One of the good threads on Fchat, just shows how tight this community is. I settled with a 2002 NSX because I couldn't even afford a 10k $ bill every now and then. I also put down 10.000 miles a year on a summer only car so I figured it wouldn't work out at all. I will have it until the F430 becomes more attainable (it will also be a bigger upgrade than NSX - 360 performance wise) and I'm able to insure it without insurance restrictions (no restrictions when I'm 30+ years old, as in my country). It's nowhere near a Ferrari but it was a safe choice for me (security is important for me personally) so I hope you can gather the information you need and decide yourself whether you can afford it or not - nobody else can give you the answer on that I will personally start with 10k $ "saving box for Ferrari" and add 1000 $ in there each month and see how it goes. Anyway I really wanted the F355 Spider because it's my personal favorite Ferrari, but I'm not 100% sure about the "engine out" services so I'm trying to keep myself from trading into one lol
I find it noble when people will go out of their way to share knoweldge on a forum to make sure fellow posters don;t get screwed! Luckily, my biz partner and I know how how big banks just throw around titles. Yes, I am aware that almost everyone that gets a promotion after they are hired becomes a VP (LOL). He was in charge of handling arbitration claims, and wrote their restrictive covenants. The guy knows his stuff, but we are aware of the faux title if you may. I was a VP at a couple real estate firms for the same reason; sales. He wants 20% equity but we are probably going to work soemthing out in terms of options or something. I can't see us giving up 20% equity not knowing how he is going to perform. WE can have him work on a deal by deal basis with a percentage of each deal and give him options on top of it. so at least he can earn his equity share. Other than us knowing about his "title" ironically he also mentioned to us that VP doesn't mean member of managment and he was mainly a team lead as you stated, so we knew he was at least upfront and didnt try to fudge how high up the ladder he really is. Again, thanks a lot for the heads up....its awesome how people watch out for people on this board. It is much appreciated.
No problem with the info, and glad you knew a lot of that stuff already. Not telling you what to do, but just an idea. Pay for performance clause. Too many people get free rides and golden parachutes even though they help drive a company into the ground. In fact we push hard with our clients to get this clause when salaries are over 500K. If we do well you get paid. We do poorly you get $1 and a foot in the ass. Thank you come again. .m
I give you a lot of credit here. I a lot of people would have taken this as a personal afront. I agree, this has developed into a very interesting thread. Maybe in the wrong section but ....
$15/monthly x 9,000,000 players = $135M. They also charge $25 for server transfers and character account transfers which probably all in all net another $100-200k/month. Not to mention the initial $19.99 they charge for the game and the $39.99 for the expansion pack and another expansion pack that is going to be released November of next year.
How exactly does the pay for performance clause work? Initially, we have a letter of intent that he will become a 20% equity partner and basically be one of our business partner, but we all have equal voting rights. He will handle most of our intenal legal stuff, since most of the real estate law would be handled by specialized attorneys. His main objective is to make sure we don't get screwed and to write up our contingency, non-circ/confidentiality contracts, and handle our investment relations. We paid him $1000 to start workin on our business plan, which he has, and to protect him in case he does this work until a formal Operating Agreement is signed since he will be putting work as of right now and no operating agreement is signed. I am in contact with an NYU professor that does a lot of this work, and stated that I should give him 20% of options after we do a valuation and chop up our shares; then he can earn his equity position by executing the options after he makes a considerable contribution to the financial growth of our company. Also, we should put a yearly performance review period in the OA to give us the option to buy him out or what not. The operating agreement is going to be a long process, and we are going to need to invest in some legal counseling, but it should all work out. Thanks for the input!
Hi everyone, I had some lease quotes through yesterday for a 355 and a 360, and the difference was marginal between the two. The figures were suprisingly very affordable for me, so I set about looking for the scary costs of maintenence and found this thread. Firstly, I'm just an average worker who realistically can't afford a modern Ferrari looking at the maintenence figures that are being quoted. But I have a question anyway if you don't mind; can you put into context the figures your quoting please? For example, I drive a Boxster at the moment. A new engine costs about £10-15k, a new gearbox about £7k. RMS/Clutch about £1k. Brakes £1.5k. These figures would scare a lot of (normal income) people (like me) off buying one had I heard about the engine/gearbox prices in advance. However, the reality is that you have to be really unlucky to have an engine or gearbox failure on a Porsche - but they are mentioned to newbie owners on Porsche forums as they 'could' happen. Equally the other numbers can be halved at specialists rather than main dealers. So, the scary problems and prices that are being quoted - are these fairly frequent problems (and accepted as part of Ferrari ownership), or just things that 'could' happen if your particularly unlucky? BTW - I'm not considering a Fezza because I want to look richer than I am. I want one because I WANT ONE! A LOT! If I can't stretch to the 355 or 360, then I'll be heading down the 348 route. One way or another, I'm going to experience one of these bad-boys on my drive in the next 18 months. Thanks for your time! Paul.
Maintenance costs of $1/mile are real, you need that at minimum. The big surprises are less common but not as rare as in a Porsche. Your FRDF needs to be 20K or so on top of the maintenance and you need to be ok with a number 2x that. Maybe you have to sell stocks or something but you have to be able/willing to pop 40 if things go very badly.
But that is different money. Car money and investment money should always be different money. If it's not different where do you stop investing and start enjoying? Edit... I finished reading through this thread and I am not surprised to see there are a lot of intelligent people here. I too am involved in real-estate, have been since I was 16, not a family business either. I was raised pretty poor, pathetically poor to be exact, financially anyways. My wife and I have 452 rental units now and adding to that each month. I agree on the hours in a day thing. If not for our staff there would be no way to do this, my PA is worth more than I can pay her. We treat all of our staff like gold. All of them, right down to the cleaners, make twice what they could anywhere else. We have a very small turnover in staff. We also teach our staff how to own their own rental property and how to "get rich" by owning rentals. If we did not have the hours in a day our staff give to us we would be out of business.
Ray, I must ask, how did you make the leap from IT professional to stock market guru? I've been thinking about the newsletter concept -- and what kind of information people will pay for. It's a bit tricky, isn't it? You need to be able to provide value-add on some constantly changing information base. If you're working from a static base of konwledge, expertise, or information, you'll pump the well dry eventually and it may be of limited general value. And you don't want to be in the business of answering individual questions or tailoring to unique situations becuase it can't scale. You also have to choose your target market well to avoid (or do better than) the competition. For instance, I'm an IP lawyer, but there's no way I can compete with the likes of established players like Lexis or Westlaw to provide legal information and analysis feeds. I like the idea presented above about targeting dentist's offices: choose the right market with a targeted product, and it works even if the market is relatively narrow (you only have to make money for yourself, not enough to support a big company!) By the way, what would you recommend as a good way to get up a functional web site quickly and cheaply that handles these newsletter types of functions? I love this thread!! Rick
Hi Rick, Well, I didn't exactly make a "jump" per se. I grew up loving both computers and the stock market. So I guess you could say my experience/knowledge base in both areas developed in parallel (at the same time) in many respects. I started programming/building computers in 1980 as a Freshman in highschool. At almost the same time (around 1983 or 1984) I became equally interested in economics and playing the stock market. So, along the way, I really have done both things over a large part of my life growing up. It wasn't that I was a computer professional and suddenly woke up one day and said "I think I'll do something in the stock market". I had already been playing the market as a daytrader while running my computer business. When the Internet came along, I added web design services to my computer business, and also started to explore the internet for services relating to my trading, etc. At the same time, I was running a newsletter business on the weekends - both as a means to make additional money (for trading) and also in order to teach myself graphic design and desktop publishing. After a while, everything sort of just merged into daytraders.com My passion, still, is a mixture of computers and the stock market. So I live/eat/breath both every day of my life. I never take a vacation (which drives my girlfriend crazy), because I love working on computers and playing the markets so much. So for me, my knowledge base in both areas is effectively most of my life - both past and also on a daily basis. To answer your question about the newsletter website, it just depends on what you are trying to setup. Myself, I like using a mixture of HTML, javascript, PHP and MySQL to build a website. You might be able to find something already out there. When it comes to sending out the newsletter via e-mail, you basically just need a system that will generate a mass e-mail from a flat file list of addresses (or perhaps from a MySQL query). I would recommend using either PHP or Perl as the interface between your SQL database (where the customers are maintained) and whatever your mail transfer agent is (I like Postfix myself, which is a sendmail clone). The website just needs to show what you offer, then provide some method for maintaining/creating customer accounts, etc. Any programmer skilled at creating websites with SQL back end databases should have no problem setting something up for you. Then you just write the newsletter and send it out. Ray
FYI for what it is worth. I bought a 2003 360 and put $3,100 in maintence costs the first year and $2,700 the second year. The car is well worth it and drives great! I have put about 4000 miles on it so far. It should not need any more maintence for another 12 months. I hope that helps. Kevin.
Havent followed this all the way through but YOUR TIMING BELT AIN'T GONNA BREAK!! Buy it right and your engine won't need replacement, just maintenance, care and some attention...which is the FUN part.. Cheers and good luck...
Last I heard, World of Warcraft did 700M+ in annual sales and that was several years ago. It's way more than that now. The larger online game companies are making close to or more than 1M per DAY. Ray: $300k per month would result in more than a $500k check to the IRS even if the $300k was shared with your business partner. I need your accountant or you need my calculator. Back to the original topic: If you have a stable future and you can do it somewhat comfortably, why wait? If it's a stretch, be careful. The economic outlook of the US isn't looking so hot for 08. Hell, since the dollar might tank, you might as well put your money into a Ferrari.
$300K (actually around $325K) was our highest peak month, but keep in mind, that's a gross figure, not a net figure. I don't know what the other months leading up to (and after) that were, but they were in the high $200K's as I recall. Also, that year I think my partner made around 1.5M total (including bonuses, etc). I know he was seeing some big checks each month. So even though margins were up there, net was a split between two people. You also have to take into account capital gains/losses, etc. because I also trade for a living (and as I recall, that was around the same time the market crashed on me - and a lot of people - due to the tech bubble crash). I don't know how it all factors in as far as what you ultimately pay in taxes or how short term capital gains impact income, etc.. but then that's why I use a very good accounting firm They handle that stuff and tell me "Ray, we need a check for XXX amount". I don't have the checks in front of me, but I recall it was up there. $500K or something like that - but I could be off by $100K either way. I don't remember without looking it up. It was also almost 10 years ago, so I'm just ball parking some of the figures. The original point was when I bought my 355, it amounted to about 2 weeks of cash flow. I figured if there was ever going to be a time to buy a Ferrari, that was the time! Ray
+1 Exactly. If it's comfortable, do it (everyone should own a Ferrari at least once in their life). If it's a stretch, as JChoice says, be careful. Ray
Thanks for all the information, Ray. It's very inspiring that you parlayed your hobby into a successful business enterprise! Rick
