Monday, August 25, 2008

A Dollar A Day - The Startup

This series of blog posts will be a real money experiment about what can be achieved if you're only able to save, invest or give away a dollar a day. The original dollar must be earned from wages paid in exchange for services rendered. The dollar I will be using must be saved from wages or earned passively from interest or dividends. I will also be exploring giving my dollar a day to charity as well as donating part of my interest on my dollar a day through Zopa (www.zopa.com). The goal is to earn a dollar a day in various forms, savings interest or stock dividends, as passive income using only a dollar a day to create this income.

What triggered this interest in the subject was a blog post by Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar (www.thesimpledollar.com) in which one of his readers complained that almost all financial advice was aimed at the well heeled. Trent replied with a post to show 10 things to do to improve your situation if you are working for minimum wage.

The first thing to do is find a low cost entry, no fee, high yield savings account to place my savings into. HSBC Direct (www.hsbcdirect.com) is the bank I chose after surfing around Bankrate.com (www.bankrate.com). I will be opening up an account and funding it with $253 dollars sometime after August 29, 2008. I get paid every two weeks, so I will be adding 14 dollars to the account every two weeks as I go along. This is a real money blog and as such, if there are any “bumps in the road” on the way to my goals, you’ll read about them here.

I will be using Scottrade (www.scottrade.com) in the near future to buy stocks for the dividend portion of this experiment. Scottrade’s minimum amount to open an account is $500 dollars. This account will be opened in December, 2008 near the end of the month. Scottrade’s transaction fees are only 7 dollars. The cheaper, the better for my purposes. As a friend of mine tells me, "Cheap is good, free is better!"

For those of you who like to read the end of the book, this experiment will take a few years. This should be a fun adventure. I hope you find this series of posts fun and entertaining.