Do You Need A Billion Dollar Home?

In a previous article, I mentioned that Donald Trump just sold the world’s most expensive home. Actually, the world’s most expensive home belongs to steel tycoon Laxmi Mittal and is valued at $125 million. However the world’s most expensive home is currently being built by Indian billionare Mukesh Ambani, son of legendary businessman, Dhirubhai Ambani. Its reportedly going to cost a staggering $2 Billion USD.

Considering that his networth is estimated at $43 billion that’s less than 5% of his networth. Quite a lot less than the average American has tied up in his house!

The house will be 27 stories tall and will have 400,000 sq ft of living space. I bet they’ll have maps with “you are here” arrows scattered through-out the house, along with handheld GPS device’s for guests. Maybe the’ll even geocaching tournaments too!

The World’s Most Expensive House

Anyone remember Apprentice winner Kendra Todd? No, I didn’t think so. Anyway Donald Trump (aka “The Donald”) used her previous experience as a real estate agent and had her doing some renovation work on a house he wanted to flip.

But this wasn’t any old flipper house. This was a multi-million dollar West Palm Beach Mansion that Trump bought for $41 million in 2004.

Russian Fertilizer Billionaire, Dmitry Rybolovlev, paid $95 million dollars for this property. Can you imagine the home insurance and property taxes on this thing? I wouldn’t be surprized if they ran a whopping $4 million a year.

The World’s Most Expensive Gold Coin

China just released a 10 Kilo Gold Coin to commemorate the 2008 Olympics that are currently being held in Beijing. 10 kilos of .9999 Fine gold is a staggering 321 ounces, more than 22 pounds and its more than a half foot in diameter! Not only is it the largest gold coin, it’s the rarest as well: Only 29 have been struck for the entire world and all have been sold.

This spectacular museum piece is housed in an exotic African Blackwood presentation case, which is crowned with a 35 pound carved stone dragon. The coin is legal tender with a face value of 100,000 Yuan and is Proof struck, which means it has an ultra-high relief, frosted design set against a flawless mirror background.

A company in the US is currently selling it for a whopping $1 million! That’s right One Million Dollars!! Considering that it contains 321 ounces, and each ounce sells for $960, that means its worth about $308,000. Charging $1 million for it is a bit too steep a premium, but considering that there are only 29 in existence, I can see the lure of owning something rare appealing to many people. Especially those people with a lot of money and not enough places to spend it! If I had a million bucks to spend on gold, I’d buy the 100 Kilo Canadian Maple Leaf instead. And this coin cotains .99999 pure gold!

But since I don’t have a million dollars lying around, I’d rather keep on buying my 200 year old Napoleon 1st French gold coins for under $500 each! I don’t know if the Chinese will be minting any more of these Olympic gold coins, but I’m positive Napoleon 1st is definitely done minting his collection! I already have several of these, and they’re really quite spetacular.

Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac Collapse

About 5 weeks ago I suggested that both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were going bankrupt and their shares were going to hit single digits in 12 months. Well it looks like the market believed that too and their shares were punished. Instead of having to wait a year, the stocks dropped like bricks within the month!

According to Nouriel Roubini, renowned Professor of Economics & International Business at NYU’s Stern Business school, this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the worst U.S. Recession in the last few decades.

The FDIC that has already depleted 10% of its funds in the rescue of IndyMac alone will run out of funds and will have to be recapitalized by Congress as its insurance premia were woefully insufficient to cover the hole from the biggest banking crisis since the Great Depression

Fannie and Freddie are insolvent and the Treasury bailout plan (the mother of all moral hazard bailout) is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street; it is the continuation of a corrupt system where profits are privatized and losses are socialized. Instead of wiping out shareholders of the two GSEs, replacing corrupt and incompetent managers and forcing a haircut on the claims of the creditors/bondholders such a plan bails out shareholders, managers and creditors at a massive cost to U.S. taxpayers.

Wow, those are strong words! Practically every stock in the financial sector has jumped today, probably due of extreme oversold conditions and not because of any underlying change in the fundamental scenario.

Sadly, my beloved Oil & Gas stocks are down. It may be a sector rotation out of energy stocks and into the financials. But so long as my Canadian Income Trusts continue to provide me with dividends and passive income, I’ll continue to hold them.

But I might enter new short positions in the financials if the stocks rally significantly above these levels. Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke announced today that FNM & FRE were “in no danger of failing”. I don’t know if I believe him – sounds just like a few months ago when the government telling us there’s no recession. Meanwhile everything (except housing) is getting more expensive and unemployment is rising. And as Jim Rogers says that “the only people Bernanke cares about are his buddies on Wall Street”!

There's Still No Recession!

Monthly Passive Income Finally Breaks $3,000 Barrier!

A few of my readers have emailed me asking when I’m going to post the Passive Income numbers for June. Apologies for the delay; I’m going to be starting my full-time MBA at UCLA pretty soon and I’ve had to look for apartments in Los Angeles so I’ve been pretty busy since the beginning of this month.

As reported earlier, April was a been a record breaking month for me with total “passive” income amounting to $2,811.42. I haven’t posted May’s break-down but it was a lot lower at $2,330.00.

However, June’s income has broken all previous records and was a whopping $3,354.51! I’ve finally attained my goal of $3,000/month in passive (or semi-passive) income. Let’s hope I can maintain it!

This is a strong 19.6% jump against my previous monthly high in April. Since I’ve been neglecting my sites this month, I expect July income to again drop significantly. But the number of sites that I’ve created is increasing every month, so hopefully it’ll all balance out eventually.

Here’s the breakdown:

The biggest jump in income came from direct advertisements and from the oil drilling programs. I expect both to dip next month.

Adsense, Linkworth, Text-Link-Ads, ADSDAQ and Kontera have been consistent earners for me. It really isn’t a lot of income but its consistent and together it all ads up.

Amazon affiliate income hasn’t really taken off and to be honest I haven’t really been doing anything to boost it. Hopefully, I’ll be able to devote more time to this.

The affiliate income from Ebay has been growing steadily. My Discount iPod-iPhone and Gold Coin Store have started seeing some traffic. These sites are .info sites that I bought for $0.99 from GoDaddy and it was created using BANS. For a little more info on how to generate passive income from sites, look at the 2nd half of this post.

In March, I made $60 from Domain Embarking, a site that helps you earn money from parked domains. Since they only pay out quarterly, I was supposed to get a payment in the end of June, but they got booted from the Google Adsense program (for unknown reasons) and suspended all payments until end of September. Apparently I’ve made another $63.15 with them, but until I see the next payment, I’m ignoring it. Until then, I’ll continue to use their services as its a great way to create automated content, traffic and boost page ranking. Members can now place their own adsense or affiliate ads on the pages of sites parked with Domain Embarking. Make sure you at least put up your affiliate ads.

I’m not sure if Prosper is still handing out $25 signup bonuses to new lenders and but I do know that the referral program is changing. I may no longer get any money from referrals, so thats one income stream that is likely to dry up. But I’ll still keep investing through the site. Here’s a good post on How Not To Bid On Prosper.

To help make up for Prosper’s anticipated drop, a new program RevResponse has been added. They basically provide free publications and white papers on various topics ranging from finance and banking to search engine optimization and car detailing. Check out the Free Financial Magazines link. Bloggers might also want to check out the Sales & Marketing articles too. Old School programmers might remember Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Well, it’s available for free too. And the best part is I get paid for providing my readers with free useful information! So if you’ve ever wondered if you can make money selling magazines, here’s your chance to find out without getting off out of your chair. They’re also paying $50 for writing a 200 word post about them this month, so you should definitely join immediately if you’re a blogger.

I also made around $1,099 from some oil investments and other dividends. Some of the stocks pay over 10% in annual dividends. In the past 2 weeks the market has taken a beating and there are a lot of stellar companies paying over 4% annual yield. Some of them are Verizon(VZ), General Electric (GE) and Pfizer (PFE). Even stocks like McDonalds (MCD) are yielding 2.6% which is more than you get in your savings account!

Last month I bought a few more domains like Hobby Rubber Stamps and Invasion TV from GoDaddy. GoDaddy currently has a promotion – .com domain purchases for only $6.99 and .info domains for only 99 cents. I’ll try a few ways to monetize these domains over the next few months and hopefully they’ll add to my passive income as well.

I have multiple streams of both online & offline income. As I’ve mentioned before, having small amounts of income from various companies provides diversity and risk management. Occasionally, one of them will drop off (like adsense went from $400 a month to $150), and not being too concentrated in it prevents your passive income totally disappearing.

I’ll end with a quote from last months post:

Having any sort side income that sufficiently large to allow you to pay the rent and put food on the top is a great stress reliever. It also provides you F*** YOU money, in case you don’t see eye-to-eye with your boss or you feel that your job is sucking the life out of you! For stubborn and opinionated people, having F-U money is awesome!

I hope I’ve inspired all of you to try and boost your passive income or maybe add new sources to increase your current income streams. Please let me know how you’re all doing.