Do you remember those old pyramid schemes?  The ones where you were sent a bulky letter in the mail, with a giant list of people and their addresses, and you were supposed to send like one dollar to the first ten or something like that, then add your name to the top of the list, and mail it off to a billion other poor saps and hope they would give you the same courtesy…  and hopefully in a few months time you’d have dollar bills rolling into your mailbox?

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My senior year of high school, I received a scholorship that I could use at any of the local community colleges.  It was for $1000 per semester, and I really can’t remember whehter it covered books in addition to the classes or not.  Regardless, I do remember how expensive books were even then, and I often tried to get used books from the campus bookstore if at all possible to save money.

My daughter is only three years old right now, and I hope that one day she will be able to go to college.  But I can’t even imagine what it is going to cost us by the time she is old enough to attend.  It’s already a whole lot more expensive now than it was 15 years ago… Fast forward another 15 years? Heck we’ll probably have to be millionaires to be able to send her anywhere decent unless she gets a full ride scholarship!

Fortunately at this point in time, and hopefully in the distant future as well, there will be other options to find the cheapest college text books around so that we can save money.  Goodness knows that tuition is going to be hard enough to cover, so any way we can save money on the books is going to be a godsend.

So I’ve been seeing on several blogs that there is this new website called Art Fire where artisans who make handmade items can put their products up for sale for one monthly fee. Right now for the first 5000 artisans who sign up, it will only be $7/mo for life – as long as they remain a member and their payments do not lapse. After the first 5000 I think it goes up to $20 a month.

I am kind of on the fence about this, mainly because I have very little product to sell. Right now if I were to set up a shop on Etsy, I think it is .20 per listing (for 4 months?) and something like 3.5% of the sale – if it sells. I think I figured, just based on the listing price alone, to get my money’s worth at Art Fire, I would have to list at least 35 items. Obviously this does not take into consideration the fees that are charged at Etsy, but considering I have only had two sales of my current product at my ecommerce store, I am just basing my comparison on the same lack of sales (what great confidence I have, eh?).

So for now, since I do not even have an Etsy store yet, and don’t yet have enough product to list 35 items at Art Fire to make it worth the $7, I will be carefully watching their site to observe the number of accounts remaining… if it starts to drop like wildfire I may just buck up and pay the $7 to reserve myself a spot at that price, as it is certainly better than being left in the cold and having to pay $20 a month later on if I miss the boat. But for now I will just bide my time and try to build up some inventory.

(please note this is not a sponsored post – I just wanted to pass the info along to any crafty blogger looking for another place to sell their wares)

My husband and I are both under the belief that this bailout was not a good idea to begin with, at least not as it stands currently.  Why bailout the banks who screwed up and gave money to people who couldn’t afford it to begin with, especially since the bulk of those loans were the shady ARM loans?  We DID have one of those at one point.  We got out as soon as the flat rate expired and it became the beast that started asking for no less than $200 more a month out of our pockets – and was going to continue to go up.  Fortunately the market was still stable then, so we were able to do this easily.

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The hubby got a speeding ticket on our way home from work yesterday.

It’s jacked up because he was simply keeping up with traffic.  In our state, the speed limit is supposed to be 
“reasonable and prudent”. In other words, stick to the speed limit whenever possible, but if it is unsafe to maintain AT the speed limit, then going a little over would usually be overlooked.

For instance, on the freeway we were on, the limit is 65mph.  If there isn’t a back up of traffic, it is rare to see anyone stick to that limit.  I would say the average is more like 75mph.  We were clocked at 80.  AND being passed by others.

So yeah, we think the officer was probably singing “eeny-meeny-miney-mo” in his mind when he tagged us. 

The fine is $172, or $165 for defensive driving school.  Either way we’re coughing up quite a bit of dough.

Dang it.  >.<

Starting tomorrow, I am going to start a small featurette for my jewelry store to try to ramp up some business over there.  I will feature one item from the store either every Friday, or every other Friday, and offer a discount on that item.  How steep of a discount, I haven’t yet decided.  Maybe as much as 25% off, but likely no more than that.

I haven’t really added anything recent since, oh, June I think.  Most of that is because while I thought I had a pretty decent idea with my “summer drink” series, I only received minimal feed back on the few things I did put together, and absolutely zero nibbles in sales.  That kind of does a lot to squash any of my own enthusiasm for adding additional pieces to the series.

In addition to the fact that I haven’t had the money to get some more supplies for some new ideas I’ve had rolling around in my head, I need to do some sales in order to cover that expense.

A couple of things I will note before I start that tomorrow, though:

1) I am not set up to do international sales.  I might consider selling to people in Canada, but my store isn’t set up for those either, I don’t think, at least not yet.  So if you’re international, sorry.  I’m just not prepared to do international sales right now.

2) Paypal is the payment option right now.  I believe it is set up so that you can either use your Paypal account, or when it takes you to Paypal’s site, you can enter your credit card (securely, of course) and not have to sign into PayPal completely.  However, if you chose to use your Paypal account, please make sure that your account is completely confirmed.  Otherwise it will NOT let you use your account, it will deny the transaction.   Confirmed accounts only via that method!  Otherwise, just a credit card will be fine.

That’s about it I think.  Feel free to hop over to my site and take a look at what I have in the meantime.  I think for now I am going to fiddle around with making some little thumbnails in preparation for the featurette tomorrow.