DaveWitwicki.com

Here’s wishing you and your family the very best during this holiday season from me and my family. Merry Christmas everyone!

- Dave

When I launched this blog three and a half months ago, my intention was to try and write with more of a serious tone and to stick to a specific topic (although I’m not quite sure what that was). Well, after all this time, I’ve found that trying to do that is hard and quite boring really. So, I’ve now decided to mix things up and post about whatever strikes my fancy (much like my tagline claims). This means there will be more inconsequential, personal posts, rants and maybe a bit of tech stuff. I think this change is more fitting for my current lifestyle. I don’t know where this will lead, but its the journey that counts so, Giddyup!

- Dave

I’ve added a list of inspirational quotes I’ve stumbled across while sipping from the informational firehose. Instead of just making it a post, I’ve used a Wordpress page. The way I have things set up currently, it shows up under the About Me page in the Subscribe section. I’ll probably have to do something about where these pages go if I plan to have more of them, but it can live there for now. Here’s a link in case it’s too much trouble to look to the left…

I stumbled across an interesting video called “Money as Debt”. The first half (~25 mins) explains, in simple terms, how money is created. The second half proposes solutions to the issue of money being reliant on debt. Whether or not these solutions are feasible is debatable but learning where money comes from is something everyone should know.

- Dave

For the past month, I’ve been exceedingly busy. Or so it seems anyway. Work has been full, not overly so, but enough that I’m mentally drained by the time I get home. Then there’s daily stuff like meals and cleaning that need to be done. Add to all that an abundance of activities for everyone in my family and it seems like there’s just not enough hours in the day to get everything accomplished. Never mind working on other projects (like generating wealth).

However, over the past week, I’ve been trying to look a little closer at my busyness and I’ve discovered that along with increased activities, my efficiency has dropped. What I mean by that is I spend a lot of time doing inconsequential stuff instead of activities with high value. Now part of my problem seems to centre around the large volume of interruptions when I’m at home. At first I thought maybe I’m just making excuses but I kept a bit of a log and discovered that I average about 6 minutes between interruptions with the longest uninterrupted stretch being about an hour. Unfortunately, that hour is right before bed and by that time I’m mentally exhausted. As if this wasn’t all bad enough, I’ve been sick for the past week with a nagging cough. It’s subsiding now, but I haven’t been sleeping well.

Anyway, my point is that it’s easy to succumb to the pressures of daily life. Weeks, months and even years can pass by while you “live your life” without really accomplishing anything. So, the question is, what can you do about this? At this point, I don’t have an answer. What I do have is some thoughts.

Make a game plan: If goals are your thing, then set some goals; both short and long term. For myself, goals have never really worked so instead, I’m trying to define what I want my life to look like. A set of guiding principles if you will. Either one requires discipline so I think it would be better to have a mix of big and small targets so you can have some small successes to keep you on track while still having the prize to keep your eye on.

Schedule “me” time: It may seem selfish, but blocking out a chunk of time for yourself may help you accomplish things. Right now, various members of my family have activities Monday to Thursday nights and then weekends at various times. As much as I would prefer to stay home to work on my activities that doesn’t seem to be working so I may need to actually leave the house during my “me” time. For those who have a specific work area in your residence, it may be enough to close the door and put a “do not disturb” sign up. Maybe I need to get a door on my office…

Optimize routine activities: I have this feeling that daily chores could be a lot easier if I had a better schedule for doing them. Right now, I just sort of do things when they catch my attention. One good area for optimization is meals. Having a meal plan for the week really helps. I used to plan out the week’s meals and go buy all the ingredients on Sunday, but with all the activities both at work and at home, there are days where we just don’t have enough time to prepare even a quick meal. Still, that’s one area where improvement would help. Another is daily/weekly chores such as dishes and laundry. Both my wife and I just seem to take care of these things whenever we feel like. I think having a regular schedule where I make lunches and do dishes right after the kids are put to bed would help. I’ve used both the meal plan and the daily schedule and they work well but it takes discipline to do it consistently.

Mix work and play: Generating wealth in and of itself isn’t very fun. I suppose this ties in with making a game plan. When determining your goals/principles, you need to ensure that you’ll enjoy whatever it is you plan to do. Sure, there’s going to be hard work. Anything worth having requires work, but find a way to add some fun to it. Even if its something simple like trying to optimize dish placement in the drying rack (yes, I do this, and yes, its kind of weird). With kids, you could do something like a quick game of laundry basketball where you see who can get the most points sinking their clothes in the laundry basket.

Change your attitude: Being grumpy or cranky just doesn’t help. Try and be happy no matter what’s going on. After a long day, the last thing you want to do is cook and clean, but it has to be done anyway so instead of grumping about it, just accept it and get to it. Play some good music in the background, that usually helps. Think about the good things in your life. Do whatever it takes to be in your happy place. This alone will make it all easier.

I’m sure there’s other things that can help overcome the daily grind. I believe the first step is recognizing that you’ve fallen victim to it. Now I’m going to put action to these thoughts and see if I can’t break the shackles of this dull routine I’ve succumbed to.

- Dave

I stopped by the bank yesterday to get some US money for my wife. She went to Minneapolis for the weekend to attend the Women of Faith conference. I rarely go into the bank as I do everything over internet banking or at an ATM. When I got into line, there was three tellers and each one had a customer. The teller in the business line was free so she called me over. That alone counts as good service. Anyway, when she punched in the transaction, the exchange rate came up as exactly even. The teller was friendly and commented on how she’d never seen it exactly even. She said that lately its been a few cents either way and joked that I should win a prize. She went off to get my US bills and when she came back she brought a free pen as my “prize”. For the most part, she was just doing her job, but the extra little touches like calling me over and giving me a pen really impressed me. That’s the kind of customer service I like. I’ve been a customer at most of the major Canadian banks and, so far, TD Canada Trust has given me the best service. Its not even a specific branch, they all seem to be good. Good enough that I had to write about it.

- Dave

I’ve done nothing in the past couple weeks in working towards building wealth. Well, that’s not quite true, I’m in the process of opening an index fund account, but that’s not what I mean when I talk about building wealth. I went down the path of Internet Marketing for a while when I stumbled across Ridiculous Income Goals and its reports for only $7.20. Usually internet marketing reports cost a heck of a lot more so I decided to spend the $7.20 and see what this was all about. I can honestly say that the stuff I received was easily worth $7.20 and I haven’t even finished reading them all yet.

This made me seriously consider getting into the whole internet marketing game. However, after thinking about it some more, I started wondering where the true value was. I have no doubt I could make money at it (and may still give it a shot), but where is the value to the customer? It seems to me that most of the customers will be other people like myself looking to build wealth (aka MAKE MONEY!). That just doesn’t sit right with me. My original concept of providing video tutorials and (hopefully) generating revenue from ads was based on the idea of first providing valuable content then monetizing it. At this point, I just don’t see any value in internet marketing beyond gathering money from others who are looking to do the same.

That’s not to say that “gathering money” is not valuable, I just don’t feel that’s what I want to be all about. I suppose if I was using internet marketing as my primary income then I might feel differently. My day job is all about using technology to provide value to my customers (being other internal employees) and I really enjoy that. It feels good to make someones life a little easier and I think I want to do that with my other wealth activities. Unfortunately, that has left me blowing in the wind a bit these last couple weeks and I still don’t know what I’m going to do yet. I like the training/tutorial idea, but I just don’t have the motivation to work on that right now. Taking a page from the internet marketing book, I think I could work on reports of my own with content about more than just making money but again, I’m not motivated to work on that right now. Heh, maybe I need to read more of these reports and see where it takes me. I don’t know, I’m really not sure what to do. I guess I’ll have to let it sit for awhile longer…

- Dave

Today I received a special invitation to The Trump Way to Wealth Introductory Seminar. I thought to myself, “Hey! Great! I’d like to check out a seminar and it’s free!”. I’ve been thinking lately that maybe a seminar or two would be good to get me inspired to move forward. Unfortunately, the seminar was last weekend so I missed it already.

The invitation was actually for my dad, but he wouldn’t have used it anyway (since he passed away a few years ago). What’s even worse is that, not only was the seminar free, but it included a free copy of Trump’s latest book. I’ll have to check the reviews and maybe buy a copy.

- Dave

Yesterday, as I was taking my daughter to a birthday party, I started thinking about the value of an hour. What is an hour of your time worth? When I was younger, I considered my time to be worth $25/hr. Eventually, I started making more than that at my day job so I bumped it up to $50/hr. Recently I discovered that the going rate for a Web Programmer is $65/hr so I raised it to that.

However, my thoughts turned to what I am really trying to describe with putting a value on my time. Is that what I charge to do extra work? Is that my goal for passive income? Is my time only worth money while I’m awake? What about entertainment, should I be adding my hourly rate on to that? How come I accept that my employer doesn’t pay me that?

Naturally, my thoughts continued on to lofty goals and I started thinking about the value of an hour for a millionaire. What would the hourly rate be if I made a million+ a year? I discovered that the numbers weren’t nearly as high as I thought. Maybe that’s a good sign. Maybe I’m finally cultivating the wealth mentality. So, how many hours are we talking about in a year?

Stats Canada seems to list two primary average income totals. Economic Families, two or more people at $78,400 in 2005, and Unattached Individuals at $32,300 in 2005. That translates into:

So, what do these numbers actually say? To me, they say that the average person doesn’t place much value on their time. It also made me realize that earning a million dollars a year really shouldn’t be that hard. These numbers seem realistic to me. Of course, I’m sure if we could find some way to measure actual productivity in hours spent on value producing activities, a completely different picture would be painted. That leads to the question, what is value? I think that question deserves an entire post to itself, but in summary, in addition to whatever someone is willing to pay me for, I see value in spending time with my family, in personal development, and in entertainment. Basically, anything that makes my life better. Granted, this will vary widely between people, but my point is, that you should think about it.

Based on the numbers, it seems my value thinking is on track. During my original driving/thinking session, I randomly picked a value of $1000 per hour since it didn’t seem that outrageous. Having calculated the numbers now, I see that it actually takes substantially less. Now I have something to shoot for. It’s good to have specific numbers in mind to compare your results against. I still have a long way to go, but every journey proceeds one step at a time.

- Dave

I’ve been thinking about home schooling my children lately. This is an option I’ve always considered possible because I have a fairly low opinion of the public school system. I will admit that the public school system has exceeded my expectations but that’s not saying much because my expectations are so low. This belief was justified this past week when my son was a bit agitated over not getting his homework done and having it sent home. After calming him down, I asked him to explain to me what happened. Basically, he was given half the assignment on Monday which he promptly completed in class. Then, on Wednesday, he was given the other half. He didn’t hear the entire assignment and, therefore, only did the part he thought was due. I had him do the part he was supposed to have finished which he completed effortlessly in a couple minutes. After he finished, I took a look through the work he’s doing and, quite honestly, was surprised at the low level of it. Now, I have to wonder if my memory is playing tricks on me, but I recall doing much more advanced work when I was in grade four. Of course, I also remember getting actual grades (I was quite proud of getting 100% in social studies). Nowadays, the “performance report” consists of a list of areas with an M or a D rating which basically translates to “does well” or “does not so well”. Even my work evaluation has more levels than that! I could go off on quite a rant at this point, but I won’t. Those of you who know me have heard this one many times before.

Anyway, there are two things that really have me considering home schooling now. One of the major benefits I see to public schools is the social opportunities provided. The kids get a chance to interact with other children and that’s important. I was talking with my wife about home schooling and she mentioned that she heard of someone who was home schooling but had their children go to a public school for gym class. I had never considered the possibility of something like that. I had always figured it was an all or nothing situation. The opportunity to have the social interaction AND a quality education is looking more doable.

The other thing that has held me back from home schooling is, of course, finances. My wife and I both work and the way we currently have our finances structured, neither of us can stop working for an extended period. We’ve recently adjusted our expense structure and budget and should have a lot more freedom within a few years but that’s a long time to wait. As I’ve mentioned previously, I am actively working towards wealth now. This situation emphasizes for me that wealth is about more than just money. Wealth is about freedom and the ability to make choices. I saved an affirmation from somewhere (I don’t recall where I first heard it) that really sums it up for me:

I never want to have to make a bad decision because of money.

I honestly believe that keeping my kids in public school is a bad decision when compared against the benefits of home schooling. There are plenty of resources available to assist in home schooling. In fact, I was quite surprised by the level of support provided by the provincial government. They appear to have a department and personnel committed to supporting the home school initiative and offer plenty of material. Their website has good information. There’s also a variety of local support groups.

So now I have even more incentive to build wealth. In the past I considered wealth not really important. My dad was very focused on building wealth and my childhood suffered for it. Unfortunately, he also wasn’t very good at it so not only was he too busy working to spend time with me, but he left no legacy to justify it. Things changed while I was still a kid but, the point is, I’ve never considered wealth to be a priority. Obviously that attitude is changing and opportunities, like home schooling, really help. I’ve been slacking lately but I should be back on track shortly. I’ll post about that a little later.

- Dave