For awhile, I was hellbent on generating passive income through online affiliate marketing, websites, ads, online businesses, etc. It seemed easy to create a few satellite websites, apply for a few ad blocks, and voila! I would be building up by passive income stream ten bucks at a time. I mean, based on numerous examples, perseverance does pay off – income-wise, if you stick with it, it WILL replace your day job.

However, I soon realized the hyper-monotonous nature of such an approach. You ponder for days to pick a niche, create a site, add new content weekly … pretty soon you lose interest AND the income. Instead, I focused on picking up new skills and improving old ones: (OLD) php, .NET, T-SQL, and (NEW) AJAX, OLAP.

When I moved across country in August and posted a crappy thrown-together resume on Dice.com with keywords Excel, SQL, and data mining, I did not have high hopes. However, when a big-office recruiter called four hours later with a nice offer, all of a sudden I put things into perspective.

A good DA (data analyst) in this town (Austin, TX) can make $50-70k, depending on the size of the firm, experience, and, most importantly, negotiation skills. If you make $60k, that’s about $48k takehome, which is $4k a month and $1,000 a week. To generate that kind of income by blogging or affiliate marketing, you must be working a lot of blogging / AM hours. The most I could ever swing was $250-300 per month even though I was busting my ass for months.

The bottom line for me – invest in myself. Whether it’s books, classes, or correspondence courses, I noticed that a combination of technical skills and leadership skills can yield amazing results.

So Nev dropped $15k cash on a car. I haven’t discussed it with him yet, but I think it’s straight up crazy. Why?

I drive a 23-year old car worth $1,700 and it STILL gets me from A to B reliably and luxuriously (link).

Fifteen large in cash is too valuable of an asset to be dropped on something as disposable as a set of wheels. Sorry, man.

If you’re a city dweller, how far do you drive? I say you sit in traffic on Mopac for much longer than you’re actually driving.

So I’m thinking of getting a second vehicle for the wife. Of course, if it was up to me, she’d be driving a 300D …

… which she won’t because all girls care about is how comfortable the seats are. They don’t give a shit that a 617 “iron five” diesel engine is arguable the best diesel engine ever created in the history of engines period. They don’t care their husbands can repair practically everything on the car, paying only for parts. They want looks, comfort, and stupid little gimmicks like “chilled gloveboxes” (I’m looking at you, Dodge Caliber).

Long story short, I did my research. We’ll be getting a Pontiac Vibe.

Why?

• It’s a Toyota.
• It’s cheap.
• It’s roomy.

Oh damn. It’s also a car payment.