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Amazon FBA Update – 8/04/2014

It has been a busy few weeks for me.  I have spent all of my extra time reading and researching more on Amazon FBA.  You can read about what I am doing in my first post here.  In that time, I have started to sell a few more things that I have shipped in and have gone out and found even more deals that I just sent in on Monday.  My new plan is to really ramp up and get serious about it.  I think this is what you need to do to make this thing work.  You need to be consistent with shopping, shipping, and selling.

Based on rough math, I believe you need to sell at least $270 a month to break even after accounting for monthly fees for Profit Bandit, Inventory Lab, and Amazon Pro Merchant Fees.  I am assuming you will take in 1/3 of the $270 as profit so $90 and the total cost of the monthly fees are ~$90.  My June results are below and I will let you know what I learned.

July

Sales – $625.39

COGS – ($282.38)

Amazon Fees – ($170.18)

Shipping – ($58.22)

Mileage – ($129.81)

Subscription Fees – ($89.31)

Long Term Storage – ($0.04)

Net Profit/(Loss) – ($104.55)

Analysis

As you can see, I operated at a loss for the month of July but not really.  I am able to deduct the mileage I drive as a business expense if I am doing FBA shopping, but I have generally been shopping in conjunction with something else.  This has allowed me to go visit my parents for free and get credit in my business which is great.  Excluding mileage, I made $25 this month!

Other than shipping, I believe I have been pretty close to other FBA sellers out there in terms of margin.  I just need more volume to make up for it!  I do need to get better at shipping to lower those expenses.  I only shipped a few items in and most were only 4-5 items per box.  IF anyone has any suggestions for how to ship more efficiently, I am all ears.  I hope to have a lot higher volume next month and show a profit above and beyond mileage.

Is anyone else having success with Amazon FBA?  What have you done that has made you successful?

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Deal Roundup – 7/23/2014

Sorry for the light updates lately.  I have had a busy couple weeks with work and a mini vacation.  It makes me appreciate the people who pump out good content consistently.  Who knew this blogging thing was hard work?

Another reason I have struggled to get content out is that I have spent all of my extra time learning and doing Amazon FBA.  I am going to write another update soon, but the main takeaway is that I am ramping up my efforts and going to try and make this a legitimate second income for my family.

Now onto the meaty stuff…some new deals or at least ones that interest me.

1.  Samsung 55” LED TV Model No. UN55H6350 – Dell is hands down the best place to consistently get good deals on TVs.  It takes a little work, but you can nab some huge savings.  This TV is another example of it and it is taking all of my will power not to upgrade my Best Buy house brand TV.  The price on dell and amazon are the same at $1,097.99.  Amazon offers you 2% back in rewards so ~$20 in Amazon credit plus whatever credit card you plan on using.  Compare that with Dell, where you can get between 15-25% and an additional $400 gift card to Dell.  You can go through ShopDiscover and get 10% back when shopping at Dell and stack that with Dell Advantage for 15%.  If you have an American Express, you can get $60 off $599+ using your synced Amex and pay with 2 cards.  Start with uPromise for another 5% or if you are feeling gutsy go through ShopDiscover for 10%.  I say gutsy because you could get none of the cashback without paying with your Discover Card.  Sell the gift card and net this Samsung TV for $530 to $630

A next level play is to use Big Habitat’s play from today using the Amex Sync deal and try using the bonus gift cards you get from buying the Wii U’s towards the TV.  The big risk is that you do not get the gift cards in time to use them to buy the TV in which case you lost $15 out of pocket and have $300 in Dell credit.  I might give this a try as an experiment and will let you know how it goes.

2.  Canon SL1 with lens, printer, and paper – Similar one to what I wrote about last week here.  This camera is better and a smaller form factor than the T3.  It is actually the one I purchased and what I wrote the anatomy of a deal post on.  Go through TopCashback and get 3% back.  Like the last one, the price was a $100 less and ended up rising later in the day.  It might be worth checking Ritz Camera for these deals daily if you are looking for a camera.  After cashback and selling the printer/paper, you can have the camera for $450.

3.  AC Routers at Staples – Sometimes the best deals are in store and completely YMMV as ar as availability.  I was dropping off my latest FBA order at Staples and like any good deal hunter or FBA seller browsed the clearance section.  I noticed 2 fairly expensive routers marked down to ridiculously low prices.  The 2 routers were Linksys EA6500 for $50 that retails new for ~$150 and Belkin AC750 for $30 that retails for ~$80 new.  I plan on checking other Staples locations this weekend, but figured I would throw it out there for anyone in the market.  These are both Dual Band AC routers, which are close to the latest technology.

Let me know if some of you get a chance to take advantage of these deals.  Also, look for more posts on FBA later this week.

Affiliate Disclosure: The TopCashback and Amazon router links are affiliate links and I appreciate anyone using them to join TopCashback or purchase something from Amazon!

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Deal Roundup – 7/15/2014

Wanted to write a quick post on a few deals that I know are going on.  I am going to try and make this a regular thing when I know there are a collection of deals that are of interest to me and hopefully to you as well.

1) Amex Sync with Best Buy for $25 off $250 in spend – You can get this deal buy tweeting #amexbestbuy @amexoffers on Twitter or you can add it on Facebook to your synced card.  See Frequent Miler’s post here for all the details on SyncI have taken advantage of this offer in the past to buy laptops for personal use, but they are good for Amazon or iTunes gift cards also.  If you are lucky enough, you might be able to purchase Visa gift cards if your lucky enough to have a Best Buy that stocks them.   In summation, you get discounted gift cards, free points on your Amex cards, and Best Buy points and spend towards Elite status.

2) Ritz Camera Canon Rebel T3 Package – The deal was better earlier today, but couldn’t post at work.  From now on, I will tweet out the deal as I see it so follow me on Twitter @_woodennickels.  The deal is for $333 you can snag a Canon Rebel T3 with lens, SD card, bag, Pixma Pro-100 printer, ink, and photo paper for $333.  View the deal here.  You will spend $733 out of pocket and receive a $400 mail in rebate to get to the $333 net price.  Then you can decide whether you want to keep or sell the printer to lower the net price further.  Another way to save is use Top Cashback for an additional 3% on the $733 in spend.

3)Big Habitat Laptop Deal – Big Habitat posted about a potential price/product error on an i3 laptop.  You can read his post here.  I am not going to write anything further on it except to say I jumped in for 2.

Anyone going to take advantage of these?

 

Disclosure: The Top Cashback link is my affiliate link and I will receive $10 when you sign up and make a qualifying purchase.  It will not impact the money for you in any way.  I will never advertise a deal that isn’t the best available to my knowledge.

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Making Bank with Amazon FBA – July 10 Update

One of the main purposes of this blog is document some of my personal finance journey.  I believe there are 3 parts to the personal finance equation: 1) Making money, 2) Saving Money, and 3) What to do with said money.  I plan on covering a bit of all 3 on the blog, but today I want to share what I am doing to increase the 1st part of the equation.I have some ideas for a few side projects, but selling items through Amazon FBA is the one I have been able to really make progress on.  BigHabitat has a primer on selling on Amazon and creating FBA shipments so I am going to skip those details for now and jump straight into where I am at.

I would say I have been roughly selling for a month even though I started paying Pro seller fees on May 2nd.  My first item actually sold on June 17th and the month of June is when I really started doing my shopping of things to buy and sell.  It was an amazing feeling receiving an email that told me an item has sold.  I only sent in 3 or 4 items in my first shipment so selling one was pretty good for me.  I took the positive momentum and went out shopping for more things to sell with slightly more success.

My plan for the blog is to update you monthly on my progress for selling things through Amazon FBA.  I am going to include all revenues and expenses and plan to track the number of hours I spend on the business.  I want this to be a legit income supplement for my family and want to show you how easy/difficult it might be for you to do it for yourself.  I have no inside knowledge and have only learned what I know from a few free resources such as Pat Flynn’s podcast where he interviews Jessica Larrew, Jessica Larrew’s website, and the Online Selling Experiment.  I have invested in some tools that I learned about through these websites, but other than that the investment has been minimal except for buying product.

I do plan to invest in the business in the future once I have some profit to speak of and determine that is viable for me to continue.  My future investments are going to be a bluetooth scanner, proper scale (using a kitchen one currently), and maybe a course or 2 from one of the websites mentioned above.  I am not afraid to put some money back into the business if it shows me some success.

What I started with:

  1. Dymo 450 Series Printer (free or $80)- I purchased this from Staples using my ink recycling rewards, but also can be found on Amazon.  If you don’t know what that is, check out this post from Big Habitat.
  2. USB Barcode Scanner ($26) – I purchased this off of Amazon and it is helpful when listing inventory.  It is so much easier than typing in the numbers.  The next step is to get a bluetooth scanner for price checking items while out and about instead of draining the battery on my iPhone.
  3. Self Seal Poly Bags (~$51) – Used for sealing food and other products.  Definitely not necessary to start so not sure what my logic was for purchasing them.  You need these bags to put certain products and the bags need to have a label that have a suffocation warning on them.
  4. Boxes from Home Depot ($1.30/box) – I bought 4 large boxes and 4 small ones since they didn’t have any medium ones.  I will be returning the large boxes since they are huge!
  5. Packing Tape (free or $5-$6) – I also used Staples rewards for this item and already had some laying around the house.
  6. Profit Band Phone App ($15) – Used for scanning items in stores and determining if they are worth buying.

This is all I used to get started and it was all under $200 if I were to buy it all out right.  You probably can do it cheaper if you want to get rid of the poly bags and the barcode scanner.  You technically don’t need profit bandit, but for $15 it is a must have I think.  Now, I think they have a monthly subscription model so you can try out it for free for a month or 2.

To date, I have made $30 in profit net of all fees including the cost of purchasing the goods and the $40 pro merchant fees.  Not bad!  I have a decent amount of inventory now so I expect the profit to go up.  My ultimate goal is to make $1,000 in profit monthly by the end of the year.  Do you think it is possible?  Anyone else have experience with FBA?  Leave me a comment.

[Full Disclosure: The first 3 item links are affiliate links and I will make a small commission if you purchase an item using them.  Normally, I would advocate for using a cashback site to lower your price but that isn’t possible with Amazon so I comfortable linking them.]

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To Buy or Rent that is the question

One of the most common questions I hear people asking about when it comes to housing is the decision to buy or to rent.  Given the size of the monthly expense and potentially large down payment, it is probably a fair question.  However, I find that many people don’t apply the proper analysis in making the decision.  It is not always a question of dollars and cents.  You need to understand what home ownership means and if it is a good fit for you and your lifestyle.  I just recently made this decision and learned some valuable lessons from it.  Now, I want to share my learnings with you.

Considerations when deciding buy vs. rent (in order of importance):

Flexibility (or lack there of) – If you rent, the world is your oyster and you can live anywhere you can afford to.  When you buy, not so much.  The housing market is liquid enough that you can sell your house quickly if the price is good enough.  Otherwise, you could be waiting a long time to sell your house and recoup your closing/selling costs.  I think this is the most important thing to consider when buying a home.  Do you love the area and the house enough to be in it for at least 5 years?  If you don’t, you probably shouldn’t be buying.

Market Analysis – If you answered yes to the first question, then you need to perform some market analysis in your area on home prices and monthly rents for your target properties in your area to decide the next step.  You need to make sure your monthly payments on your house including utilities, taxes, HOAs, and insurance.  You might even include the opportunity cost of the down payment if you had planned to invest the down payment money otherwise.  I would compare this figure to the monthly rents including utilities.  If rent is less than house payment, then you rent.  If rent is higher than house payment, it isn’t always a given that you buy.  I personally would want my savings over my projected time horizon of living at the house to be substantial.  For example, saving $50 a month over 5 years is $3,000.  I’m not sure that is worth all of the potential risk you have being a homeowner because things do go wrong.

Property Analysis – Assuming you can commit to buying a house and the rental market makes it a rational financial decision then you need to find a property to purchase.  This is the most difficult step especially if you or whoever you are buying the property with doesn’t view it as a financial decision and attaches more emotion to it.  I know you have to live there, but I’m not sure heated bathroom floors and custom closets are worth overpaying for.  I would only consider overpaying for a house if I planned on being in the house forever and even then I would be hesitant.  Forever is a looong time!  Try to purchase a property at or below market value in a desirable location.  It is not always easy, but it can be done if you are patient enough.

I recently just sold my first home and will be looking to purchase another one in the next year.  Let’s look at how I did in my first purchase to see if I followed my own advice.

Requirement 1:  Can you commit to being in a home for at least 5 years?  We checked the box on this first requirement.  My wife and I had good jobs with no plans of changing them and no plans for expanding the family.  Bottom line is that we planned to be there for 5 years and couldn’t see any reason for that to change.  Spoiler alert:  We sold after 2 years…whoops!

Requirement 2:  Does the rental market make buying a smart decision?  I also think I scored a passing grade on this item as well.  The rental market was commanding $1,600+ in rent and we were able to purchase similar properties under $230,000.  With interest rates being favorable, it amounted to a payment of around $1,300.

Requirement 3:  Can you find a property you like at or below market value?  We were fortunate enough to be in a buyer’s market when searching for a home and purchased a home for $205,000 that appraised for $215,000.  Seeing the appraisal being above the purchase price means I completed requirement 3.

In the end, we came out ahead in the buy vs rent scenario by almost $500 or $600 a month when you include what we made from selling the house. I believe our success was mostly due to following these principles and maybe a little bit of luck.  I know they are very simple in nature even though there are so many factors to weigh in deciding whether to rent or buy.  On the flip side though, I do think they provide a useful framework for making a practical decision when people sometimes act irrationally when it comes to home ownership (see 2007 financial crisis).

 
What do you think?  Are there any big misses in my guidelines?  Do you perform a similar analysis when deciding whether to buy or rent?

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Wooden Nickels orders from Sears….Chaos Ensues

Thursday was pretty busy.  I planned on posting about the Amazon FBA business I am attempting to run, but the Rapid Rewards deal that Big Habitat and FrequentMiler posted about kept me busy.  I am going to join Big Habitat on his journey for a companion pass

This is how I was going to start my Friday post before Sears decided to lose my gift card order out in cyberspace somewhere.  Sears-iously, how does this happen?!

Cyberspace-1

 

 

 

 

 

(Where I imagine my order went)

I spent a decent portion of Thursday night and Friday trying to sort out what happened with them in between trying to live my life.  There are sooo many customer service #’s and departments.  Sears might be able to avoid bankruptcy if they just consolidated those departments.  Over the course of the next 2 days, I spoke to 5 different customer service reps and the calls all orignated from different 1-800 #’s.  The only answer I got was that they were working on it and would get back with me so after Saturday’s call I just gave up. It’s not the end of the world, but it means I didn’t get the full 10x from the Rapid Rewards and had to settle for 16x instead of 20x on my $1,200 order.  I will live I guess.

If the order debacle wasn’t enough, I saw where Big Habitat went and upped the ante on me and decided to go for 2 passes instead of 1.  I am still sticking with only 1 pass since we are a family of 2 and our pass expires at the end of this year, but look forward to watching his progress and what the final expense tally is going to be.  I have some time so I will try to break even on my attempt so hopefully they run some good promo’s down the road.

If you read his post, I went with the intermediate difficulty and used 2 Discover cards to buy 2 sets of $1500 worth of gift cards.  I used the first batch to upgrade my mattress from a queen to a king and the mattress even came with a $100 MIR.  This was a much need addition when there is a dog sharing your bed.  With the mattress purchase, I earned close to $75 in SYWR that I used on my second order for things I am going to sell on Craigslist and Amazon FBA (will talk more about this in another post this week). In the end, I hope to net around 50k points, $150 in Discover cashback, and a bunch of Shop Your Way points.  These purchases actually bumped up to VIP silver and pretty close to VIP gold.  I look forward to exploring the benefits of status and will let you know if it is worthwhile.

I hope to be posting 2-3 times a week from here on out and I will be starting my series on my experience with Amazon FBA this week.

 

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Anatomy of a Deal

I mentioned in my original post that I would post on various deals that I buy for friends or myself so I wanted to share one really great one I scored earlier in the year.  The great thing about this deal is that it is mostly still available today.  As with many of these deals, I was able to score an amazing price due to a confluence of events so you may not be able to repeat my exact deal.

The hunt started in December when I saw a notice to pop up on fat wallet for DSLR camera.  I have been wanting to upgrade for a while, but didn’t want to spend the $$ on a toy for myself.  Focus Camera was offering a package deal for a Canon Rebel T3, 2 lenses, printer, and printer paper for $749 with a $400 mail in rebate.  I jumped on this one quick and tried to figure out how I could bring the price down even further.

My main methods of reducing the price are using coupons, credit cards, gift cards, and cashback portals.  I use cashbackholic.com to find the best cashback rebates and giftcardgranny.com to find out if there are in gift cards in the market.  Focus Camera didn’t have any gift cards, but they were running a special where you could buy them from the site for 10% off.

I was a bit unsure of whether to buy the gift cards late in December since the $400 promo ended on December 31st and I wasn’t sure they would have any stock left.  My greedy side took over and I took a chance and ordered exactly the amount I needed to get the Canon Rebel T3.  As suspected, the gift cards were slow to come and they sold out of the camera package.  You can imagine my joy in holding almost $1k in gift cards to a random camera store in New York.  Thankfully, they sell Apple products and I could at least sell those at a small discount and get most of my money back.

Miraculously, Canon started a new promotion in the 1st Quarter and I was going to jump on it.  The extra time gave me a chance to do more research on the camera I wanted to buy.  This may have end up costing me money since I bought the Canon SL1 outside of the package deal and was a nicer camera….Whoops!

Here is how the math worked out:

Excel deal

As you can see, the total worked to be $352.79 or close to $300 off a really good retail price.  Not bad!  I could definitely sell it and make $100 to $150 so I consider that a win.  I probably could have gotten the T3 package for close to $100, but didn’t since I was keeping it.  I wanted to get a camera that would last me a long time and take great pictures!  Drop me a comment and tell me about your best deals and whether you sold or kept them.

SR-71

(SR71 Blackbird taken with SL1)

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Saving Money on Movies

ultraviolet_logo

I don’t know about you, but I always enjoy a good movie.  Only problem is that it more than $20 in tickets to go to the movies for 2 people and that is without the delicious popcorn.  If you are like me, you can resist going to the theater and wait for all the movies to come to blu-ray or DVD (except Batman or Lone Survivor) to save a little money.  You buy the movie when it comes out for $20 and worry about storing all of the discs or you can rent the movies for $3 or $4 from redbox, your cable company, or Amazon etc. What if I told you that you could get your own copy of new releases movies for the price of a rental?

The key is the ultraviolet program, which for some reason seems to be relatively unknown at least among my friends and family.  Ultraviolet is a consortium of companies that allows you to store your digital copies of tv shows and movies in the cloud so you can access them anywhere using different services and devices.  I am able to watch them using my computer, XBOX 360, PS3, Apple TV, iPad, smart tv, and blu-ray player.   I have a way to access them on every tv and even when I am traveling.  I am particularly fond of storing them on my iPad for long flights so I don’t need internet or crappy inflight entertainment.  The service gets even better in that you can share your movies/account with up to 5 other people to either increase your buying power or a good friend and just share.  The best part is if they add a movie to their own account then it gets added to your library as well so it is a win-win.

Here is a snapshot of my library and all of the movies you see cost me less than $4, which I think is pretty good and sure beats the theater or buying and storing discs.

Screen Shot 2014-06-19 at 10.28.10 PM

The best part of these codes is that people buy, sell, and trade them for less than half of what the blu-ray would cost!  I have spent the last year building a library of my favorite movies and new releases I want to see. I have been able to purchase more movies cheaply than I have been able to watch.  I have an example of an ultraviolet code below for those who don’t know what they look like.  They come in most new movies and it is usually indicated on the packaging.  The only movies I have seen without them are studios that don’t participate like MGM or some of the $5 movies from Wal-Mart or Best Buy.  There is a way around the no code, but I will get into that in another post about VUDU.

hobbit_auj-ultraviolet-code-300x245

There are several sites where you can go to buy these codes to start building your own library up.

Through shopping around, I have been able to build a pretty sizable library and provided myself with hours of entertainment for pretty cheap.  This is also one of my strategies to help with getting rid of cable, which I will share more about later!  Does anyone else use the ultraviolet service?  Do you have any tips and tricks for me?

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Hello Saverocity Readers!

Hello and welcome to the Wooden Nickels blog. The title Wooden Nickels comes from probably the first bit of personal finance advice I received from my Dad. Many times my Dad would tell me to “not take any wooden nickels.” I think it means pay attention and don’t get cheated. A random title for a blog that will cover a lot of random topics loosely related to personal finance.

My passions in life are to help people, saving money, and making easy money. A lot of my help comes in the form of saving people money from online shopping, knowing what credit card can get them some cheap travel, or sharing other money saving tips that I use. I won’t spend much time on credit cards on this blog since the market is a bit completely saturated. I will post my hunts for deals and money saving ideas. I want to help readers deal hunt and save money too so send me an email with what you are after and what is costing you too much money.

As I said my other passion is making money. I am going to share my adventures into starting my own businesses to help keep me accountable and show everyone how my efforts are going. Hopefully someone can learn from what I am doing and make enough to quit their job or achieve whatever financial goal they have. My ultimate goal is to make enough in one of my side hustles to quit my full time job.

Occasionally, I will also share some personal financial musings based on what is happening in my life. I have had enough in that department this year to write a book it feels like so I will share them as they come up and feel like they are interesting and valuable. Please send me emails with topics, deal help, or whatever you want to read about. I have enough ideas to cover me for a few months, but I want the blog to be interactive so send your ideas and requests my way.

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