Archive for Investing

Facebook App: Sold!

// January 4th, 2008 // No Comments » // Brad's Life, Facebook, Investing, Technology

I’ve been messing with Facebook Apps for about 2 months now, and generated a nice little revenue stream during my run.

In late October I paid a guy from Australia $50 to code me a quotes application. I also used some tutorials to build an RSS reader/publisher for Facebook Apps.

Since then I launched 3 main apps: UIS Prairie Stars Newsflash, Butler Basketball Tracker, and LOLCat Bible Verses. I never really had the time to grow the LOLCat app like I wanted to, but built a decent user base (400). The Butler Basketball Tracker peaked around 600 users, and the UIS app hit a high of about 20 users. (I really can’t understand how inept UIS students are when it comes to the internet/social media. Seriously. Say the word blog or RSS and they’ll shrug and look at you with a blank stare.)

So on the side I started selling the code that I had tweaked to work for me. I would post the availability of it on message boards and kind of decide a price based on how interested the person seemed. Here’s what I ended up with over 2 months:

RSS App: $40, $50, $75, $60, $50 = $275
Quotes App: $50, $75, $65, $45 = $235
Total = $510

And today I put the LOLCat Application itself up for sale for $300 and it sold within a few hours. Total profit = $810. Nice little 1620% increase from the initial $50 I spent to get some code going. Pretty sweet. Helps pay for those gadgets that I love without my wife freaking out.

Question: Do I need to get a 1099 from Facebook for taxes? Haha :)

ALRIGHT — Off to go buy our house!!! Wish me luck.

First Time Homebuyer Tip!

// December 19th, 2007 // No Comments » // Brad's Life, House Search, Investing

Hey all you down the road prospective first-time homebuyers, here’s a little tip for you to store in the back of your mind until it’s that time.

You can take out up to $10,000 TAX FREE (which can be upwards of 30%) from your IRA for the purchase of a first home. (Another side note — A first time homebuyer is considered as someone who has not owned a house for more than 2 years, so if you buy a house and move 1.5 years later, you can do this again. However, the $10,000 is a one-time maximum for life.)

So if you get a job straight out of college that gives you money towards a retirement fund, inquire with HR about pulling it out into your own IRA, which is typically a free rollover, then pull it out from there.  Just give yourself about a month for all the paperwork to be safe.

I had accumulated about $5K from working 15 months at UIS, so for the past 2 weeks I’ve been working with SURS and Fidelity to roll it over to a rollover IRA.  A lot of paperwork, but it went very well.  The money hit the IRA yesterday, and I wired it to my bank over lunch. And HUGE props to SURS.  I was expecting a huge headache working with them, but I guess I was just used to the majority of the HR department at UIS (except for Bob L., who is amazing).

In the time I’ve been at Butler, I’ve nearly re-accumulated that amount with their awesome 5%+10% match. I think when I’m 59.5 years old, I won’t be missing out a whole lot from using the initial year of savings towards a downpayment. Heck, a lot of people don’t get started saving for retirement for a couple more years after college.

Just a little tidbit I wanted to throw out there for you all.  It’s definitely helping us right now!