Life is for living has always been my motto – its one of the reasons I now own my own business rather than make obscene amounts of money as an IT contractor. Being that miserable isn’t worth any amount of money. And sometimes going to work just seem too trivial to be bothered with. Unfortunately my online business has felt a bit like that over that last little while!
Well life went from interesting to worse really. After I wrote that post (when we had sold the house, and my partner’s mum had died) – we found a new place we liked and bought it. There was gap of about a month between during which we stayed with friends – which was very nice and saved us a fortune. In the 4 weeks we stayed I managed to write-off our car by running it into a bus – no serious damage to me but the back is only just about recovered from the whiplash now. My partner’s uncle died in Australia so he had to fly over for that funeral (its only 4 hours flying from here though – slightly shorter than if we’d still been in Perth).
My partner then ended up having an angiogram (he’s OK – but it was seriously scary for the few days it took him to have it done). It could have been stress (duh!) .That was rock bottom really.
Then stuff started improving:
- We bought a new(er) car (NZ has a wonderful deal where we import used Japanese cars with low mileage so we are now driving a 2005 car for less than US$7000 (NZ$11,000) )
- We took a long weekend and gave the car a run to New Plymouth (I’d never been) and even got to see the mountain (unusual in winter).
- We moved into our new house, we unpacked (mostly). We bought new toys like a dryer and a digital video recorder thingy that will watch TV for you (yes I know about video tapes but I couldn’t be arsed connecting it really -and its really hard to buy tapes now). Eyeing up a new thin TV and some furniture to put it in but the credit card is over-tired this month LOL
- We moved into our 5-year-old townhouse to discover that insulation really does work, even in Wellington, as the weather was seriously cold even for us, that we really did like the place (I am never sure once I’ve bought somewhere), that it’s super convenient , and we really don’t need to do much redecorating. And the vegetable plot even seems to be growing non-weedy things (I understand they are called Brassicas).
Stuff has been happening on the Internet Marketing front too – but I might save that for another post – and no it won’t be as long this time! Too main points though:
- no – I haven’t given up on the Keyword Academy Case Study – and although I haven’t built anymore links my rankings are basically holding from my last update.
- if anyone is still considering the The Keyword Academy – the price has dropped back down to $33/month (after the first month @ $1) – if you signed up under the $67 rate – check your email and follow the instructions to get your fees retroactively reduced.
- I have decided to work smarter not harder – more details soon.
13 replies on “Is Lis Lost Down Under?”
Hi Lissie,
Good to see you back! Sorry to hear about your travail over the past few months. I’ve always kind of thought that life tends to even itself out over time .. so, on that theory, you ought to have some pretty good stuff coming your way here in the future. 🙂
Thanks Todd – that’s a nice thought – as I said to someone at one point – I wish life would go away and just leave us in peace for a while LOL
How cool- I love seeing ‘life at home’ pics.
Hopefully ‘life at home’ is in for a calmer stretch now, after all your excitement.
Hi Lis,
First time posting but i’ve been lurking. You don’t post often but i like your laid back, personal approach to writing. Glad to hear your rankings are holding strong 🙂
Good to see you back Lis, was almost thinking you had “unsubsribed” me!
Glad for the update, Lis, and yes, I think life generally balances out also, so here’s hoping yours will be on the upswing.
Interesting report about the car. What many of my fellow Americans don’t realize in the eternal quest to keep unemployment low in the auto industry is, Japan long ago found a way … but many won’t like it. When you buy a new car in Japan it will be forced off the road at the 5 or 6 year point … just can’t be registered/used any longer. Want low unemployment? Easy, just wait for the government to tell you when you have to buy a car 😉
So the back lots of car dealers and junk yards in japan are just full of 5 and 6 year old cars kilometers on a car in Japan, due to traffic, no parking spaces for commuters, etc.
Where do these ‘good used’ cars wind up? many get shoved two at a time into containers and get sent all over Asia .. especially attractive to countries like yours where the drive on the same side of the road as Japan (we get them here in the Philippines too, but by law they have to be converted to let hand drive, and that can be a horror story in itself). Good deal for the countries who drive on the left, though.
An interesting point regarding the keyword Academy price drop. I thought it very strange that none of the mails I’ve gotten from them said what you said above, that the price reduction would be retroactive to those who had bought at the increased price.
Two business lessons here .. when you make a miss step, as TKA readily admits they did with the price increase, don’t be afraid to admit it and out things right, and two, make darn sure you publicly take care of anyone who got ‘pinched” by any price or feature changes. Good thing they have you to point that out for them 😉
I had never knew about that with the Japs forced 5/6 year old cars off the road. They have tightened the regs here – cars can’t be older than 10? years – which forced the prices. Meanwhile you get a car with 60k on the clock 5 years old with all the bells and whistles (I really like not needing a key to drive anymore!)
We used to have the most expensive cars in the world when I was at uni 30 years ago a 20 year old car cost the same as a 10 year old car does now! We were home of all the old 50/60s car. You could pay for your trip to Europe just by importing one car and selling it The import controls were all to protect the local car industry.
In 1987 the got rid of all the controls – the local industry collapsed within 2 years, as did the price of cars and literally within the same time the average age of cars on the road dropped by 10+ years.
The Australians still pay a fortune for cars because of local protectionism – and I guess the US does too. Oddly our unemployment figures are no worse now than they those 2 countries (actually a lot better than the US’s) – of course there were howls of rage from both the employers and the unions at the time LOL
Yeah TKA is certainly on to it- I have seen my sign ups to the trial bounce right back up as soon as this was announced…
Interesting how the auto industry has changed there in NZ. The funny? thing with all the furor over bailing out the US auto industry over the past two years is … they really mean bailing out the US-branded auto industry, the “Big Three” who, strangely enough, make almost all their cars in Canada and Mexico now.
There’s another huge segment of the US auto industry, with names like Honda and Toyota and Nissan and even BMW which has been rolling along quite well.
It basically seems to boil down to a union thing more than anything else. Companies with mostly non-union workers do quite well (Honda makes a lot of cars for export to Japan in the US, make all their top line motorcycles in the US, etc.) BMW build certain of their models for the entire world market 100% in the US … those German workers are expensive 😉
So is the US now mainly an “outsourcing” resource for cheap labor? Seems that way in some perspectives.
Airbus Industries is poised to win a huge contract from the US military … if they win, where will they build their Brit/French/European Union airplanes? At a non-union factory in the USA. It’s written right into their contract proposal documents.
So Britain and France will now look to outsource to the US for cheap labor, yet thousands of my fellow Americans, laid off from production-type jobs, wait hopefully for things to “return to normal”. Not happening. A ‘cross-border” world IS the new normal, IMO.
These ramblings aren’t as off topic as they seem at first, becuase we have often talked here before about the globalization of business,and how people with passive income web businesses can no longer afford to think “only US”, or “Only New Zealand” or “Only Australian”, etc.
Borders and passports may still exists, but business can leap borders very easily in today’s world.
Hi Lis,
So you’re posting the odd one too this year! Life does tend to throw crap from time to time, but then it throws some good stuff too, you just have to be in the right place to catch it!
How did you manage to hit that bus by the way? Did it hide behind a lamp post then jump out in front of you at the last minute? Damn things are so sneaky LOL!
Glad you got your new home sorted and now you can start eating healthy home grown cabbage while you slave over that hot laptop and keep those pennies rolling in. Keep up the good work and be successful!
Terry
Yeah life has been firmly told to leave me alone for a month or 3! It distracts someone so the laptop has been luke warm not hot LOL! Yeah I feel a gardening site in my future.. Gardening for idiots – I could be good at that !
Great to get an update from you Lis! And good to hear things are settling down and looking up after several pitfalls. Hang in there. We’ll be here if you need us!
Thanks Trent – I was just reading a book about entrepreneurship and apparently one of the problems with home based businesses is that you get very isolated professionally – can’t say I have ever noticed (I think the author didn’t really understand the Internet and the book was a few years old)
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