Graduate With a Profit : Make Money While in School

This goes right along with the PostalMethods entry, but I divided it into two posts to emphasize two points.

IDEA: For college kids, there is a central postal box on campus. Do you know how easy this would be to start on a college campus, but with a twist. Not many students physically send mail letters anymore unless they are thank you cards or packages. HOWEVER, what does every college student have in common at the post office? They have a personal box! This means that each student must at some point or another get out of their dorm, go to the PO, check their box, and most likely throw away the junk offers or bring their letters back to their dorms.

WHAT TO DO: Start a business that does the OPPOSITE of THIS business! Have a service that students will pay you to check their PO Boxes for you, and deliver it to their dorms! The students would have to sign a waiver giving you permission to check their PO Boxes, give you their box combination, dorm number, and a small monthly fee - like $3 or so. Get a group of kids to do it, that’s an easy extra couple bucks in your pocket every month. Even better - offer the service as a discount to fraternities and sororities for $2 per person for anyone in the organization. Often times at schools, fraternity brothers will live in the same house, and some have very large dorm style houses. What do the students get out of this? For a small $3/month fee, they dont ever have to go back to the PO Box which is normally a daily routine and have more freedom knowing that if they ever get anything, it’ll be delivered straight to their door. And another thing, if you get a large group of kids to do this, all you would need to do is check all of the boxes at the same time, and deliver them at the same time, so maybe an hour’s worth of work would be done for the day, no need to go back and forth. I haven’t done any number crunching, but I would think it would be successful.

I’d love to hear your comments on this one. I wish I thought of this earlier when I was in school.

What an amazing business idea! Whoever is the person that thought of “Hey, why don’t we just have people email us their documents or letters, and we’ll print it, put it in an envelop, stamp it, and ship it out?” - has got to be doing pretty well for themselves right now. They know their market - lazy Americans; and they make money off it, and the coolest part, is that IT IS SUCH A SIMPLE IDEA! This is great for people who dont want to go through the “hassle” of sending things out.

PostalMethods website

One of my good friends was driving a big Dodge Durango SUV and just recently traded it in for a brand new 2008 Honda Accord. He traded it in to save money on gas.

Edmunds has a really neat new feature called the “Gas-Guzzler Trade-In Calculator” which calculates about how long it would take for you to start realizing an actual savings. From their website, here is the example they used:

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A Typical Example
A classic situation might be a person who wants to buy a Toyota Prius and trade in a four-year-old GMC Yukon. We ran this situation through the calculator and came up with these figures:

• The Yukon is worth $16,090 in this market.
• The price of the Prius is $23,903.
• The balance is $7,813.

We put in 1,500 miles driven per month and changed the pre-populated
price of gas from $4.25 to $4.59 per gallon. We then hit the
“calculate” button and got the answer. The calculator told us that we
would be saving $312 per month in the cost of gas. However, given the
fact that it would cost us at least
$7,813 to make this switch, it would take 25 months (or two years and
one month) before we would begin actually saving money on gas.

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My dad told my friend not to do it for this same exact reason, and he was right. If you are going to get a new car to save gas, at least do it with an educated research backing it - dont do it on a whim, and DEFINATELY dont buy a BRAND NEW CAR if that is your reason. The ammount of gas money you would be saving would be completely erased since you are PAYING THOUSANDS of dollars just in depreciation of the car, ontop of normal gas and maintainence.

But for the record, I am a proud supporter of anyone that drives more gas/eco friendly cars. For more detailed research on car mileage, go to www.fueleconomy.gov.

So the market isn’t doing too good right now, or the economy in general for that reason, yes we all know that. But as entrepreneurs - we are used to taking some risk and doing things that most people would do. We often think the opposite of the “norm” and get asked a lot “You invested your money in WHAT?!” and then we just laugh at people when we get a nice ROI. That is my thoughts with the current stock market situation - a lot of funds are lowing a significant amount of value right now, so when is a good time to buy? When the prices go down and it becomes a better investment for you! Enter my thoughts….

Vanguard Capital Value Fund

http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=MUTF:VCVLX

This fund has dropped over 45% since July ’07 (at its peak). Normally people would freak out at this, because yes, this is VERY BAD. But however, when you look at the whole picture, that means that the price that it is right now, is about the same price it was in May 2003. But notice that from April 2003 to July 07 it GAINED 106%!!! What does this mean? This means that I can buy a ton of shares now at rock bottom prices, hold onto it and wait for it to start gaining momentum again, and then it’ll easily start compounding.

To put this in perspective, if you were to invest $10,000 in the beginning of 2003, and follow the value of your investment up until the peak in July 2007, you would have almost DOUBLED your money.

Catch my drift now? So instead of buying it at the high prices in 2007 and losing a TON of money, why not be a smart investor, and play the market by taking advantage of the low prices now, and then ride the waves later. Granted, this is by no means a guarantee of fund performance, but chances are, whenever this recession ends, that you would have made a good decision. Even if the market continues to fall, you would have gotten an investment that was much better than if you were to have invested recently.

To illustrate how there is a certain amount of risk associated with stocks, remember that if you were to invest $10,000 in this stock a year ago, it would be worth $6,696.85 now - a net LOSS of $3,303.15 which is a large chunk of change that will take time to re cooperate.

Similar thing for the Vanguard Windsor Fund
http://finance.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=MUTF:VWNDX

Too bad I cant say the same for US Airways:
http://finance.google.com/finance?gl=us&hl=en&q=NYSE%3ALCC&client=fss
Lost over 92% in ONE YEAR! Now $2 and was $63 Not a good investment. The only airline that I would invest in is Southwest, as they are the only major airline (according to the nightly evening news) that is actually turning a profit right now - gotta love Fuel Hedging, right?

Anyway, food for thought - good luck! I’d love to hear any comments (Good and bad) about my thoughts. If I do (probably will) take this investment, I am going to publish monthly results of my earnings/losses as they happen. Stay tuned.

http://www.trapster.com/
This website is an amazing website and an idea that I’ve had since I was young and I am very happy the technology is finally here and that someone made it real. Trapster is an application that you can save spots where police hide, it saves it to an online website, and then it alerts others as they approach the speed traps. It will either work on your cell phone or GPS device.

It has a very impressive feature that learns the credibility of each user. The more a user uploads, and the more people verify that this is an accurate trap, the higher that persons credibility goes. This helps ensure accurate alerts of police traps. This is great for speed traps, red light cameras, and speed cameras.

On the map, green icons represent a suggestion with only 1 vote, where as a red icon represents 5 or more votes. This is a good visual tool that helps people know where are the more accurate/common points that police usually sit.

Unforuntately this only works on Nokia smartphones. This means that my Verizon Wireless regular slider phone will not work with this service.

The bads:
It has an annoying background alert voice prompt.
Also, the commands to use this require a lot of phone keypad usage. This is real bad when driving at 60MPH - never text and drive.

Ideal situation (idea when I was a kid):
Have radar/laser detectors automatically upload a detected police location to a server, that all other detectors are synced up to, so even if the detector cannot physically see the police trap, it will be alerted from users that have already seen it infront of you on the highway. I like to call this the reverse notification because it alerts people behind you of an upcoming trap. Afterall, the only way for someone that is behind you to know there is a cop infront of them, is to have oncoming traffic flash their lights when they see it and have the person behind you see that - not efficient. My thoughts, in order to have this advanced synchronization and backwards notifcation technique in place, a very large and expensive infrastructure would have to be in place, and require a very large number of users actively using this. Of course, this would only work in states that allow these detectors (another reason why MD is superior to VA, haha kidding.)