Money Blue Book

I left the traditional attorney job behind a few years ago and now do finance and legal work on a contractual basis. I’ve been doing this for more than a year now and so far it’s been enjoyable, although not without its ups and downs. But then they don’t call it a job for nothing. I probably can go on and on about how miserable I was working as an attorney but I think I’ll save that for another day. Suffice to say, the legal field is overly saturated and the profession simply isn’t the lucrative and inspiring field it used to be. I think most attorneys today, including myself would be wary about recommending law school to those contemplating a field of study. I am constantly trying to tell younger friends to bypass law school and do something more worthwhile and meaningful with their lives, but they never seem to listen. They’ll know what I mean when they get out.

A Change Of Profession Is What I Needed

So here I am in my current job, working on a contractual basis in a field somewhat related to my area of study. The job security and rapid advancement opportunities may be gone, but my sanity and happiness have flourished ten fold. Working on a contractual basis, I now have the opportunity and time to develop and improve my various side ventures – things I’m quite passionate about. Of course, perhaps one day I will tire and choose to get back to the nitty gritty legal practice. Tax law and small business consulting maybe.

All in all, it was definitely worth the transition, although I do look back with tiny tinges of regret and musings of – what if? What if I had done something different with my life? What would be my dream job? I’m sure we’ve all pondered these questions at some point in our lives. Well here’s a list of a few fantasy jobs I wanted to have during different times in my life, starting with the most recent and working my way into childhood:

1. Sports Anchor – I currently love watching and following spectator sports. I love playing fantasy football and I take it seriously, spending a lot of time researching and tracking player and team performance statistics. My dream job would be to become a sports commentator for a major network like ESPN or even for a local television station. Everytime I watch Comcast SportsNet I always wish I was sitting on the sofa in front of the camera sharing my thoughts and predictions about my favorite sports teams. I have so much to say but no group to call an audience. My girlfriend is not into sports although I think she enjoys watching me get all excited when I talk about how my favorite teams are doing.
2. Investigative News Reporter – I think I see a trend here. I really should have gone into journalism as I love to write and speak my mind. I’ve always envisioned myself walking the news beat exposing bad business practices, defective products, as well as cracking down on white collar computer crimes. I think I would greatly enjoy chasing perpetrators down to get the story. I would probably focus my first investigative pieces on exposing online scammers, and those who engage in phishing and other illegal online activity.
3. Doctor - Like everyone else when they were young, I originally wanted to be a doctor – that is, until I realized how disinterested in the sciences I was. I started college as a biochemistry major on the pre-med track but ultimately shifted gears into computer science and finance. Eventually I went on to complete law school. I think if I had continued, I could have ended up becoming a doctor, although it would have been out of character for me. I’m simply not very passionate about medicine or the natural sciences.
4. Video Game Designer – When I got out of the pre-med track, I studied computer science for a year before I transitioned into finance. During the transition I initially wanted to become a video game designer. Ever since high school I loved playing role-playing video games and I always wanted to design them. When I was a kid I remember making my mom buy me an expensive computer paint shop program so I could dabble in graphic design. However I eventually grew out of it, although my interest for web designing and programming remained.
5. Pet Shop Owner – Okay, I know this one’s extremely random but when I was very little I wanted to run my own pet shop. I’ve had a variety of pets in my lifetime, including a parrot that I still own today. At the time I thought it would be so cool to have my own breeding facility where I could raise baby animals. Of course that’s before I got older and realized that I wouldn’t be able to keep them forever and would have to give them up to paying customers. Well, it was whimsical while it lasted.

So, now you know my current and past dream jobs. What are some of your own?

If you run a small home business on the side like I do, it’s not always easy to project a professional image without breaking the bank. If your business is new, it’s unlikely you have the financial means or even the budget to afford a commercial office space, a secretary, a furnished meeting room, or any of the usual business amenities. However, depending on your budget and needs, there are affordable options out there.

Rent A Shared Office For Meeting Room Or Virtual Office Needs

More established small businesses might be able to look into renting a shared or serviced office space through a workplace solution company like Regus. These business office rental locations are usually fully furnished with desks, meeting rooms, functional kitchens, and business amenities like secretarial service and a professional front desk to handle clients, mail delivery, and customized call answering. They provide a professional working environment without the long term commitment. I would know – I’m currently working a contract project at such a location.

Rental offices are a good alternative for small but growing businesses looking to expand but don’t want to deal with the hassle of property ownership or long term commercial leases. However, many small business owners run things from their own homes. For them, there are virtual office solutions available:

1) Telephone Service

Sharing business phone calls with your personal home line isn’t a good idea, especially if you get a lot of incoming business calls. Dialing out is fine, but for incoming business calls how does one line handle voicemail greetings for both personal and business calls? You can always get another landline or cellphone number, but that can get awfully expensive, especially if it is underused.

Since I don’t have a separate landline at home, I currently use my cell phone plan in conjunction with eBay’s GrandCentral free phone service to re-route business phone calls to my personal cell phone number. The service provides customers a free separate number that can be given out as a business line, and have calls automatically forwarded to your personal line.

Since exceeding monthly cell phone plan minutes may be a problem, another solution is to sign up for an established Voice Over IP (VoIP) phone service like Skype. For $3 a month, along with an extra charge for a personal SkypeIn phone number to handle business calls, you can receive unlimited incoming calls from a cell or a landline. SkypeIn calls are handled through the online Skype interface and calls can be picked up anywhere you have internet access.

2) Fax Service

Although it’s ancient technology, it is still widely used, surprisingly. If you fax frequently, I’d recommend just going ahead and buying a cheap fax machine. But if you only need to receive faxes on occasion and rarely send them, you can try going with eFax Free, which will give you a free non-local fax number to accept incoming faxes through e-mail.

If you want to send faxes for free and don’t mind having cover page ads automatically attached to your outgoing fax messages, then you can always go with FaxZero. However, you will only be allowed to fax 2 document sets per day, with a maximum of 3 pages each.

3) Mailboxes That Offer A Professional Mailing Address

Personally I use my home as my business address, but if you want some privacy or if you expect to receive a lot of packages, you may want to get a larger standalone postal box. The U.S. Postal Service and most major private postal carriers like UPS and Fedex offer free pickup and the option to conveniently pay and print your postal stamp labels at home.

You can get a separate standalone P.O. Box through the U.S. Postal Service, but your mailing address will contain the “PO BOX” tag followed by your personal box number. If you want to get a more professional sounding mailing address that contains an actual street address, you may want to go with a private mailbox at a place like the UPS Store. Prices vary but private UPS box prices are usually about $200 a year (compared to less than $100 for a standard PO Box). However, unlike a standard PO Box, a private mailbox through UPS is 24 hour accessible.

4) Business E-Mail Addresses

Free e-mail addresses are simple to find – just check out Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail. However, if you want to sound professional and want to be taken seriously, you probably will need to get an e-mail address that contains your business name. There are plenty of email hosting options out there depending on your needs. For example, with DreamHost, you can get unlimited e-mail addresses and email forwarding for a pretty good $5.95 a month.

Although I work a regular full time job, I also run a few fledgling side ventures on the side. As I mentioned about a month ago, I am currently attempting to establish a trade name and open a business bank account in the business’ name to better keep track of venture earnings and assets.

However, I’m currently unable to establish a business bank account because the state agency hasn’t processed and sent me my approved trade name certificate yet. I did not file for expedited service (*snapping fingers in a darnnit motion* ) so it’s taking much longer than expected. Banks will not usually allow an individual to establish a business bank account that doesn’t contain the applicant’s name in the account title without a valid trade name or fictitious business certificate. So for now, I’m stuck without the services of a proper business bank account. However, meanwhile my side businesses have continued to generate income and now I have several business checks made out to my fictitious business name that I am unable to deposit immediately. It has been weeks and the business checks continue to sit on my desk gathering dust and looking quite lonely.

Ideally, business funds should not be co-mingled with personal funds since the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) will require the tax filer to account for his/her business income and expenses on a separate form, although both business and personal income will ultimately be treated as the tax filer’s ordinary income. However, my checks have been sitting around un-deposited for some time and I am getting to the point where I want them in bank accounts and generating interest.

So Am I Permitted to Deposit Business Checks Into My Own Personal Bank Account?

I am tempted to just go ahead and deposit my business checks into my regular checking or savings account at Citibank. I am the only owner and operator of my sole proprietor business so there wouldn’t be stakeholder problems. The pickle is whether my particular financial institution will permit the deposit or not.

Perhaps my deposit will be more willingly accepted by my bank’s ATM machine than by a live teller. There are some readers out there that have indicated that an ATM made deposit will be more readily approved by the bank than one made at the counter since ATM transactions are mostly computerized. The idea is that so long as I properly endorse the back of the check with signatures containing the business name and my own name, the bank will likely accept it as valid, particularly if the check’s numerical amount is not too significant. I’m just not certain on where the business checks go if the deposit into my personal account is denied and rejected.

There are no specific laws governing such deposits that I am aware of and it appears to be a policy decision governed and made by individual financial institutions. In general, business accounts involve higher sums of money with greater transactional frequency, thus demanding more of the financial institution’s attention. This probably explains why many banks tend to require higher maintenance fees for business accounts than personal bank accounts. Because of the higher transactional costs and blanket policy reasons, some banks simply may not be willing to allow this sort of practice and may require business check depositors to open business checking account if they want to deposit a business check made out to the business’ name.

Interestingly, online services like Google Adsense and a few others have permitted me to create direct deposit relationships with my own personal banking account, even though the checks were made payable out to my business name. I’m not sure if these were merely oversights or indicative of more flexible policies, but I wish there was more overall uniformity on the issue.

I think I may ultimately wait this out until my trade name certificate gets cleared since it should be approved in a few more weeks, but I wonder if anyone knows the answer for this question?

I debated about whether I should share this story, but at the end I decided that my experience might help prevent someone from falling into the same scam as I did. At the time I was young, inexperienced and financially naive. Since then, I’ve learned and improved based on my past failures and eventually went on to run a small but profitable home business by making money online with ebay, at least for a modest period of time.

It All Started With Too Much Greed

Shortly after college I decided I wanted to start a part time side business selling merchandise on eBay. But first I needed to find a wholesale supplier. After some research I decided I wanted to focus on consumer electronics such as GPS navigation devices and Apple iPods, and concluded my best bet at finding a supplier would be through a free network site like Alibaba, that helps connect sellers with buyers of goods. Little did I know at the time, but sites like Alibaba are crawling with scammers and evil doers.

I ultimately decided to focus on selling Garmin and Tom Tom branded GPS units. After a few searches, I was amazed to find numerous sellers offering brand new Garmin GPS units for very little money. The Garmin GPS model I was interested in buying in bulk retailed for more than $1200 on eBay at the time. The sellers I found on Alibaba were offering each unit for only $700 each. The asking prices were exceedingly low, but sadly I was too overcome with dollar signs in my head to realize that the offers were likely too good to be true. I essentially had blinders on and was too busy calculating all the profit I was going to make by selling these units for such high markup. Eventually I narrowed down a potential seller.

Greed Prevented Me From Recognizing the Warning Flags

When you are overcome with greed, it is hard to think clearly, even when a clearly fraudulent transaction is staring at you in the face. I should have been more aware of all the telltale signs that the seller was likely a potential scammer and a fraud. First of all, the seller provided me contact information based in Indonesia, a country like Nigeria that is notorious for being a hotbed of scammer activity. He also provided very limited company background information that could be used to verify his personal or business identity, or determine his true geographical location. The phone number he provided me did indeed work, but I should have realized that nowadays with VOIP technology, phone number locations are very easily faked. It’s easy to reside in one country and still obtain a temporary, disposable local phone number from another. Even paid identity authentication and verification services are subject to abuse and illegal manipulation as well. It’s not all that difficult for online scammers on Alibaba or any other Internet exchange service to obtain a genuine TrustPass or Alibaba Gold Membership certification using falsified identification.

Another thing that should have raised red flags was the fact that the seller offered to pay for shipping, which is an extremely unusual practice for first time wholesale purchases, especially since international shipping can be quite expensive. The seller also insisted on rushing the sale, frequently threatening to end the lucrative deal if I continued to demand more verification information and not move forward with payment. But otherwise, the scammer was extremely convincing in the way he portrayed the deal as completely legitimate. Rather than thinking that the sale was a scam, I just thought I was getting an excellent deal.

Because I was so motivated by greedy emotions, I was more fearful of losing the lucrative buy than I was of being scammed. There were so many warning signs that I simply ignored, such as the seller refusing to accept Paypal or even credit card payment. Instead, he demanded payment through bank wire transfer. If I had conducted more due diligence, I would have known that unlike Paypal or credit card transactions where my money would have been protected, bank wire transactions are permanent and irreversible once properly executed.

I Fell For the Trap – Hook, Line, and Sinker

Ultimately I sent him over $2,025.00 through bank wire transfer for 3 sample Garmin GPS units. Once he had the money, he disappeared without a trace. I attempted to contact him through the phone number he provided me, but the line had been disconnected. He never responded back to my e-mails and I never received the merchandise. My money was gone and I never recovered it.

Afterwards, I felt very stupid and ashamed, but I learned many valuable lessons as a result. I’m glad I experienced this hard knock life lesson earlier in my life when the potential stakes were lower. I thought something like this could never possibly happen to me, but it did, and I allowed my greedy emotions to get in the way of rational caution. You and I, we may think we’re very smart and that we’re so clever, but we are only human, and still susceptible to basic human emotional irrationality. It’s difficult to control emotions like greed, fear, and pride. So my friends, it’s important to always stay vigilant – scammers are everywhere and one day you might be in their cross hairs too.