Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Seven

In this series I am purportedly demonstrating how I, a self described monetarily challenged moron, am going about turning $100 into $500.

Let me begin this week’s episode about “How I make money” with the true account of how I lost money. A lot of money…

I believe it was last Thursday and my brother was on his way to my house to pick up $180 in cash for a job he had recently done for me. I popped down to the local ATM to withdraw the money, popped in the old eftpos card, selected my account, entered the amount, declined further options, took my card and went to the supermarket…

Sounds pretty basic, except while standing in the queue at the grocery store, with my cocktail sausages, garlic bread and bottle of milk, I opened my wallet to discover that the money I had just withdrawn had gone to wherever it is that odd socks go when they mysteriously disappear!

But I knew that that could not be it, because such a place does not exist according to Richard Dawkins and all the other miserable “scientists” like him who have ruined the world beyond the veil for everyone; that only left me with one option – I had left $180 sitting in the ATM!

Leaving my sausages and milk behind to keep the rejected garlic bread company, I dashed outside as fast as my little legs could carry me. I was glad I was not topless at this point; my flabby gut and chest would have given the bewildered shoppers much to laugh at (or run from) as it wobbled like a skydiving bowl of jelly…

Teenagers in school uniform began to heckle me with what might have been, “Run Forest Run!” But I knew that no one who truly liked that movie could possibly put down an obviously distressed and panicked individual as myself, who now ran across the car park to the ATM as if I was going to save a kitten from a burning tree in the middle of a sea of hungry crocodiles…

When I got there, breathing and wheezing like a frantic bicycle pump with a rusty spring, I knew instantly that I was too late -the money was gone.

That wasn’t the hard part though… the worst of it was going home and admitting to my wife that I had just flushed nearly $200 down the proverbial lavatory.

Never have I felt more tempted than I did that day to “kill the goose” and withdraw the money I have made from this endeavor so as to save my butt.

But thankfully, to my great bottomless relief, the bank informed me that the machine gobbled my money back up when it realized that some idiot had forgotten to take their money. Now whenever I go back to my bank the ATM is going to think, “Oh no, it’s that git again!”

Now let me tell you about how I lost $10.40…

After the roaring success of selling over 13 books the previous week, and just when I thought it was safe to sit down in the boat, it capsized…and I got wet.

This week I sold:

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin -$5
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Novel by Douglas Adams -$6
Homer’s Odyssey - $3
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote -$3
Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum - $4
Tully by Paullina Simons - $3
Flying Saucers – Serious Business by Frank Edwards - $3

Only seven books, making me a total of only $27…

Ok, so that’s not THAT bad considering when, in my last series, I was trying to turn $20 into $100 I was lucky to make even $10 in a week… but the problem is, every day I am listing and relisting books and that costs money!

Approximately speaking I’m spending about $20 a week on listing and success fees, and that’s still a hard thing for me to get used to!

So let’s look at the figures and compare them to last week…

Last week I was left with $183.95 and went away feeling like I was going to be able to brag this week about effectively doubling my money! But this week, after taking into account success fees and listing fees I’m left with $173.55…

This feels like when I was 17 and I read Lord of the Rings for the first time. Tolkien ended the second book with Frodo being stung by the big hairy spider and I thought he was dead… I was so upset that I put the book down and spent that night tossing and turning between tears of grief and shaking fists of anger at old JRR for putting down my hero… I actually lost almost a whole night’s sleep over that misunderstanding, but boy did I feel stupid when I read on to discover that Frodo was still alive and well!

My point is, don’t give up on me just yet! I’m determined to make this work! I certainly hope you won’t lose any sleep over my failure to move forward... when I’m actually only successfully moving backwards!

When I think about it I realized another expense has played a big part in my shrunken total. Now that I buy postage slips in bulk at $36 for ten, I still haven’t made back what I spent on them because an unusual number of customers opted to personally pick up their items this week… something I find irksome and mildly inconvenient but I allow it because for a lot of people it’s a selling point.

For such individuals I just pop the book in my letter box and trust that they will leave the correct amount for me… although my letter box is so rusty and falling to bits it might be a possible liability and give one of my customers tetanus! I am trying to convince my wife to let me make a TARDIS shaped letter box but I’m not having much luck there…

But one thing I have had some extremely good luck in this week has been the inconceivable popularity of Part Five in this series, having exploded through 200 hits, and most of them from France! At least some numbers are going in the right direction this week…

It turns out that one of the Blog Carnivals I’ve been submitting my links to is to blame for this… so to the folks down at www.workingathomeinternet.com/WP/ I would like to say thank you for your internet hospitality and for your awesome site! For anyone reading my blogs and who also dream of working from home then you should definitely “favourite” this site and tell all your friends about it!

In any case, please come back next week and, fingers crossed, I will be hurtling towards that $500 like a mannequin in a catapult testing facility.

Oh, and as an afterthought, this week I'm going to refrain from purchasing new product because I'm still trying painfully and slowly to list the last two week's worth of new stock...

I usually end the blogs with a plea to follow me on Facebook or leave you with a mental image of me begging you to “like” this blog but not this week (although those do sound like pretty cool ideas), this week I implore you earnestly to leave a comment (a nice one) because I need to know that the hits I’m getting are from real people and not robots, spambots or people who say things like, “Me like blog this much very, it makes sense to good when sometimes I have trouble my mobile telephone, perhaps you check out my site – www.spamartist.com?” – I get that a lot!

Until next week…


Click Here to read Part Eight of this series!

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Click Here to read this series from the beginning!

Click Here to read my awesome last series, Pimp My Twenty Bucks

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