Settle Down Making Money in Retirement and Loving It

Settle Down

Making Money in Retirement and Loving It

by

Bobby Everett Smith

Copyright © 2015 Bobby Everett Smith

All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1: My Retirement History

Chapter 2: How Much Money Will You Need In Retirement?

Chapter 3: How to Fund Your Retirement

Chapter 4: Starting A New Business—Pros and Cons

Chapter 5: How Much Does A New Business Cost?

Chapter 6: Finding Your Niche

Chapter 7: Become a Thought Leader

Chapter 8: Selling With Public Relations

Chapter 9: Building Your Website

Chapter 10: Blog

Chapter 11: Search Engine Optimization

Chapter 12: Facebook Selling

Chapter 13: Linkedin Selling

Chapter 14: Email Marketing Campaigns

Chapter 15: E-commerce

Chapter 16: Analytics

Chapter 17: Summary How to Set Up an At Home Business

Chapter 1

My Retirement History

I am hoping to hear today if my reverse mortgage has been approved. Liberty Equity salesman, Gary Hunt, called last week to tell me that the appraisal of my house came in at $300,000 which is exactly what I initially suggested the value should be. Gary said we should get final approval from the underwriters (aka loan prevention team) this week.

It takes a lot of money for retirement and you don’t know how long it is going to last so it is hard to predict the total amount of money you will need. I ought to know. I am now 80 and have half of my retirement behind me.

That’s what this book is about—how much money will you need in retirement and where will it come from? I am going to share with you my experiences in my retirement years including how much money I need and where I have gotten it so far.

Starting an at-home online sales business is the best long term way to supplement your income during retirement and in the following chapters, we will explore step by step how to do that. It’s not easy and it is not get rich quick but most people can do it and if you follow my steps and links you can have income PDQ, pretty damn quick.

As your at-home business matures and evolves, it should morph into a passive business running on auto-pilot so that by the time you are too old to work at it every day, it will be producing regular income to supplement your Social Security, investments and other income sources.

Making money in retirement

Here are some experiences I have had in my retirement years that might help you decide if an at-home business is right for you:

I always wanted to be a full-time trader in the stock market. I’ve got $54,000 in my Schwab IRA account and that should be enough to support me while I get going in that new business.

Since I had not traded stocks or options for about 5 years, I was pretty rusty. Back to the books. I read from options trading advisors like Bernie Schaeffer, John Carter, and Preston James. They all assured me in their promotions, that making a good living, even getting filthy rich, was a sure thing. Well, yes, some risk but I (the options guru) did it and you can too. I was pretty confident that I could at least make a couple of thousand per month which is all I needed to meet my minimum financial requirements.

With great enthusiasm and total optimism, I paid Preston $1600 to join the WOW program, Weekly Options Windfall. We were selling weekly options which expire every Friday with the hope that the foundation stock price would go up during the week, allowing me to retain the premium I received when I sold the option the previous Friday.

Everything went pretty well for about a week. But then the market took a dip and my options went with it. If the stock price went down during the week, I would lose money. That’s something that Preston did not promote but in fairness, he did not overtly hide that information either. Had I done my homework, I would have projected that kind of loss.

I started just trading one or two contracts per stock per week, but as I lost I doubled up and more. Apple was doing well overall, but volatile. I found myself with eight contracts of Apple which is equivalent to 800 share of AAPL stock.

That’s $500,000 more or less and here I am with less than $50,000 in my trading account. Good leverage but poor judgment. One morning in mid-December, I woke up with an exercise of my options to o buy 800 shares of AAPL at $8.95, a purchase of $452,008. Luckily I was able to close that out later in the day but I lost $16,000 on that trade alone. I made back $10,000 in a later trade of AAPL. Even so, my IRA account was dwindling along with my self-confidence.

By the time, I got down to $25,000 in my IRA, it was time to bail out. I stopped trading and applied to Preston for a refund since he promised a money-back guarantee. No such luck, my warranty had expired but the good news was that I could continue to receive his weekly recommendations for trades. Not now, I said. I will just swallow the $20K or so losses and get another project management gig where I can make it back per quickly at the going rate of $40 to $65 per hour.

A home-based internet business

When 2004 birthday rolled around, I was 70 years old and had been especially busy for the past couple of years. I was full-time employed by IBM Global Services consulting and had started an at-home study course to become a graduate gemologist (GG) at the Gemological Institute of America.

The GG degree was not a trivial course. Aimed at the certification of professional jewelers, it consists of numerous courses about diamonds and colored gem stones. The courses take a couple of years of hard work and the at-home students compete with on-campus students who study the same courses. The GG requirement concludes with a test where 20 unidentified gem stones are presented to the student and he has 3 hours to identify all of them and justify his/her decision as to the why he/she picked that ID. The student must make 100% on the test to qualify for GG. Many students have taken it 20 times or more.

I passed it the second time I tried. Now, I had credentials to enhance my claims of being an expert jeweler and appraiser—no experience in jewelry business but a lot of very good book knowledge. I could start a successful internet business selling diamonds and colored gemstones on-line.

After completing the GG studies, I started to train myself for project management professional (PMP) certification by the Project Management Institute. This was aimed at building up my qualifications as an IBM consultant. I passed that 4 hour test in November 2004.

With zero experience in the jewelry business and the same in internet sales, I started an on-line business with the intent of selling diamonds for investment purposes as my primary focus.

When I started the business in 2005, I did not even realize that selling diamonds for investments was not a new idea that only I had recognized. In the 1960’s and 70’s several scam artists had started selling diamonds the same way, advertising significant price growth over the years surpassing investments in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, gold, oil, or real estate.

Unfortunately for the investors, the diamonds sold were frequently of inferior grade in color, clarity or cut. The investments were disappointing to most investors and soon law enforcement got into it and the fad for diamond investments faded.

My intent was to deliver top quality diamonds at near wholesale prices. I rationalized that I did not need a lot of profit and that I could develop a long-term relationship with lots of very rich investors or collectors.

I needed suppliers and in February 2005, I attended the international gem show in Tucson, AZ. This is the primary show that jewelers from all over the world go to stock their inventories for the coming year. You have to be a qualified jewelry tradesman to get in the door to purchase at these wholesale prices.

With my GG degree and on-line store front and a business card, I talked my way into the show. Thousands of vendors from all over the world presented their wares in multiple venues throughout the city.

Browsing around, I met a young man and his mother who were manning a small booth selling sapphires from Sri Lanka or previously called Ceylon. Isam, the man, had attended Texas A&M and spoke excellent English. We developed a rapport due to his good salesmanship. He immediately convinced me that he was honest and had quality sapphires.

At the time, I knew nothing about sapphires but I learned they could be a good addition to my diamond focus. Sapphires are hardness scale 9.0 which is the next hardest gemstone to diamonds, which are hardness 10.0 (but exponentially harder than sapphires.) I also learned that sapphires are the same variety as rubies. They both come from the Corundum family. Sapphires and rubies are beautiful and sometimes much cheaper than the same sized quality diamond.

I bought a couple of pink sapphires from Isam paying about $1,000 in cash. (I had to go to an ATM machine to get the money since he did not take credit cards.)

Next, I needed a diamond dealer. I started reading books and came up with a dealer in Houston, Texas who had written a book on how to buy diamonds. Fred Cuellar, How to Buy a Diamond, 4th edition. This book’s cover advertises Insider Secrets for Getting Your Money’s Worth and Wholesale Secret Pricing Charts. Just the right book for me and I ordered it from Amazon as soon as I read about it.

Fred’s offices are in Houston where I graduated from Rice University in 1956. The next time I was in Houston which was a couple of months later, I called Fred and asked if he would meet with me in his office. I was surprised but enthusiastic when he said yes.

That fact that I called and went to see Fred is a descriptor of my character. In 1965, I had picked up a copy of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill in the Atlanta airport while waiting for a new flight while I was enroute to Greenville, SC for a job interview. I read Napoleon Hill’s book enthusiastically and concluded that I could do anything possible—if I put my mind to it.

At my first meeting with Fred, he was most gracious and allocated an hour of his day to talk with me. His facilities were beautiful, secure offices in the posh Galleria section of Houston. I was most impressed when Fred told me that he was the primary designer of Super Bowl and World Series rings. He had a couple of examples to show me which at that time, he said cost $35,000 each.

He also showed me a collection of about 6 loose diamonds which he had in a jewelry case in his desk drawer. They were beautiful 4-5 carat diamonds which he said combined were worth $21 million. You’ve got to be kidding, I thought. In your desk drawer. He said the owner was a rich Cuban investor from Dallas. That blew me away.

When I told him my plan to sell high quality diamonds to rich investors, he conceded that it might work. He did not tell me that investment diamonds already had a black eye both in the jewelry and the investment industries. I left his office telling him that I just wanted to have some fun while making some money in my retirement. He nodded and smiled knowingly.

Funding the business

Britain Street Diamonds, Inc. was my first on-line business and I made a lot of mistakes. Here is a list of some of them:

• I had no experience in jewelry, loose gemstones although I had received a Graduate Gemology (GG) degree from Gemological Institute of America which gave me some excellent book knowledge about gems and jewelry.

• I had no experience with online sales and marketing even though I had 40 years in the computer industry in sales and marketing

• Buying high quality diamonds and sapphires which is what I did took a lot of money. I charged that to my credit