One year ago today: September 5, 2017, 38 mph, pure luxury.
Five years ago today: September 5, 2013, 346 miles daily.
Nine years ago today: September 5, 2009, probably fat, too.
Random years ago today: September 5, 2004, Cost of Living
I was wondering about the possibility of utilizing more of the accounting training I’ve got that has, frankly, never been used. Subsidiary accounting, for example. Took the course, passed the test, and have long since forgotten all about it. But I do have some experience discounting, that’s where I buy a contract for a string of future payments for a small cash settlement now. If you’ve ever bought furniture or electronics on credit “with no payments until” some future date, you’ll have experienced this. The company you bought the goods from takes your (say) $2,000 contract to the discount agency and sells it for $1,200 right now. Next thing you know, you start getting billing notices from somebody you never heard of.
Where I’m already ahead is I’ve learned the ropes of operating an entire business startup from this hotdog wagon. I have plenty of experience in the office part, but now I’ve got hands on doing the entire process myself. Except for some minor cleaning and towing, I got no help at all. So, why not brush up on my subsidiary accounting with the stock? The other guy has no money, and I don’t want to risk anything out of pocket. So what I did was roll and bag the change bucket coins accumulated since I moved here. So if you want to experience authentic operations, don’t skip over my reports on this process. I’ll tell you why.
These days, nobody wants to bother with small amounts. If it’s less than $2,500 may places will tell you to use a credit card. Banks won’t lend so little, they’ll give you a line of credit. My point is two-fold. Firstly those routes involve credit and secondly, probably more important, there is no place you can really invest small amounts of money any more. I counted up $228.50 in an hour. Hmmmm. That’s what the picture of the purse is all about. The money fits in here and it weighs 7.8 pounds. If I decide to “invest” it in the company, then just by reading you could potentially find out a lot about what has to happen to create a profit, and why most small operations don’t get that far.
We use “vacuum cleaner” accounting here, the type of contract where the interest is calculated in advance and added to the monthly payments. If I invest $228.50 at 22.5% for one year, my total return is $51.41. Some of you can already see that suddenly this is not such a great deal for me any more. Add these two numbers together and divide by 12 for a monthly payment of $23.32. Let’s take a look at what has already happened. I drove the scooter downtown and bought coin tubes, which will have to traded in for bills. Let’s add up my transactions so far:
3.2 miles on the scooter @ 27.5¢ per mile is 88¢. The coin tubes were $1.07. My time is worth a base rate of $13.20 per hour, that is, you have to pay me that much to do nothing. Then there is my time to count the money and the time to set up the books and record the transaction and this computer and printer were hardly free. Let’s call it three hours of my time for just what is here, and suddenly it has already cost me $40.48. In a situation like this, the only effective behavior is to piggyback the activity. Do the banking when I’m already there for some other purpose. Or count the money while I’m waiting on a load of laundry. When you do things like that quite well, it is called becoming “efficient”. Are you still with me? In a wink, my net income has dropped from $51.41 per YEAR to $10.93, and that presumes I won’t have more costs over that time. Um, maybe now isn’t the time to mention that the $10.93 is before taxes.
It’s how the system works, my friends. Even counting your money, normally a pleasurable activity, is now a chore you do yourself or hire somebody to do for you. For anyone out there who is beginning to see that this example explains a lot of other things, that’s a sign you are office staff, not line staff. Let me know if I start any apprenticeships out there. Can you now see why I value the education of setting up this cart to be at least $10,000 for me personally? Because that is what I would charge anyone who might want me to set a cart up for them. A lot of my costs were based on making the business secure against failure over dumb mistakes. And it tied up six times the hard money cost of the cart over things most new people would not even consider. To their peril.
[Author’s note: listen closely, I said the money was tied up, not that it was spent. Of course, we could have started on a shoestring of the original $1,030. A lot of people try that and my question is what happened to them all? By extrapolating, I put forward that they lasted only until the first Act of God wiped them off the board. Then they lost all the money they “saved” and their business as well.
I’m fully aware how I could have done things on less. If you are still going to try that route despite my warnings anyway, my advice is don’t try it across the street from me.]
Drum solo?
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It was not a great day, but here’s some slightly better quality pictures from a temporary camera I got while trying to find something better. It’s a model known to eat batteries. How about this lunch box from the shed? We don’t know if it is a knock off or an heirloom. I spent the afternoon on small projects, which blog rules say I must tell you what those were. Because they were the most important events. In that sense, this blog is like the hit parade and Fox News (I’m told). On a slow stretch some pretty crappy stuff can make top story. It was the same back in my day, before the record companies learned to share release dates on their new albums. And it could get bad, with Broadway tunes like “Age of Aquarius” making the rock charts.
And I got mail, a personal letter. Hand-written, you know, with that characteristic upward slant from those who don’t address mail all that often. Aw, how sweet, they planted a tree in my name. Some program for the animal shelter. I wrote back asking if it was okay to rename the tree to “Cuthbert”. Would everyone be okay with that?
ADDENDUM
The “found money” account is now assigned to funding the opening stock for operations. If this is a new term for you, it’s the account I established decades ago on the premise that I could find more money in the streets and ditches than my parents spent on raising me. That was proven in no time but I kept the account on the books long thereafter. The most famous peak value was $28,000 that kept me afloat between February 2004 and November 2010. But that is another story. The title arises from the fact that I was so destitute when I left home that the only chance of having any spare money was if I found it. In reality, the largest amount I ever found was $88 in a phone booth in Montana when I was 22 or 23.
The reader should be aware of the ruthlessness that underlies the events being described here. This is not a partnership, it is nothing more than an agreement to behave in collusion. The facts are not so pretty. There is a body of default law that governs the arrangement, and I am well aware that the other party is not versed in these laws. The cold fact is I am the 100% owner and things proceed when and how I say they will. However, if there are any consequences, the other guy takes the fall. I’ll describe in a moment why I’ve decided to go ahead early.
This weekend, he and not I, will technically be breaking the law by operating without a city license or waiting for the state to say okay. The equipment belongs to me and the papers are purposely not kept on the wagon, I’ve decided to accept the “penalty” for failing to produce them as a cost of doing business. You and I have dallied on this point before, this process of disobedience if a profit can be made after any potential citations. Call it calculated non-compliance. It works for Monsanto.
I’m turning a blind eye because it is a situation where we could “play dumb”. The cart is operating on private property. And if anything goes down, I was not part of it, but I remain the owner. The impetus here is that Agt. R wants and needs the cart in operation asap despite my cautioning words about not counting any chickens. I yield to that pressure, though he likely thinks he participated in the decision. Nope. I insisted when he pick up the supplies, he do it through the commissary, and if anything is sold from the cart besides hotdogs, he also get that from the same source. So we could always claim we are operating as an adjunct to that licensed company.
I’m sorry the startup process has dragged on for 2-1/2 months, but I did not get any help. Although we had agreed to get the cart going as a team effort, he quickly adopted the attitude of why put anything into the cart since it is not registered in his name. However, maintenance and repair comes off the top, and the only thing he is not required to pay for is any improvements. He’s never taken even a basic business law course, so he is unaware how powerless he is if anything goes wrong. Having said that, I honesty believe he is the man for the job and that he will sell hotdogs like crazy.
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