Planting trees for your retirement.

I ran across this comment on the simple dollar (see below) http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2008/06/02/planning-for-the-long-haul-my-familys-lifetime-financial-plan/

I am sure you may have thought of this, but maybe some of your reader’s are less familiar with buying land.
Forested land can often make you money back. Selling the lumber on premise can often pay back a significant amount of the purchase price. Just be sure to use a logger who would respect your desire to keep the mess in your woods to a minimum.
A significantly aged forest for example can get up to $2,000 a acre in lumber. Wait twenty years and repeat.

I wonder if you could buy up 10 acres for $10,000 if that is the case, you could sell the lumber on it and get the acres for free.
Then you plant trees, cost: $2000 or so, wait 20 years, pay 20 years of taxes... maybe that is high like $500 per year.

Seems like you wouldn't make much money and you'd only make the money like twice in your life. That is unless you own like 1000 acres.

for example:
http://www.maineland4sale.com/,, I found 100 acres for $175,000. If it all had trees, the profit would be $200,000.
Then you spend 2 years straight with a staff of 10 workers and replant the whole thing with trees and in 20 years, you have another $200,000 ready there. I'll be age 48, that sounds like about the right time for paying for my kids' college. Then I'll plant another forest. When I am 68, I'll need to buy my retirement home. So I'll just cut down my trees, build a small house on 1 acre of it, and then ask the grand kids to plant another 100 acres of forest, when I am 88, I'll die, and my kids will inherit a nice cash cow.

This place has a bunch of listings:
http://www.landforless.com/cgi-local/search_p_new.cgi?region=1&Northern+Maine=0&Central+Maine=0&Southern+Maine=0&Acreage=3&Amt_from=1&Amt_to=7&Search=Click+Here+to+Search+For+Properties+

Here's an example of a piece of land that would easily be profitable:
it is 100% trees.
If you cut down half of them (35 acres), you could make $70,000 which would pay for the land. The other half of the cut down would be pure profit.

Property ID:

Click here to zoom in on this property
POR_8
Lot: 8
Town: Portage
Location: Northern Maine
Area/Subdivision: Portage Lake
Price Was: $92,900
Price: $69,900
Size: 70.3 Acres
Other Details: No Mobile Homes, Power/phone Near by, Lake Front
Landscape: Trees: 100% Fields:
Financing Options:
$505 Per Month with 30% Down (20 Years, 11 % APR)
$739 Per Month with 15% Down (20 years, 14% APR)

Open questions:
- how long and how much would it cost to replant your land so that a forest will be there 20 years from now?
- is there a machine you can buy that will go replant everything?
- how easy is it to hire up a logging company? Do you need special permissions from the town you buy the land from?
- do you have any ethical problems with destroying a forest and its wild life?

-Greg

Wet and Wild Idea

I heard a story on the radio talk about how people in some part of the US were collecting rain water in huge barrels because there was a water ban.

Then I thought, well, how could you use this harness water in other ways to make $. As you can imagine, it's hard, but here's what I came up with: Use collected water to make a hydroelectric generator. and as a bonus To get exercise, refill water container manually

So can you see yourself doing this?
1. go here and build your own generator http://www.re-energy.ca/t-i_waterbuild-1.shtml
2. Install pipe on your deck that goes down to the generator.
3. When it rains, your cell phone gets charged
4. After it rains you carry buckets of rain water up to the top of your deck, and pour it down the pipes to simulate rain so you can charge your wife's cell phone battery
5. Brag to your friends about how smart you are and how big your muscles are from all that exercise!

See the figure on the left for detailed design information. Enjoy!

Wikipedia quote to make you rich

Here's the quote

"Many index funds and exchange-traded funds track the performance of the S&P 500 by holding the same stocks as the index, in the same proportions, and thus attempting to match its performance (before fees and expenses). Partly because of this, a company which has its stock added to the list may see a boost in its stock price as the managers of the mutual funds must purchase that company's stock in order to match the funds' composition to that of the S&P 500 index."

So, if you could just predict which stocks are going to get into the S&P500, you would have great stock picking success and of course make millions, retire early, buy a boat , and say things like, "It's important to take risks" whenever some young person comes to say hi.

You can make a million too

So, do you want to make a million? Do you want to be a guru?

Take the 10 ideas in this blog post:
http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2007/11/14/52-books-52-weeks-10-fundamental-personal-finance-ideas/

and then make a 10 chapter book. Make sure you have a good looking photo of yourself on the front. You get bonus money if you can get on Oprah.

What? you think "how can this possibly work, anyone could do that!" Normally, I would be skeptical too, but if Kiyosaki, Orman, David Bach, etc.. can do it over and over agan over the course of half a decade, why couldn't you?,

Hey Ebay Man!

Helloooo blogosphere!! Here's a random money making idea:

It's called "priceofXYZonebay.com" where XYZ can be any product such as magic cards or hummels.

Hummels are these cute little figurines like the one pictured here.

Now lately, I've been selling a bunch of them, and I was noticing how hard it is to find out how much they cost. Also, I noticed if I knew how much a certain hummel cost, and found one for cheap, I could do an "ebay flip".

So let me just get to the idea. I want to build a site priceofhummelsonebay.com. It's so simple. It would retrieve the latest prices for all the hummels on ebay. When one is about to be sold for less than the average price, then the software would alert me and I could go buy the thing and resell it for a higher price.

But wait! that means I have to do the work of receiving and selling the hummels. So here's the extra idea, I "sell" access to this list to the highest bidder. For a share of the listings a user can get up to date, last minute, notifications that a cheap hummel is about to be sold. The system does not send notifications to any other users about those hummels until someone else offers me more money for access to the listings.

So here's an example:
Joe is browsing the site, looking at prices for hummels, but the price quotes are delayed by a day. He decides to buy access to the up to date prices for 10 types of hummels at $5 per month. During the month, the system alerts him that 5 hummels are cheap. Joe buys them and flips them for a profit of $5 per hummel. Joe is very happy. That is until Harry comes along. Harry wants in on the action and is willing to pay $10 for the alerts. The system let's Harry do it and kicks Joe out of the action. Then Harry begins to get notifications and Joe does not.

And the great thing is that this pattern can be repeated for many, many types of items without extra work.

What do you think?