matthewsumpter.com

Just over 5 years ago, we purchased a brand new Hyundai Santa Fe.  we loved the fact that it came with a 5-year bumper-to-bumper warranty and a 10-year powertrain warranty.  They also offered us oil changes for life, which was a nice perk.  The last nail in the coffin was the 0% financing available at the time.  We were destined to buy a new car. 

After the negotiations were completed, with an air of relief and anticipation, we were prodded on into the financing office to finalize the paperwork.  It will become obvious that we were young, impressionable and naive through the following narrative.  The financial agent made general small talk and made us feel comfortable as he prepared the paperwork.  He asked if we invested and talked a little about how he played around with the stock market.  I dabbled as well, so he got his first hook in me.  We were putting several thousand dollars down on the car since we had it available.  He asked if we had considered putting less down and investing the rest.  After all, the loan was interest free.  At the time it made sense, so we kept a couple thousand for ourselves for “investing”.  I’m not really sure what happened to that “investment”. Net Result: our monthly payment went up a little bit and so did the agent’s commission. 

With his first objective complete, he moved on to the extended warranty pitch.  I don’t think at that time we had any interest especially since we already had the 5-year/10-year option already, but he was talking about extending the 5-year bumper-to-bumper to 10 years.  Looking back, I would have thought that we had zero interest since I had purchased an extended warranty on a previous car and the insurance company went out of business, thus losing me approximately $1,200.  We were under the impression that the warranty was being offered through the dealership, so it would just be an extensions of the existing warranty.  He assured us that there was no concern of them going out of business.  He essentially convinced us that we would be stupid not to get the warranty.  What if the transmission went out on the day after 5 years?  We would be out at least $2,000 to have it fixed.  I don’t remember too many details from that meeting due to the euphoria of buying a new car, but apparently at some point, we signed the dotted line.  Our monthly payment went up a little more and the agent’s commission did as well.  All-in-all, we ended up with a brand new small SUV and a 60-month, $322 a month payment (AKA $19,000+ in debt).

I’d like to say that we lived happily ever after, which we did for a few years, but the fairy tale is beginning to crumble.  During the first five years, we regularly took the car to have the oil changed.  It was nice to not have to pay, but the hour long wait was a bit of a pain.  Once, we had a light bulb go out, but it was not easily replaceable, so we had to have the dealership take apart the fixture to replace.  We figured this was included in the warranty, but we had to pay for this.  No big deal.  The metallic coating begain peeling on one of the door handles and they repaired this for free under the manufacturer warranty.  Then recently we had a couple of malfunctions.  The overhead light fixture began blinking randomly and then stopped working altogether.  Also, one of the cruise control switch covers broke off.  At the last oil change, my wife mentioned the issues, but they said that they didn’t have time to look at it that day. 

We didn’t pay much attention to the dates since we purchased the car, but the 5-year period expired at some point.  A week ago, we were scheduled for another oil change so we decided to ask about the other issues again since they didn’t seem extremely busy on this day.  They said that they would have time to look at it.  When they pulled up our account, they noticed that our original warranty had expired and that our extended warranty was with a company named Interstate.  This is the first that we remember being notified of this.  We were told that we would have to call this company to get an authorization to get a repair done before they would pay for the repairs.  I called; I waded through the automated menu; I eventually talked to a person.  I asked her about the authorization and was told that the repair shop would have to diagnose the problem and then call for an authorization.  I asked if the issues that our car had would be covered. She stated that they were not excluded, but they would have to have a diagnosis before authorizing.  The repair shop told us it would cost $100 just to open up the light fixture wiring and diagnose.  Neither could tell us if this might be covered by the warranty.  Great!  We pressed our luck and told them to go ahead and fix the issues, hoping that the warranty would cover it.  Several hours later, we called to check on the status and see if they had gotten authoriZation yet.  They said that they were still “diagnosing”.  A little while later they called to tell us that the repairs will be covered, but wanted to make sure that we knew that there was a $100 deductible.  This is another thing that they neglected to point out when they sold us the warranty.  So basically at this point, we would be paying $100 to have our items repaired or $100 for the diangosis and to have them put it back together without repairing.  We opted for the repair. 

I haven’t yet attempted to find our original paperwork, but on Interstate’s website, I found a sample contract which stated that if no deductible was indicated, the default of $100 would apply.  I guess it pays to read the fine print. 

By the way, just out of curiosity, I plugged the $1,200 premium payment into a calculator and find that if I’d put that in the stock market, by now I would possibly have enough to pay for that $2,000 transmission repair.  If we were lucky enough to make it 10 years without a major repair, the account could have almost $4,000.  Not a bad start for a new car savings fund…

Would you call this “A New Era of Responsibility”?

I wouldn’t exactly call George W. Bush a penny pincher, but Barack H. Obama is making him look absolutely like a Scrooge McDuck.  During 2009, I found it very difficult to keep track of all of the spending taking place in the U.S. government.  It seemed like it was a few hundred billion here, a few hundred billion there as if money didn’t have meaning or value.  The money was thrown around so casually almost like me saying that I’m going to give you 700 billion grains of sand.  Sure it seems like a lot, but it doesn’t have a lot of meaning.

Many of the numbers that I reference can be found in the Summary Tables of the United States Budget from the Office of Management and Budget.

Let’s start by taking a look at the budget for 2009.  The government expected to spend 3.938 trillion dollars.  Just so you can envision that better, let’s use real numbers: $3,938,000,000,000. With an estimated population in the U.S. of 304,059,724, each man, woman and child on average was responsible for $12,951.40 in 2009 alone.  If everybody paid the same amount, then my family would need to pony up $51,805.60.  That is insane.  I can tell you that I do not receive $50,000 worth of benefit each year from my government.  But wait, there’s more.  That was the first year in office.  Let’s take a look at the future.  Each year, the outlays grow gradually until in 2019 when the number increases to $5,158,000,000,000.  I don’t know about you, but I believe that the number will be modified to be much higher by the time 2019 rolls around, but for now, we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.  We will also be generous with the population growth rate at 1% which has been declining continuously. In 2019, the population could be approximately 332,545,642 which brings the responsibility of each person to $15,510.65 or $62,042.60 for a family of four.  Just for reference, the responsibility for each person went up from $9,810.57 in 2008 to the above-mentioned $12,951.40 in 2009 (one year).

Now, where do you think this money is going to come from?  Some of it will come from more loans.  The deficit is planned to increase by almost 9 trillion dollars from 2009-2019.  Yes, that is quite a bit more than the total current deficit (since the birth of our nation), racked up in only ten years.  The rest of the money will come from… yes, you guessed it, directly out of your pocket.  Let’s look at the expected receipts over the same date range.  In 2009, expected receipts were $2,186,000,000,000.  In 2019, $4,446,000,000,000.  Yes, that is over double the current amount.  Since almost all of this comes from some sort of income tax, prepare to have your wallet lightened.

If you want to read the article that got me started chasing this path of research, you can read it at
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704320104575015072822042394.html

For many years, you have likely heard financial advisers instructing you to save at least 10% of your income in a retirement account.  I know that I was told that and given the impression that I’d be just fine if I could do this from a young age.  I was told that thanks to the miracle of compound interest, that by the time I retire, the money will be growing so fast each year, that I can withdraw a large amount each year in retirement and still make money.  In general, I believed them at the time.  The more I’ve look at it though, the more I fear that I won’t have the retirement that I expected.  I can hear the collective “Duh” coming from my millions dozens of readers across the world.  When is the last time that you’ve sat down and taken a look at one of the zillions of retirement calculators online to see how much you’re on pace to save?  Did it take into account inflation?

Let’s just take a look at couple of calculations from a home-built Excel file that I created. 

The first example is kind of a best-case scenario.  Imagine that at the age of 20, you are able to get a job paying $40,000 a year.  From the first year, you begin socking away 10% of your income for retirement.  After all, you are hoping to retire in the Caribbean at age 65, so you better start young.  Assuming that you receive raises that keep pace with inflation (we’ll assume 3%), you will have put away around $370,000 over the 45 years that you’ve saved.  With an estimated return of 8% and thanks to the “Miracle of Compound Interest“, the balance of your retirement account has ballooned to over $2,250,000.  Yes, that’s over two and a quarter million dollars.  You’re a millionaire just like the financial advisers promised.  Oh wait, we forgot about a little thing called “The Miracle of Inflation“.  Unfortunately that two million dollars will only buy about $950,000 in today’s dollars.  OK, so still close to a millionaire, not bad.  Well, let’s think about this a little more.  With your 3% annual raise compounded, when you retire, you’re making about $146,000 per year.  When you stop working, you’ll be ready to start withdrawing from your retirement fund.  That two million dollars isn’t going to last very long.  In fact, by time you’re 85, you’ll be almost out of money and you’re expenses will be higher than ever.

If that was a best-case scenario, then I’d hate to see a worse case, but let’s look anyway.  Suppose I’m 30 and figure I still have 35 years to save.  I’ll be fine.  Unfortunately at 30, I only make $40,000.  Well, when I turn 65, my account balance will stand at $957,719 with a purchasing power of $502,689 in today’s dollars.  It still seems like it’d be nice to have almost a million dollars when you retire, but just realize that you would likely be making over $100,000 in salary by that time.  Doesn’t sound like so much after all.  In this case, your retirement savings may last you 9-10 years, if you’re lucky.

My judgement would lead me to believe that 10% just isn’t going to cut it.  Just out of curiosity, I tried 15% and found that with the same scenarios above, my retirement income would last me until around 100 years of age.  If I die earlier, my kids might even get a little something.  Now for my final trick, I’d like to see what 20% would do.  This is currently how much I actually save, thanks to my company’s matching.  If I had started with 20% saved since age 20, I would expect to have enough money to survive until I turn something like 150 years old.  Apparently there are two keys to saving for retirement. 

1) Start Young
2) Save a LOT OF MONEY!

Now, after all that, I actually have come to a completely different conclusion.  Instead of relying on the stock market, I’d much rather rely on my own skills to provide for my retirement.  Although I will continue to save through my 401(k), I will also be looking into various other ways of providing for my elder-years.  I already own real-estate and plan to continue that as well as investigate small businesses and  other opportunities.

Have you ever closely looked at your 401(k) statement and compared the values of the funds to the quotes available online for those funds? I did recently and got a bit of a surprise.

My company provides a 401(k) option through John Hancock, which I have participated in for the last couple of years. I would often check the account balance on the website and I would skim the quarterly statements that they sent in the mail, but I never spent much time tracking the details of each fund. A couple of months ago I decided to a put a little bit more effort into actively managing my investments. A good friend of mine works at one of the larger investment firms in our city, so I decided to let him have a look at my fund options. He gave me a set of recommendations which I implemented for my ongoing contributions.

I thought that I’d keep a closer watch on the performance so that I could let my friend know how his suggestions panned out. I haven’t used Google Finance  much, so I thought I’d give their portfolio tool a try. I just took all of my current funds and entered them into the portfolio as if I had purchased them today. For example, I entered a BUY of DFA Emerging Markets (DFEVX) for 57.007 units at a value of $42.538 per unit just as my John Hancock Statement indicated my current balance to be. I wanted to be able to see day-to-day from now on, how my invesmtents performed. After saving the transaction, what I saw confused me a bit. The tool correctly labeled the cost of purchase at $2,425.06 (the current value), but listed the current value as only $1,856.15 showing a loss of over 23%. This didn’t make any sense to me. I was trying to enter the values as of today, so I expected to see a gain/loss of 0% and begin tracking from today forward. Then I noticed that the last price was listed as $32.56 per unit. Why would this state $32 when my account stated that they were $42 each. I double-checked my prospectus and the ticker symbols matched.

I decided to run this question by my VP of Finance before I went any further to see if he knew the explanation. He didn’t know why it was like that. I confirmed that several other funds had the same issue. I decided to give John Hancock a call. It took a few minutes to get through the menus, but to their credit, a live person picked up right away. They didn’t even ask me for the same account numbers that I had already typed in. That was refreshing. After explaining my question, the agent attempted to answer to the best of her ability. I’m sure the explanation was fine, but I wasn’t sure how much it made sense in my mind as she described what was going on. Here is my best recounting of what I was told.

“You are not actually buying shares of that mutual fund (DFEVX). You are buying shares of a John Hancock fund that mirrors the performance of the fund. John Hancock is then in turn using that money to purchase shares of that specific fund, so the unit values will sometimes differ. When you first buy the units, the values match, but as the price fluctuates on the open market, John Hancock’s fund price doesn’t fluctuate the same. When dividends are paid, we don’t pay them to you because those would be counted as distributions. Instead, we purchase more shares of the same fund for you.”

I mulled this over in my head and then verified with her that the values listed on my statements would never match the values on the open market. I decided to attempt to find some more information about this through Google and came up with a few results, but never found a great answer. In fact, the best answer on Yahoo Answers was “This is a question that can only be answered by the manager of the fund.” I did find one person who referred to some small print in the prospectus, so I looked it up and this is what I found:

When contributions are allocated to Funds under your employer’s group annuity contract with John Hancock, they will be held in a sub-account (also referred to as “Fund”), which invests solely in shares of the specified underlying mutual fund. The ticker symbols shown are for the underlying mutual funds in which sub-accounts are invested. The ticker symbols do not directly apply to the John Hancock sub-account and therefore any public information accessed using these symbols will not reflect the unit value of the subaccount, nor will such information reflect sub-account or contract-level charges under your plan’s group annuity contract.

Well, I guess that about sums it up. I can’t believe that I’ve never noticed this before and I also can’t believe that I didn’t find more answers online. I’m a little bummed that I can’t use the Google charting to track my account.  It looks pretty cool.  If anyone has a better way to explain this, please leave an explanation or a link in the comments. Maybe I’ll hit up my friend for a descritpion of how it all works.

I just looked at some of the amazing pictures of the snow storms that are taking place around the world and find it mildly amusing.  I know that in my hometown, we are having what seems to be an unprecedented string of cold and snowy days; at least it hasn’t happened in many years.  I’m not going to go so far as to say that God is causing this weather to put on a show, but it is somewhat ironic that this is all happening so shortly after the Copenhagen debacle and the many other attempts to stamp out “global warming”.

You can see the pictures I’m speaking about at: http://bit.ly/7wvnCx

I just signed up for a 3-month trial of Amazon Prime for only $1.00.  Normally, this would cost around $7.00 per month.  The main feature is that when you order from Amazon, you can have your items shipped 2-day for free.  Also, you can upgrade to overnight shipping for only $3.99.    I had previously signed up for the 1-month trial and was still able to take advantage of this.

Some people explain in the comments how to get this free, but if you spend the $1.00 you’ll also get a book shipped to you in 2-days.

For all of the details, follow the steps posted by Mercedes at

http://www.commonsensewithmoney.com/2009/12/month-amazon-prime-trial-1/

Since when did we start giving A’s for effort in the “real world”?  I assume that we are doing that currently in the public school system, but as far as I knew, in the workplace, employers still expect results.  Here are a couple of excerpts from the article linked to below:

“When it comes to effort, [Obama] should get a straight A,”

“But [Obama] is working very hard and trying. And he’s got enthusiasm and drive.” 

Who do you think made these comments? Give it your best guess and then you can read the full article by clicking here.  Maybe I should run for president.  I’ll try really hard, I promise.

As I have stated before, life is a series of investments.  Not just monetary, but investments of time, love and devotion are made every day.  We need to make the best of these investments so that they are not wasted.

When people talk about marketing themselves, you may automatically think that they are trying to sell something.  What we need to realize is that we are always selling something; we are selling ourselves every day to each and every person we meet or talk with.   Whether you’re a business owner, work for someone else, are retired, a stay-at-home mom, or are currently unemployed, how you HAVE LIVED YOUR LIFE will make a difference in how you WILL LIVE YOUR LIFE.  In order for us to live our life in the way we have dreamed, we need motivation.  Motivation comes to some of us in the study of Scripture, some are motivated by providing for their family, and others are motivated by the lure of success.  Whatever the motivation, daily affirmations can be a benefit to us all. 

 
I just ran across what appears to be a great source of daily affirmations for any of the people that I have described above (likely everyone).  Seth Godin is the author of a book that is coming out entitled Linchpin.  I have followed his blog for quite a while now as he usually has profound wisdom that applies to business as well as life in general.  I have only been through about 25% of this document so far, but I like what I see.  Each page has a quote or article by a well-known or successful person, which serves as a great motivation for life.  I like the idea of treating this almost like one of those page-a-day calendars where I post a new page each day at my desk and keep the advice fresh in my head throughout the day.  You can get your own complimentary copy of this eBook right here on my website.  Seth has generously offered this resource to the world without charge.

Click here to read “What Matters Now”

On the business side of things…

A while back, I posted an eBook from a friend of mine called Got Sprouts?.  It offered a lot of marketing ideas geared towards businesses.  One of the recommendations within the book was to publish eBooks.  You can provide a complimentary service while that service provides you with free advertising.  That is exactly what Seth has done with this book that I am providing.  You will not notice this book as being preachy or sales-geared, but at the very end you MAY notice a small picture of Seth’s new book, which links to an Amazon.com page.  You will also notice that at the bottom of each page, the author is credited, complete with a link to their blog or book.  Seth has made a very smart move here.  He not only is providing a great service to thousands of readers, but he is also strengthening relationships with these other authors and obtaining free advertising for his blog as well as his books.  Just another lesson to those out there looking for ways to strengthen their own businesses.

I saw this near our home tonight and had to stop and take a picture.  It kind of makes me wish my neighbor had a more elaborate Christmas light display so that I could do the same thing…

Ditto Christmas Lights

If you know what I’m talking about, you can digg this picture at:
http://digg.com/comedy/Best_Christmas_Light_Display_Ever_3

You can also vote for this picture on FailBlog at:
http://cheezburger.com/view.aspx?ciid=6122053

I recently ran across a couple of great tools for my website that I wanted to pass along to you, my readers.  These tools can be beneficial to a internet marketer or used just for fun.

The first is really multiple tools rolled into one.  The product is called ClickTale.  It’s like no other tool I’ve seen, so I don’t know exactly how to categorize it.  I guess I’ll just tell you what it does.  Basically, it records what your website’s visitors see.  I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what it does.  In fact, if you’re reading this on my site right now, then I can go back and watch what you did on my site.  Scary, isn’t it?  If you’re reading my feed then you’re safe…for now.   Don’t worry, after all as Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google says, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

I won’t get into technical details of how this system works, but essentially I can see when you scrolled, where you clicked, etc.  Of course, I don’t know who you are; I just know what someone did.  Watch the video below to get an idea of exactly what I mean.  This is an example of a video of one of my visitors that is sped up to 2x normal speed and it skips any time when the mouse is not moving.

(Sorry that the quality is bad, but I tried to keep the video file small, so it would load quickly)

You may wonder exactly why this is useful. I still kind of wonder that myself, but I can see that it does give me a good idea of how long people stick around on an article as well as what path visitors take throughout my site.  It probably would give me a good idea of the best placement of advertisements as well.

Another very interesting feature of ClickTale is called Heatmaps.  Here is an example:

No, no one put graffiti on my website.  This is the heatmap.  Where you see dark orange are the most common areas that people move their mouse pointers over, down to light blue being the least.  Again, I’m not sure how to use this information yet, but it’s kind of cool to see how people move around the site.

There are many other standard statistics as well that other packages would include, such as visitor demographics, top pages, time on site, etc.

I do see one major downfall in this product – the price.  What I have shown you so far is actually absolutely free, but that comes with limitations.  For example, when viewing the video of a visitor, you can only view the first two pages that they visit, not their entires session.  Another limitation is that it will only record 100 visits per week.  These can be overcome by upgrading to a paid plan, but that can be prohibitively expensive.  The lowest available plan is $99/month but gives you up to 20,000 recorded pagesviews as well as many other features.  Right now, they are actually offering %40 off of their annual plans, so you can get it for around $59 a month.  Still too rich for my blood at this point, but maybe in the future when I’m HUGE, I can justify the expense.

Click here if you’d like more information on ClickTale.

The second tool is actually in use in this post. That little video that you saw above was actually created with a free screen capture software called CamStudio.  It is very simple to use, quick and effective.  After you’ve downloaded (no registration required) the software and installed it, you can get started right away.

Just click the record button, choose the boundaries of your screen that you want to record and it starts recording immediately.  When you’re done, click stop and save your file as an .avi file that you can use or edit in another program.  It also comes with a .swf converter so that you can post your video online as I have done above.  This can be great for computer training as well as just showing off things on your computer.  I’ve been told that video really helps attract visitors to articles, though this video was far from exciting.

I received this e-mail at work and thought I’d post it for the world to see.  I don’t know if this was an official iPhone charger, or a cheap imitation…

Hi All,  
 
As some of you may know, we had a pretty scary incident recently.   Attached are pictures of what remains of our 2007 Suburban.  We  are all okay but I wanted to warn everyone not to make the same mistake I  did.  
 
This fire resulted from leaving an Iphone charger/docking station plugged  into the car outlet.  It overheated and started a fire, while parked in  our garage.  PLEASE unplug anything you have in your car outlets once you  turn off your car!  
 
We were VERY fortunate that we accidentally found the fire, at 11pm, before  going to bed and before it spread to the house.  None of our garage heat  detectors or house fire alarms went off (another item to take care of on my  to do list).  

 Feel free to pass this along to anyone you want.  Better safe than  sorry.

Click Images below to see full size

Him giving to you that is…

For those of you who don’t know, during the month of December, Dave Ramsey is giving away at least one great gift each day.  For example, so far he has given away 150 Financial Peace University kits, 10 Kindles, 5 iPod Touches, $1,000, $2,000, and more.  The stakes seem to be going up each day.  Today the prize is $3,000.  All you have to do is enter your contact information each day.  You aren’t required to even sign up for a newsletter.

Visit DaveRamsey.com to sign up.

Also, many of the products at the Dave Ramsey Online Store are currently only $10, just in time for Christmas.  For some of the products, this is a  60% savings.

I want to write about a surprisingly happy event that culminated today for me.

A few weeks ago, we decided to let a professional rebuild our staircase for us.  This was a very smart decision, as the original plan was for me to do it myself.  So far, he has installed the skirt board (boards on the walls adjacent to the steps), treads and risers.  Unfortunately, we had not yet decided on balusters (spindles), so our contractor had to take a break for a few weeks for us to get these ordered.

A week or so ago, we started looking for the perfect wrought iron balusters to complete our new staircase.  At Home Depot, we had approximately one style to choose from, but it was a very reasonable price at around $5.00 per baluster, plus accessories.  We needed forty, so we were looking at around $200-300 for it all.  We decided that if we are remodeling the stairs anyway, we should spend a few extra bucks and get what we really want which will hopefully pay off in the long run also.   Our contractor brought us a catalog to look through, and with the help of an online design tool, picked out our favorite style.  I spent a couple of hours searching online for the supplier with the best price; then I procrastinated through the holidays.

Last night I determined that I would have to take the final step and get these ordered so that we can have our stairs completed by the end of the year.  I found the two lowest priced sites and then began to compare other aspects of the companies.  Although the overall price would have been around $30 cheaper at ironpickets.com, I felt much more comfortable with the cheapstairparts.com website.  Here are some of the main reasons:

-          Prominently posted customer service phone hours with a toll-free number.

-          FAQ’s, a dedicated contact page, and a gallery of their product in use

-          Shipping and return policies

-          General aesthetics of the website

-          Same day shipping

-          A price match guarantee

The Iron Pickets website basically provides a listing of available products and that’s about it.  Actually to be fair, the main page contains a local phone number as well as a gmail address to contact them.  This did not do a lot to reassure me.  The funny thing is that since I’m pretty technical, I recognized that both sites used free shopping cart software to create their sites.  Cheap Stair Parts was savvy enough to jazz up their site enough that the average consumer would have no idea.

My guess is that neither site actually stocks these items, they simply market the products to buyers and then send the order on to the same supplier, House of Forgings and then collect their profit on the sale.  Instead of completing the order last night on the cheaper site (I considered it), I decided to wait until morning and give the more reputable company a call in an attempt to get the price match.

Boy am I glad that I waited.  I called the toll-free number, and spoke to Douglas, I believe.  After telling him what I was looking for, he assured me that they could match the price of the competitor.  The websites stated that the prices were between $11.44 and 12.95 for the different baluster styles that I was ordering, plus accessories.  All in all, I expected the order total to be around $560 + $108 for freight shipping.  The representative said something along the lines of “let’s do each of the balusters for $10 each to make sure we beat everyone else on price”.  All in all, the total price (shipping included!) ended up being $552. This is almost $120 less than I was prepared and expecting to pay.  They will ship it today and it should be here in a few days.

I’ve been happy all day after this phone call.  It just goes to proves that good customer service does more than makes the customer happy with that single transaction.  I’d be happy to recommend them to others looking to make a purchase and they are getting some free advertising and a link from me in this post.

Hopefully, all goes well with the remainder of the transaction and I won’t have to write a follow-up.

By the way, if you live in the Kansas City area and you are looking for a dependable Master Carpenter, I’d recommend contacting Ronnie Duncan at 913-909-3089.  Tell him that Matthew Sumpter sent you.  I’ve already recommended him to a couple of other friends of mine and so far, I haven’t heard a complaint.

So yesterday I was minding my own business, reading my latest pickup from the library: The E-Myth Enterprise by Michael Gerber. In chapter 4, I begin to read a detailed description of a set of brothers (Sol Weissberg and Marty Weissberg) who are called to take over their father’s (Morris Weissberg) army-navy surplus store after he passed away. Both brothers hated this store because of the childhood that it took away from them as they spent hours unpacking boxes, cleaning the floors, moving displays and other mundane tasks. They also hated what it had done to their father. The store was his life.

I don’t mean to retell the entire story as this is not the point of the post and I don’t wish to receive cease and desist letters from Michael, but I just wish to get across the gist of what Mr. Gerber has done here. Now back to the story. Eventually one of the brothers started dreaming about what the store could become if they put a little work into making it welcoming and amazing. They started making changes, big changes, including a large sign on the roof that said “FLYING HIGH & FIELDSTONE GREEN!”. No, I don’t know what it means either. The author then goes on to say that this store was grandfather of a sporting goods/camping/mountain-climbing empire with stores everywhere. He goes on “Can you guess what that chain, that empires, is today? You’d probably be wrong.”

He’s right, I was wrong. I had several guesses, but I decided to take the easy way out and ask Google. I searched for everything that I could think of: “Marty Weissberg”, “Sol Weissberg”, “Morris Weissberg”, “Weissberg’s Army-Navy Surplus Store”, even “FLYING HIGH & FIELDSTONE GREEN!”. I could not believe that I wasn’t able to find one useful result from any of these searches. Did this place really exist? My top guesses were Cabela’s and Bass Pro Shop, so I visited the history pages of each of their websites… no dice. My last resort was to visit the author’s website and ask the question directly. To my amazement, here is the response that I received:

Matthew – There is no store. There is no Marty and Sol. They are all a figment of my imagination. Having said that, they represent every small business owner I have ever met in one way or another. They are you. And if they are you, then what are you waiting for? You can choose Marty’s Path, or Sol’s Path, or their father’s Path. Your choice. If you choose Marty’s Path, enroll in my December Dreaming Room now, and come begin it. Your Heart, your Soul, your Spirit must be in it. Love, Michael Gerber

All I can really say is “Wow”. I felt a little bit betrayed that I was emotionally drawn into this story of hope and dreams come true only to have my belief dashed against the rocks. Oh well, I’ll get over it. All in all though, Mr. Gerber was probably a bit of a genius in this regard. I wonder how many people have done the exact same thing as I did after reading this story and ended up getting a response directly from the author. How many times does an author get the opportunity to directly contact his readers after they read the book? This was an up-sell opportunity and I guarantee you that this was the plan all along. Plus, he got me to blog about it and expose all of my many readers to his books and include a link to his website. That’s known as free advertising.

Maybe I will save some people the trouble of contacting the author. Maybe others will find my post when searching for the answers to the riddle of who this great company has become. Let’s see if I can become the top result when people search for “FLYING HIGH & FIELDSTONE GREEN!”. I can guarantee that as of the time of this writing, Google has no results for that search term. This is the dream of an SEO consultant. If anyone else out there has an interest in marketing (specifically viral marketing in this case), let me know what you think in the comments section below.