Financial Videos

How Mark Cuban Became a Billionaire

May 3, 2014 By Jeffrey Strain 1 Comment

One of the best ways to learn about how to make money is to look at those who have been successful at doing it. It’s important to listen and learn from the advice of people like Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Taking the advice that they have to offer can help you do better with your own personal finances, and help you reach the money goals you have.

Bloomberg put together a video about Mark Cuban that’s well worth a look. You can learn a bit more about how he became a billionaire, and also take away some lessons that can be of use for your own personal finances.

Here are five big takeaways from the video that you can learn from and apply to your own success:

Look for Opportunities

Opportunities are out there and you need to be on the lookout for them. Cuban began to do this from an early age. One of his first entrepreneurial exploits was with postage stamp arbitrage. Cuban discovered that he could buy stamps for as little as $0.25 and then resell them for as much as $50. He became so good at it that, according to his brother, that a neighbor gave him $5000 to buy stamps at a stamp show in New York for him.

It Takes a Lot of Work

Success doesn’t just fall into your lap. As Cuban says, he looks at business as a sport, much like football and basketball. The difference is while those games are played 60 minutes and 48 minutes respectively, business is played 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You aren’t going to be a success unless your work your heart out, and put in more effort than the other competitors out there.

Have an Eye for Marketing

Marketing opportunities can come from strange places and you can take those opportunities to leverage them to your benefit. Cuban, as owner the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, told a ref that he wasn’t qualified to manage a Dairy Queen. This upset Dairy Queen which wanted Cuban (and everyone) to know that it wasn’t easy to manage a Dairy Queen, and their managers are highly trained. Dairy Queen challenged him to work in a shop. It would have been easy for Cuban to blow the whole thing off, but he instead took the opportunity to work at Dairy Queen for an afternoon, garnering him a huge amount of publicity.

Be Willing to do Things Differently

In many of the businesses that he has owned, Cuban has gone about and done something fundamentally different than what businesses in that area had been doing up until then. As he says, if you are doing what everyone else is doing, you are missing the future and where those business will be in the years to come. It’s important to not only look at what’s happening now, but to anticipate where things will go so that you’re the one to implement that future.

Luck Plays a Big Part

Even with a lot of hard work, luck has a lot to do with it as well. He ended up selling his company at the right time at the height of the Internet bubble for much more than he ever could have a few years later. While this doesn’t discount all the hard work that you must do to be successful, there is an element of luck that comes into play as well. Cuban considers himself “the luckiest person in the world” and that luck had a lot to do with his overall success.

Finally, if you’re interested in learning more about Mark Cuban’s business secrets, check out his autobiography How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It. Its gotten an average of 4 stars out of 2,911 ratings on goodreads.com, so its well worth checking out. Pick up a copy on Amazon for under 5 bucks.

Not a Merry Christmas: People Stealing Food from the Needy for Profit in San Francisco

December 19, 2013 By Jeffrey Strain 4 Comments

If you want to get your blood boiling, just take a look at the video below. This took place at Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco by a local TV station. It’s the complete antithesis of what the holiday season is supposed to be about. Food that is meant to be given to the needy is taken by a long line of people. But instead of being thankful and taken home to eat, many instead immediately sell the food for $5 a bag to others. It doesn’t stop there. People then go back into line to get more bags of food. Some people even throw out (yes, into the trash) the food that they’ve just been given because they don’t want it for themselves or can’t resell it. Just watch the video and be amazed in a bad way.

This is a classic example of people taking advantage of peoples’ generosity to help themselves at the expense of the people who really do need the food. My guess is that anyone who watches the video will be disgusted, and they should be. But instead of leaving it at that, why not do something positive to help those in need. Here are a few things that you can do:

Donate Food

In my experience working with food banks, it is an exception that abuse like this happens, and not the rule. Most people that use the food banks are extremely thankful and appreciative of the help. Most food banks usually have protocols in place so that the few people who do try to abuse the system aren’t able to do so. With that in mind, donate some food to your local food bank. There is always a great need for it, and unlike the video above, it will go to a family that not only needs it, but greatly appreciates the generosity.

Donate Money

If you have some extra cash this holiday season, consider donating it to your local food bank. When you do this, they are able to get the food that they need most. Often they can get it for a greatly discounted price compared to what you could buy it for at the grocery store. In other words, a dollar given to a food bank will often result in more than a dollar’s worth of food from the local grocery store.

Volunteer

This is an extremely busy time for food banks and they usually can use all the extra help that they can get. Volunteer to help so that the food that is donated really does get to the people who need it most. Part of the issue in the above video was that the church probably didn’t have enough volunteers to help prevent the abuse from happening. This is not to say that there was any fault on the church’s part or that it should have ever happened in the first place. Having more volunteers simply ensures that distribution goes more smoothly.

Help All Year

Consider helping out more than just during the holiday season. There are a lot of things you can do to help any non profit without spending any money, and most are always looking for help in a variety of ways throughout the year. Let the disgust you felt from watching the video motivate you to do more to make sure that help is given to those who really do need it.

5 Life Insurance Commercials That Will Make You Cry

January 4, 2012 By Jeffrey Strain 2 Comments

When it comes to getting life insurance, most of us tend to shy away from really thinking about why we need it. It doesn’t matter whether you fall into the low risk or high risk life insurance category, we’d all rather ignore the reason that it’s purchased in the first place.

For this reason, most people don’t think of life insurance commercials when they think of quality, moving entertainment. They most certainly should when it comes to a series of life insurance commercials created by a Thai life insurance company. It’s not often that media can hook you into a story line in just a couple of minutes, but these commercials definitely do that. They are all wonderfully done and they will make you wonder why more commercials can’t be like this. Prepare to be WOWed and grab a box of tissues — you will likely need it (if you are looking for more videos that will make the tears flow, head over to Damn Onions where there are plenty more)

My Girl

Silence of Love

I Want More Time

Held Just One Time

Grandma

I warned you…

For those that are looking for insurance information, insurance-how-to.com may be able to help.

Using Cash Means You’re A Terrorist?

December 17, 2011 By Jeffrey Strain 9 Comments

I do have a credit card and I use it for a lot of my travel expenses because it provides me with a lot of advantages. I also use cash a lot just because I developed the habit when I lived in Japan and almost all transactions there were done in cash. There are still times when I will make a large purchase in cash.

There are also a lot of people that have misused credit cards and found themselves in credit card debt. For this reason, they have sworn off credit cards. For those who have a difficult time exhibiting self control with a credit card, it’s often recommended that they get rid of it and use cash instead. This action seems pretty simple and a logical step to take, but apparently not having a credit card makes you weird and possibly even a terrorist according to the Department of Homeland Security:

Have we really reached the point where using cash is considered so abnormal that it flags one as to suspect of doing something wrong?

City Mining for Gold: Strange Ways To Make Money

December 3, 2011 By Jeffrey Strain 3 Comments

I’ve always kept my eyes open and to the ground when I walk and the result is that I usually find at least $100 dollars a year. There’s a lot of money at your feet if you are willing to look, and some people take this looking seriously. In fact, for them the streets are literally paved with gold (as well as diamonds and other precious stones).

While city mining for gold might first appear to be a ridiculous adventure, the basis of it are pretty simple and straight forward. Just like the gold found in streams and bedrock in the wilderness is heavier than the surrounding mud and dirt, gold found in city mining also sinks to the bottom. When gold falls off of people, it lands in the cracks and crevices in the sidewalks that people walk over day in and day out. Find that debris and you will find gold.

The key, much like in the wilderness, is to locate an area in the city where there is likely to be a lot of gold. In most cities, that area would be where people work with gold on a daily basis such as a jewelry district. Tiny particles of gold will stick to the clothing of those working with jewelry during the workday and when they come outside, it will fall off and gather in the sidewalk cracks and crevices along with other debris. If you collect that debris and pan it in a similar way as gold prospectors pan for gold in the wilderness, the resulting found gold can bring you $300 a day. That doesn’t even count the diamonds and other precious stones that you are also likely to find.

Sound hard to believe? Watch and learn:

I think I may have found myself a new hobby…

(Photo courtesy of Brooks Elliott)

100 Money Slang Terms

November 18, 2011 By Jeffrey Strain Leave a Comment

While money isn’t actually made out of paper (it’s made out of cotton fibers), bills are sometimes referred to as “paper” in slang terms. That may change in the not too distant future. While “plastic” is a term which is usually reserved for credit cards, it may soon become yet another slang term for those bills in your pocket. Canada has decided to use plastic for it’s new bills in an attempt to make them more difficult to counterfeit:

And just for those that want to use something a bit different than “money” in your next conversation, here are over 100 money slang terms from bacon to yen — I’m sure there are many more that I missed, so feel free to add more in the comments.

bacon, baht, bananas, banknotes, bankroll, beans, Benjamins ($100 bills), big ones, bills, bits, boffo, bones, booty, bottle caps, bread, buckaroos, bucks, bullets, bundle

C-notes ($100 bills), cabbage, cake, capital, cash, cents, change, checks, cheddar, cheese, chips, chits, chump change, clams, coconuts, coin, copper, cream, currency

dead presidents, dibs, dinars, dinero, dollars, doubloons, dough, drachmae, drafts, duckettes

Euros

feti, finances, fins ($5 bills), fish, folding green, fortune, frogskins, funds

Gs ($1000), gelt, gold, grand ($1000), gravy, green, greenbacks, grip, guilders, guineas, gwop

honey, hundies ($100 bills)

jack, Jacksons ($50 bills)

K ($1000), kale, keesh, king’s ransom

lettuce, long green, loonies, loot, lucre, lumber

mangos, marbles, marks, mazuma, means, mint, mite, moolah

pap, paper, pelf, pelts, pesos, pieces of eight, pin money, pittance, plaster, pocket money, pop cans, potatoes

quid

relish, resources, riches, ringgits, rivets, roll, rubles, rupees

sacagaweas, sawbucks ($10 bills), scratch, scrilla, scrip, shekels, shillings, shrapnel, silver, simoleons, smack, smackers, specie, spending money, spondulicks, stack, stake, stash

tender, tips, treasure

USD

wad, WAM (walking around money), wampum, won, wonga

yen