The tenant finally has a new, working water heater. Hooray. The contractor was even did a temporary fix for the basement door, without me asking, which makes me happy. As long as he can respond to my calls timely, I will be using him for every repair I need. Turns out that he also is a landlord himself, so I’ll be milking him for lots of advice/tips, for sure.

After speaking to a good friend of mine, I’m going to give this landlording business a chance. It is passive income after all, and I don’t really want to give that up. I feel I have a good tenant, so as long as the property is decent, I should be okay. I think my rant yesterday was a result of momentary insanity caused by frustration. So let’s see.

On the vending business front, I’m in the process of signing up with a charity, and then I’m going to hire a locating service to place the machine so I don’t have to pay a commission every month. The service charges only $31 and they offer a money back guarantee with results within a week of ordering. They’ll even relocate for free if I get kicked out within 90 days for any reason.

On the perfume business front, I’m closing my Paypal account. They have instituted a new “policy” where they can hold your funds for whatever amount of time they please. The letter states that it is not because I did anything wrong, but because they want to implement a new policy to “protect” me. I received this information after receiving a new order for almost $100 from a new client through the iOffer.com store. So guess what? I told them, with a selection of choice words, that I don’t need to use their service anymore. So I instructed them to refund the transaction to the buyer and close my account. In the meantime, the buyer paid me via Google Checkout (with NO problems whatsoever, of course), and I’ll be processing the order today. It’s so nice to have a choice with payment processors.

passive income · Paypal sucks ass · perfume business · real estate rentals · vending business

Fragrances: I thought my “professional looking” fragrance website would be up and running by now, but it’s not. I believe part of the problem is that I picked a bad shopping cart software package, then I selected a vendor who has revealed (after starting the project), that he’s never installed this particular shopping cart before. He just created a sample for me to see that he could at least do the basics. The problem with that is my project requires more than the basics. The only thing working is the Paypal module. I can’t import products or categories, and I can’t insert them manually either. Which has now given me great pause. While the site I created myself wasn’t the prettiest, it worked perfectly, and was easy to update. Now I’m thinking that I should’ve just left my creation in place, and hire someone to make it beautiful instead of hiring someone to do the opposite.

Real estate investing: One of my wholesale deals has run into a snag. I already knew it would have issues with liens, but the title report reveals that the liens are A LOT bigger than what the seller said (big surprise). There’s a tax lien of $16K, and a water bill lien of $25K (no, that’s not a typo). I’ve emailed the seller with no response so I’ll call her today. Thank goodness I have three more in the pipeline, because I have a feeling this one won’t work out.

elance · perfume business · real estate wholesaling business · wholesale properties

I started my perfume dropshipping business way before I read The 4-Hour Workweek as an additional income stream. I started it just over a year ago, and it’s not a real moneymaker. In fact, I’ve only had 57 transaction over the past year. That averages to just one transaction per week, with an average profit of $8 per transaction. After paying for a domain and webhosting for the year, it has provided a profit of $399 for the year. That’s just under $400 for a year’s work, and that doesn’t include the time spent on the occasional wacky international transaction. Barely enough for a mortgage payment!

This business requires time for marketing and management which I just don’t have. It also seems to be a very difficult industry to find a niche for. So this may be one of the ventures that bites the dust this year. I already retired two other websites earlier this year because they weren’t profitable, and I had no real desire to make them profitable. The perfume business has already started to head down that route. I’ve achieved great feedback on my iOffer.com store, but unless I can develop a way to automate it, it will be retired by the end of this month.

dropshipping · low profits · niches · perfume business · profitability