Where has Broke been?
Shifting tides and what I have been doing with my money and time
As you may have noticed I have taken a small sabbatical from Twitter/X lately. First of all, yes, I’m alive and no, I’m not back in jail. Now that we got that out of the way, is my departure permanent? No. I’ve just been really busy and needed to dot my i’s and cross my t’s on some land I was in the process of buying. I closed on my final strategic piece of land that completes my long term strategy for the area I have been buying land in. So, number one, that took a lot of time. Walking the land, negotiating the price (which took 6 months just with the back and forth) and finally the internal struggle of “Do I really need more land?”. I also have a couple of new mountain cabins that I started building so needed to be extremely present on job sites making sure the foundation was prepped and done properly for the slope of the mountain. On these steep grades and sides of mountains that I build on, if your foundation isn’t 100% perfect, you’re screwed.
Truth be told though, I also needed a small mental break. Am I interested in politics? Yes. Do I want political animosity to be incessantly in front of my face every time I open the app? No. But, unfortunately, in the climate we are in today, that’s just how it goes. There was an old saying in my corporate days when we would be readying new information or a new program to roll out to field operations. We would need our audience to absorb, in a short 3 day meeting, material that took us two years to prepare, which they in turn would need to roll out to their field employees. We would start the meetings with “Now everyone, this is going to be like drinking water from a fire hydrant”. That pretty much sums up how I feel with all of the political posts I see. A constant non stop barrage of mind numbing proportions. I realize I can mute/block people, key words and all the other tools in our arsenal to cultivate the feed to my liking. No matter what I did though, endless political material still shows up. And with that plenty of vitriol. I am sure, unlike everyone else with extreme discipline to keep scrolling on by, I inevitably get sucked into reading the comments of the posts and then look up and two hours have passed.
I would far rather see tweets about growing businesses, savings, retirement, Treasury bills, land, money, tax planning, estate planning, mountain life. You know, the fun and exciting stuff. The material that inspires your goals. But truth be told, at my age, I don’t get much “new” information to act upon when I even read those posts. I’ve built my wealth, retired from the corporate grind 15 years early, have my side hustles that sustain me and pretty much do my own thing. When you hit the 50 year old mark, you really aren’t going to learn a ton of new business and life information. You’ve learned most of what you’re going to learn…plus, you get stubborn. The key thing for most at my age is “Did we act on what we learned?”. For me, many many times in life in my 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, I learned what I should be doing, what I should be investing in, what I should be avoiding, how I should be acting, BUT I didn’t change my behavior. It took some hard life events to finally get me to start ACTING on what I knew and had learned earlier in life. I had the behavior in my brain, it just didn’t make its way down to my feet. Translation: I knew what I should do, I just didn’t do it.
Don’t want to lose massive amounts of money with stocks/crypto? Don’t chase risky Stock Option Trades or crypto trades based on what you read on the internet.
Don’t want to get crushed in Real Estate? Don’t take out crazy mortgage loans and lever up your eyeballs with rental properties like I did.
Don’t wanna cheat and blow your family/relationship up? Then don’t even flirt. Run as fast as you can in the opposite direction of that person, including quitting your job if necessary. A lesson I had to learn the hard way.
While I do get tidbits of info that I can take action on with regard to business, taxes, life and other areas, it doesn’t make up for the exorbitant amount of time I would waste on the app. The ROI for me after a year of being on there constantly just isn’t there. The big gains for me on Twitter were actually things that most people would find trivial or silly. Getting a Ninja Creami after hearing about it non-stop on the app. Seeing Mike Cernovich post to put your HVAC filters on auto repeat order on Amazon for every few months when the filters need changing. (Game changer for keeping your Air Conditioner Filter changed in a timely manner).
With that in mind, I just needed a little mental break. I got extremely busy in my business life as well and the app just made me waste so much time on a daily basis. There are many parts of my personal life that I have not had much discipline with (as some of my long standing followers know), but one thing I can say…when it comes to my businesses, once I flick the switch, I get laser focused and driven.
My decision to take a break from Twitter actually came down to a mathematical equation. As most of you know, my Amazon business laid the foundation for my ability to walk away from a corporate America job after 25 years of be an employee of “the man”. I go into detail about this in some earlier newsletters. For those who have never done Amazon, August starts my holiday and Christmas season preparation. I begin sending in mass amounts of inventory to Amazon in early August. I started doing this back in 2016, after my first couple of years selling on Amazon. I began selling on Amazon in mid 2014, after transitioning from Ebay. During 2014 and 2015 I would send in my inventory to Amazon around mid to late October. It would arrive at their warehouse, get checked in and by mid November would be sold out. As I scrambled and attempted to send in more items in November, I realized very quickly “Every single person who sells on Amazon is doing the exact same thing and my inventory is taking forever to get checked in”.
One year I was reading the Amazon Seller forums after my shipped pallets had not checked in 3 weeks after sending them in to Amazon’s Fulfillment Center. People who lived near a big Amazon distribution center were saying the UPS trucks full of incoming inventory were lined up for 2 miles down the road. Inevitably my items wouldn’t get checked in until late mid to late December sometimes, causing me to miss 2-3 weeks of the major Christmas rush. After experiencing that I decided to start prepping in the late summer. My new goal became: I needed ALL of my inventory into Amazon by October 1st. Anything getting shipped in after that day would be “gravy” if it got checked in by Amazon. Has served me very well ever since. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t stop sending in massive amounts of material after October, but I realize some of those items may not get checked into Amazon in time.
Back to my math problem. As most of you know, Twitter can be a major time suck. It is a GREAT avenue to make connections, meet friends, build businesses, stay informed of world events. But there is so much data coming at me I sometimes feel like I get trapped quicksand. I get sucked into scrolling and can’t get out.
With preparing shipments for Amazon, I profit between $2,000-$4,000/day if I am cranking out items. And yes, that’s profit, not revenue. Revenue is obviously much higher as my margins hover around 20-25%. I have a few part time employees, but mainly, it’s me and one other person. Once I started doing the building construction, I had to scale back quite a bit on Amazon as I was just getting pulled in too many different directions in multiple states. To prep items, I have to receive them, unbox them, inspect them, re-barcode them with my labels, re-box them and them ship them off to Amazon fulfillment centers. We can generally do 400-600 units per day on average at my warehouse. I have had days where we prep, label and ship off 2,000-3,000 units in a single day to Amazon, but those numbers are not the norm. To barcode and ship off even 400-600 items, it’s an 7-10 hour job. As Holiday season was looming in my head,