Recycling Cans and Bottles.

The Recycling plan.  

So now it is time to get our hands dirty and make some green, literally. Times are tough and we need cash. Lets take a look at this plan to put food on the table for next week. or add a little extra to that principle of your car loan.

This is a simple tutorial, but I really think people need to be reminded of the things they can do for money. A lot of people complain when they barely make rent or when they are always broke. The funny thing is they sit on their ass on there days off or when they don't have a job period. If your fall into this category I don't feel sorry for you. Get your ass up and start making money, with sweat and a little ingenuity.

There is money to be made in this and if your not feeling like it's worth it, your doing it wrong. If this is the case tweak your areas and your collection methods.
before you scoff watch this.



Materials you'll need:
Plan 1- 
Gloves - the kind that you do garden work with will do.
Ergonomic plastic grabber - One of these.
A back pack or garbage bag.
Saturday afternoon - really any afternoon/morning/day will do.

Plan 1 (extended)
recycling garbage bins
recycling sign stencil.
spray paint.

Step One.-Reconnaissance
Plan 1.
We need to pick an area, one with lots of people and trash cans. Festivals , Days in the park, Busy streets in the city, you'll know.

 Plan 1- extended.
We need to pick the festivals, air shows, concerts, etc.

 Step Two- Get to pickin'.
Plan 1.
That's right we are picking up cans, bottles, etc. There is money in every single one you collect. About 30 cans makes a pound,  a beer bottle weighs roughly seven ounces so about two a pound. Use this information to rationalize what your making, some places also do the 5 cent thing so even more cash.

Plan 1 extended
Get with the people putting concerts, festivals and things on and tell them you are with Green pace or Planet recycles , get creative. Anyway your objective is to put your own trashcans with your logo/name and the recycling sign in this event. When the event is over go through the area and start picking up your recycling cans, plus search the area for the remnants.


Extra tips:

If you are shy and feel your pride is at stake to dig through trash cans, wear a yellow/florescent shirt and spray paint or marker or whatever a random green peace/planet earth corps. logo on it. This will help because people will look at you and figure your supposed to be doing that and helping the planet, well you are.


If your work or office doesn't have a recycling bin PUT ONE UP! the more cans and bottles you get you get the better off you are.

If you have an MP3 player put it in, and just jam while you collect.




DARKSIDER TIP:
I don't condone to this but it is good information if your are really desperate. While you spend your afternoon picking up cans also carry a tin jug or something with a piece of paper label. The label will say what your shirt says from the extra tip. When you get tired of picking cans up, PAN HANDLE. This means stand in the busy area and ask people for "donations" to your green peace cause. The only reason I can justify writing this and suggesting it is because in a direct way they are paying you to pick up their shit they threw on the ground. :)

"Fortune favors the bold"

Eye Care

Your reading this, ten years from now you will want the ability to read this. Take Care of Your Eyes.

1) Stop wearing the same pair of contacts you've been wearing for the last 7 years. It's gross they do wear out and they do get dirty, leading to.....

2) Clean you contacts ,Don't sleep with them in, Don't wear them while swimming, and whatever else the box said.

3) Stop staring at bright lights. Stop looking at the sun to see if its still there, it is. Invest in a pair of sunglasses and stop losing/forgetting them. When your seeing spots, its because you broke something (rods and cones baby) or your passing out , you'll know.

4) When your showering or you get something in your eye, stop wiping from outside to inside. Your pushing the stuff into your eye and defeating the purpose. Inside to outside.

5) Stop rubbing your eyes.  Also as a bonus stop touching your face. There is nothing to high five there , its not a hand rest.

It makes you look like this.

6) If you do get something in your eye WASH IT OUT! If it is bad enough, milk is best to wash your eye out with incase you didn't know. So next time your buddy wants to see if a bird bath full of gasoline can be lit with a cigarette (nope) and he splashes some in his eye, milk bro.

7) Light, when you are reading. Stop straining in the dark, turn on a light.

8) Stretch. when you get bored take a deep breath and stare at your "third eye". It's the spot between your eye brows in the middle of your forehead.  Protip: Try and do this alone, it's creepy to see someone doing it. Bonus: it's relaxing when supplemented with a breathing exercise.

 "Start now because you can't see the future without them"

Water

Some facts on water

Water covers about 70% of the rock we live on. Since we live in a closed system its the same water from billions of years ago. Your father drank it, your caveman ancestors drank it and now you drink it, all the same stuff. Weird.

It makes up 70% of our adult bodies. 80% of an infants weight.

Its pretty cheap in some places , free in others, and in Mexico you Don't drink it.

They think they found it on mars and on one of Jupiter's moons.

and your overlooking it. Do you carry a water bottle? Do you buy a new one all the time? well stop, your wasting money. Its water, its considered a basic human right in most of the world to have access to clean water. The tap is tested a lot, only people who follow Erin Brockavich can die from the municipal water supply (science.) I read something a while back which made sense, if everyone is pumping more money into bottled water, less funds for municipal water supply. Less funds means no new projects, which means i don't get to drink fresh desalinized water. I WANT SALT FREE SEA WATER. Aquafina even got caught a while back taking water from the municipal water supply and then bottling it, shame. Raise a toast to health with WATER (yes from the tap.)

 Become a half interested "I only do it for the chicks" activist and read up!

truth brother.

So ask yourself, 8 cups a day is bull-o-knee , are you drinking enough? Start carrying a water bottle with you everyday and push for a gallon.  Hyper-hydration can happen but not to you because you know how much water you drink (a gallon). So get to it?   
Moral: Drink more water its good for you, stop buying that bottled crap.

                  "I don't always drink water, but when I do I stop having common health problems."

Savings Goal

Why save? For the fatalists out there your right I can't find a reason for you. For everyone else, because there is a future and to have more money to my name today , than yesterday, last week, last month, last year is my goal and it should be yours to.

protip : if your spending more than you are doing it wrong.


so what do we need to save for to be financially grounded
1. Emergency Fund - first and foremost your not going to get anywhere if you amass a large pile of cash and then your car breaks down, you lose your job and the kids get sick. All that hard work for nothing.
So we need an emergency fund, the people that calculate things for a living suggest 2-3 months of your gross income ( the Dinero you put in your pocket before you get taxed.) This provides the cushion should something happen so you can keep your pile under your mattress.

2. We need a Sinking fund (optional but recommended)  this is the what we fix the leaks with. The repairs and other things that are guaranteed to happen in life. Depending on your situation these things vary.

3. Retirement - the sooner the better. because when everything is all said and done. This is your sit on ass fund, and the more you have in here the sooner you get to sit on your ass and grow vineyards, or whatever else Charles Swab thinks old people do when they retire.

3 and a half.   Business Investments. We all need a side hustle. Collecting one pay check is cool , but Collecting two is even better. With most things you have to spend money to make money.  Asset building do you do it?  These can be your own business investments like starting a lawn ninja company ( gotta get overhead) or investing in the stock market. This all requires money to start.

4. Education - Yours or your kids.  You think they give Chic-A-Filet's franchises to just any dumbass. We need a degree to show people. and plus you can get your business degree all online now!

4.The things we Don't need fund - this can be for a vacation, a new car, brand new furniture, whatever. These things have never been a priority to me, 2/3 of all self made millionaires live well below their means. It's not in the plans to struggle through life to visit Europe for week and a Lexus doesn't need to be the reason i have to choose between chicken and rice everyday or a great well balanced diet.

These are the goals. You can vary them however you like, this is my outline and its worked pretty good so far. I do plan on visiting Europe, its just not in the cards right now unless I want to go Vagabonding (seriously thought about it)

More topics to come on different types of savings.

A Penny saved is a Penny earned!

Stress

Stress.

All organisms deal with stress, you are not alone. Mechanically speaking the chair your siting on is dealing with stress(es) right now. It's an internal reaction cause by load applied by external forces. In our terms, it can be your boss, your kids, your bills, something in your world that is putting the hurt on you. It can be physical or psychological, but on an evolutionary standpoint we need it. It is there for that very reason, to bring change physically and psychologically. In the developing and fast paced world we live in we deal with a lot of change. Its about coping and learning to adapt for the better that we thrive through these changes, these stresses (near epic).





SCIENCE and History

Claude Bernard, french guy, comes up with the idea of dynamic equilibrium (later called homeostasis). In this the internal's must remain somewhat steady but also must react and adapt to outside influences (temperature, pressure, Habanero sauce, etc.) in order to survive, pretty startling stuff right. Well a guy named Walter Canon comes along with his Emo haircut and says that its not just physical but emotional as well. After writing a few poems about it, the world is given the idea of "flight or flight".   He adds the science of adrenal glands to it, marking epinephrine(adrenaline) and norepinephrine (noradrenaline) as culprits. A third dude jumps on the band wagon, Hans Selye, and adds another adrenal gland to it. The pituitary gland at the base of the brain is responsible for secreting the hormones needed to deal with these fluctuations. He also added the term stress which he borrowed from engineering and GODSMACK.  and that is a mostly true story. 






Signs and Symptoms
These are the things that you need to look for. The things you need to notice.
-irritability -trouble sleeping -fatigue -frequent head aches -gastrointestinal problems -loss/increase in appetite -loss of concentration. -fidgeting -scattered thoughts , and the list continues and can vary with all people.



 - Smoking ( stop this ,visit the blog here- quit smoking) , increase in alcohol and/or drugs, and poor nutritional choices are all related to stress. These can also breed into vicious cycles. From vicious cycles to disease. Just overbearing stress is linked to lowered immune system, anxiety disorders, depression, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease, certain gastrointestinal diseases, some cancers, and even aging.

side story:
I knew a Sgt. in the Marine Corps, who was in Fallujah when shit hit the fan. He was telling me about combat stress and the whole time I couldn't help but stare at the gray hairs on his head (he was 25.) He was telling me about the people he would see that were 22 and looked 30. Combat stress will age you 5 years, is what he would say.




So What can we do H&W?
Don't join the marine corps. (joke) . Seriously you have two choices. There are more but I don't condone those. You can either embrace it or escape it. Fight or flight. Lets see.

BREATHE. Relax. It's literally( LITERALLY) all in your head, all in your dome space. What I love to do with minor stress is realize that it is truly all relative. That my plight is nothing compared to most of the world's people. So take a deep breath and ponder the facts that your facing. Find a way to make it funny, interesting and enjoyable (yes enjoyable turn that frown upside down.)  When your tense make sure it makes sense! Put that on some t-shirts and sell it.
http://stress.about.com/od/breathingexercises/Breathing_Exercises_for_Stress_Management.htm

Exercise. Use the stress to your advantage. Throw some weight around. I know a lot of people (not me) who love to go running or biking or even take long walks to keep a clear head and focus on nothing. Maybe cars and pots holes. I take that back I'm a walking type, but I do a lot of thinking while I walk, and it always turns out good for me.


Vacation. Get out of that environment. It doesn't have to be a sub orbit flight (virgin galactic) or a cruise to the Caribbean. Just get out, go somewhere and do something. a road trip is my kind of vacation. I'm sure you have your weekend spots, and favorite places to go, so go.


Talk about it. Talk with friends and family, they are there for support. If this is isn't the case, while your rethinking who your friends are, go to my favorite choice.  Talk to strangers, seriously. I ride the city bus and I love talking to people who will actually have a conversation with me. There is just that factor of no cares. A stranger can give you unbiased answers and have no fear in telling you the truth. Protip: You can tell a stranger things that you could never tell anyone else, cause they are a stranger.

IN CONCLUSION. Life is change, change is stress, therefor life is stress ( for all you math people). So acknowledge it and cope/adapt/face/treat it. Now walk it out.
  

Assets vs. Liabilities : Understanding the difference.

In order to get your finances together, We are going to need to know the difference between an Asset and a Liability.  The pluses column and the negatives column.

Dictionary Time
Asset
2.  a single item of ownership having exchange value.

a. items of ownership convertible into cash; total resources of a person or business, as cash, notes and accounts receivable, securities, inventories, goodwill, fixtures, machinery, or real estate ( opposed to liabilities). 

Liability

1. a. moneys owed; debts or pecuniary obligations ( opposed to assets).

    b. Accounting . liabilities as detailed on a balance sheet, esp. in relation to assets and capital.
  
Now most people believe that their possessions are assets and in reality they are, but we aren't going to think like most people. We are now thinking like financial guru's. This means that from now on an asset is something that brings you money, whether its a paycheck or a mesothelioma injury lawsuit that is paying handsomely because you found a great attorney/lawyer (same thing). This is how the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad thinks and it makes sense. 

Reasoning for this thinking:   When your filling out paper work for a loan and have to show your assets, by all means please list your golf clubs and your ipad. But when doing our own financial counseling we have to be honest with ourselves. When you list your championship golf club on your papers you would mark it as how much you paid for it. This is a lie because if were to sell it at that very moment you would be S.O.L to get back what you paid for it.  Even when people mark their cars, a brand new one will lose up to 20% or more as soon as they drive it off the lot. So from now if its not bringing us money directly, its a liability.

I love this photo.
Liabilities. These are our bills. For our reality checks, we are now also listing our house, our cars, our kids (financially, stick with me I have a heart)  and anything else that requires our time, money , maintenence etc. as a liability.
Unless your kids get jobs and you make them pay rent or sell them to slave labor then they can go under assets (joke)
Side note: Things are not concrete and you can change a liablity to an asset at any time with some creative thinking. Renting your car out , or a room in your house. or my joke. These things can change a liability into an asset.

Assets and Liabilities, what are yours? Know Thy enemy!


Protip; Positive thoughts lead to positive actions lead to positive results. 

Quit Smoking NOW!

Its is time ladies and gentlemen. Not next week, Not Tomorrow, Not when you finish this pack, Not after your next cigarette. We quit NOW!  so lets get to it.

Reasons for Quitting. (abridged)Health, Finances, Family, Friends.

The list can be huge. Everyone has their own reasons and since its your own choice to quit, your own reasons will be more empowering than what I can bribe you with here. You can sift through extras Here and Here.

Notice: I mention finances because it is often overlooked, take a peak at how much you apply your own personal tax to an overrated activity.    TALLY IT UP!

Ways to tackle and slay this beast!

As with anything whether it is bodybuilding, strategic carpet bombing, or Burt Reynolds caricatures, you need a plan. Failing to plan is the same as planning to fail (remember this.)  Smokefree.gov  has great resources for this, get to planning.

COLD TURKEY! oh yes. This is the tried and true method of all smokers that have quit for 10 minutes and went right back to it. I don't believe in it. Attempt this only if you are very strong willed, or have a friend to punch you in the goods every time you slip up.  (pain disassociation, I don't recommend it.)

The reality of it. If we had iron wills when it comes to this stuff, we wouldn't be reading on the internet for tips on quitting. We would instead be Googling "finger boxes" or "Cigar guy" and enjoying the best nutshots on You tube.  So since we are here, lets be real.

My personal recommendations from my experience is to slowly but surely lower your intake. Next time you buy a pack take a business card and stick it in plastic wrapper around the pack. Because your the young entrepreneur that you are use the pen that you ALWAYS carry and mark on this business card every time you engage in an act of smoking.  PROTIP: an act of smoking is not a cigarette. an act of smoking is everytime you put your hand to your face with a cancer stick holding the gap between your fingers and take a drag. Now imagine with me how many times you do this 10-12 per cigarette which is 200-240 times a pack. which is 1400-1680? ( i did it in my head) times a week at a pack/day. yikes , let those numbers sink in.

Counseling, Prescription medication,  Preventable Death.  They offer those things for suicide attempt victims as well, if these things are on the same page. C'mon open your eyes ,  I did and ill never go back, it's not even a thought anymore. Better breathing was my reason and it was well worth it.

Offering my congratulations now.



(if you enjoyed this please pass it on/ leave your tips in the comments below/ put someone you wish would quit in the comments.)

Ive decided to dedicate my blog to health and wealth.

Time to get to writing, wish me luck. If there is anything you would like to see on this blog, any littles tips or advice feel free to drop them in your comments.