Die Broke (Live Rich)

Stephen M. Pollen's national best seller Die Broke is a very interesting personal finance book that I came across recently. I am not saying I agree with the concepts he introduced. In fact, I hold some completely different points of view. However, his concepts are unusual, unique and intriguing.

These are the four steps plan in the book:
1. Quit today
2. Pay cash
3. Don't retire, and
4. Die broke

Quit Today requires us to view our job as, literally, just JOB, NOT career. Be our own boss and quit to think we have boss even if we work in an organisation. View ourselves as free agents that work in an organisation. The person we usually call 'boss' is our client, not boss. Jump ship if need to for a better deal. Resign if it is no longer worth while. Forget about career development in an organisation but concentrate on skills development.

Yes, it means forget about career, a series of related jobs that are viewed in one way direction, in an organisation that bring you higher salary and status. You rely on your skills set, concentrate on jobs and become your own boss.

Pay Cash means pay cash. Don't use credit. Get rid of debts and save money. Get rid of credit cards and ATM cards! Get rid of the conveniences that encourage you to spend money.

Don't Retire. Work and that leisure isn't more fulfilling than work. (I agree with my hands and legs up.)

Die Broke. Spend all your money before you die. In an ideal situation, Stephen wrote, you write your last cheque for your funeral expenses. Go vacations, live a good life. Forget about leaving inheritance to your children. Instead, give your children money and help them when you are alive and when they are in need. Buy annuities from reputable and good insurance companies at your old age to ensure you will never outlive your money. Die broke, live rich and NOT live broke!

These are unique ideas. Personally I think Die Broke is a risky strategy. You rely on insurance companies to honour their annuities' payments. What if the insurance company goes bust? No matter how reputable or how high an insurance company was rated, buyers bear the risks of not covering thier future incomes when they are old.

Setting up web sites

"How much do you pay for these web sites? How much do these web sites cost you for the design and infrastructure?"

These questions have almost become FAQs (frequently asked questions) among my friends who know that I am managing a few web sites including FPM.

When I started my online hobby I tried few html editors like Microsoft FrontPage and Eversoft 1stPage. It took me few weeks just to setup a not-so-decent web site. It was not well designed at all. The look and feel was amateur. The structure was not optimized for search engine ranking. It was difficult to update. After setting it up, I lost interest in them. They just did not look good enough.

Free Scripts for Content Management System...

It took me about half a year to realize that there are something called "free script" and "free content management system" (CMS) on the internet. First thing first, there are abundance of free and wonderful scripts available on the net due to Open Source Movement. I can simply install these scripts in my web hosting, with few clicks here and there, and the entire infrastructure of my web site is constructed. I just need to write and post my content, i.e. articles, to my web hosting. All of these free scripts come with free templates of various designs with different look and feel for your web site. Some scripts, come with thousands of free templates.

It takes me less than 2 hours to setup a professionally looking web site (like these: photography, career and personal finance. Click here for more free templates and choices for look & feel.) with FREE opt-in mailing system (like Financial Planning Malaysia, outside price is about $15 per month) completed with a discussion forum (like this: financial forum). Again, these scripts are all FREE. (for FPM, I use free template from Blogger. So I paid zero dollar for this web site.)

I was rather shocked. I had been working hard on a primitive and not-too-good-looking web site for six months (including content) only to find out that I could have saved most of my time spent on designing and constructing the web site structure.

Riding on Open Source Movement...

There are ample of such free scripts under open source licencing available in the net for various online purposes like site building, content management, blogs, mailing lists, polls & surveys, image galleries, discussion board, guestbooks, project management, billing system, shopping cart system, online customer handling system (i.e. live chat script, FAQ script, helpdesk ticket script, etc.), wiki, etc. Once you install these scripts, you can handle these advance online tasks single handedly.

FPM uses a web hosting service that contains more than 50 types of free open source scripts. Some of these scripts are famous and popular like phpBB2, PHPNuke, Mambo, PostNuke, Wordpress, Drupal, Geeklog, phpWiki, etc.

Yes, you can download all these scripts through their respective web sites, upload and install them to your web host one-by-one manually. However, this is not as easy as you think. Every script comes with its own unique and different installation procedures and requirements These installation processes are usually not very straight forward for newbies. It took me a while to get familiar with the installation process of some of these scripts. Almost all of them require you to first setup mySQL data base in the web server. More importantly, not all web hosting plans and services support these free scripts.

However there is a quick solution that I use to cut short my web site setup time in less than 2 hours...the cPanel.

This web hosting service help me to set things up quickly and professionally...

FPM uses a web hosting service that comes with a login panel containing all the scripts above. All I have to do is just choose a script and fill up information to INSTALL these scripts. Therefore I could spend less than two man hours to setup the entire structure of a web site.

This is the package that FPM are using:

1. Unlimited domain & sub-domain names (so you can have multiple web sites. I have 8 web sites under this web hosting.)
2. 5Gb disk space and 75 Gb bandwidth (This is so far one of the best in the industry for the same price [below].)
3. Entire scripts library of more than 50 scripts (I just counted it) to be installed in few clicks.
4. 24/7/365 support via phone, online live chat and e-mail, 99.9% uptime, and have a 30 day money back guarantee (I never lose a chance to utilise their online support service)
   
5. Video tutorials (Being almost a complete newbie a year ago, I learned through their video tutorials)
6. Stat report for you to track your traffic. Which search engines, which friendly web sites and which search terms (keywords) bring you traffic?
7. How much is the cost? $7.95 per month. Not bad at all.

Introducing $7.95 Hosting, Free Setup and $75 Marketing Rebate

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