Some months ago, when I was looking through various microfinance sites (for opportunities to work as well as volunteer), I ran across one called Women for Women International that intrigued me because of their sponsorship program. One of the toughest things for me (and probably many others) has always been trying to find enough time between working long hours at a full-time job and spending time with family to squeeze in and give back to the world in an effective way.

When I read about WFWI’s sponsorship program, I decided that it was probably just what I was realistically looking for. Here’s how it works: for about $27 a month, you basically get to sponsor a woman participating in the WFWI program who lives in a war-torn area. Currently, the choices listed on the WFWI site are Afghanistan, Boznia and Herzegovina, the Dem. Rep. of the Congo, Kosova, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Sudan. I opted to just be matched to wherever the greatest need was, and a few weeks ago I found out I was matched to someone in Kosova.

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Earlier last year, I signed up for Vizu Polls as an income source for this blog. Income from Vizu has been very small, but paying publishers to display polls from interested parties seemed like a decent and interesting business idea. When there isn’t a paying poll to display, Vizu displays basic demographic polls for visitors to answer, and I’ve collected the findings here. I’m sure the data isn’t completely clean or scientific — I don’t know that they have a mechanism in place to prevent double answers, and of course, it’s garbage in, garbage out — but I find the results fun to look at anyway.

Do the results below describe you?

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Using the SMF add-in from Randy at Yahoo! groups, the spreadsheet now automatically looks up SPY’s performance on a particular date rather than requiring you to manually enter in SPY prices, a real time saver.

Thanks for doing this Jae! You can go to the link above to find the spreadsheet as well as his instructions, and while you’re at it, check out his blog and “about” page.

Sorry to everyone for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience. I’ve since upgraded Wordpress so that, hopefully, security is a bit better, though it never goes away entirely…..

Thanks very much for conducting this interview. I’m curious on how you first got the idea to start a blog about unusual business ideas?

Well, I am sort of addicted to such stories and I wanted to keep them all in one place. That’s how this blog started. And then the blog took off.

Where do you get the content/material for this blog? Do you write everything yourself? If you do, how do you find the time? If not, where do you find the content?

99% of content is not mine. I think I have a few posts that werewritten by me, but most are reprints. Most of them come from magazines (Entrepreneur, Forbes, Business 2.0, Startup Journal) plus Springwise.com.

One of the toughest things about maintaining multiple blogs as you do is scalability. How do you manage to keep on top of all of your sites?

Well, you can’t if you have to write all the content yourself. But if you reprint content, it’s not a problem. There is a lot of fuss about printing other people’s content - both moral and legal. However, all my blogs are about topics that interest me personally. For instance, I love documentaries - so I have a blog about that (called Best Free Documentaries). I get e-mails every day about that blog. People thank me about starting it - because they come to one place and it’s all there. Every day there is a new documentary. You can go to Google Video yourself and enter ‘documentaries’ in search. But you’ll get good videos and bad videos. The ‘this is a documentary me and my buddy Mike did for a school project kind’.

So it does pay to collect all the good stuff and post it in one place. And since I do read about weird businesses daily and browse Google Video daily, having so many blogs isn’t a problem for me.

Bloggers span the spectrum when it comes to the question of monetization and commercial blogging. You mentioned that you gave AdSense a shot, which didn’t pan out as well as you hoped, but ultimately you were very successful. I’m sure many readers are interested in how you managed to become a successful commercial blogger. Can you give us a glimpse?

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In this post, we’ll look at a slightly more complicated example and show a couple of tips and tricks for making VLOOKUP work correctly.

By the way, I’ve received a couple of comments and thanks for my previous post and just want to encourage readers to let me know if there are other examples of functions or situations they face that they need help with. They make a great source for future posts on this site :)

In our last example, we had a simple, two-column list of names and types of animals. In this post, we’ll take a look at a list of employee names and data, say, for calculating commissions for sales people. Here’s what our data looks like (on all images in this post, click to enlarge):

As you can see, we’re given employees’ last and first names, their base salaries, their bonus percentage, and the % of the year that they were employees. We’re also given a unique identifier in the form of an employee number. Let’s examine the data a bit further.

First, what we should notice is that there are employees with the same last and first names. There’s an Andrew Anderson as well as an Andrew Cobb. And a Penny and Jim Dee.

Remember that VLOOKUP will either return the first match it finds in a list. In this case, if we were to use VLOOKUP to lookup a list of last names or first names, VLOOKUP would always return Andrew Anderson’s data (if we were looking using the “First Name” field) or Penny’s data (if we were looking using the “Last Name” field).

So, what to do?

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Sadly, as most companies seem to rely on Excel as a poor-man’s database of sorts (a totally unscalable solution and prone to errors with every revision, but don’t get me started), once you know vlookup, it’s likely to become one of your most often used Excel functions.

So, let’s get started with a very simple example of what vlookup is all about. Suppose you had the following table:

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Description of Property: Guaranteed California Lottery Payments

Payable as follows:

$ 19,999.98 net on or around 12/05/2014
$ 19,999.98 net on or around 12/05/2015
$ 19,999.98 net on or around 12/05/2016

Encumbrances Note: None senior to Federal Tax Lien

Minimum Bid: $ 24,000.00

So is this a good deal? It’s a pretty straightforward present value problem, but you’d have to do some sensitivity analyses around some key assumptions (discount rate, tax rate, etc.) to figure out how much your maximum bid should be. How about it?

A series of searches for variations on the keywords “2001fp vertical stripe problem” on Google eventually landed me on a Boing Boing Gadgets blog post written just earlier this month that described a vertical stripe display problem with a Dell 2001fp that was as close to the problem that I was experiencing as I could find. Happily, I scrolled down to look through the comments on suggestions for how to fix this, only to find a comment from someone who sounded like he did LCD repairs for a living that explained that the issue was not likely something I could fix and was probably due to an overheating graphics board :(

After re-reading the post and comments, I noticed that the blogger also said that Dell had read his entry and contacted him, suggesting that his monitor might still be covered under its 3-year warranty. Luckily, my hubby is an organized person who saves containers and original boxes, and we still had our packing slip from the original box that the 2001fp came in. Keeping expectations low, I called up Dell and explained the situation.

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I know, but I find both the pen and the bag ugly and unappealing, independent of their price tags. They’re just not aesthetically pleasing designs. Maybe it’s just me.

The pen reminds me of HR Giger’s work, which I think is best suited for for sci-fi films like Alien. It doesn’t look comfortable to use.

At first, I decided that there was absolutely no question that the psychographic target market for this pen were people who want to collect brand-named, ultra-luxury goods for the sake of showing off or having them. So what if that’s a narrowly defined set of people? Just find the handful who are willing to buy the 27 limited editions you made and your done with your pen sales for the next 5 years.

And then I read this article, about how another Montblanc limited edition pen called the Solitaire Royal that sold for $175K when it was first released is now worth up to 10 times that amount. That’s a CAGR of nearly 20% over 13 years. Sheesh.

What’s perplexing is that the Daily Treasury Yield Curve for the 4-week bill dipped to 2.47% (!) just yesterday, August 20, 2007.

I was feeling good about my decision yesterday, but I was really surprised today.

I guess I’ve learned my lesson: for the 4-week T-bill, I might as well stick to laddering. I only lock up my money for a month’s time, and it seems the yield curve is not necessarily a good predictor of results.

Last week, I gave it a try and wasn’t disappointed. Their audio downloads are spoken word-for-word versions of each issue. Since my car can play mp3 CDs, I now have a great system for keeping up with a great magazine I never had enough time to read each week: I download each issue, copy each one over to a CD-RW disc, and listen to it to and from my drive to work each day. There are usually 70+ chapters, which pretty much fits into a week’s worth of commute. Each week, I overwrite the previous edition for the next week’s drive. (Supposedly, each CD-RW these days can be erased and rewritten 1000 times.)

At $8.99 for a 10-pack of CD-RWs at Target, this turns out to be a pretty cheap way to stay informed.

Truth be told, prior to using the audio edition, I don’t think I’d ever actually read every single article each week in that magazine. Now, no more.

In a way, I find listening to the politics and regional news a bit like reading a geeky version of tabloid magazines. What worldwide leaders are abusing power? Who tried to do what this week? I’d never noticed the dry humor in these articles as much when I was reading them, which I guess is a compliment to the readers. That they can make articles about governments, politics, and even economics worth listening to is saying a lot.

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The catch is that the mechanics of the award are a bit unusual: rather than getting $500 as part of my next paycheck or receiving some sort of gift certificate, what I have to do is buy something (or some things) and then file an expense report with receipts to get $500 reimbursed.

The good thing about this, I’m told, is that this avoids payroll taxes. On the other hand, it also means I have to actually buy something.

Being the inefficient decision maker that I am when it comes to actually spending money on myself, the most pragmatic thing I’ve come up with is to purchase a Visa gift card at Safeway for $500 and pay the processing fee ($5?) so that I can spend the money at my leisure and wherever I’d like. (Or at least spend it at a more leisurely pace than if I had to buy something for $500 in the next month and half. I understand most these gift cards come with other hidden fees depending on when and how you use them. Er, if anyone has advice on which gift card with the best trade offs between flexibility of use and fees, let me know.)

The award certificate clearly states that I’m free to expense $500 for whatever I’d like, but obviously, my manager and Accounts Payable will get to see what I buy when approving my expense report. Not that I’d buy anything that weird, of course.

What would you buy?

Below is a table I pulled from the US Treasury’s Daily Treasury Yield Curve site showing daily yield curve rates for 4-week through 30-year Treasuries:

I’ve been continuing my laddering and buying 4- and 13-week treasuries on a recurring basis for several weeks now since, being a resident of California, I benefit from T-bills’ nice feature of being exempt from state income taxes.

But if the current yield is any indicator of upcoming auction results next week, the 9.6% tax shield on interest that I get is no longer a sufficient enough benefit to overcome the big drop in rates, especially when taxable money market funds and CDs are yielding around 5%.

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I’ve been trying to solve this problem for sometime with no success. I have also attempted using your information (How to calculate NPV) on the website, got close but still didnt get the solution.

Can you please help? Here is the question.

A fashion clothing company is considering investing in new machinery to improve its productivity over the next 5 years. You have been given the following information:

Sales are predicted to increase by $1,500,000 in year 1 and continue at this level.

The new machinery costs $10 million payable immediately.

It will be depreciated over 5 years on a straight line basis.

All the old machinery can be sold for $2 million.

The new equipment is more complicated and will cost $160,000 per year every year to maintain, as against the $100,000 for the old machines, but other running costs will be reduced by $120,000.

Finance for the purchase needs to be raised via a loan which requires annual interest payments of $300,000.

Wages will be reduced by $100,000 due to increased automation.

At the end of the five years the machinery will have a scrap value of $2million.

The feasibility study for this project (already completed and paid for) cost $200,000.

The cost of capital on investment appraisal for this level of risk is 7.5%.

Identify which of these items would be included in an NPV calculation and calculate the NPV. You may ignore tax and inflation.

This sounds like a typical NPV problem that you’d find in a business school finance class, and simplifies things by ignoring tax and inflation.

I’m laying out my reasoning and solution here, but I welcome any comments from others, as there may be other interpretations and I might just be plain wrong. (The beauty of a blog, right?)

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