Monday, Nov. 24, 2003 - 3:34 a.m.

Origin Story (Part 3 of 3)

The Making of a Financial Superhero

Part 3: Endgame

(See Part 1, Part 2, and Coming Out of the Closet.)

Around this time, Anarchy Man told me that he and d-anarchist were moving to Eugene, and he asked if I’d be so kind as to find them a place to stay. I ran around looking for a place to rent for 3 or more people, while emailing them in Tennessee about the details. Foolishly, they left the final decision to me, sight unseen. I found what I thought was a marvelous (basement) apartment on the most beautiful street in Eugene, across the street from a wonderful park where people play Frisbee. In my haste, I never noticed that this basement apartment had no doors on two of the three bedrooms, that no water came out of the shower, nor that the place was infested with fleas.

Anarchy Man was living on his trust fund, so I was confident he could help with his share of the rent. I used up nearly every last dollar I had on the deposit and first month’s rent for the Hell Hole Apartment. Anarchy Man said he’d pay me back when he got to Eugene, after some people who owed him money paid him back.

Spurned on by an acquaintance who bragged that her rent was only $150 a month, by Your Money or Your Life’s exhortation to reduce your cost of living to a level that feels like enough to you, and also by my own frugality streak, I was on a kick to get my cost of living down to as close to zero as I could. I considered renting an apartment in a duplex that had 2 bedrooms and a one-car garage. I figured that d-anarchist and Anarchy Man could share one room, we could rent out another to a stranger, and I could live in the garage while only paying $100 a month! I was really excited about this idea, and I could smell victory. I looked at another house for rent with a detached garage, and fantasized about my liberated future I’d spend living on a pittance. The lower my cost of living, the less I’d have to work, and the sooner I could save up enough capital so I could live off the interest thereafter.

Hell Hole Apartment looked almost as good. At $550 a month, with three bedrooms, my share was $183. Still pricey compared to my garage fantasy, but a substantial improvement over the decadent $225 I had been paying for my room in Hydrogen House. I was willing to live underground amidst the bunker-like décor, if it could save me money. The atrocious shortcomings of the Hell Hole gave me an epiphany. Stunned, I had to ponder where this approach had gotten me. What was I thinking? You can’t make money by spending less! That only slows the rate of attrition. The time had come to shop for a better paradigm. Maybe instead of trying to make my consumption smaller and smaller (down to a singularity?), I could try to make my income bigger and bigger.

But making the mental shift was not easy; I had conditioned myself to believe that I couldn’t make money. The world was full of money, but none of it was for me. There was feasting all around, but I might be lucky to get a few crumbs knocked off the table, said my habitual thought pattern.

Popular wisdom says to never change your home, your job, and your romantic relationship all at the same time. Popular wisdom is right. It’s a sure recipe for stress. Prior Tenant had dumped me in June, despite how well things had been going between us, in order to spend more time alone, she said. Within weeks, she had fallen in love with her ex-boyfriend and decided to move to New Jersey to live with him. Before Anarchy Man and d-anarchist arrived in Eugene, I enjoyed the thrill of independence that came with having my own apartment all to myself, a thrill that was thoroughly soured as the already shitty but spacious basement apartment grew so moldy after a refrigerator leak that I could no longer stand to breathe the air down there. d-anarchist and Anarchy Man arrived with two additional new roommates for us (whom I had never met, and whom they barely knew themselves), in tow. Anarchy Man said that the people who owed him money had refused to pay him, so he was broke. The other 3 people now living in my apartment had no money either. I myself was down to under $100. “Can you, like, buy us food?” asked Anarchy Man. I freaked out. I concluded that my life had taken a major wrong turn.

Before she left town, Prior Tenant left me with two gifts that are still improving the quality of my life to this day. The first was a book. I told her about my money woes, and she recommended the book she had gotten from the library, Creating Money. True to Prior Tenant’s new age bent, this book was very new age, so new age in fact that it was channeled, the authors claim, from a couple of otherworldly spirits who for some reason take a keen interest in the financial success of mortals. It was the kind of thing I would typically avoid like the plague. Now, however, I was so desperate, and so disillusioned with my previous approach to money that I was ready to try anything.

Jist of book: thought creates reality, and the details of cause and effect are merely a secondary byproduct of our consciousness. That’s typical new age fare. With respect to money in particular, they say that if you believe you can have the money, the money will come to you. Wishes are horses, and beggars will ride. They call it, “manifesting”. More specifically, they say you will be most “magnetic” to money when you can 1) believe it’s possible 2) be willing to accept it when it comes 3) form a clear intention to have it, and 4) do something to get it. I had no problem translating that into more familiar Western, rationalist, cause-and-effect language I could digest. Clearly, attitude affects performance, and performance affects results. And expectations shape which options we allow ourselves to be aware of and explore. Other parts of the book focused on ascertaining what qualities you want to get out of the object or money you desire, and what qualities in yourself you hope to express through getting it. Again, I don’t need magic to explain how getting really clear about your intentions could bring you closer to getting what you want.

I started manifesting right away. The first thing I manifested was a better dwelling. One time while visiting Prior Tenant as she was making arrangements to leave, it dawned on me that she had a nice place: a former garden shed converted into a furnished efficiency apartment complete with real wood paneling, drywall, carpet, tile, and a full kitchen, plus a detached bathroom shed with tile, wood paneling, and stonework. Formerly, I never would have even considered it because it cost $350 a month, and that kind of decadent expenditure didn’t fit into my frugality plan. After living in Hell Hole Apartment for a few weeks, I could see the sense in paying a little more for a home that was aesthetically pleasing to me. I asked her if anyone was moving in after she vacated. She encouraged me to apply to her landlord. Her landlord said I came along in the nick of time, because he was about to offer it to someone else. To move in, I needed to pay the first and last month’s rent, a total of $700. Anarchy Man had cashed out the remainder of his trust fund, and was waiting for his check to arrive. Anarchy Man owed me $700 for the rent and deposit on Hell Hole Apartment. And I had worked a week and a half helping Hydrogen Man renovate the former Hydrogen House. Hydrogen Man owed me $710. But Anarchy Man’s check was delayed and Hydrogen Man was having cash flow problems, and couldn’t afford to pay me the full amount. I handed my new landlord $270 in cash, which was every last dollar I had, and begged him not to rent the shed to someone else. I was surprised when he trusted me to pay him and let me move into my cute, cozy, properly-funtioning, good-smelling new home on October 1st. Anarchy Man’s check arrived on the 4th, he paid me, and I was able to pay my landlord the remainder I owed.

That’s the second gift Prior Tenant gave me: her house (and that’s the story of how she came to be called Prior Tenant).

Next, I manifested me a job. After applying to over 40 different places to no avail, I resolved one Monday to have a job by the end of the week. Later that day, I was hired at the telemarketing place I had applied to a month earlier.

Anarchy Man has a habit of insisting I read different radical tracts, and I usually comply. In recent months he had become enamored of the anarcho-capitalist scene, especially an online forum called Anti-State.com. Believing that voluntary communist groups could exist within a stateless free-market society, he began calling himself a free-market anarcho-communist. Though I was highly skeptical of this crowd, to say the least, I was also fed up with the leftist approach to anarchism, and ready to explore new options. One fateful night, Anarchy Man asked me to read this piece by a hyper-libertarian named Frederick Mann. Then I read this, this, and this. While a bit frustrated that Frederick Mann’s writing takes such a long, dull time to make a simple point, I really, really liked the points he was making.

In addition to his political writings, I was intrigued by the other half of his activity, making money on the Internet. Here was a writer who wrote voluminously about his political ideas, and here he was, staking his reputation on these money-making ventures. He also wrote voluminously about financial advice, certainly above and beyond the call of duty were he just another scammer, I thought. Anyone else making the same claims, I would have ignored, but Frederick Mann seemed to be motivated by his ideals, and that got my attention.

I spent countless hours reading BuildFreedom.com and BigBooster.com. When I got off of work every day, I’d walk over to the library and use their Internet for the hour they’d let me. Then I’d bike through the cold November rain (it’s hard to hold a candle) to use the DSL connection at Hell Hole Apartment, which I was still paying for part of, and read some more. Depriving myself of sleep, I just kept reading. Not wanting to pause or leave for any reason, I “nourished” myself eating Anarchy Man’s food: ramen in Styrofoam cups and cocoa puff cereal by the handful.

I was intrigued with Frederick Mann’s description of multilevel marketing that functioned over the Internet. I had become disgusted with MLM a few years back after a guy surreptitiously hijacked an hour long presentation at a conference I attended in order to hawk his MLM. Then I ran into some algae-selling people and learned that their M.O. is to pitch everyone within a meter radius of their bodies. I had no wish to lose the respect and trust of my friends and family by trying to make money off of them. The Internet version of MLM was entirely different, because you didn’t have to bug anybody who wasn’t interested. I tried to follow Frederick Mann’s example: I got myself a website, and named it, exponentialsuccess.net. I made the background sky blue with a bright sun, to evoke that cloudless week in October, 2000, when I got some much needed clarity. I joined Six Figure Income and a couple of other free programs, linked to them on my site, and submitted my site to search engines. I made no money with that, however, because I had no idea how to get interested people to come to my site.

I was more intrigued by high-yield investment programs, or “Private Programs”, as Frederick Mann calls them. They weren’t free to join, but if you put money in, they promised to pay you interest, and you didn’t have to do any marketing to make them work. Could they really pay 1% or more per day?!!! And this e-gold, that was just like PayPal, but based on gold, right? I couldn’t wait to try those. Some had minimum deposits of only one dollar. The only problem was, I was broke, and I needed to save as much as I could in order to pay my rent.

I showed up for my wage slavery each day with a renewed vigor, because I knew its days were numbered. I was determined to break out of the hamster wheel of employment, no matter what. Telemarketing was just a short-term fix to get the initial capital. I saved as much as I could, aiming to accumulate a 6-month cushion, during which I could maybe try to start a freelance web design business, and try these investments.

Near the end of February, 2003, I purchased my first hundred dollars worth of e-gold. I was impressed to see the system work; I could deposit cash into the bank account of an exchange company, and they would fund my e-gold account. I could also send an exchange company my e-gold, and they would mail me a check or wire money into my bank account. Now that I have an ATM card, I can turn e-gold into cash within 24 hours, so the whole endeavor feels even more real to me.

After watching the first $200 I invested earn interest every day, I saw no reason not to invest more. Not willing to watch my savings atrophy in the bank, I put most of my cushion into these investments. My goal was to grow my capital to the point where it was generating twice my cost of living. That way, I could live off half of the income while compounding the other half. If half of these high-risk investments stopped paying suddenly, I’d still have enough income to live on. At the time, I was re-investing all of my returns in anticipation of that day. I projected the growth of my money, and estimated I’d reach my retirement point sometime in August.

In June, I started painting address numbers on curbs. I tried it out for a few evenings, and proved to myself that it could generate income for me. Independence was within my grasp. I phoned Good Sense of Life Phone Surveys and gave them two weeks notice. My autonomy was a bit premature. After my initial flush of money from painting curbs, my average net income turned out to be only a little over 3 bucks an hour—half of the minimum wage I was making at phone surveys. Not only that, but I found it extremely difficult to get myself out of the house and onto the streets. When no one is expecting you, it’s frightfully easy to postpone leaving for work for 5 minutes, 15 minutes, or 2 hours. Additionally, I suddenly lost one third of my investment income when Safespenders, one of my investments, went out of business. I knew better than to have such a large portion of my capital in one company, but it paid more than the others I had, and I had been impatient to get to my retirement point. Haste makes waste, I learned.

Good Sense of Life Phone Surveys called me a couple of times begging me to return to my old job, and now needing money again, I relented. I considered writing an entry entitled, “Back in the Saddle Again”, but that wasn’t a horse I wanted to ride. I made sure I wasn’t on their schedule, and had the freedom to work there only when it pleased me. I only went back for one day. When I returned a month later to pick up my check, the manager goaded me to get on the phone. I bothered people for half an hour, and got so disgusted with what I was doing that I got up and left, and spent the rest of the afternoon in the cheap movie theater. I resolved not to go back to phone surveys, and renewed my commitment to attract people to my website or die trying.

From that point forward, I’ve spent the bulk of my time trying to learn the basics of Internet marketing, while living on the interest income. I knew I could potentially get more money from referral fees than from my own paltry investments, and shorten the time before I could reach my sustainable retirement point. I could spend my time looking for a new job, perhaps in vain, or I could spend that same time pursuing my mission whole hog. There was no decision to make.

I got fired from telemarketing. I got fired from the lumber job. I was actually grateful. This served to confirm to me that employment is not my path. A different destiny awaits me. My son, ask for thyself another kingdom. I may not be suitable for employment, and employment sure ain’t suitable for me.

My body functions most sustainably with ten hours of sleep a night. I read very slowly. I often lack the degree of mental focus as I’d like to have. Hence, even if I had a job I didn’t hate and wouldn’t get fired from, my past experience indicates that I won’t accomplish much if I’m doing it in the evenings after work. I have no end of aspirations: writing a book, making cartoons, singing, composing music, maybe even making movies. I’m still considering starting my own intentional community. I want the time and resources to take whatever steps I think are most effective to bring our culture to become fundamentally cooperative.

This internet money-making stuff doesn’t fully meet my need for integrity. With the investments that turn out to be scams, I feel bad for the investors, but not too bad, because they knew they were taking a risk. I feel more trepidation about the ones that aren’t scams, because Forex and “offshore investments” could mean I’m indirectly making money off of exploiting workers in the Third World and corporate globalization. And though I like the idea of trading gold instead of funny money printed by the Federal Reserve Bank, I don’t think precious metals are the answer. I happened by a TV a while ago that had a program on about a place that makes gold bars. The gold was moved by guards wearing bulletproof vests and toting machine guns. Money is violence. At best that violence is dimly in the background.

Ultimately, my quest is not about the money. There’s so much I want to do and express in the finite time I have on this planet. Money is only one strategy I’m trying. It’s also a tricky strategy, given that the concept of money, and many of the ways in which money is commonly used, are antithetical to the kind of world I’m after. I’m trying to invent novel ways I can use money to foster the qualities of human relationship I like to see. If money doesn’t work as a strategy, I’ll try something else.

Money also continues to provide challenging opportunities for personal growth. Money is a shadow zone in my life that I’ve avoided dealing with much in the past, but now I’m venturing into my shadow dead on. I’m in an ongoing battle against fear and discouragement. I learned that poverty is a state of mind characterized by fear. And it’s not even related to income level. When I think I don’t have enough money, my body clenches up, and I feel destitution breathing down my neck. I’ve also observed that I sometimes feel that way even when I can see that I objectively have enough. When a check that I was expecting got lost in the mail, my first reaction was to panic. Then I stopped and realized that I was feeling that way because I was attached to maintaining my current lifestyle. I was afraid of loosing my cute little shed to live in. When I realized this underlying dynamic, I felt so grateful for the opportunity to play with these emotions with real physical stakes on the line. I reminded myself that all things are impermanent. I may gain money, I may lose money. I may live in a shed one time, a mansion another time, and in a ditch yet another time. Everything keeps changing, so there’s no use in clinging to any particular set of circumstances.

I will not rest in my quest to take a permanent vacation from employment. I WANT TO LIVE!!! I want to live on my own terms. I want to experience things, feel alive, and get the most out of life. I want the joy of contributing positively to other people’s lives. I want power to change the world, in voluntary cooperation with others. I believe I can do it.

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