I’m feeling playful today–what is the worst financial advice you’ve ever received? Mine was so bad it was epic and funny, at least to me.
I am a professional author of a trade paperback and two e-books, one of which is self-published. This “make a six figure income and travel the world” guru wrote that you could get a six figure income by hiring a ghostwriter (I’ve done that, too) to write 100 books and sell them on Kindle.
This is funny to me because of what all goes in to writing a book. My trade paperback is about 22,500 words and took three months to write and was published two months later–that’s extremely fast for a book and at several points in time I questioned my sanity. Total haul–$7,500.
Multiply that by 100. If you write one book at a time at three months per book, you’ll hit 100 books at 300 months, or 25 years.
While we’re at it, a total haul of $7,500 over 3 months comes down to $525 a week. You can make that at a full-time job that pays slightly more than $13/hour.
But say you do e-books. Most e-books sell less than 100 copies. So let’s say you sell 100 copies at $100 each–I own an extremely rare book that cost that much! I’m not shelling out that kind of money on an unknown writer with no reviews!
Also, my record turnaround on e-books is a 25-page e-book on overcoming loneliness that was written in 5 days, and the client I wrote it for defaulted, so I self-published it to recoup some of my losses. Writing five pages a day is pretty taxing even if you know what you’re doing.
Anyway, that’s the worst advice I ever got on how to make money. What’s yours?
I think some of the worst advice for making money a lot of people talk about and is kind of the first advice you run into when you get started online.
That advice is to go and do surveys and use other similar sites. While these all have their place, when you really look at how much time it takes, and how little you get, it is really not a viable way to “make money”.
You would be much better off just getting a second job that you only worked 1 hour a week. I am pretty sure you would probably make more doing this at minimum wage than you would with doing surveys on most sites.
The few people who do make an okay income aren’t really factoring in the true value of their time.
In the day and age we live in, there are so many ways to make income on the side and in my opinion, doing surveys is not one of them.
Ooooh! Love this question. Mine would probably have to be – “It doesn’t matter what you do with your money right now, as long as you save for retirement, you’ll be fine.” I think it’s so easy to think what you do now won’t impact your future, or that you can always make more money – but I’m glad I learned the value of creating healthy financial habits now so I don’t have to worry (as much, hopefully) later!
When I was a broke newly married college student I spent a lot of time reading up on how you could make money by getting your car wrapped in advertisements. I could get paid to drive around! Sadly most of the programs that were hyped up online required you to pay to get more info. I never fell for that scammy part but man, I wasted a lot of time on that research!
The worst advice I ever got was to go with a debt settlement company! My experience with what I thought was going to be a help, ended up being a nightmare. My credit was ruined, and my creditors had no patience with me, when they found out, I had chosen a debt settlement company. It was one of the worst experiences of my life, and caused me extreme stress and discomfort!! The lesson I learned was that there is no short cut to paying one’s bills, and that if a medical emergency comes up, and you owe creditor’s money, most of them could care less what your problem is, you had better pay your bill, or you will be sued!
