Saturday Musings - Getting Out of Your Financial Mess

Do you ever feel like everyone seems to be putting their hands into your wallet and helping themselves? Bills and taxes keep on rising and living is more and more expensive each year while your pay continues to shrink in size. There seems to be less left over for you to enjoy life.

Many years ago I read a fantastic book that I would highly recommend to anyone…..and no, it wasn’t my book, Battleframe (although it isn’t a bad read). The book was “The Richest Man in Babylon” and the author illustrates a number of principles about managing money through stories…..it’s really a compelling read.

The first point he raised was, “Pay Yourself First”. What this means is keep some of the money for yourself……not your bills but for you. If you need to negotiate with creditors and pay them over a period of time then do so but whatever you do pay yourself now. An amazing thing will happen, you will pay off your creditors and also manage your expense line appropriately.

The second point he made was once you’ve accumulated some funds in your “pay to yourself” account then don’t blow it on a holiday, fancy car or some other item. Take the funds and wisely invest them so that this money can have “children” of its own.

Wisely investing is critical. You don’t go to the butcher and ask them about what diamonds you should buy, you go to the jeweler. Likewise, don’t go to the baker about what property to invest in, go talk to realtors. If you unwisely invest then expect your hard-earned money to vanish in a puff of smoke.

There are other principles outlined in the book but I will stop here and share a brief synopsis of my story with you.

Many years ago, we were going through a hard-financial time and I decided to apply these principles to our family’s life. I paid myself first, the bills still got paid and I had money to invest into these new things called domains.

I’ll never forget taking that first $100 that we saved up (we literally didn’t have anything) and I bought a domain that earned ten cents the next day in a click. I knew right then that all I needed to do was scale and let my investments in domains have more and more children.

What we still needed was cash to buy domains and we needed it in a hurry! Being smart, my wife and I looked around the house and said, “What do we have?” I know! We have space. We ended up renting our living room out to another business and had foreign students boarding with us to add more money into our investment pot. At one stage, our son was sleeping underneath the stairs like Harry Potter because we’d rented his room out…..he actually loved it!

As time went by I bought more and more domains, getting wiser in the process and better at monetizing the domain traffic. I remember getting to $3 a day and my brother said, “You can’t even buy a McDonalds Happy Meal. This is going nowhere for you.”

What he didn’t understand was that once I had the domains they just kept on earning money and I was on the hunt for more of them. My earnings kept on rising and at about $100/day the detractors went silent and at $300/day I began getting calls from people wanting me to get them domains……not sure why I would do that!

Up, up and up the earnings kept on rising. At one stage, we took our family on a six-month trip around the USA and while my wife drove the car I was sitting in the passenger seat buying domains on a wireless Internet connection. Crazy times!

At the top of the market I noticed there was a couple of domain magazines entering the market. I’ve seen bubbles before and decided it was time to exit and sold the majority of my domains for a tidy sum. Several years later, with my current ParkLogic business partner we bought back into domains as we watched the market slide down.

I remember speaking at one of the very first Domain Fest conferences on how I was optimizing my own domain traffic. Quite a number of people asked me whether I could help them out with their own portfolios…..that was when ParkLogic was born.

It’s been over ten years and ParkLogic keeps on growing and developing better ways to extract the full value from domain traffic for clients all over the world. We’ve just launched our new website and the Next platform which will give us incredible flexibility to really target the traffic to the right end user moving into the next decade.

When I look back at the last 20 years I’m so grateful for the tiny book I read. I’ve now bought a lot of copies of it and encouraged friends to read it. Likewise, I would encourage you to buy the book and apply the principles within it. Who knows, in a couple of decades time you may end up writing about your own amazing story!

Have a great weekend.