isolated places to pray. I just sat down at some bench and pray while sitting down.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

These are what I can think of, and as I said earlier I do have another separate post regarding my own NEO CITY: Seoul experience, and I will update under a thread. If you have any questions feel free to contact me via twitter (@sugnsook/@yudotaeil) or curiouscat.me/6sungjae. Also for neo city fancams/random pics about my trip, it will be updated eventually under the main thread where this entry is posted :) Hope it helps!

#neo city seoul #sm global package #h:blog #concert

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prompt-and-circumstances · 5 years ago

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Pop Tart Heart

Characters/Pairings: No Pairings! Reader Insert, Original Characters, Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester

Prompt: Pop Tart Heart for the 2016 Louden Swain FanFic Project by @mrswhozeewhatsis!

Word Count: 2,273

Warning(s): Violence, Death, Teen Angst, Revenge, Gore?

A/N: My very first song-based piece of fan fiction for the very first Louden Swain Challenge. This is a reposting and there is a sequel.

Pop Tart Heart with a Side of Shotgun Shells

“They’re coming for us!”

You turned to stare, horrified, at Toby and the gang. Those things were breaking through. Deep down you knew, you couldn’t finish what you started. “Yeah, they’re coming for us. But guess what? We came for them too. I’m not leaving until this accursed job is done.” You turned to face the double doors, shotgun at the ready. As if on cue, a pack of broken-hearted dudes were knocking at your door. Toby emptied the gas can into the chainsaw and started her up; Chelsea strapped on her belt of aerosol containers she stole from her beauty school classes and held up one in a series of lighters. Maddox, determined to go out as any self-respecting nerd would, braced himself not far from Chelsea with a sword. You hadn’t really paid that much attention when he got it, but you thought he had said it was a replica from Game of Thorns or whatever the hell it was.

Chelsea shrieked, the dudes had created a hole in the door though thankfully it was not large enough for them to enter, yet. Hands reached through the hole, grasping for something. On the other side you could hear them singing some forgotten carol. The doors wouldn’t hold for much longer. Reciting to yourself that you had to finish what you started, your finger twitching above the trigger. A deafening sound came when the doors collapsed under the onslaught of the dudes; all dressed in the same apparel they rushed towards the lot of you.

Having grown up with four brothers in the sticks, you didn’t hesitate with that shotgun. You managed to blow away two heads before you had to start walking backwards with each shot. It was like smashing open a piñata but instead of candy, you won somebody else’s biological hard drive. Thank God your parents were not here to see this, they’d never let you hear the end of it. There was a downside to retreating backwards without looking though, as you quickly discovered when you fell. Shotgun almost flying out of your hands, you scrambled to get upright and in a shooting position again.

In those spare minutes you were open for attack, which a dude exploited. Grabbing your ankle, he twisted hard to get you onto your stomach, preventing you from getting off a shot in defense. His filthy nails dug into your flesh; the flesh of his hand was cold and slimy from perspiration, at least you hoped it was perspiration. You felt a solid thud against your back but it wasn’t followed by pain; turning to see what happened, the dude lay at your ankles. Blinking hard you noticed what was missing, his head. Standing above you and pulling you to your feet was Maddox. He nodded quickly, acknowledging your silent gratitude and then charged off after Chelsea with his sword. Note to self, never bully nerds again.

Toby looked like another person altogether, covered head to toe in guts and blood. His trusty chainsaw eating away at anything that tried to come near its master. Chelsea was actually surprisingly accurate with her homespun flamethrowers; she stood back-to-back with Maddox and they were cutting down the dudes like a well-oiled machine. They didn’t have to come with you on this mission, you planned on coming alone but they wouldn’t have any of that. Friends stand by each other, that’s what they said. How could you ask for more?

After an hour of grueling battle, the dudes lay on the floor in pieces if they were lucky, or mush if they weren’t lucky. Silently offering praise to whatever deity would listen, you took in the sight of your faithful companions. So far the only injury sustained was your ankle and you honestly have had worse. Chelsea stifled a sob as she looked at the singed dude laying inches from her feet. “Tha-that thing was Tommy!”

Tommy. Thomas Bandenberry. Leader of the Scholastic team and an up-and-coming track star. You all just assumed he’d get a track scholarship for college someday, but that day will never come now. You hadn’t thought of it until now but every last one of these dudes had a name, and you knew them all. You were all students at the same high school. Hell, you knew some of these dudes since grade school. That’s why they all had the same apparel, school uniforms. Twenty-five of your peers lay slaughtered before you and you wondered if feeling relieved made you a bad person.

Toby threw his arm around your shoulders, “Hey, let’s finish what you started once and for all.” Maddox gripped his sword tightly and voiced his agreement while Chelsea, still choking back tears, vigorously nodded her agreement. Resting your shotgun on your shoulder you stared at your friends, all of you in silent agreement. This ended now.

The four of you walked in silence back to the school, where this all began. You were bringing up the rear, lost in your thoughts. Last year, all twenty-five of those dudes died in a freak accident. It devastated the entire county; then two weeks ago they came back but they seemed to be missing something. You couldn’t quite place it, but for two weeks they got weirder and weirder. They were all athletic, all-American boys with healthy appetites but the more days that passed, the hungrier they became.

Tommy had been sitting in the bleachers just two days ago talking with you like you always had before the accident. You forgot that he was dead, or re-alive, or whatever the term was. All you remembered two days ago was that you had your best friend back. It was natural talking to him about everything. You had been doing that since you learned how to talk. You confided in him forty-eight hours ago; you told him of your nightmare.

I had a dream, that I ate your heart Tommy. It was toasted like a strawberry pop tart; all hot, and soft, and sweet. It took its place inside my belly and then my insides turned to jelly and your pop tart heart slowly began to beat.

He never said anything, just nodded as if he understood. And then the change came. Twenty-five hungry athletes turned on whoever was near them, and the dudes began to devour human flesh. You became convinced that it was your fault, that you had somehow flicked on an internal switch inside them. If you hadn’t told Tommy your dream, then he and his friends wouldn’t have become zombies, right? This was your fault, you started it and now you had to finish it.

You were jerked from your thoughts when you bumped into Chelsea. “Why’d you stop walking? We’re not to the school yet.” Chelsea didn’t answer, just stood there panic-stricken and shaking uncontrollably.

Following her gaze, you saw a mass of people previously dead now lumbering towards you. “What the hell?” Stepping in front of Chelsea, you’d be damned if you were going to let any of them get Tommy’s little sister, you raised your shotgun but didn’t pull the trigger. Walking in front of the mass with a ten-foot lead at least, was Colin Rottergut. Colin’s parents were from the Caribbean and he was a first-generation American. You didn’t recall him having that many friends, he was always talking about the weird creepy things they did on the islands. Voodoo and crap like that.

He sniggered at you, “Payback’s a bitch.”

“Payback? What are you paying us back for?” you demanded.

“Oh I’m not paying them back; they didn’t do anything. But you, you my little butterfly slighted me.”

To your left you could hear Toby growl in disgust. Colin must be referring to prom. He had asked you but you had to turn him down, Toby had already asked you a month in advance. Besides, it’d be weird not to go to prom with your boyfriend and with some other boy instead. “So, you’re paying me back by turning the cemetery into zombies? Don’t you think that’s a little overkill?”

“Hey baby, if there’s an itch you gotta scratch it. If there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Ah, now you remembered Colin! He was that guy that when he thought he was on a roll with something, kept going until he had beaten a dead horse. And tonight was apparently no different.

“You don’t debate, you gotta nab it. It don’t come for free, there’s a fee and you gotta pay it now!”

The mass of undead bodies ran toward you and your friends, but they didn’t get very far. Just three feet from you they all dropped. Colin furiously shrieked, ‘What did you do to my lovelies?”

Toby looked helplessly at you, Maddox just shrugged his shoulders. Chelsea wrapped her arms around you and hugged you so tight you thought your head would pop off from the pressure. You just look dumbfounded past Colin. Two men, two very tall men, walked up behind Colin. The shorter one had a strange gait, bow-legged but determined. Somehow he managed to keep up with the long strides of the taller one.

Catching up to Colin, the short one placed a bloody hand on his shoulder. “So you’re the little punk who caused this mess.” Colin started at the touch and Toby later mentioned he thought Colin was going to piss himself. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done Junior Mint?”

The tall one turned to look at the shorter one, “Dean!”

“What?”

“Dude, that was totally racist.”

“So? The kid just raised an entire frickin’ town!”

“Yeah, key word there Dean. Kid.”

Maddox literally raised his hand as if he were in class before clearing his throat and timidly piping up, “Um, excuse me, but who the hell are you guys? And what the hell just happened?”

The tall one stepped forward to address the four of you while the short one, Dean, kept a firm grip on Colin. You noticed Dean’s other hand was holding a gun held dangerously close to Colin’s ribcage.

“Hi, uh, my name’s Sam Winchester and this is my older brother Dean. We came to help with your zombie apocalypse here. You see, your sheriff is friends with someone we know, who also happens to be a sheriff. Our friend, Sheriff Mills told us about the goings-on in your town and sent us to help. I guess you could say we specialize in this kind of thing.”

Maddox had taken up the spokesman job for you guys, “Specialists? In zombies?”

Dean pushed Colin forward, “We’re hunters. We kill all the things that go bump in the night. Your little buddy here raised them with a voodoo spell. We mess up the spell, everybody drops permanently. Kapisch?”

You weighed in without thinking about it, “I thought it was my fault. I had a nightmare about eating hearts and told one of them about it. Shortly after that they started eating people.”

Sam patted your shoulder, “No, you didn’t do anything wrong. In fact, you were quite brave to stand up to them. You guys are armed to the teeth.”

Dean grunted at his brother, “What do I do with this one?”

Toby had an idea. “Why don’t we cuff him to Tommy and leave him there until morning? These two can make an anonymous phone call to the police and tip them off to Colin’s whereabouts, and let the cops sort it all out.”

Sam and Dean seemed to like that idea. You all marched back to the barn and it was kind of amusing to watch two “specialists” go green when they saw the place. “What the hell happened here?” they asked simultaneously.

Chelsea explained the whole thing to them. Dean looked like a proud Dad but Sam seemed sad to hear about your exploits, and you couldn’t have that. “Hey, don’t look so glum. They were coming for us and I thought I started this mess so I had to finish it. I grew up hunting deer and skinning them, I handled it. Besides, it was either kill them or be killed.”

“I know, but you’re just kids. You should be doing kid stuff, not blowing heads off of zombies.”

“We’re not kids, we’re seniors. Next year, we’ll be going to college. Now we know monsters are real so at least now we’ve had a taste of it and we won’t be caught off guard next time.”

“Next time? No way, promise me and Dean you guys won’t go looking for this stuff.”

Toby put his arm around your shoulders again and pulled you close, “she promises and so do the rest of us. We’re prepared now if they come for us, but we sure as hell aren’t going looking for it intentionally. Do you have any idea how hard this was? Tommy was Chelsea’s older brother. Can you imagine watching your brother die twice?”

Sam and Dean subtly exchanged knowing glances, you were fairly certain they did know. Maybe you could ask them about it next time you saw them, if you ever saw them again. They spent the rest of that night teaching you, Chelsea, Maddox, and Toby about hunters and hunting and made sure you were all alright. An hour before dawn they walked each one of you home, swearing each of you into secrecy.

That night, you dreamed about eating hearts that tasted like pop tarts. It wasn’t as scary this time now that you knew, no zombies were going to come from those dreams.

#2016 louden swain fanfic project #Louden Swain #pop tart heart #with a side of shotgun shells #sam winchester #dean winchester #supernatural fanfiction #SPN Fanfic Pond

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jeanjauthor · 7 years ago

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Just reread an officer's choice, and in it you said there are literal billions of people in the terran armed forces, now assuming the military is 1 % of the Terran human population and the word billions is the minimum of 2 billion, that would mean that the Terrans have a population of about 200 billion people, am I anywhere within spitting distance?

…That’s assuming the proportion of the population in the military is just 1%. By Ia’s day, there is a very sizeable amount of military presence needed to patrol around each of the Salik worlds. A very large number of those in turn have to be cycled out frequently because Blockade duty is extremely stressful.

On top of that, they have to have a large military presence for the Border patrols, which includes not only inhabited sectors but uninhabited sectors…and there are a lot of star systems without inhabited moons or planets (domeworld or M-class, it’s all the same).

And on top of that, every inhabited system (moon, planet, space station, etc) has to have a TUPSF-Navy presence for guarding it against attacks…

And on top of that…yep, all those planets & moons have to have ground troops. Not just in case of invasion from outside forces, or even the (highly improbable) possibility of civil war uprisings, but because if it’s an inhabitable world, it’s full of potentially dangerous local lifeforms. Military troops also double as search & rescue teams, relief supply personnel, etc, etc, during natural disasters.

…The real question is, where the heck did all those kids come from?? And that, I can tell you, is quite simple: wombpods. Artificial uterinoid technology. Medi-mechanical growth tanks for developing children. Even before Jackie’s day, the need for women (and nonbinary/transgender folks, etc) to be the sole source of reproduction for the survival of the species had been completely removed from the equation.

If someone with a womb/uterus wants to have a child the old-fashioned (i.e. risk of death, albeit very very low in the 23rd century) way, they are completely free to do so. In fact, PopEx (Population Expansion) pays people to have more children…provided they pass the mandatory training courses & tests to make sure they’ll be good parental material.

Many choose to transfer the zygote to a wombpod as soon as they know they’re pregnant. Many more children are deliberately bred via wombpod creches, where they are raised by professional nannies, etc. One of the big reasons why PopEx pays people to have kids is because newly settled colonyworlds are dangerous places; the more people are born, the more people there are to replace those who die, and the more hands on deck there’ll be when they’ve grown up enough to help out.

Colonizing a world (inhabitable open air colonization or carefully spaced clusters of domes in style) has an attrition rate, but it also has an expansion rate curve that has to be kept ahead of. The initial living situations are sparse, resources are tight, and it’s all increasingly crowded. But infrastructure is being built by that first generation that then uplifts the second generation into much more rapid expansion.

Take Sanctuary, for example: the parent generation (firstworlders, the ones to actually land on the planet) was roughly 50,000 people. Admittedly, that’s a bit low, but that’s because they were pulling colonists off of Eiaven and other lesser heavyworlds to try to populate Sanctuary. By Ia’s day (2nd generation, grandchild of the firstworlders), there are over 200,000 settlers…and that includes an attrition rate on a planet where simply falling down can kill a person, if they fall on the wrong surface. (Cracked/crushed skulls, etc.)

Eventually, enough soft plexcrete and other padded surfaces get laid all over the place that the death rate drops significantly…but the wombpod creches are still pumping out lots of children. By the time of the Firegirl Prophecy, they have a population of many, many millions.

On the downside, once there are a craptonne of people, the need for excess population expansion has to be slowed down…but gauging by how much is awkward. That means you have about 1-2 generations (10-20 ish years Terran Standard) where you’re still “overproducing” population numbers…and many of them need to have a job to do. Except, on the home colony, all or most of the infrastructure is laid, or at least the current workforces can easily keep up with the needs of the people…and so you need to give them something to do.

But oh, hey, look, we just happen to have a huge Saik Interdicted Zone, and all those hundreds & thousands of star systems to patrol, and if you agree to serve for X number of years defending planet Y, you’ll get the title deed to a nice big plot of land ot settle on, and grow that world’s population some day, maybe, with kids of your own!

Ironically, Ia knows that there will be a massive problem with scaling down the Space Force, with lots of people suddenly out of military work, and in need of being reintegrated into civilian work, and��well, the nice thing, the really nice thing, about the Terran United Planets Space Force, is that they don’t just hand a soldier her discharge papers and show her the door. They transition them, and keep in constant touch for years–yes, years–afterward to make sure they’re doing okay. (Everyone gets free healthcare paid by actually sensible taxation, though military veterans have additional free access to specialists who deal with veteran-style chronic injuries to body, heart, & mind.)

We just never got to see any of that because Ia’s story was focused solely on her and her choice to become career military, i.e. not retire during the scope of the story…and Jackie’s story during the First Salik War both started and ended at points in her life where we just didn’t get to see any of that post-service support going on for her.

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shelleyseale · 5 years ago

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How to Prepare for a Trek to Everest Base Camp

When we first started planning our trip to Everest base camp, we both were continuously on Google searching how to prepare for a trek to Everest base camp. We had loads of questions regarding trekking to Everest base camp like, how hard is it? How fit do you have to be? Is it dangerous? What is the accommodation like? What kind of gear do you need? Do you need a guide/porter? And while we found answers to the majority of our questions we had to find and read numerous websites and blog posts to get the information. Our aim for this post is to provide you answers to all the questions we had, plus more. Which in turn, we hope, will help you plan and prepare your trip to Everest base camp.

Everest Base Camp

When's the best time to go?

You can actually trek to Everest Base Camp during any time of the year but it's not always easy going and can be very difficult to reach. During the winter months of January and February, the temperatures can drop to way below freezing, with snow covering the higher ground. The majority of lodges also close down higher up so it can be difficult to find accommodation. It is also advisable not to trek during the monsoon season of June to September the trails can become impassable due to landslides and rock falls, it's also not nice trekking in torrential downpours. The best times to trek to Everest base camp are during the months of March to April and October to around the middle of December. From March through to the end of April, usually by late morning the clouds start to roll in and the snow cover on the mountains is minimal, but it's the time when climbers descend on Base Camp to attempt to summit Everest, so the trails are full of trekkers and climbers. October until late December can be a great time to trek to Base Camp, the skies are usually clear offering amazing views of the freshly, snow covered mountains. Towards the end of November into December, the trails become less crowded which can make your trek more enjoyable, but the nights become cold, frequently dropping into minus figures.

Claire on the Everest Base Camp trek

How fit do you really need to be?

The fitter you are the easier it will be, but that doesn't mean you've got to be super fit. We would put both of us into the category of an average fitness. A couple months before we left the U.K we use to run 5K twice a week and tried to go on a long walk every weekend. But to be honest, unless you live in a mountainous region it will be hard to get the type of training you need to prepare for Everest base camp. As our guide told us, as long as you take it slow and steady and listen to your body you'll be fine.

How much does it cost?

This also depends on how you decide to go about it. If you decide to trek independently you will spend on average between $20 to €30 a day on food and accommodation, plus any snacks you may want to buy during the day. Depending on your negotiating skills the majority of lodges will actually let you stay for free of a few $ as long as you eat your meals at the lodge. If you take the independent trekking route you will also have to arrange and pay for transport to and from the domestic terminal at Kathmandu airport, flights to Lukla which cost $148 one way (unless you plan to trek from Jiri or Shivalaya, which will add a further 8 days on to your trek) plus your TIMS card and the Sagarmatha National Park entrance fees which costs $20 and $32 respectively. Another option is to contact a local trekking agency in Kathmandu and get the trek tailored to your liking. After much thought, we decided against trekking independently and arranged for Nepal Hiking Adventure to arrange the flights and permits and provide us just with a guide but no porter. Depending on the guide's experience you can expect to pay between $20 - $35 a day, beforehand make sure you spend some time getting to know them. You will be spending 2 weeks trekking with the guide so it's good to get on together. The price of a porter can range between $10 - $20 a day. This option provides a happy medium between the cost of trekking independently and going with a group tour.

Everest Base Camp trek Which leads us to the last option which is the group tour. There are literally hundreds of international and local companies offering group tours to Everest Base Camp, you could arrive in Kathmandu and book onto a group tour leaving in the next couple days or larger international companies like G Adventures offer online booking. The positives of joining a group tour are, that everything is arranged for you, all you have to do is get yourself to Kathmandu. You will also get to meet and trek with a group of 10 -12 people from all over the world, giving you a chance to make new and possibly life long friends. The downside of group tours is that in our opinion you have no control, everything is arranged from the trekking itinerary to each lodge you will stay at. You will also overpay, sometimes by $600 compared to going with local trekking agencies or independently.

What is the accommodation like?

If luxury accommodation is your thing then maybe this trek isn't for you, the accommodation along the trail is very basic but comfy. Each tea house has a number of rooms, usually consisting of two single beds with one pillow and blanket, a shared bedside table and a few coat hooks, and that's it. The walls are consist of thin plywood/chipboard, so you will hear what your neighbours are up to, so bring earplugs. At the start of the trail in Phakding and Namche it is possible to find rooms with an ensuite toilet but the majority of the time it will be shared toilets. Hot showers are available but it will cost you and once you're above a certain height once you're wet, it's hard to get warm again. But don't be put off, overall the tea houses are well maintained, clean and comfy.

What kind of trekking gear do I need?

This is completely down to the choice of the person doing the trek, you could spend a fortune on all the different gear you may need for the trek to base camp but you can also get by with the bare basics. We are in the middle of putting an Everest Base Camp packing list together and will link it here once it's finished. But for now, we have highlighted the three most important things you must have on your trek, without these the trek to Everest base camp will become a lot harder and uncomfortable, but still not impossible. 1 x Thermal Jacket - This can be hired in almost every other shop in Thamel for around 100 rupees (£0.75) a day. You can also buy them for a good price depending on your bartering skills. Just don't expect them to last much longer than the trek. 1 x Sleeping Bag - Again unless you want to carry the extra weight while travelling to Nepal you can hire a sleeping bag once in Thamel for around 100 rupees (£0.75). If you are travelling in winter you need to get at least a three season bag to stay warm. 1 x Hiking Boots/Shoes - This is one item that shouldn't be overlooked and worth spending money on. You will be walking on average 5-6 hours a day, so you need to look after your feet. Make sure your boots are comfy and well broken in before attempting the trek, you don't want to make it harder for yourself by getting blisters along the way.

Good hiking boots are essential for a trek to Everest Base Camp

What permits and documents do I need?

To trek to Everest base camp you will need to get a TIMS Card, you will need to provide the dates of your planned trek, an itinerary and contact number. You will also need a copy of your passport and provide two passport sized photos. If you're trekking as an organised group or through a trekking agency they will take care of this and it should be included in the price. If you are an individual trekker you will need to go to the Nepal Tourism Board office in Kathmandu or Pokhara and apply for one yourself. You will also need to pay the Sagamartha National Park entrance fee, this can be paid for at the entry point on the trail in Monjo or beforehand in Kathmandu at the Tourist Service Centre. For more information please visit the website here www.welcomenepal.com. It is also advisable to contact your countries embassy upon arrival to Nepal, to let them know of your planned trekking dates and route. It's also a good idea to carry a copy of your insurance details and emergency numbers.

How to prevent and deal with altitude sickness?

Altitude sickness or acute mountain sickness can affect anyone, you could be the fittest person on earth but still succumb to the effects of altitude, no one knows when it will happen or at what altitude and if you are unfortunate to get altitude sickness the only way to recover is to descend back down to lower altitudes. Minor symptoms of altitude sickness are headaches, loss of appetite and insomnia, most people will experience at least one or all of these symptoms, we had all three at some points of the trek. Severe symptoms include shortness of breath, at rest, severe headaches, vomiting and diarrhea, dizziness, coughing, retinal hemorrhage and Edema. But while some of the symptoms sound terrifying very few trekkers get severe altitude sickness on the trek to Everest base camp, there are steps to try and prevent altitude sickness and reduce your risks. While booking or planning your trip to Everest Base Camp make sure the itinerary includes at least two acclimatization days. Depending on the route you take the acclimatization days are usually day 3 at Namche and day 6 at Dingboche. These acclimatization days are essential for your body to acclimatize to the change in altitude helping your chances to a successful and safe ascent. Once you reach 3,000m you should not increase the altitude at which you sleep by more than 300 - 400m a night. It's advised to climb high and sleep low, so for example when you land in Lukla to begin your trek your first night will be in Phakding which is 200m below your starting point. Drink plenty of water, you need to drink between 3 - 4 litres every day to keep you hydrated, trekking at altitude can dehydrate you very quickly due to less moisture being in the air and water vapor evaporating from your lungs at a higher rate. Take it slow, the slower you go the better. It's not a race to the top, take your time and let your body adjust. There is also a host of drugs you can buy that will help prevent/cover up symptoms of altitude sickness but we are not in a position to recommend this.

Mount Everest, the highest peak on earth

What is the food like on the trek, and how easy is it to get water?

From our experience, the food got worse the higher we went. Tengboche and below the food was actually quite nice, meat was available but we stuck with vegetarian food for the duration of the trek. Everything in the mountains has to be carried up so we didn't really want to risk eating meat that it could have been not refrigerated for 2/3 days. The types of dishes you'll expect to see are along the lines of veg noodles, noodle soups, all types of cooked eggs, Dal Bhat which is the mainstay of Nepalese food, they eat it 2/3 times a day, every day. You should definitely try it, we loved it. Fried rice, veg fried rice, and pizzas, which we heard weren't so good. The breakfast menu was quite good, you could have tea, coffee, toast, porridge, fruit, muesli and fried potatoes and eggs. Dom is quite a fussy eater and he managed to find plenty of food he enjoyed. As for getting water on the trek, bottled water is readily available and can be bought almost everywhere, but it's expensive. The cheapest we saw was 100 rupees and the most expensive at Gorak Shep was 400 rupees, compared with 20 rupees in Kathmandu. The prices rise the higher you go which is understandable but we thought this was pushing it a bit too much. To save money on buying water either buy iodine or water purification tablets in Kathmandu and ask the lodge to fill your water bottle each time. Or the other option is to get a water purification system, we used a Steri Pen Adventurer Opti which worked fine and we didn't get ill once.

Can you connect to the internet while trekking?

Yes, but the majority of the time it will cost you. All the lodges have WiFi but you've got to pay for it, and the higher you go the more expensive it is. At Dingboche, we paid 500 rupees for unlimited WiFi but in the evenings the signal usually goes. The only two places we found free WiFi was the Foot Rest Lodge in Namche and the Namche bakery. Upon arrival to Nepal, we bought a 5GB Ncell sim card at the airport and we received 3G signal all the way up to Tengboche before we lost it and then reappeared at Gorak Shep and base camp.

How long does the trek take?

The typical Everest base camp trek where you fly in and out of Lukla, trek to base camp and back safely takes 13 days, which includes two acclimatisation days that are a must. Please don't attempt the trek without including these days. If you decide to walk in from Jiri or Shivala you can add a further 8 days to your trek. There are of course other options which you can add on to your Everest base camp trek, such as Cho la pass and Gokyo lakes, Ama Dablam base camp and even climbing island peak.

Should I book a group tour or can I trek independently?

This is something only you can decide and is down to personal choice and cost. Both have positives and negatives, with a group it gives you a chance to make good friends with people from all over the world, everything is arranged for you, so all you've got to do really is turn up and walk. If you don't like your own company then this would ideally be the best option. Trekking independently gives you a lot more freedom to stop as much as you want, decided which lodges you want to stay at and extend your trip if wanted. Unless your trekking in the off season your never be lonely on the trail and will have plenty of people to chat to once you've arrived at the lodge. Trekking independently can be dangerous and if possible it's always best to find another person to walk with, the Himalayas can be a dangerous place and you wouldn't want to be on your own if you get into an accident or suddenly become ill.

Other treks in Nepal

The majority of trekkers heading to Nepal go for the Everest Base Camp trek, but the country has so much more to offer, trekking wise than just Everest. Another popular trek is the Annapurna circuit which we are yet to do, if interested and want to find out more, then check out this great post by The Common Wanderer - Read this before hiking the Annapurna Circuit: 21 essential things to know. We hope you have found the above information helpful, and hopefully, would have answered some questions on how to prepare for a trek to Everest base camp. If you are planning to go and have any other questions either send us an email or comment below and we will do our best to answer them for you. Feel inspired? Pin this to your Pinterest Board!

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#Everest #EverestBaseCamp #hiking #Himalayas #howtoprepareforeverest #Kathmandu #Nepal #Trekking #trekkingEverest #trekkingNepal

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funnynewsheadlines · 5 years ago

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6 Scariest Client Feedback Stories Turned Into Vintage Horror Movie Posters

Freelancers and contractors have certain perks in their work lives; the freedom to pick and choose projects that seem the most interesting and challenging is great, plus you can decide how much you think your work is worth and set your own schedule.

Image credits: seriousstudio

However, there are downsides too. Demanding clients can suddenly shift deadlines and budgets, micromanage your work until it’s no longer your creation anymore and don’t even get me started on paying taxes… Sometimes completing a project is only the beginning. Then comes the feedback, the excuses for incomplete payment, the complaints and the “just one more thing.”

Image credits: seriousstudio

Philippines-based design studio Serious Studio have obviously been there many times before and decided to turn their terrifying client experiences into a series of vintage horror movie posters. As you can see, they make perfect sense!

Image credits: seriousstudio

Spooky story #1: “It’s 4pm and I’m about to wrap things up and call it a day when all of a sudden, a client calls, demanding a turnover for a new concept by the end of the day. Sometimes, at night, I can still hear the shrill echo of a voice taunting me to make that deadline…” – Anonymous Advertising Creative

Image credits: seriousstudio

Spooky story #2: “A few days ago, my client wanted me to just copy his competitor’s logo to save time and back-and-forths. He was persistent that I should just copy it because ‘it just works’. I wanted to tell him that if he’s just going to literally copy a restaurant, he should just forget about starting one. I didn’t tell him because I’m just sitting here eating my popcorn, waiting for this trainwreck that is just about to happen.” – Anonymous Graphic Designer

Image credits: seriousstudio

Spooky story #3: “My small agency just finished a project that went on for months. By the time we started to talk about billing, my client told me to talk to their accounting department. The sad part is they really don’t have an accounting department— I was actually talking to their intern, who was a really bad liar. He ended up just saying that his boss suddenly can’t pay our agency. ” – Anonymous Finance Guy

Image credits: seriousstudio

Spooky story #4: “My client told me that I shouldn’t get paid for this because they’re just a startup. The best they can do is pay me in exposure, and get me when they’re way bigger. After all, he said, it’s called freelancing for a reason. Also, who lives on exposure anyway?” – Anonymous Freelancer

Image credits: seriousstudio

Spooky story #5: “I’m at my daughter’s ballet recital, and out of nowhere my boss asks me to fix some site bugs that could easily be done on Monday. Here’s to the weekend!” – Anonymous Web Developer

Image credits: seriousstudio

Here’s the last one. The lesson in this one is to never pitch for free. Spooky story #6: “I pitched a brand campaign to this company last July and they loved it. A week later, they told me that they didn’t have a budget for it, so they went ahead and executed it with someone who could do it for cheap.” – Anonymous Advertising Creative

Image credits: seriousstudio

from Funny – Bored Panda http://bit.ly/2Z4InC6 via IFTTT from Blogger http://bit.ly/2QHL6OV

#funny news #funny videos #funny news today #funny photos

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simnovels-blog · 7 years ago

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Rags to Riches - Chapter 2

I made sure I sneaked out of the fire station before the sun came up so no one would notice I had been there. Before any of the town's residents set foot outside, I was already safely back in the forest. I spent the day gathering seeds, flowers and I encountered a few more birds! One of them was quite unique, and it turned out it was indeed a very rare species. The pet store owner gave me nearly a thousand simoleons for it! Combined with some of the other animals I caught and the seeds and flowers I gathered, I managed to make more than enough money to buy the piece of land. I had never imagined I would have been able to do that within two days! For the first time since graduating high school, I felt like I had truly accomplished something. If only my parents could see me now. Zorah Diamond, owner of the land at 52 Bristlecone Way in Hidden Springs! It was right in the forest as well, so it was perfect for me.

Unfortunately, buying the land took nearly all of my money and I wasn't able to build myself a little house yet. I had managed to put down some walls and a floor in the evening before I returned to the fire station, but I'd have to spend at least another day scavenging until I could turn it into an actual home. I needed to build a house where I could feel safe and secure. I mean, the woods were very dark at night. It was a perfect place for burglars, since the trees prevented any neighbors from being able to see what was going on at the house next door. Before I'd put anything of value on my property, I had to make sure it had a door that could be locked.

And so I left the fire station the next day to get back to work. It was already the third day since I arrived here, and because I had been in contact with fishermen, pet store owners, flower shops and now also a real estate agent, people started to notice my presence. I could see my various neighbors glance at me curiously as they passed by. I didn't really care much about any of them though. Making money was my main concern and it took up all of my time. Scavenging was a fulltime job and it required a lot of physical labor as well. That third day was my lucky day though! Apparently, around the festival grounds in the forest, wild flowers grew all over the place. I hadn't noticed it two days ago when I had caught the red bird near this place, but I found a lot of flowers that were considered pretty rare in the next town over. The guy at the flower shop paid me a huge amount of money for flowers like Cosmos, Sweet Williams and Indian Blankets. These flowers happened to grow plenty at the festival grounds and it was very close to my land as well.

The flowers turned out to be my personal goldmine. I managed to make more than 5.500 simoleons that day, more than enough to finish building myself a decent home. From the money I managed to include a bathroom, a separate bedroom and a kitchen with a fridge and stove and even a dining table.

That night I slept in my own bed in my own house for the first time. I felt safe, my doors and windows locked, my walls protecting me from any dangers out there in the dark forest. I didn't have to sneak around in the fire station anymore, keeping the lights off not to draw any attention. This was MY house. I could do whatever I wanted in here. I had built it with money I earned from hard work that I did by myself. It truly felt amazing that I had accomplished all of this within such a small amount of time. I started to really like Hidden Springs, with all its rare flowers and animals. Nature had helped me get to where I was right now and I was incredibly thankful for it. If it was even possible, I had come to love nature and all of its living creatures even more than I already did.

After eating nothing but cereal at the fire station for a couple of days, it felt good to make myself an actual healthy meal with fresh ingredients. The thing was, I never learned how to cook! I was too scared to even touch my brand new second hand stove. What if I accidentally set my house on fire?! So I decided to stick to making myself a salad. This was ok for me, I always loved salad it was my favorite meal. Maybe I would learn how to cook some day, but for now this was more than enough for me.

Though I had my own house now and it basically had all the necessities to keep me alive for a very long time, I missed having stuff to do. I had no living room or tv, not even a bookcase to store some books in. There were also bills to pay, like the land tax and electricity bill for the lights and kitchen appliances. I realized that even though I had my own house now, that didn't mean I could just stop working. A house cost money and there was still plenty of new stuff to buy and rooms to expand as well. So that morning after I had made myself a whole bunch of salad that would get me through the next few days, I headed out and went back to my scavenging business. The festival park had grown a few new flowers I could pick and sell and I found plenty of seeds and minerals too. By the end of the day, I had collected stuff worth another thousand simoleons. I was starting to get really good at this! A daily income of more than a thousand simoleons was not bad at all. Better than some actual jobs I heard of. The only downside was, scavenging took up my whole day. It was super exhausting to run all over town, wandering through abandoned areas and thick woods to find stuff at places no one else had bothered to look. By the time I got home, I was hungry, dirty and exhausted. I had no social life at all. I decided I needed an alternative income that would take a little less time. From the thousand simoleons I bought a second hand computer and an easel to paint on. I loved drawing, but I never painted in my life before. I had no clue if the life of an artist was for me, but the least I could do was try.

And so I started painting. I wasn't very good at it. My first painting only sold for two simoleons to a kid on the streets who probably thought it looked like something he could draw as well. But I would eventually get better, and painting was way more relaxing than scavenging. This didn't mean that I had given up on scavenging completely though. I still loved nature and wandering outside made me feel free somehow. But instead of scavenging from the early morning until the late evening, I decided to cut my day in half and only gather stuff until lunch. After that, I would practice my painting until dinner and then I'd even have some time left over to relax on the computer in the evening.

With this new schedule, I gradually earned myself a decent income. It wasn't more than a thousand simoleons a day anymore, but it was good enough to improve my home a little bit. I was able to redo my walls and floors so that it didn't look like a shack anymore and I expanded my bedroom a bit so that I could buy myself a bigger bed. My life was more relaxing now, but I still missed something very important in life: social interaction. I had a computer so I could occasionally chat with strangers not to feel completely isolated from society, but it wasn't enough for me. Back home I never had friends either, but at least my parents were always there to keep me company. It might have been negative company most of the time, but now that I was always completely alone, I realized how important any kind of social interaction really was. Until right now, I had never appreciated my parents company. I found a valuable lesson in this. Humans never seem to realize the things they already have and are always focused on what they don't have. Losing literally everything helped me to find true value in things that for others might seem minor and therefore are underappreciated by them. A roof above my head, a meal with fresh ingredients, a warm shower and a comfy bed... And here I was, feeling super lonely while during my old life all I ever wanted was to get away from the only two people that still bothered to talk and interact me on a regular basis. I wish I could call them, to tell them how I was doing. Just a few weeks ago, I could've never imagined wanting something like that. It's funny how your perspective on life can change so drastically when going through a hard time. I decided I should probably leave behind anything that connected me to my old life and this included my parents. Instead, I left my house and walked towards the town centre. It was time to mingle with my neighbors.

#Rags to Riches #The Sims 3 #Sims 3 Legacy #Sims story #The Sims #Sims 3 challenge #ts3 #ts3 legacy #ts3 story #ts3 challenge #ts3 Rags to Riches #simblr #ts3 simblr #ts3rtr

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caitlynlynch · 8 years ago

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How do I get into reviewing books? (By which I mean, how do I get people to listen to me and respect my opinion? I can do the actual reviewing part.)

uhm, that’s a really good question. I guess I’ll tell you when I find out the answer?

Look, I think you just have to start doing it. I’ve only been reviewing books ‘professionally’ by which I mean reading books I didn’t pay for, by opting in to get ARCs (advance review copies) from authors since the beginning of the year, and I’m still building audience. Here’s what I’ve done so far:

I created a Trello board to keep myself organized. All books are sorted by the date their review is due - in some cases, that is release date, in some cases I have assigned an arbitrary one. You can see my board here. Trello is free to use and very handy to keep yourself organized for all sorts of tasks.

I joined a shit ton of author and reading groups on Facebook. In many of them, authors will post a Google Form asking you to fill it out to request for a free ARC. Then you review. BEWARE. I got Triple Princes this way and it was one of the worst piles of dogshit I’ve ever had to review. Search Facebook Groups for ‘book’ ‘review’ ‘reader’ ‘author’ etc. There are literally hundreds.

I post on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Goodreads and Amazon as well as on my own blog. (Friends and followers on all of the above are VERY welcome). This maximises my social reach as far as I can possibly manage. If you use Instagram or Pinterest then you might want to use one of those, too.

Some friends are currently trying to talk me into doing a YouTube channel where I vidcast my reactions to some of the worst books I have to read, along with reading samples of the awful. I’m considering it :D (feedback and opinions would be good here...)

Once I’d done a few reviews to the best of my ability, I applied to join NetGalley, ReadingAlley, The Romance Reviews and Readers Favorite. These are the four ‘professional’ reviewing sites that I know of. Basically, authors put their books on the sites for review and then you request to review them.

I’ll give you a quick rundown of the four so that you know what to expect.

NetGalley is the ‘professional’s choice’. It probably has the highest average quality of books, which does NOT mean that you won’t pick up stinkers. It also has ‘big names’ - I’ve reviewed a Lois McMaster Bujold off there, and I requested to review one by @seananmcguire but got knocked back. And that’s the downside with NetGalley; they can and do knock you back, especially in the early days of being a reviewer. You kind of have to start small with the little indie presses and work your way up. These days I probably get accepted for four out of five that I ask for.

ReadingAlley is largely populated by indie authors. You can actually get ‘paid’ for doing ReadingAlley reviews; you collect RA points which, when you have enough, you can exchange for Amazon gift cards or other good stuff. The quality of stuff you get on here can be a bit hit and miss and there isn’t a huge amount of choice. Like NetGalley, you request a book and the author/publisher decides whether you get it or not. That said, I have never, ever been turned down. (Yet.)

The Romance Reviews is pretty much what it says on the tin. You’re only going to get romance books. You ‘assign’ books to yourself to review; you get a limited quota. You have to pass a ‘review assessment’ to get in. They are quite picky and you are not permitted to post low-star reviews publicly; it’s considered ‘author feedback’ only. Quality; all over the place, from superb to poke-your-eyes-out awful. I tend to check out authors’ works on Goodreads before assigning myself books.

Readers’ Favorite is by FAR the hardest site to get accepted for. You have to pass an author assessment written to their guidelines, and you aren’t allowed to post reviews below 4 stars publicly. Populated by indie authors, again the quality is WILDLY variable. HOWEVER. The one big positive for RF is that they pay you. Normally $1 per review but there are often Express reviews available which are worth $10 if you can complete within a couple of weeks. They pay out to PayPal once you’ve amassed $50 in credit. So yes, you really can get paid for reading books.

If you don’t want to get stuck with an awful book, do your research. If the book is already published, you can preview the first 10% of it on Amazon. That’ll give you a pretty fair idea of the quality of the writing. I also use Goodreads a lot because readers there tend to be a bit more honest; check out any low-star reviews for the book you are reading or other books by the author.

Review consistently. I read really, really fast and average 5-7 books a week. If that’s not you, that’s OK, but you need to be able to do at least 1-2 books per week. Consider teaming up with other friends maybe? You can always create a reviewer blog with a team of reviewers! (If you get popular, do ask me to join! :P)

Wow, I’ve ranted on a lot for such a short question... but I hope some of this has been useful info, for you or anyone else who’s considering becoming a reviewer. There are a lot of good articles out there on ‘how to write a book review’ (just Google) but you do need to develop your own style. I’ve gone for blatant, sometimes brutal, honesty. My Amazon page is actually called Brutally Honest Reviews, and I try to live by that code. Many reviewers state that they won’t publicly post 3* or lower reviews; I think that’s dishonest to potential buyers.

Good luck. If you’d like to post a guest review on my blog, do ask! The worst I can say is “no thanks, not this time” after all!

#book reviewing #averyjheath

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foodbeforedude · 3 years ago

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Pricing your Covid Vaccines

Imagine! You are a business owner and you've just launched your new product. It is none other than 'Coca Cola'. Yes, you are none other than Asa Griggs Candler. Keep yourself in his shoes. Now you have a burning question on your mind - How should I price my beverage? If I price too low, then I would lose out on the profit. But if I price too high, then I would lose on the potential people who would've bought my drink otherwise, again unnecessarily losing on the profit. I just need to price it right. Uggghhh

But you know, even at any standard uniform price, there will always be some people who could've paid more for my Coke and some people who might have been able to afford it if only I had priced it just a dollar lower. You cannot have best of both worlds.

Whaaaat a burning question.I wish there was a way to exactly find a customer's ability to pay and price the product accordingly. As long as I was covering the cost, I could have sold my Coke and made maximum profits.

Like Coca Cola's business owner, all businesses face this challenge. To price the product in the most profitable way. Differential pricing is a dream for businesses but unfortunately there is no foolproof method to determine a person's ability to pay. It's impossible. Markets don't have any mechanism. There are a few examples of differential pricing but they are not foolproof and sellers do end up losing their producer surplus. Now fast forward to today. What is the burning topic of today? The pandemic. And what could possibly end the pandemic or at least shorten its lifespan? Vaccines! Now let's put ourselves in Poonawalla's shoes. 'Woah! I've created a miracle product. How do I price it?' Now people will have multiple opinions on it - "Why are you worrying about profit when this could be a literal lifesaver? Can you look beyond the profit and give it free/at bare minimum cost for humanity?" While some people will be like - "This is such an essential product. I can price it at any point I want and people still will have to buy it. There's already a shortage and very few competitors so all the stars are in my favor." But somehow we as a business always will come to the question of finding a right price point so that we can maximize our producer surplus.

Vaccine pricing is complicated. We cannot put any random high price just because the its demand is inelastic. In reality, we have rules and regulations to follow. And vaccines being an essential product, obviously the government will intervene in its pricing.

Now let's come to the actual case of what is happening in India. During the 1st phase of vaccination, it was priced at Rs 150 per dose. The vaccine was free to the people and the government was paying for it. This was important. We needed to vaccinate our HCW, front line workers and high risk people. However, let's again discuss the price point of Rs 150. Put yourself in Poonawalla's shoes (or any other vaccine manufacturer) "My product can fetch so much profit, why should I price it so low. I'm losing all my margins" As per NDTV Interview - Rs 150 was giving his normal profits but not supernormal profits. So it is not like the manufacturer was going into losses. Then again Rs 150 price for lifetime seems like we're undercutting the true profits. As a business I need to increase my producer's surplus. Rs 150 per dose for many of us is a low price for the vaccine. I'm making a guess, but I think most of the middle class and above can pay a higher price. Then why not charge them that price? Simply put, differential pricing is a dream, but still there are ways to achieve a bit of differential pricing. And this brings me to the second phase of vaccination drives - Vaccine for all 18+ years and above. Now the first example of differential pricing we saw when the price for central government procured vaccines and state government procurement was different. 400 per dose for Covishield for state governments, and Rs 600 per dose for private hospitals as opposed to the Rs 150 which the central government was procuring. (Prices might have updated a bit) Yay! As a producer, I've managed to create a differential pricing. Now I'll be able to get more profits. Some would say - vaccines should be free for all/ the government should pay for the vaccine/ we have poor people who cannot afford the vaccine at this price etc etc. While all those points are valid, we must also understand that we are not living in an ideal world. We cannot just give free vaccines. Our government does not have enough money to cover the free vaccination for the whole country. India's fiscal deficit is ₹18.21 lakh crore for 20-21. Call it the government's poor budgeting or whatever, the truth is - the government cannot undertake more expenses. And why shouldn't a private individual who earns more Rs 50000 a month pay the right price for their vaccine? If one has the ability to pay, then they should pay. Free vaccination will put unnecessary burden on the government, hence privatisation of some portion of vaccine distribution makes sense. It would relieve the government from unnecessary expenses and also allow our vaccine manufacturers to earn their dream supernatural profit. Privatisation of some portions of vaccine distribution has also led corporations to come forward and vaccinate their employees. Corporations are running vaccination drives so that their employees get vaccines. Now I'm not sure at what price the corporations negotiate with vaccine manufacturers, but I think it is safe to assume it would be higher than any government procurement price. While privatisation of vaccines may have its downsides - rich people will get their vaccines first, poor people might not have the time and resources to play Fastest Fingers First on CoWin website for vaccination slots etc, this is a good(might be the only) way to ensure speedy distribution of vaccines considering the current scenario and governance. This article was originally intended to talk more on the economics of differential pricing but I might have derailed a lot.

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bettydgunter90 · 4 years ago

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083: “If Only I Had Known!” – What Every Rookie Land Investor Ought to Know

Wouldn’t it be great if we could travel back in time and give ourselves advice based on the information we know today?

Just imagine how much faster you’d be able to focus on what works and stop struggling on the paths that lead nowhere.

In this episode, Jaren and I are talking about the things we wished we had known back when we started our land businesses. Everything from the value of experience to the importance of time management, and a whole lot in between.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a time machine, but the next best thing we can do is learn from our mistakes.

I think this conversation will be particularly helpful for anybody who is thinking about getting into the land business or who is already in it, but still in the “beginner phase”.

And for people who have been in the business for a while, you’ll probably agree with a lot of the stuff we’re going to cover here. Likewise, if you have other things you want to contribute to what we’re talking about, you’re more than welcome to do that in the comments at the bottom of this page!

Links and Resources

How to Build a Buying Website

A Closer Look at My Blind Offer Template

Profit First Changed My Life. It Will Change Yours Too.

REtipster Land Coaching

Why Seller Financing Makes Sense

Kolbe Index A Test

How to Close a Cash Land Transaction In-House (Full DIY Instructions!)

How Land Investors Can Leverage the Power of Real Estate Agents

I Just Paid Off My House. Am I Smart or Stupid?

048: Investing in Belize Real Estate – Upsides and Risks

Share Your Thoughts

Leave a note in the comments section below!

Share this episode on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn (social sharing buttons below!)

Help out the show:

Leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts Your ratings and reviews really help (and I read each one).

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts

Subscribe on Spotify

Subscribe on Stitcher

Thanks again for joining me this week. Until next time!

Right-click here and “Save As” to download this episode to your computer.

Episode 83 Transcription

Seth: Hey, everybody. How’s it going? This is Seth Williams and Jaren Barnes with the RETipster podcast. And today you’re listening to episode 83. In this episode, it’s just Jaren and I, and we’re going back and forth on an interesting topic. We’re talking about the key things that we wish we had known about land investing back when we got started.

I think this will be particularly helpful for anybody who is thinking about getting into the land business or anybody who’s sort of already in it, but they’re kind of in the beginner phase, like maybe you’re in your first year. And for people who have been in the business for a while, I think you’ll probably find this kind of interesting as well. You’ll probably agree with a lot of the stuff we’re saying. And if you have other things you want to contribute to what we’re talking about here, you’re more than welcome to do that in the comments which you can find in the show notes at retipster.com/83.

So, we’re just going to jump into the things that we wish we had been better aware of, because I think everybody out there can kind of relate whenever you decide to get into a new business like this, you usually make that decision based on the highlights. Like the really great things about the business that you were told or that you were led to believe. Most of that stuff is like totally true and legit, but the stuff that you’re not really told about, or you don’t really figure out until you just start doing it, it’s like, “Oh, I see. Well, that kind of stinks. That’s not fun.”

This is just a reality of life. I mean, this happens with literally everything. Think of any product you’ve ever bought, any business you’ve ever tried. Anything. There are always these downsides or downers. It’s not necessarily just downers, but just things that would have been really helpful. If we had known better. I probably could have made better decisions or chose to focus our energy on certain things rather than others. So, we’re just going to pick apart some of the first things that come to mind for us. I’ve got my own little list and Jaren has his list as well. So, we’re going to go through that.

Jaren: I’m really excited because like you said, I think that this is going to be very insightful for people who are just getting started or are in the beginning phases of their land business. Seth: Why don’t you kick it off? What’s the first thing that comes to mind for you?

Jaren: So, for me, the very first thing I wish I knew when starting my land business was the time that it takes to sell a property in land. Now I have sold property within five days of it being listed on the market. So, I’m not saying that it’s impossible to sell property faster than this, but I found that on average, I sell properties within three to six months. And I used to get really frustrated when I was doing everything right, doing everything according to what everybody says you’re supposed to do. Listing on Facebook marketplace on Zillow and buy-sell trade groups and Land Wash and Craigslist and the whole thing. But I wasn’t selling property. I thought that there was something wrong with me or there was something wrong with what I was doing. And I was doing everything right. I just needed time.

And so that’s for me, the biggest mindset shift that I had to adjust to within land compared to houses. Because when you’re coming off of working at Simple Wholesaling and the wholesaling space in Indianapolis, I mean, if we were holding onto a property for more than a month, we had a bad deal on our hands and it was very costly.

And so, for me to adjust and say, “Oh, okay. If I have inventory for three to six months, I’m fine.” Like, I don’t even touch, adjust the price or touch a header on like a listing or any of that for at least three to four months, I don’t even consider it because it takes longer to sell, at least in my business.

Now I want to say a big caveat out there. People might have other types of businesses and markets might be completely different but for my experience, both in Indiana and in Florida, it’s been more so that I’ve had to wait three to six months on average to sell a property. And having that understanding allowed my heart to be like, it’s okay, everything’s good. I got everything out there. And I’m just in the waiting game, work on my leads, have fun, enjoy the process. And then on the other side, they always seem to sell.

Seth: I’m curious, what role does the amount of responses play in that? Say if you don’t get a single email, nobody asks “Is this available?” on Facebook, just total crickets for three to four months versus like you’re getting maybe an inquiry per week or something like that. In terms of like, whether or not you touch the pictures of the description or the headline or the price or anything like that, how much weight do you give that whole thing about the number of inquiries you’re getting?

Jaren: Personally, not much. But again, I mean, everybody’s business is different. I can only speak from my own experience. But I’ve had situations where I didn’t get any bites at all for like the first month or the first two months. But then all of a sudden at month three, I have a bunch of interest.

Seth: And that’s without changing anything?

Jaren: Without changing anything, yeah. So, I think that it can happen that way. Now if you’re getting absolutely no interest and no bites at all, you could change it sooner. Like I’m not telling you that you have to not touch anything for three months. I’m just saying in my business, I just don’t.

I kind of break up my land business on the disposition side in phases. So, phase one is preparing the property for sale. I get the pictures, area map views, and I get all the descriptions written up. And then phase two is actually listing the property and having it be on the market. And I stay in phase two for a long time, that three- to four-month mark. And then if it hits four to six months and I still haven’t sold the property, then we enter into phase three where I am adjusting the price, looking at possibly offering seller financing, adjusting the headers, looking at the pictures, trying to understand if I should redo my copy. That’s where I’m like, “Okay. Let me tweak around.” But I really give it some time before I make that call.

Seth: Yeah.

Jaren: What about you?

Seth: For me, I would say that three- to six- month time range has been pretty typical in my case as well. Again, sometimes you’ll sell it the next day, sometimes you’ll sell it in a month. If it’s three to six months, that’s not abnormal. It doesn’t mean anything is wrong or you’ve done something or somehow screwed something up.

I think I tend to monkey around with stuff a little sooner than that. And it’s not saying that’s right either. I am one who tends to, if things aren’t happening within like a month or so, like if I don’t see any activity, I just start thinking, “Hm, maybe something’s wrong. Maybe something has to change.” As I look back, I think sometimes I can see a notable difference when I do that stuff.

But usually the difference has to do with the price itself or how I am framing the property in the headline. If I’m drawing attention to, “Hey, pay X amount per month for this instead of a flat-out cash amount.” Again, that’s only if I’m even going down the seller financing track, which I usually don’t.

But all this to say, I don’t think your way is wrong, Jaren. I was just curious, how much weight do you give to lack of any inquiries at all? Does that cause concern for you or give you reason to mess with things or you pretty much almost put a calendar reminder, like “Don’t even look at this for another three months regardless of what happens?”

Jaren: That’s how I do it. Yep.

Seth: I’m sure that probably frees up your mental head space that you don’t have to think about stuff like that. So, there’s something to be said for that.

Jaren: What’s your number one?

Seth: I don’t know if this is in order of priority. It’s not like a one, two, three, four or five kind of thing. But for me, this was a very, very time-intensive business, especially in the first year. I just remember I was talking with a few other people who were doing this alongside me way back in the day. And that was the thing we kept talking about. I was like, this just takes so much time setting things up, like figuring out, okay, phone system, website, new email address, just getting things established. And then the first time I ever get a list, figuring that a lot. And the first time I ever sent out a direct mail campaign.

Every step, it was just such a big learning process. It got way faster after that for a year or so. I just remember in those first 12 months, it just seemed like it was such a massive time suck and adding to that was the particular way that I was doing. It was also not the most time-efficient way to do it, where I was sending out a neutral message to somebody and inviting them to call me and only giving them that option. Then I would try to call them back. We’d play phone tag. We talked for 30 minutes. I’d write up a full contract and send it to them. They’d say, no.

The other way I could have wasted more time was if I answered calls live and that it would have totally destroyed my life. But the way that I was doing it in the very beginning, there are some advantages to that. But like, man, it was just such a time-consuming ordeal. And there’s certainly things that I would do differently starting today, which I have done.

Had I known back then I would have gotten a buying website set up pretty early on. Again, not that you need this, but it can be very effective at those phone conversations, taking them off your plate in terms of gathering the information. And also, the idea of blind offers. That was something that I was totally oblivious to for several years. And again, not saying blind offers are right for every person’s situation, but there’s a lot of time efficiencies there.

And I wish first of all, that I would have just known how much time it’s going to take just so I could have gone into it with the right expectations. I think that’s kind of inevitable in your first year of anything. There are just tons of new stuff you have to figure out, but also just knowing like, “Hey, there are other ways to handle this too.” You don’t have to do the most time-consuming approach. And just kind of knowing all the options on the table now it’s just really helpful to know, “Oh, okay. I could do it this way. I could get that way. If I’ve got more money, I could go that way,” that kind of thing.

Jaren: I love it, man. That’s awesome.

Seth: What about you? What’s your next one?

Jaren: So, my next one is a really big deal actually. When I first got started in land, I was coming off the coattails of a very large company that was doing 25 to 30 properties a month on average. And we were spending a lot of money on direct mail and on staff and all this. And so, when I first got started, I was operating underneath this mindset of like, I’m just going to throw money at anything and everything that I have to and just growth at all costs. And so, I tried to hire somebody full time when I first got started.

Seth: Really?

Jaren: Yeah. And I tried to commit to doing a large amount of direct mail every single month. It was not wise. I think the biggest piece that I struggled with as a business owner was understanding how to manage money. And so, I’ve been saying it a lot lately around the community. I wrote a whole blog post all about it. But Profit First and implementing Profit First in my land business has been a huge game changer because it’s given me a financial management system that, I mean, you have to set it up and there’s a lot of work to set it up.

But once it’s in place, it’s really intuitive. And I don’t want to say easy because nothing worth doing is easy, but it’s simple and it’s intuitive. And it makes a lot of sense and puts things on autopilot in a number of ways. So, I committed, I think at some point in my land business, to doing direct mail every single month without fail, no matter what. And I think that was a big mistake when I first started out.

I think that the smarter way to run your direct mail is to do it in a cyclical manner. So, you run your business from direct mail campaign to direct mail campaign. So, you do direct mail, you work all of the leads all the way to sale on that one direct mail campaign, allocating a certain amount of the profit from each property and putting it toward a marketing account.

And then once you’ve exhausted all of the leads that have come or the majority, because you might have one that will call you a year from now or whatever, but at least the majority of the properties that have come in for that direct mail campaign are waiting until you have some significant money set aside for your next direct mail campaign.

Because overhead in the land business is really small except for direct mail. You’re looking at maybe $200 to $500 a month depending on software and listing sites and stuff that you can do. That’s the numbers in session two of our coaching program, I actually have a sample budget. And that’s where I got that number from. I’ve written out like DataTree and phone service and all these things. And it’s not that much of overhead, but then if you throw in $2,000 a month for direct mail cost, all of a sudden that’s a lot. That’s $24,000 a year.

I would heavily encourage people, especially in the beginning to only send out direct mail when you have the money to send out direct mail. Send it out with your seed money, get properties, sell your properties, make revenue, and then operate your business off of the real revenue that’s actually there. And don’t try to borrow and don’t try to scale too quickly.

Seth: I think some of that kind of evolves with time, like when you’re first getting started, you don’t really know what you’re doing yet. You don’t know what works. You don’t know if you’ve got the right market yet. There’s just so many unknowns. I would agree that in those early stages, you don’t want to just start throwing tens of thousands of dollars to something you don’t fully understand yet.

I know a lot of people who do have a full-time thing now, and they’re doing a lot more volume. I don’t know that they’re doing that, that there is mail going out every single month, but they also have it fine-tuned down to a science and they’ve got a lot more money coming in. So, it sort of shifts a little bit, I think. Or it can shift as you start to grow.

Jaren: A hundred percent.

Seth: I think part of it is understanding how to manage the money. But the other part of it is just understanding like that idea of sending out tons of direct mail when you don’t really know if you have it all figured out yet, it probably would make more sense to do smaller batches in a few places to see what happens. And then once you have a pulse on what’s going on, then start opening up the floodgates.

But it seemed like you were more just like, “Nope, we just got to spend money and get it out there.” And do you think it’s accurate that you just didn’t know yet what you were doing when you started spending the money?

Jaren: Yeah, it was that. And I was kind of operating at Simple Wholesaling. It was almost like I had an unlimited budget for marketing and branding and stuff when I was there. Like, it wasn’t truly unlimited, but there was a lot of threshold. There was a lot of slack that I could play with.

But when you’re in your own business and you’re a startup and you’re trying to grow, if I may use Brett’s… I know Brett’s story really well. He started with one wholesale deal that he bought off of eBay. He bought it for $10,000. He put in $5,000, his dad put in $5,000, and he did one deal and he didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t even know wholesaling was a thing. So, he just bought it and then he turned around and sold it for $15,000. And he made $5,000. And then he did another deal. And then he did another day. And then he worked a full-time job for a year, doing deals on his own, on the side for that entire year, before he branched out onto his own.

And most people that are full-time into their entrepreneurial thing, whether it’s real estate, they transition into it slowly. They do it in a way where they can course-correct if something starts to go south. Why didn’t they do that? I was like, I’m going to go all in. I’m going to put all my money. I’m going to put all my eggs in this basket and I’m going to go hard. And so, I did that, but I wasted a lot of money in the beginning. It was not the right move. I always thought before I read Profit First unconsciously that the purpose of a business was to grow at all costs.

But the goal of the business isn’t to grow at all costs. You need to grow to the point where you’re making the kind of money that you want to make. But the overall objective of your business is to make money. Profit First actually is the objective of a business. That’s why businesses exist—to make money.

Seth: To make profit, you mean.

Jaren: To make profit. Yeah. So, in my mind, I didn’t have that framework. I didn’t understand, “Okay. I need to make profit; my number one priority in my business.” I thought it was growth. So, I threw everything I could at the wall to see what would stick and it cost me.

Seth: Yeah, that’s something to know about Jaren. I don’t know how many people out there have taken the Kolbe index A test, but Jaren and I both took it and other people at RETipster have taken it. It scores you based on four different ranking factors. And one of them is called quick start. So, somebody who is really good at like, you don’t fall into analysis paralysis, you just start moving and you make things happen very quickly. And that’s actually like a superpower and that’s something a lot of people don’t have.

But the downside of a quick start is that sometimes you just start moving before you really know what you’re doing and you just full speed out of the gate without a very clear direction. And so that’s kind of like everything has its tradeoffs. That’s one of the quick start tradeoffs.

Jaren: Yeah, for sure. I wish that I had Profit First and I wish that I knew that it was okay to grow slowly. And it was okay, if I had to work another job and build my land thing on the side, that’s okay. I’m not a less of an entrepreneur because I have a W-2 income. That was a dumb mindset that I had to fight with in my early days.

Seth: Yeah, I got you, man.

Jaren: So, what about you? What’s your next one?

Seth: Yeah. So, for me, and we’ve talked about this many times in the past, but I wish I’d understood. I think I sort of understood the importance of working in the right market, but I didn’t really have any idea how to even figure out what the right market was. I was like, “Hey, is there a land there? Well, it must be fine then.”

And so, I just started in Michigan and it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t necessarily the best place either. And so, I kind of struggled with slow turnaround for years because of that. I mean, it wasn’t always slow. It’s not like it was doomed to fail or anything, but I just think it was sluggish for a lot longer than it needed to be. And it wasn’t till I started just trying other markets that I realized in some places, this is a lot easier to sell stuff or it’s a lot easier to value properties and blind offers work better in some markets than in others. And it’s just easier to come up with pricing and that kind of thing.

So, I think I would have tried a lot sooner to explore maybe a few different markets at a time to figure out, okay, this one seems to be lower barriers just from the whole, not only buying, but also selling and state laws and stuff like that. I just had this idea of like, “Nope, got to work in Michigan because that’s where you live,” and not even a point to look anywhere else. And I didn’t really get that. It took me a long time to figure it out.

Jaren: Mine is very similar. It’s on market research and I feel like it was at least a six-month period where every week you and me, we’re going back on market research and really trying to wrap our head on what makes a good landmark versus a bad one. And I’m not convinced that you can even really have that framework of this is a good land market and this is a bad market.

I feel like the land business will work in any market based on a few principles. If you’re in the path of growth or you’re in a county that for whatever reason, people value land there, whether that’s where people go to vacation, or maybe it’s a cheaper adjacent county to a really hustle and bustle area.

Now there are a number of different factors that go into it. But at a high level, you’re trying to quantify desirability. And so, looking at things like job growth and population growth and crime rate. And even some guys will look at building permits and a number of other metrics that kind of help you determine, “Okay, there’s a lot of desirability for this area.”

And understanding that shift in my mind was really helpful because Florida has been a completely different animal than Southern Indiana. Southern Indiana, for me at least, was just very hit or miss. It was like sometimes I had really good properties and then other times it didn’t go so hot and it was just hard to sell and hard to move stuff.

And a lot of that might’ve been like beginners, like learning curve and due diligence issues and things like that. But I mean, it’s just the demand in Florida is just way higher because you have an international desirability. You got people even from Europe that go to Florida every year for vacations and stuff.

So, if you’re in a place like Arkansas or South Dakota, where there might not be a lot of population growth, you can still use those high-level principles and still do well in those places. And might have less competition too. But you want to just ask yourself, “Where are people wanting to buy land in? And can I afford to do business there?” If you find that out, then that’s a really good indicator of where you want to do the land business.

Seth: Yeah. And even that, if you are knowing nothing else, those are definitely good things to look at. But there can be awesome deals in bad markets too.

Jaren: Yeah. It’s true.

Seth: As with anything in life, you can’t just generalize stuff, but when you’re getting stared at, you just sort of have to, when you know nothing else and you just want some very basic pointers on where to go. Yeah. I know what you mean.

Jaren: What’s your next one?

Seth: Next one for me on my list was just knowing that people are incredibly flaky, especially buyers when you’re selling land and sellers as well. But there were so many times when I just got really annoyed by people who said, “Yep, I’m going to buy the property, take it off the market. Here are some of the bridges and I do all this stuff,” and they just ghost me and go silent. Or a photographer I find on Craigslist. Like, “Hey, go get the pictures for me. I’ll plan on next week, Tuesday.” And they just never respond to me. And I just wasted a week. Dumb little stuff like that.

Just do what you say you’re going to do. This is not a hard thing. If you can’t do it, then don’t say you’re going to do it. I think if I had just known to kind of expect this, I wouldn’t have gotten so frustrated. This is just kind of how people are. And also, there are ways you can have these conversations that you sort of get a person to verbally commit. Again, it doesn’t guarantee they’re going to do it, but you sort of like put a person on the hook a little bit better saying things like, “Tell me, sir, if you take a look at this property, it meets everything you’re expecting and it’s beautiful, amazing and ready to go. I’d be ready to buy this thing by the end of the day today, do you have the cash on hand? Are you ready to commit?” Kind of framing it up in a way that it’s like, I’m not messing around here. Like, I’m ready to go, I expect you to be ready to go too. Again, it’s not like a guarantee that people are going to do it, but it sorts of sets an expectation so that if people are just screwing around with you, they can just stop and go do that with somebody else.

Jaren: Yeah. And I’ve been having my fair share of that with contractors. You think that it would be simple for somebody to just have good communication and be like, “Hey, I can’t come today because X, Y, Z. So, I’m going to come next week.” But for whatever reason, I don’t know, people just have a really hard time initiating good communication. And again, it doesn’t make sense to me either, but that is a big deal.

Seth: I can sort of understand the flakiness with land buyers because it’s just something they found on the internet. It’s not their livelihood, who cares? But for a contractor you think like, it’s your livelihood, it’s your reputation at stake. Why would you not pay more attention to that as being somebody who does what you say? But I agree. It’s shocking the level of irresponsibility out there.

Jaren: I can’t even begin to wrap my head around why. My next one, now this is one that is, I want to be careful about because it’s specific to me and what works best for me. And I can’t say that this is the right path for every other land investor out in the world. But I always want to go through a title or a closing attorney, if I’m in an attorney only state.

But the reason why is in the beginning, I did a lot of self-closings and I hired a VA to do title searches for me and I did title searches to the best of my ability. But I had a handful of properties that I bought that way on the sales side when I had a buyer in place, come up with some severe title issues. And there were a couple really close calls of me, like losing out on the deal and wasting money on the property. One guy lived in the Bahamas and we had to track down his son in the Bahamas. And just this crazy like, “Well, I’m probably going to lose money on this deal.”

Seth: Was this something that you had already bought the property and you were selling it and that’s when the title issue came up?

Jaren: Yeah.

Seth: And you had to go, “Oh, man.”

Jaren: Yeah. And it’s not happened like once. It’s happened probably at least five times on five different properties. So, for me, even if I’m going to buy a property for $1,000 or $300, I’m going to spend that $600 to $1,000 on closing costs because I want to have the title insurance.

I realize now, in hindsight, that title professionals spend 40-plus hours a week working in title. You have title researchers that that’s all they do. And yet even then, 40 hours a week, all day, every day, they still have title insurance for a reason. It’s because people make mistakes. And I don’t want to have to deal with that ever again in my land business. So, for me, I always want to go through title.

Now, if you’re doing seller financing or you have your business set up in a way where it’s more like an eCommerce business where people buy directly from your website, that’s a huge bottleneck to have to always go through title. And so, I get it that for other people that might not be the case for them, but for me, at least for the foreseeable future, unless something drastically changes in the way that I do the land business, I always want to go through title.

Seth: Yeah. That’s a great point, man. I’m glad you said that. I’m similar. I’ve done one self-closing in the past year, but that was kind of an anomaly. Like I really try not to. It’s not because I don’t know how, I definitely do and I’ve done it plenty, but like you said, there’s a lot of opportunities to screw stuff up. Even if you do a perfect job, it’s really time-consuming. And just the issue of exchanging funds. That issue alone is like its own separate problem. You have to overcome, like you gotta trust them and they gotta trust you. I don’t know. It’s just a hassle. And this is why title companies exist. They make it way easier. And granted, they’re slower, and sometimes they get stuck on a really stupid problems that aren’t actually problems.

But, I don’t know, in the end, there’s a lot to be said, they’re almost sort of like a little employee that just handles your closings and you just pay them to do that. It may make sense to just work with properties that have enough profit on the bone to pay for that. If it’s super cheap, if you’re only going to make like a thousand bucks anyway, I mean, I guess you can do that. It might be a helpful learning experience.

But the thing that I kind of struggled with, and I remember back when I first started like making blog posts about this stuff, like how you do it. I struggled a lot with should I even be putting this out there? Even if I explain it perfectly, people can still read this and screw it up on their own and then blame me for it because they messed it up. And some people are very proficient at this stuff. They’re really good at catching the finer details.

Basically, people who are our lawyers are trained attorneys, they really know how to make sense of the weird stuff that gets written in deeds and dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s because that stuff really matters. You can actually screw up title if you get one little digit wrong. It’s important to know yourself and what you’re good at. And if you know you’re good at that, you could probably do it with no problem. If you don’t have a history of doing well with that kind of thing, or if you just know you struggle with the details, it might not be the best job for you.

Jaren: And a title company is really amazing at being a resource for you. If I am writing up a deed or I’m writing up something, I can call my title company and ask them to give me the full legal description of the property. And whereas even DataTree, even though they have it, in many cases, it’s still an abbreviated version. And so, there’s a number of different things that I’ve used my title company for. If I’m talking to a seller and they want to vet me, they’re sketched out to see if I’m like a scam artist or not. I can just straight up say, “Hey, why don’t you call my title company and ask them how many transactions I do and if I close or not?” And they say, “Sure, that works.” Then they call my title company rep and that makes it a new point. But it’s huge.

Seth: That’s a good point.

Jaren: There’s a lot of value in establishing a solid relationship with a title company.

Seth: Absolutely. That was a great one. Thanks for bringing that one up. So, for me, the next one was kind of related to seller financing. Because I know the first time I ever heard about seller financing, I actually was part of a panel discussion about this earlier this week on a different podcast, but seller financing, especially with land, it is a pretty awesome thing for a lot of reasons. It makes a ton of sense with the land business.

I totally support the idea and think it’s a great thing to be aware of and understand how it works. For a lot of people, it really has made the difference between them being able to go full time versus not. It’s that big of a deal. However, it’s not without issues. I think the way that it’s explained in a lot of cases, people just explain the great things about it without mentioning all of the really annoying, monotonous hassle type things that come along with it, like getting the right documentation that is actually correct, to using your specific state and understanding state laws, and what’s involved if you need to take a property back and the likelihood that a lot of borrowers will stop paying you. This is not something that might happen, it will happen.

And collecting payments and communicating and every seller finance deal you create, that is a relationship you are creating that’s going to last for as long as that loan exists. It’s not that any one deal is that difficult, but when you get like a hundred of them going, it’s a lot of stuff to juggle and you need good systems in place. And a lot of people don’t think about this until they just start doing it. They either do it wrong or they try to do it right and they’re like, “Whoa, this is like a lot of work. It’s kind of hard.”

It took me a long time to understand all this. It wasn’t until I think it was 2016 when I tried to do this really ambitious project of very clearly documenting how seller financing works in all 50 states, which in hindsight, now I know was just a crazy thing to even try to do because there are so many variations. I don’t think there’s even a single lawyer on earth who knows how it works in all 50 states.

So just understanding that, if you’re going to do that, I would pick a handful of states max and just become a specialist there. Don’t try to understand every state and how it all works. And get an attorney in that state to review and approve of the documentation for that single state, get some good software or a loan management company to manage these deals.

Don’t forget that this is not permanent to passive income. It will stop at some point. So, it is not the same as a “buy and hold” property where that stream of income doesn’t go away as long as you own it. All of these are like caveat kind of things that nobody ever explained to me, I kind of had to figure it out the hard way. And I wish I would’ve known that.

Jaren: Yeah. A hundred percent. And there’s a lot of depreciation and tax benefits to buy and hold real estate that other land seller financing just doesn’t have. So, my last one that I have on here is about land agents, land specialized real estate agents. When I first got started in land, everybody, everyone I talked to said that agents are a waste of time. I even had people say when I’m buying properties, that if it’s listed with an agent, just walk away because you’re just going to waste your time. Agents are incompetent and they’re this and they’re that.

I’m going through my memory right now. And I’m seeing images of Facebook posts and forums and Facebook groups that say, “I never use agents. They don’t know anything. They ruined deals.” And I think that there’s validity to that if you’re dealing with an agent that specializes in residential transactional real estate.

Seth: Like houses?

Jaren: Yeah, houses. If they help you buy and sell houses, that’s what they specialize in. So, obviously they’re not going to know anything about land or wholesaling or flipping or whatever, because that’s not what they specialize in. They don’t know about it. But if you find a land-specialized real estate agent, then it’s a totally different conversation. And they’re out there.

And the last, I don’t know, six months to eight months in my business, I’ve actually been exclusively using land-specialized agents to sell because it outsources all of the bottleneck for me. I’m really busy. I work at RETipster and I do a bunch of other things. And so, for me, the biggest time suck in my land business was like posting on Facebook marketplace and on Craigslist and dealing with those buyer leads and all that stuff that I was doing when I first got started.

And I’ll tell you what, it’s been a completely different situation. It’s been amazing because when I work with a land-specialized real estate agent on the due diligence side, when I am buying my property, they’ll go to the property for me, walk it, and give me feedback on it.

For example, in Florida, if you have cypress trees on the property, in practicality, it’s wetlands. I may not show up on the wetland’s mapper as wetlands. But if there are cypress trees on there, it’s pretty much wetlands. So, one of my agents goes and walks the property and he sees cypress trees there. He says, “There’s a bunch of cypress trees, Jaren, let’s move on to the next one.” That’s gold. That’s worth its weight in gold.

My agents will also give me my list price. So, I’ll do my comps and I’ll go as far as I can. But at the end of the day, I can just call my agent and say, “Hey, what can I sell this property for within three to six months?” And they give me a price to sell lists or list price. And then I work my numbers backwards. And I say, “Okay, if I’m going to list it for this, let’s say 20% from the list price is going to be roughly what we’re going to sell it for. I know I can offer this and make the spread that I want to make.” And that’s huge. They deal with all the buyer leads. They deal with all the showings.

Practically after I get a deal and I go to a title company. I hand it off to my agent and then I just wait and I collect a check. So, when it comes to automation, it doesn’t get much more automated than that.

But there are drawbacks to it just like everything else. I’m not going to sit here and try to say that this is the best thing since sliced cheese and this is what everybody has to do. You can’t really do seller financing with agents because how are you going to figure out their commissions? You can’t really do extremely cheap property. Like if I’m buying property for $500 and selling it for $3,500, that’s not much motivation for my agent to take my property as top priority. So, I have to be a little bit of a higher tier.

I’m typically buying property within $8,000 to $15,000, selling it within probably $15,000 to $30,000, somewhere in that range. And that’s enough to keep them happy because it’s volume-based and they know that there’s going to be repeat business in the future. So, it’s been a huge revelation in my real estate journey to use land specialized agents and I recommend it for the right people.

Now, if I was full-time in my land business, I don’t know if I would exclusively use agents because if I go to a new market and I can’t find a good agent, I’m struggling. That creates a bottleneck in my business. I don’t have as much control. There’s a lot of control in having your own buyers list and your own brand. So, if I were full-time, I don’t know if I would put all my eggs in this one basket, but as a side business, it’s perfect. It’s a really good system for me. So, agents are out there that are worth their weight in gold. You just got to find them.

Seth: Yeah. And that “you just got to find them” thing, Jaren actually does have a really good blog post about that, that I’ll link to in the show notes. You can find that at retipster.com/83. It answers a lot of the questions like where do you look? What questions are you supposed to ask? How do you vet them and figure out like, is this person worth their salt or not? Because yeah, a lot of people aren’t.

But it’s interesting you say that Jaren, because I can attest. Every bad experience I’ve ever had with an agent in the land business has been a house-selling agent that has not been a land-specialized agent. So, it’s a very important thing to distinguish and that blog post can help people figure out how to find them.

Jaren: On that too, I probably need to do a slight update to that blog post for the listeners. Today you guys can get kind of the updated version on that. Zillow has an agent profile that you can look up. So, if you see a land listing, like take those, the principles on that blog post, and go look up good listings and all that. But when you find them, look at the agent’s profile on Zillow and look at past listings. And look at the ratio of land to how sales are other types of real estate sales. And if the majority of what they’re selling is land, there’s a high chance that they’re a good land agent. That’s another really big piece that didn’t make it into that blog post yet, because I just really recognized that pattern in my business recently. So, I need to update that.

Seth: That’s great to know. Thanks for pointing that out. For me, the last big one on my list and its sort of a lot of things lumped into one, but I’ve kind of hit on this earlier as well, but just understanding that there are downsides to every approach to everything you do.

For example, if you get your list from the delinquent tax list versus a data company, guess what? Both ways have a downside to it. If you use postcards versus blind offers, both ways have a downside to it. It’s not like one is the ultimate perfect, always the best option. It’s that both of them have strengths in different areas and it’s important to know what you need as an individual and what you work well with and your financial situation, how much money you do or don’t want to spend, how much time you do or don’t want to spend. It’s like probably one of my biggest pet peeves is when I hear somebody somewhere just saying like, “Always do it this way,” or “This is always wrong.” It’s just like, no.

And granted for that individual, that may be accurate maybe because they’re terrible at talking on the phone, they shouldn’t be on the phone with people, or if they have no money, then they shouldn’t be sending out $10,000 blind offers. I’m not discounting that for them. Maybe they figured that out for themselves, but to just advise the whole world of what always works. And this is something that just takes a lot of time in testing on your own to figure out what am I good at doing? And I’ve had lots of time to do that. And so, I know that now, but man, I was very clueless back in the beginning and it’s easy when you don’t know any better and you hear somebody just give very pointed advice on something that may or may not apply to you. It’s easy to assume, “Well, they must know what they’re talking about. They sound pretty confident. So, I’ll go with what they say.”

I think any advice anybody gets, it’s important to just discern and just realize like, I’m probably not hearing the whole story here. There are probably things I need to investigate for myself. Not close the book on an issue before you really have gotten to the bottom of it. And I think if you figure out something that is clearly working, then you probably don’t have to investigate that further. But if it’s not working, realize there’s probably another path out there that may make more sense for you.

I think the bottom line is experience is a huge deal. There’s just a lot of stuff that you will discover for yourself when you get into any kind of business. These are the things that we wanted to highlight for the land investors out there. Anything else you want to hash out on that, Jared? Or did we kind of cover it?

Jaren: I think that that was a really good piece of content we put out in the world there, man. I really wish that I listened to this episode about three years ago at this point.

Seth: Yeah, I wish it existed back then. Okay. So, let’s wrap this up with an unrelated question here. The question today is if Jaren and I won the lottery and had a million dollars after taxes to invest in real estate, what would we do with it? What would be the way that we would throw it out into the world and create streams of income or double or triple or quadruple that money?

Jaren: So, if I had a million dollars, the very first thing that I would do is I would pay off all of my debt, including my house.

Seth: Really? Interesting. So, you’re going to go that route? Because I know a lot of people think that’s ridiculous.

Jaren: I go back and forth on it. I understand why you would consider not looking at your house as an asset, but as a liability. I think for me, my house it’s kind of a half-investment, half-not investment. It’s a security thing. My home is where my son grows up. It’s where I have memories with my family. It’s our safety place. And to be able to have that, at least right now, we’ve got another child on the way. And we just got a lot of things that in this season in my life to be 100% debt-free plus including the mortgage, would be a big deal. But I will tell you, I probably would take an equity line of credit out of my house and I would invest based on that. So, I’d still probably use the equity.

I would definitely pay off the mortgage for sure. And then what would be left, I would either buy rental properties. I might buy like one, I don’t know, larger unit, maybe like a 25 unit or larger, if not cash, I would leverage the remaining to buy and hold real estate or get into vacation rentals and buy a couple of exotic places that I Airbnb throughout the year. I really would like to get into that.

It’s on my bucket list to own property in Belize ever since that interview we had. I talk about it all the time and people ask me what my dreams are. I’m like, to own a property in Belize, man. So, I think it’d be awesome.

I’m slowly trying to develop my life in a way where me and my family travel heavily through the months of January through March. So, I don’t think we’re there yet. I think we’re probably at least three to five years off. But my goal is to slowly inch toward this lifestyle where one to three months out of the year, we’re pretty much traveling and we’re planning on homeschooling our kids. And a large reason behind that as opposed to like public school or private school is because I want to be able to have the flexibility to travel with them.

Traveling for me, I didn’t go to university, I went to my freshman year and then I dropped out and stuff. And traveling and books have been the 80/20 of my personal development. And I think that traveling is extremely important to help you become a more well-rounded person.

People buy sports cars or big TVs or big houses or whatever. I think my thing is I want to be able to travel. I think it’s important to me, something I’m working toward.

Seth: I don’t need to travel anywhere. Once I’ve seen America, I’ve seen the greatest this world has to offer.

Jaren: I’m not going to argue with you there.

Seth: I’m joking by the way.

Jaren: There are some great things out there in the world.

Seth: The land of McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A, that’s all we need from this world.

Jaren: Most of is the Chick-fil-A. Everything else is subservient to Chick-fil-A, it’s the greatest fast food on the planet.

Seth: For me, I was thinking about this a little bit and I was having a really hard time coming up with one definitive answer because there’s so many different ways you can go with this. Like so many different types of property or you could use it in an active business to make money even faster and that kind of thing. And I think where I’m at in my life now, I’m looking for the passive stuff. So, buy and hold.

I think what I struggle with right now, it’s much harder to find high-equity, super cheap deals today than it was 10 years ago. Obviously, I would find something that cash flows and I would probably leverage it, leverage that million bucks to buy four or five properties that are worth a million each or something like that. And would cash flow and pretty much be set for life, I think. All I would really need.

But yeah, I liked that idea of something, preferably something triple net so I don’t have to manage it and the numbers make sense. I know the opportunities are out there. I feel like though this may be a ripe market to actually do new construction on certain kinds of things. Just because properties are so crazy expensive right now. And granted, I think that will probably change in the next year. So, I don’t want to jump the gun on that, but I’m wondering about that.

Jaren: Well, it’s so funny you said that because within the last 24 hours, I’ve heard three people, including you, say that about new construction. Because apparently the market’s getting so hot, the cost of building is still staying cheap. It’s not rising with the cost of real estate. So, it’s actually really cheap.

I literally had somebody who came earlier to my house today, a contractor, they gave me a bit on the roof of our new house and he said the exact same things. He said a lot of people are looking at new builds right now.

Seth: That’s what kind of makes you nervous because you might be looking at like 9 to 12 months to finish a construction project depending on what it is and who your builder is. And a lot could change in that time right now, given where the world is at, there’s tons of unknown.

Jaren: I have friends that are way more sophisticated and intelligent than I am. And a lot of the big wig guys in the apartment syndication space, a lot of the thought leaders and stuff, they’re all saying that within the next year to two years, there’s going to be a lot of bad things to come on the same for the world. Like we’re going to have a pretty major economic downturn.

So, it feels like ever since 2008, everybody since 2008 has been expecting the next economic downturn. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I feel like there’s a bunch of people that just have huge amounts of savings set aside to gobble up property when they can.

So, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know if that’s going to like, inflate the market or prevent us from actually having it be as bad as it could be. But a lot of people are saying foreclosures are going to start entering the scene and all kinds of stuff.

Seth: I don’t think there’s ever been a year since 2008 when I haven’t heard somebody say, “It’s all going to fall apart next year.” That is a very common recurring thing I hear from people who are smart. I would think they would know, but they haven’t.

Jaren: And it’s funny too, because a lot of the gurus or thought leaders, they predicted each year because when it does happen, there would be the guy that called it and they can brand that, right?

Seth: Pretty much. But yeah, it would be nice to have a million bucks one way or another. Cool man. Well, if anybody out there wants to follow along with what we’re doing, feel free to take out your phone and text the word “FREE.” F-R-E-E to the number 33777.

You can get access to some top-secret resources, text the word “FREE” to 33777 and you’ll be glad you did. I promise.

And again, if you want to check out the show notes for this episode, it’s retipster.com/83. Thanks again for listening and we’ll talk to you guys again in the next episode.

Jaren: Later guys.

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from Real Estate Tips https://retipster.com/083-if-only-we-had-known/

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