Chapter 21
Jeffee Tries to Market JJJ Investing
Remember like it said this biography will be like Mark Twain's so basically I'm speaking about what I am thinking at the time and doesn't really matter if it's in chronological order or not – the main thing is to get all the events down and how I feel about them and the absurdity of all of the stuff and let you read it.
Let me tell you another frustrating area of my life; God there’s so many it's hard to know where to start. But let's start with Jeffee trying to market JJJ Investing to the world. The legend of JJJ Investing began many years ago with a very nice man by the name of Warren Bean from Australia.
No, actually the marketing for JJJ Investing began even before the very nice man by the name of Warren Bean came into my life. Many, many years ago when I first moved to San Antonio in 1994 I was already trying to market my business.
My original marketing efforts consisted of offering classes at Ramstein Air Force Base for young military student who I wanted to help get an early start on investing. They were fine young men and women, risking their life for their country, and not receiving a heck of a lot of money for doing it. So I wanted to help teach them a few fundamentals about investing so they could be prepared for retirement, for college for their children; all the things that take a heck of a lot of money. I taught my class for three or four years and had great time teaching and then once again things went bad because suddenly the Morale Welfare and Recreation (MWR) Agency people started doing business differently and I basically had to stop offering my class which made me sad and disappointed. I have never had a thrill it felt so good as when I was in front of a class of eager students teaching them about investing sadly have only got to do that a few times in my life. Amazing how all the things I like to do I get to do so seldom like teach my investing class, play poker with my buddies, go golfing, yet I get to do the crap every single day oh well as they say "my only crime was being born".
I came back to the US in 1994 and again I'm still trying to market my business as this is what I would like to do rather than working for the government all my life. The first thing I discovered was this online service called CompuServe. Basically as I realized today; it was like an internal Internet where everybody was a member of CompuServe and they had all these different areas you could go to look for information, and they also had a paid advertising service where you could put ads trying to sell things.
So I posted an ad on CompuServe for JJJ Investing, the ad cost money, maybe about $25 for six months. But CompuServe said you will reach millions and millions of people so I gave it a try. I never sold any books thanks to CompuServe. And after a year or two on CompuServe, I became aware of the Internet and realized that CompuServe was a rip-off because they nickeled and dimed you for every one of their many many services and so many months I got quite a large bill as did many other people and basically CompuServe went out of business and the Internet came into being.
So here comes the Internet and all I knew how to do was to put ads up on the Internet for JJJ Investing and offer a free copy of my book via e-mail to anybody. I hoped they would read the free book and then they'd like to buy a printed copy of the book or buy a subscription to my monthly newsletter or have me help them decide on what stocks and ETF's to buy, etc.
Once again like with CompuServe, I was wonderfully unsuccessful in getting any business from all of the free ads on the Internet. At least I wasn't dumb enough to be paying for any ads. But I guess you get what you pay for – I paid nothing and basically I got nothing in the way of any business.
Then I tried another trick: I pay few bucks a month to companies that promised to list you in all the search engines. They swore to God they would list your business with all of the leading search engines on the Internet and back in the 90’s there were a lot of search engines because Google or Yahoo did not predominate in the field of search. There were hundreds of search engines I used to faithfully post to each month. I listed my site every single month and posted to bigger sites like Yahoo and others to get my site listed – basically I tried to do anything and everything I could with sweat labor to advance JJJ Investing.
I always try to learn more about computing and stuff and I went to this free class on a Saturday morning about how to make a website for the Internet which I knew nothing about. So I attended one Saturday morning class for about three hours and actually learned a lot because basically that's the only training have ever had in my life on building a website and I think I have built a pretty incredible website and hot links to other websites– judge for yourself, go to a http://www.jjjinvesting.com.
Of course I didn't go back to my house and immediately build a website but at least I had a little bit of knowledge. Then Warren Bean (no, not Mr. Bean!) from Australia, one of the most helpful people in my life, unfortunately he didn't have much competition, did something highly unusual and wonderful in my eyes.
Warren actually created a website for JJJ Investing in maybe 1997 and parts of that website are still part of my website today. I was figuring out things like you could look at the source of a webpage and figure out the code and stuff and then paste that code from the other website to your website so you didn't have to always reinvent the wheel. You could just copy some code from some other website and put it in your website and would work the same on your website as it did on another website.
Warren Bean's website for JJJ Investing became the site I used for many many years and then finally I never heard again from Warren. I still want to thank him for doing that for me because he gave me a lot of hope and help and he got me started on my website.
So now I had a website to try and market JJJ Investing and I have improved the website over the years and edited many things including I joined PayPal and now I'm able to accept credit cards and people can order just by clicking a button on my website. I've tried to make it as easy as possible but that still hasn't led me to the point where I give my two weeks’ notice to Uncle Sam if you know what I mean.
I've also listed approximately 10,000 to 15,000 links (but who's counting) on my website. People promise that if I put up a link for them, they would put up a link for me. I can't tell you how much time that has taken me and how much trouble it's been and again it's virtually led to no business. Again if you ever want to see all my hard work, go to my website http://www.jjjinvesting.com and you will see under the links pages on my homepage just how many links there are and again they did me no real good.
The other great area I tried to market myself was to open a Twitter account. Again I work morning, noon, and night trying to gain more followers and putting in over 25,000 tweets. About 90% of my tweets are investing advice or very nice religious quotes or something humorous or something sarcastic and then about 10% of the time I'll put in the tweet saying send for my free book.
I have about three or four different tweets advertising my book and I slip them in saying send for my free book and learn how to invest in a real easy way. Again I've been largely unsuccessful but I'm a persistent cuss so I'm going to keep trying it. You want to see what I twit about? Go to my website on twitter which is: http://twitter.com/jjjinvesting - Go to my twitter website and see my twitter account. I now have over 57,500 followers in a little over two years and again it's been about as totally unsuccessful as my time on CompuServe, the 10 or 15,000 reciprocal links I put up and the smoke signals in the sky I've used to say send for my free book.
I have another incentive on why I should become successful with JJJ Investing. The big news in the business world in the last couple of days has been the fact that General Electric Company will pay no federal corporate income tax on last year's profits even though they basically had revenue of some like $35 billion and made billions and billions of dollars of profits. Of course it helps when I read in the article that General Electric has about 950 people who work exclusively on ensuring that General Electric pays the least possible taxes. But maybe the article I found on ways for people who are self-employed to save on their taxes will do me some good because it gave me some information that may help me someday if I can ever become successful with JJJ Investing. Yes, I know that is a long shot if you been reading my book so far.
The Wall Street Journal had this article about how the average self-employed person could do the same thing as General Electric and basically pay no taxes so of course I was interested because I never know; maybe my business will become successful someday and maybe the tooth fairy is real. Of course I want to be just like General Electric and pay the least possible taxes because most of the taxes go to subsidize the rich anyway in the form of farm subsidies to big farmers to bailouts for banks etc. so why should I pay them when they have enough money as far as I'm concerned.
So here's how you and I could save just as much money as General Electric. Let's say you have a business and let's say you made $150,000 in your first year. Well as it says in the article, first of all you can deduct $10,000 for 2010 start up expenses. You could've written off all $10,000 in one year instead of having to depreciate expenses.
l found lots of stuff that might help me which I didn't realize. The article says if you make a profit on your business you have to pay Medicare and Social Security taxes just like General Electric and because you're self-employed you pay both sides of Medicare and Social Security.
So let's say you and I paid $15,000 Medicare and Social Security taxes. First of all you and I can deduct half of that amount or $7500 as a business expense. Now comes the good part which I didn't know about which inspires me to actually become successful someday.
If you're self-employed you have access to terrific tax breaks on investment and retirement accounts as the article says the best deal for many is going to be a self-employed 401(k). It says for somebody who made $150,000 in revenue for the year that right off the bat you could save $43,000 in your retirement account, and write it off against your taxes and that money goes straight into a sheltered investment account as with the regular 401(k).
The article further explains how the guy came up with $43,100. Because with a solo 401(k) you're both the employer and the employee. So as the employee of JJJ Investing I would get to contribute a maximum of $16,500 as with any regular 401(k). But I'm also my employer so I also get to lavish myself with an incredibly generous company match of up to 20% of my net income.
So being the chief cook and bottle washer has its privileges. And since I'm over 50 my limit as an employee is raised from $16,500 each to $22,000.
And I can save another $10,000 by also contributing to individual retirement accounts – $5, 000 for me, and $5,000 for my wife. And if I use a traditional IRA, rather than a Roth, that reduces my taxable income as well. So since I'm over 50, the limit rises to $6,000 apiece for the individual 401(k) and then if I pay any state or local taxes I can write that off too. This would really help me.
Here's another kicker I hadn't thought about. If I'm self-employed then health insurance is a big headache and expense. But the news isn't totally bad. I could write off the premiums for myself, my wife and for my kids. And if I use a qualifying high deductible health insurance plan – there are a variety of rules to make sure plan qualifies – I would get another break.
If I contribute $3,000 year into a tax – sheltered health savings account, or $6,150 to family health savings account, I could write off those contributions against my taxable income. The investments grow sheltered from tax. And if I spend that money on qualifying health costs the withdrawals are tax-free as well. A pretty good deal. So for example if I paid $10,000 worth of healthcare premiums and $6,150 into the health savings account that again reduces my taxable income by around $16,000.
And if I had any outstanding student loans I could also write them off also. Then of course just like without being self-employed; I still get the personal exemptions of $3, 650 per person so if I'm married that would be doubled so it's a pretty good deal.
So please help me be successful. I'll put all the money from the sale of this book which will be real cheap because people won't pay a lot of money for an autobiography that they don't know about in advance, was written by genius until they've read it. I'm making this book cheap so somebody will take a chance and buy my lofty biography.
I found a good website that looks like it will let me format my book for all the various e-book readers so I plan to list my book on Kindle, Nook, any and every e-book selling site that I can get my hands on because again that's the only way you can economically self publish a book anymore so you've got a book that's what I recommend you can always write me and I'll be glad to help you find a good place to get your book published very cheaply.