[DTF notes: Article kept for historical reference only.
We do NOT recommend any "high yield programs" or "money games" - they were all ponzi/scams/duds! However, you may still find some other useful, relevant, or interesting information here.]
by Frederick Mann & "DL"
Copyright 2004 BigBooster ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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"Thank you Frederick for publishing the testimonial from DL/Texas. It was not a testimonial -- like so many we read -- saying that DL was now a millionaire, living the high life -- but a very 'real' sounding testimonial, from a very 'real' person. I have been receiving information from you now for approximately 2 years, and until recently have done absolutely nothing with it -- didn't even bother to read a lot of the emails. But, a couple of weeks ago I did read several thoroughly, and have now invested some money in SNWBS -- thank you. Once that starts paying me, I will invest a little in another program. Last week I 'met' Mike Brescia [THINK RIGHT NOW!] through BigBooster, and was very impressed. I have ordered one tape to see how well it works, and have earmarked another 4 that I would like to have. Many thanks Frederick for the many hundreds of hours you have put into your sites and all the articles you have written. I hope that before long, I will be able to send you a testimonial similar to DL/Texas." -- DJ (2/2/04; Geraldton, Western Australia) Frederick Mann: As DL indicates in the interview, people are complex. It's difficult to tell what a particular person needs to do in order to become sufficiently capable and competent to succeed at making money on the Internet. It may be necessary to become an unstoppable self-developer! For some, THINK RIGHT NOW! may be a great place to start! |
On January 24th, 2004 I (Frederick Mann) received an email from "DL" in Texas:
"I have been able to use your example and recommendations to become entirely debt free, build a small fully paid for home on my own fully paid for property, and live entirely off my online income. Thank you Frederick."
I asked DL if I could use the above as a testimonial and also if he would be willing to be interviewed by me. He agreed, emailing me on January 25th, 2004:
"It is pretty incredible the difference you've made in my life. I've had this dream for years and never was able to make it happen. I have a good education and I've had a few pretty good jobs, but never could seem to make myself stick with them for more than a year or two, and I never seemed to save anything. After I quit I would spend a period of time on the street or wandering around when my last paycheck ran out.My present circumstances would not impress some people. My monthly income is not large (but enough to live comfortably). I meant to hold onto my last job a little longer, while I continued to rapidly build my online income, but I was working as a long haul truck driver, and when my license came up for renewal in California the DMV sent me a notice that a thumbprint and SSN were now required by law. It was the last straw. Thanks to you I had a way to tell them to stuff it."
The interview below was conducted between 1/25/04 and 1/31/04:
FM: What is your age, marital status, etc?
DL: I'm 59 and divorced from my second wife now, since the fall of 2002. I've been pretty much a loner and wanderer for much of my life.
I had been very interested in freedom issues since the late sixties when I read Harry Browne's 'How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.' I had a good computer and a couple months severance pay and a LOT of motivation to make some money off the Internet.
FM: When did you start following some of my recommendations?
DL: I came across your website around the fall of 2001. I was just about to be laid off from a very good telecommuting job for the printed circuit board division of a Silicone Valley company. My brother is a talented PCB designer, he and got me a job as a support person, a CAD librarian and virtual parts designer working under him.
FM: How much capital did you start with?
DL: Well I initially put $200 into e-gold. I used an exchanger I found on the e-gold website called Flat Rate Gold Exchange. It turned out to be a scam, and other than one lame excuse email I never heard from them or my money again. My first valuable lesson in my new field of endeavor. I had started with several MLM type ventures, some of which were promoted on your website. I spent a lot of long hard dedicated hours posting, promoting and spending money on various promotional programs. I must have put in 2 or three thousand bucks and none of them made me a penny except the Gideon Group promoting Zibycom. I had a little success with that, but it eventually kind of petered out for me also.
I had discovered that the goals I had in life were not really compatible with the beautiful Russian lady I had met in Moscow and brought back to the US the year before. The Build Freedom website had given me a lot of ideas about how I wanted to arrange my life. In the final analysis I just couldn't bring myself to go back to job slavery for the foreseeable future to support her in the style to which she wanted to become accustomed. I was really not interested in the "American Dream" at all anymore, if I ever had been.
While I took my couple of months severance trying to see how I could make a living on the Internet, to her disgust, she went off to Russia for an extended visit. When she came back I was broke, and I had discovered I actually didn't need her.
She moved in with my sister, with whom she had become good friends and soon met and married a man who was happy to give her what she wanted. I moved into a tiny little old camp trailer I owned which I moved to a cheap trailer park at the end of the flight path of Bakersfield's biggest airport. There I endured triple digit temperatures without airconditioning while I continued to struggle with online money making.
I read what you said on your site about "passive" programs being the best chance for the average person to make money online. I had already borrowed some money from my Mom to pay my pathetic space rental and food, etc. I went back and borrowed $1,000 to invest in some HYIPs. (I know, I know!) I did not listen to what you said about how to distribute the money, but stupidly put most of it into some schemes that paid like 50% per week, which quickly folded, Like Alpha Alliance, Privacy Gold and Diversifund. Some of the others were pretty good programs but were at or near the end of their somewhat truncated productive periods and I didn't make a lot off them, like Gold Capsule.
FM: With which programs have you enjoyed the most success?
DL: I did make a bit of money with a little 1% per day ponzi called Sunny Fund. I got into CBLH, Celtic Traders and a couple others I'm still in like Capital Building Club and SCIG. But basically I had to go back to work, driving a beer truck to pay back my Mom. I became suspicious that I had some guilt remaining unresolved, and was quite likely being unconsciously self-defeating in my behavior. I decided to follow your example and let Mike Goldstein at "Idenics" give me a hand. After my sessions with Mike on the telephone, things began to change for me. It didn't seem to me like there was any dramatic change in my behavior patterns, but things did start rapidly improving. It felt like my "luck" had changed. I got a job with a long haul trucking company, sold my trailer and lived in my truck, staying with my Mom when I got home to Bakersfield. Therefore I was able to plow a lot of my wages into HYIP programs.
[Comment from Mike Goldstein: "DL says that after his sessions with me he felt his "luck" changed for the better but he couldn't really "put his finger on" what had really changed in his behavior. This type of thing is not all that unusual. Many times people don't know what really happened, just that things are different. It's kind of an odd phenomenon when a person really deals with some piece of their case, or when something that has been on automatic for a long time comes off of automatic and they now have control over things. I've seen instances where I've worked on some issue that has been bugging a person for years, it gets finally handled, and afterward they don't even remember what the issue was or that the work we did was instrumental in handling it!"]
FM: How was the work you did with Idenics different from other things you've done to improve yourself?
DL: As I may have mentioned, some other things did have positive effects for me. Rebirthing, or vivation was once such practice. Some things I did in Scientology helped. However, I found Idenics to be the quickest, least unpleasant, and the most cost effective thing I ever did to handle my own blocks to success and happiness. Many of these places that start out helping people end up being subverted from their original purpose and end up exploiting people or dramatizing their own inner conflicts through their clients. I found it hard to believe that a few short easy sessions conducted over the telephone could make such an astounding difference in a persons level of success and happiness, but the proof is in the pudding as they say.
FM: Would you recommend Idenics to other people with issues they want to resolve? If so, why do you feel it would be a good idea for them to try Idenics?
DL: Yes, I definitely do recommend Idenics. I have a page on my website telling people about it, I have recommended it to others and plan to do it even more often in the future. They can bypass a lot of unnecessary expense and effort by using Idenics facilitation and get a lot more gain in a small period of time. Maybe there is something better, but I have yet to discover it, and I have always had a lot of interest in this area. Despite all my experience and research into such things I have never found anything superior in convenience, cost-effectiveness or desired results.
FM: Which money-making programs are your current favorites?
DL: Well I will always have a tender spot in my heart for the Nova-Lights programs. The first program for which I really implemented one of your compounding strategies with real success was with "Star-Game" (SG) I had been in some programs that had made me some money, some that folded and left me nothing, but it was pretty much hit and miss. I really started to hit my stride at the beginning of 2003 only a year ago. In January I made a $50 spend to SG. I made another $50 spend a little over a week later. Then I neglected it for a couple of months while I waited to see if it was going to stick around.In mid April I looked at it again and it had become $250 with daily compounding. I started to put in $100 per month and soon took out my original principal. Now I was in the "can't lose" situation. Within six months I had back in my pocket what I had spent into SG and there was still $1,000 compounding away every day for me. That's when I got really excited and the light went on upstairs. It became a steady bi-weekly stream of income to fund other programs, while it also continued to grow toward the "$10,000 strategy" mentioned on your site. I did the same with Pegasus, Get Weekly Profit and others. Lately they have had some problems, but in my opinion the admin have shown a remarkable amount of responsibility and integrity in the way they have handled the situation. They could serve as a real example for some other program admins that get lost in denial, and finally just go into overwhelm and blow with whatever dough is left from the ruins.
FM: The Nova-Lights programs died on January 28, 2004; how does that affect your overall situation?
DL: It hurts a little. But I don't believe in putting too large a portion of my money into any one program no matter how good it looks. I made a good profit off of the Nova-Lights programs, and am well ahead if I never get a cent back in refunds. All such programs promise refunds when they close, few are sincere. Of those even fewer actually are able to repay, yet I have received refunds of principal, and I just suspect Nova-Lights may be one of the few that makes them. We will just have to wait and see. As I mentioned before, with these programs it really finally clicked that even a small amount compounded daily can add up quickly with a legit program, and that you need to take earnings as they begin to accumulate and put them into other programs. I am into 26 active programs at this time, including all but one of your Perfectly Performing Private Programs. Also, some I got from Olga Fortunato, Leland Rothmore, and Boulat Rafikov, among others. Much of those programs were entered with money from Pegasus and Star Game. The knowledge I got from you, that has worked for me in the real world, will stay with me, and will put money in my pocket for years to come.
I also have enjoyed and made good money with ComShares and Cash Domain. I like the use of the Euro with ComShares. It impresses me as being one more dimension of the diversification idea as it applies to currency.
FM: Are you following the strategy I recommend for ComShares?
DL: Well, yes, I think so. I have opened another ComShares account under myself from my other e-gold account #1136912 if that is what you mean. I am very excited about ComShares.
FM: Along the way, have you suffered any severe losses?
DL: Well, other than the money I lost right at the beginning, there was a period right after the 9/11 tragedy when it seemed a lot of programs that were piggybacking off some of the others like Diversifund went belly up. I lost $100 here and $200 there, but it taught me something about the nature of true diversification.
It was still a little discouraging, but for the most part I could shrug it off. The last real loss I experienced was with "UnderGround Trades." I really didn't expect them to fail so quickly; they looked good to me. I think they took in a lot of people, including some I had believed were pretty savvy. I had put in more than I usually do with a new program. I had $1,600 of my gold in it and a paper profit of almost a thousand when it went under after only a couple of months. After deducting my referrals I had a net loss of $1,500. No heart breaker, but it stings when your total capital is no bigger than mine was at the time.
FM: Can you tell me about your attitudes or inner strengths that enable you to continue despite the setbacks?
DL: Frederick, there has been a time, a couple of times in my life; when I had my back right up against the wall, and I could see it was all over and there was nothing left I could say or do. When that happened I found that I suddenly found myself shifted to a sort of external perspective. I sort of let go. When I did that it was as though I discovered that under all the illusions and confusions of life there is actually a layer of something like solid bedrock, and none of the things we think are so important in this life really mean a damn thing. It then turned out that things were not as dire as they appeared to be at the time, and it has been my experience that this is nearly always the case. Things are never as black as they can seem right at the time of a sudden loss or threat.
After that its easier to look on these things as a game, and stop taking them so damn seriously. When you lighten up a little the losses seem to mean a lot less, and how you play the game and what you learn from it means a lot more. I think you then also find that you have less losses, and a lot more fun.
FM: Please tell me about your formal education?
DL: I got an AA degree at my local community college in Bakersfield. Went on a two year volunteer mission for my church, I was a devout Mormon at the time. And then attended BYU in Utah where I got my BS in Psychology. I entered Grad school intending to be a clinical Psychologist, but soon got disillusioned about the profession, and I was married. We got pregnant and I had to quit and get a job. I had taken some computer courses in Cobol and Fortran computer programming and was able to land an entry level position with the Contra Costa County Data Processing Department in Martinez, CA.
FM: How have you further educated yourself?
DL: I am a voracious reader and although I have wasted a lot of hours with novels of questionable value, including a lot of Sci-fi which I enjoy, I have also read a lot in the pop psych and human potential areas. The text from "A Course in Miracles" was very helpful to me. Despite the beauty of the writing, it requires concentration to stick with and follow what the Author is saying. I found it really gives me a sense of peace and unjangles some of the anxieties I often find bubbling around under the surface of my mind when I read it.
I'm also interested in natural and physical sciences. I have also had a chance to live in many parts of the country and observe a lot of different kinds of people. I lived for several months at "Consciousness Village" in the Sierra Nevadas when Leonard Orr the founder of Rebirthing owned it. I did a little training and coaching under his direction. Also met and took a course from Phil Laut who together with Jim Leonard founded the Vivation school of Rebirthing.
Incidentally, Phil also wrote the book 'Money is My Friend' which I probably could have benefitted a great deal from. I also took some courses at the Church of Scientology, and read all the books of L. Ron Hubbard. I have worked as an underground hard rock drift miner in Arizona. I lived for a while among the street people of Seattle and San Francisco. Rode freight trains. Worked for a while in Hollywood as a bit player and extra, and met a lot of celebrities.
FM: Did any of your jobs contribute to your ability to earn a full-time online income?
DL: Yes, both of my computer jobs were helpful, in fact without the last job with Dynarc I don't know when, if ever, I would have gotten the idea to try making an online income. I hadn't realized the Internet had come so far. I also had some background and success in personal sales, although I had no love of it. My erratic lifestyle also made it relatively easy for me to live very frugally. If you start from scratch like I did you need the self-discipline to put some money aside to invest in programs, and pay your dues, while learning the ropes. This gave me the edge, or "jump-start," that enabled me to be independent and debt free so quickly. Otherwise I still would have gotten there, but it would have been a lot longer trip.
FM: I've recently become very interested in the "Unstoppable Factor," particularly as covered in the excellent book 'Unstoppable: 45 Powerful Stories of Perseverance and Triumph for People Just Like You.' How unstoppable do you consider yourself?
DL: Totally 100% unstoppable. The only thing that has ever even had the slightest effect at deflecting me or turning me aside was the realization that I was trying to do two diametrically conflicting things at once. By that I mean achieve a goal that contained two impossibly conflicting elements, or trying endlessly to have and be something that never was and never will be in this world.
That's when I realized one's greatest strength is often also one's greatest drawback, Frederick, due to the bipolar nature of this world. A person who knows he is unstoppable will butt his head against an impenetrable wall for years of wasted time because he doesn't know the meaning of the word quit. A persons tolerance for pain is truly awesome sometimes, but it does have a limit, thank goodness.
FM: What did you learn from your parents about money?
DL: You know, my Dad had a pretty good relationship to money and excellent self-esteem, but he was very poor at teaching it. In fact the lessons I learned were the very opposite of what he would have wanted to teach me consciously. I really learned no connection between my behavior and receiving. I learned to keep my opinions to myself and passively do as I was told in order to receive. To me, personal ability, self-motivation, work and knowledge, were totally unrelated to the rewards a person got in life. I was split off from any responsibility for my own abundance. My Dad actually shielded me from decision making and its consequences, and I developed no real sense of responsibility at all.
Of course at some point I had violated my own personal integrity and buried the guilt of self-betrayal, and the loss of self-respect that resulted from these decisions was significant. These would come back to haunt me many times in my life, until I got some of these issues handled.
I worked summers on my Dad's cotton and melon farm and he put all my wages away for my "volunteer" mission for the church. Everything he thought I needed he bought for me. He paid for my education. I failed to learn the true meaning of responsibility on my own until very late in my life. I also developed a very low estimation of myself as you can probably appreciate. While I give her full credit for my love of reading and literature, I tended to mirror my Mom's attitude, which was pretty passive, negative, depressed and dependent in those days. I've come to understand that my parents are both pretty remarkable people, considering their accomplishments, and I no longer blame them for the problems I had. Nevertheless I do consider my start just a bit handicapped in the productivity and money- creating areas of life.
FM: Did you learn any specific money skills from your parents?
DL: I did have some good examples from my Dad. He had a knack for using numbers to make realistic estimates and potential earnings from various money making propositions and projects. He was a very practical and grounded person. Without even a high school education he became quite cultured and eventually the head of a couple of corporations that employed many PhDs and highly educated people. Many of these people were totally impractical, and if left to themselves would be totally unable to create and market a product that people would buy. My Dad had an ability to confront potential trouble sources and handle them with charm and tact. As I said, I had many good examples, but it was only as I got the confront and confidence to actually personally apply what I had seen modeled, that these examples began to do me any good. I still remain rather ungrounded, dreamy and fuzzy in my thinking and behavior at times. I'm afraid my Dad despaired of me sometimes because of that. He used to call me "unconscious."
FM: What attitudes about money did you learn from your parents (good or bad)?
DL: I guess money itself was fairly neutral in our family. We had some of the usual opinions about money you get from a family with a religious orientation. However, they did make the distinction between money being the root of all evil, and a greedy desire for money above all else being the root of all evil.
FM: What emotions (good or bad) do you associate with money as a result of how your parents raised you?
DL: On the "good" side I guess a certain amount of pride that money meant you were pleasing in the sight of God and was the expected and deserved reward for hard work done well. On the bad side was the generally accepted, but unspoken guilt, that if you were really loving and righteous you would give all your surplus wealth for the work of the Lord. My Dad actually did give an honest 10% of all he earned and quite a bit more to the church, as well as raising a family of nine children.
Of course, even the good has its drawbacks, since I now think a healthier attitude would be that hard work and struggle are not necessarily the price of abundance. My attitude at the time was that I might as well resign myself to not having any, as I had no chance of getting any of my own.
FM: What money-associated behaviors have you mimicked from your parents?
DL: I mainly have mimicked my mother I'm afraid. She has always been rather impulsive with money. Seldom having it, but when she does spending it like a sailor on shoreleave, with no real thought for tomorrow. Goodness, I hope she doesn't read this. Actually she had the same problem I did. She came from an incredibly poor family of Okies that came west in the dust bowl days. She married my Dad at 14 years of age, and I have already alluded to how he was a "take charge" Aries kind of guy who gave her no more responsibility in the money area than he did us kids. He made all those decisions and he was pretty good at it. He gave his life in a sense to leave her well off and she blew all the money in two or three years. She has finally gotten to where she has a pretty successful little business of her own and lives a very comfortable life.
FM: Do you suppose any of what you learned from your parents, your formal education, or your jobs hindered your ability to earn a full-time income online in any way? Did you need to unlearn anything that you learned from your parents, your formal education, or your jobs?
DL: And how! I think the biggest obstacles I had to overcome to be successful in life were the things I learned, or was resisting, from all three of those sources. This world's schools and institutions are not designed to make you an independent thinker, innovator or entrepreneur. Probably my Dad's greatest advantage in his success in life was that he did have so little formal education, and no family life. He was an orphan and escaped from an orphanage at an early age to make it on his own. The orphanage was an institution and a tough one, but it encouraged self-reliance and responsibility, because that was the only way that it could survive during the depression. It was totally self-sufficient. They didn't get a lot of support from the state as would be the case today. They raised all their own food and made most of their own clothing.
FM: What are your current attitudes toward money and how do you think they might change in future?
DL: I look more on it now like a flow of energy and a way of keeping score in the game of life. I still think that the eventual Real Work and contribution of my life may have little to do with my money motivation. Nevertheless, often your first responsibility is to take care of your own needs in life before you can indulge yourself in finding and doing the work you truly love, especially when little market exists for it. Practically speaking one may need to produce some of what the culture and certain of its manipulators have induced people to think they want. Or you may have to align your product with those things considered wanted and needed if you desire to become comfortable financially. And you need to be comfortable financially if you want to have the leisure to be creative in the areas you choose. Civilizations have only progressed to the point they have given at least some of their citizens leisure to pursue their own interests creatively. Nevertheless I have sometimes felt myself uncomfortable with that sort of compromise. A sort of misfit.
People will pay for what they think they want, not what you think they really need. You must either market it in a way that leads them to want it, or resign yourself to producing what they will actually pay for. That is the nature of reality in the marketplace. This means you have to show people how it can benefit them. I think you may have to make some of those compromises if you want to start out making money in HYIP. You may need to invest in some programs in which only those who know what they are doing will make money, and the masses of ignoramuses will get hurt. Because ponzis are easier to find when you are starting out than nice safe long-term programs. Many of the people you promote to will blame you for their losses, instead of the fact that they didn't follow instructions. The reason I like HYIP in spite of this is not just the convenience and financial privacy it offers me personally, but that I see it as building the infrastructure of freedom.
FM: You earlier mentioned Harry Browne's 'How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World'; have you also read 'Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom: An Owner's Manual for Life' by Gerry Spence?
DL: Oh NO! How could I have missed that? I have heard of Gerry Spence. I have something to look forward to. Thanks again, Frederick.
FM: Were there any notable obstacles you had to overcome in order to consistently earn money online?
DL: I had to overcome a sort of mental laziness. I had a tendency to make decisions on impulse, and I had difficulty being consistent about keeping records. Both of these things can really bite you in this field. I also needed to develop a certain amount of patience and live very frugally for a while to build my portfolio. Fortunately I had learned to be very comfortable with a minimal lifestyle. This stood me in good stead while I was plowing everything I could spare into my programs.
FM: Do you consider yourself good with numbers?
DL: Not particularly. I first got the idea of going into Psych because I was under the impression that it was one profession you didn't need any higher math to succeed in. I didn't know until later I'd have to plow through advanced statistics classes to graduate. It was a squeaker. However, I did get As in my one course of Business Math at Bakersfield College.
FM: What are the most important lessons you've learned in order to be able to earn a full-time online income?
DL: Keep good records. Be aware of and try to pay attention to the little cues and clues that tend to reveal bad programs and incompetent people. Usually, whenever you make a mistake that costs you a lot you later realize that there were little signs that you ignored, clues which went right past you that you can see clearly in hindsight. Ask questions of yourself and others. Be patient, this is like growing a tree not winning the lottery. You plant a seed, some will grow and others wither right away. Water it and tend to it, you can force it a little, but rapid growth is usually shaky and weak, and can collapse on you. After a while you have several growing concerns which reach a level where they take off. Just keep adding a few new ones and culling out the losers and you will eventually succeed.
FM: In what currencies (e-gold, IntGold, etc.) are most of your earnings?
DL: Most of it is in e-gold. With them I tend to believe there is actually some gold somewhere backing up their digital currency. I have obtained documentation from them and it looks good to me. I avoided Osgold and had nothing in it when they failed. E-gold has been around a while and their admin are of proven competence, and they have a lot of infrastructure that supports them. There are rumors you hear about failures to take effective action against criminals and hackers, and on the other hand being a little too quick to freeze accounts. Maybe there is some truth to it. In any case, I think there are some competition coming along that are a little more user friendly that will give them a run for their money. I like EVOcash, and am increasing my holdings in that. Their customer service is good and I like the new EMO services. I haven't really used much Intgold. They are based in the US which in my mind makes them quite susceptible to changes in the financial privacy laws, which as you have noticed are not going in an encouraging direction. I have an Intgold account that I have lost the passwords to, and while their automated responder will send me my primary password, they have never answered my repeated emails asking how to get the secondary password. Without it the account is useless. This does not impress me. Netpay I have been using for their ATM card but they took a black eye recently which I will comment on later. E-Bullion I haven't had occasion to use.
FM: You may have to set up another IntGold account -- and make sure you don't lose the passwords. (It's possible that your emails to IntGold have been regarded as dumb and time-wasting.) Personally, I'm very pleased with e-gold, IntGold, Evocash, and e-Bullion. Have you taken any special security measures to prevent thieves from getting your log-in details and raiding your accounts?
DL: Yes, I did that. I also talked to another associate who also thinks well of IntGold, and he gave me a phone number I could use to reach the Admin of the program. I dislike the phone, but I will get around to calling him eventually. I had a few bucks left in the old account, and while it was careless of me to lose the passwords, I still would have appreciated the courtesy of a response. I think no less is owed someone who has entrusted his money to you. It is not good business to offend customers, even dumb time-wasting ones, whenever it can be avoided. As a result of not taking a moment to answer my dumb time-wasting email they have lost a few dollars that they might have made from my account, but more importantly, they have a former customer who may influence many others in a negative way because of his experience with them.
And yes, I think security is vital for anyone doing HYIP. You do become a target. The fact that you have an active e-gold account becomes known pretty quickly. You will notice how many fake e-gold scam emails you start receiving. I have purchased Red Hat Linux, although I haven't yet installed it. In the meantime I keep up my patches and have made some custom security changes to my windows OS. I have virus software that I update frequently and ZonaLabs personal firewall. I have Steganos security suite, and my passwords are all random strings including numbers and upper and lower case letters. They are on an encrypted file and there are also some other second layer of security features for that file that I would rather not disclose here. I am very careful about opening attachments and visiting suspect websites. When I do inadvertently do so, or have any suspicions I run my anti virus scans and change my passwords. I use mail-vault and safe-mail for most of my email activity, as they screen html code and scripts and use SSL secure socket connections which gives a little more protection to your email files and sensitive communications.
FM: How do you convert the e-currencies into cash to buy food and pay bills?
DL: I was accessing my digital currencies with the offshore ATM card, based on a Latvian bank, (Loyal Bank) which I obtained from Netpay. I want to say it is important to have a backup way of retrieving your digital currency. Just before Christmas I transferred $500 to my Netpay cash card. It never made it to the card, and to this day I haven't gotten it. Netpay as you know was the victim of a DDOS attack and went down for quite a while and has only recently come back online. (Now they're off again) They have not answered my emails, but I expect their hands are full from other unhappy customers.
I also have a SuperCharge card from the EMO company. I like some of their attitudes about privacy and from talking to Mark Colyer at EMO I am impressed with their customer service and the feeling I get of integrity, efficiency and competence. I don't much like the way you get hammered with fees though. A charge to transfer from EVO cash or e-gold to EMO, a charge to transfer funds from EMO to the card, and then you get charged from both ends at the ATM. For a small dealer like me it takes an noticeable bite out of your pay, but I expect I will find cheaper ways to do things eventually. As you are no doubt aware Frederick, good financial privacy is not particularly cheap. Add convenience and you will have to pay something significant for it.
I also use the Davis Company. Paul Davis has been reliable and honest with me from the start and has an arrangement with a national chain of Credit Unions where you can go to fund your e-gold with cash and have it on your account within 24 hours, and I can sell gold to him and he will promptly send a check to the party I specify for a very reasonable fee.
I don't keep a regular bank account. I don't trust them, from a privacy standpoint they mostly stink. I don't use a SSN, which almost all will give you a hassle about. Mostly I don't feel like it is "building freedom" to support their businesses. My opinion is that much of the human suffering from wars and corrupt power mongers comes from the international financial elite banking families. I'll gladly experience a little inconvenience or added expense to avoid supporting them.
You do have to be careful and do some due diligence before using a new company you find online. I got in a hurry and found a site on the Net that promises to send your e-gold via Western Union to any place in the world within 24 hours. SCAM! I notice Fund-Gold.net is still up. I would think I might have learned that particular lesson with Flat Rate Gold Exchange. But, I figure I must have needed a booster shot for my stupid virus!
FM: CashCards.net used to provide good service, but in recent months they've become so bad that I've abandoned them. I believe that Graham Kelly of GoldNow.st is reasonably reliable, but service is sometimes very slow. I've had excellent service from eForexGold, but haven't used their debit card. The e-Bullion debit card coupled with their excellent service and low fees is the best I've come across. (The Bullion- Echange converts between e-gold and e-Bullion with a 2% fee and superb service.) Do you have experience with any other exchange providers?
DL: Yes, I also had a cash card, but I also didn't like the kind of customer service I was getting. I guess I have missed out on e-Bullion, now I have a reason to check them out. I have also used FastGold and X-Changers of course. That has been enough for me.
FM: Do you promote the programs you're in to others?
DL: Yes, but not to the degree I want to begin doing. I had a website, "assuredfinancialfreedom.com" that was starting to get a lot of hits from BigBooster7Million and a few from BannersgoMLM as well as getting some search engine traffic before I came out here to build my house. My Malaysian webhost suffered a major DDOS attack that shut their servers down for a couple of weeks and then they dropped me. Day before yesterday I got my line into my house to get connected. The telephone company wouldn't run the line a couple of miles underground to my place until I had the house up. I have been driving 160 miles round trip to a truckstop to get online. It was just too much to find a new host and get the website set up again while building. I want to get into some of the new generation of MLM type programs you are featuring on your website. I just got started with SNWBS and I am eager to start doing some promoting again. (I finally put my website back up onto a free host, combining it with my literary and philosophical personal website www.xandara.com, and joined MegaBooster.) I'm looking forward to some good things!
FM: What advice would you give to people just starting out in their attempts to earn money online?
DL: I think your statement that "passive" programs offer the best chance for the average person to make money online is very true. It can be pretty discouraging to spend the hours posting, cutting and pasting, setting up group mail and other email handling systems, autoresponders, joining safe lists, deleting spam, and on and on that the average person does to promote. Only to see little money coming in for all their efforts, and hours in front of the computer. By contrast, passive programs are easy money. That is not to say that they don't also take a while to make significant profits, but with a much smaller outlay of energy and drudge work. Second, I would advise new people to copy the successful actions of someone who is and does and has what they want to be, do and have. It is relatively easy and cheap to give an appearance online of expertise and competence. They need to be aware that there are a lot of second raters and some outright criminals out there with websites. There seems to be a preoccupation with appearances in our age. The Internet will teach you about substance. I don't care much about appearances anymore, give me something real. It is like you said about the good that is displayed, and the bad that isn't mentioned. Don't be afraid to experiment and learn from the "failures." You will leave them behind you, because what is real sticks, and success is real. Failure really isn't. It is a nothing, because it is actually just a minor element of success. Okay, maybe for some people a major element. You know who you are, see Mike Goldstein!
FM: What advice would you give to people who've tried without success to earn money online?
DL: Be persistent, but don't keep on doing the same things that don't work, and beating your head against the wall. That's masochism. Try a little different approach. Add something, delete something. Try to define the areas that are failing in the activity and discover the real "why" of the failure. Form a hypothesis, do something to correct the "why" you have identified, then make a fresh start. Reality will tell you if you have found the right "why." If you keep blundering around you will eventually find the opening into success you're looking for. When you know someone else is succeeding at the activity you already know that it can be done. He is doing something you are not, or not doing something you are. Find out what it is. The difference between total success and abject failure can sometimes be a very small thing.
Be open-minded enough to consider that you might be a victim of self-defeating actions stemming from unresolved subconscious conflicts. In my opinion it is much more prevalent reason for failure in life than most people realize. We are at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Obviously humans are designed for success by a million years of trial and error. If you are not succeeding in the way you desire on a regular basis look at the patterns in your life. Be honest with yourself. You owe that to yourself if to no-one else. Then if what I am saying resonates try Mike Goldstein at Idenics, or some other healing modality that others have reported success with. Your best first investment might be in yourself.
FM: There's a lot of material on BigBooster and BuildFreedom to assist people to achieve whatever personal development is necessary for success. I now believe that the following are most important:
What do you think of the above outline?
DL: Well I have to admit that you have added a couple of things that I have not yet evaluated, but I will. I am very impressed, as always, at the diligence and intelligence you have exerted in an effort to make success and independence achievable and accessible to everyone. People are complex, and their patterns of weakness and strengths mean that the barriers that stop one person may not be an obstacle for someone else. I think you have done a wonderful and comprehensive job of identifying the most common problems and obstacles we stumble on in our way to success, and generously providing remedies for many of them.
FM: What are the most important things you would suggest to someone who has never tried to make money online as to how to get started and become successful?
DL: I think it is easy for newcomers to online money making to get overwhelmed and confused when they first come upon the frenetic world of online promotion. Everyone is making fantastic claims and saying a lot of the same things. These people who try it first get excited because they are believing everything, or at least most of what they are being told. They jump in and try something, and find it isn't as easy as the promises and hype led them to believe. They work a lot of grueling hours doing essentially boring and repetitive things, fail to receive the instant success they expected, and then go to the other extreme of not believing anyone.
Finding one or two people who are credible, and to whom you can really relate, can mean a lot. I came to your site initially because I was interested in freedom. I had already gotten pretty burned out on MLM, and similar programs, even ones promoted on your site that I wasn't able to make work, even with a lot of motivated effort. You had credibility with me because you had a purpose that was in line with mine, and it consisted of more than just a desire to make some money. I could see that making people freer, more independent, healthier and wealthier was in line with your high-order purpose. You had an ethic that included others in your well-being. This was an identifiable ethical motive for helping people. Seeing this made me feel you were not simply out to use and exploit others, like many do on the web. And you were identifying the reasons I had not succeeded, and actually offering solutions.
Among the success solutions you had identified was Idenics, something that I obviously needed as a key to achieving the personal goals I had failed for many years to reach. Would I have tried it unless you had some credibility with me? Probably not.
As I mentioned previously, you also suggested that if a person had no real talent and will to be a successful promoter, perhaps a better chance would be to get into "passive" programs. That was a piece of advice that gave me the fresh approach to online money-making a lazy guy like me was looking for.
Communication is the key, and also the strength of the information age. Finding a communication line, and through sharing and pooling information, cut out a lot of the mistakes that a person would normally have to slog through in order to find the successful actions alone. Networks of trust develop, that form into lines following natural leaders. These are people that you have learned to trust, who are a little more experienced than yourself. Part of these true leaders own learning, and the final step at becoming a master at this or any game, involves teaching someone else what they have learned and thus confirming it to themselves. At the same time they develop a junior who will take their place in the line, so that they can move up a notch. This is how progress occurs in a cosmic sense. If you are new, find one of these lines and get into it.
FM: What are your goals for the future and how do you plan to achieve them?
DL: I hope to continue to expand my financial success through further learning, and more importantly, through practicing more effectively the things I already know about HYIP and expanding into some of the best matrix or MLM type programs you have identified. And I also want to refine my situation in the areas of personal and financial privacy.
I plan to use the leisure I have created for myself to write a book on my experiences in HYIP, and life, and get it published. I also have some plans for my little homestead that I am looking forward to implementing.
I also have a desire to write some more fiction, and finish some of what I have already started writing. Along more grandiose lines, and I think everyone should have a couple of those kinds of goals, I have the seed of an idea that I am also developing into a philosophy of life. I am hoping that someday it may form the basis of a movement that will bring a little more peace and happiness into the world. I call it Xandara.
Mike Goldstein and Mark Lindsay contributed some questions and comments.
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