Lending
I slowed down a little bit with the lending. Too much stuff going on in November. Also, some of my loans have put me a little bit on edge, specifically two big ones. Not sure what I was thinking. Both borrowers seem to have good jobs, but if either (or both) don’t intend to pay back, I’ll have to go through the whole process of trying to recover the funds. Going forward, I’ll try to avoid bigger loans. The bigger one makes me more uncomfortable because he hasn’t paid back anything yet, and he reached out to me first. That’s never a good thing. The smaller one makes me uncomfortable because he gave an excuse for not paying back an earlier loan and then asked for another which I gave (of course). Again, if they turn out to be trustworthy, then they’re both great finds. In between, I had good experiences with other lenders repaying in full, some paying late with valid excuses.
UPDATE
Unfortunately, the borrower of the bigger loan is most likely a scammer. I opened up a dispute in PayPal, and I’m in a battle to get my money back. I never would’ve guessed that he was a scammer. Pretty much everything checked out. I got his address and checked public records online. His name is on the deed, and it’s like a $500k house. I guess I know where he gets his money from. At least some of it anyway. He also gave me his LinkedIn, and he has multiple posts with comments from other people who seem real. I suppose there were three red flags. He reached out to me directly instead of using the platform. He lied about his Facebook, giving me two reasons why he wouldn’t share it. He also lied about being able to pay me with Facebook (something I caught after the fact). Finally, he gave me a sob story about why he needed the loan and told me he’d be able to pay it back when he got his huge bonus. That never happened. If I lose the money, it’ll be one very expensive learning experience. Thankfully, the smaller loan is doing okay, and the borrower is paying back on time for the most part. He also seemed scammy, but he never lied. The dispute process should be done mid-December, and I’ll include the details in December’s blog.
Knife Sharpening
No progress with knife Sharpening. It’s been a little bit of a crazy month.
Property Rental
I couldn’t find anybody to rent the extra room, but I did some work on the yard which will hopefully reduce maintenance costs in the future. The two giant trees on either side of the house dropped a ton of leaves. To combat the leaf issue, I bought a 16ft, $80 dollar pole saw to prune the big leaf-dropping trees. The electric pole saw was really tempting ($300), but the manual pole saw worked just fine. It just needed some manual labor which I’m not opposed to. A couple of the branches were as big as small trees. They didn’t look that big 16ft up, but when they came crashing onto my tiny deck, I could see how big they actually were. One branch also fell on the roof, but I don’t think it did any damage. It was good practice for when I prune the tree on my neighbor’s side. Dang tree is right in between my house and my neighbors house, and our houses are pretty close together. Maybe I can slowly widdle it away with my pole saw. I also finished taking out a big stump from the front yard, and it only took a couple months (sarcasm), using a sledge hammer and wedge. Yes, I am pretty slow when it comes to these projects.
Web Apps
Not sure if this is a side hustle, but I suppose it has potential to make money some day. Does it have to make money to be a side hustle? I built a web app for keeping track of time, the way I like to keep track of time. I like to keep track of time in a very specific way. All the time trackers I tried only had timers that I couldn’t manually update. Manually updating a time block is important because I’ll start a timer and then completely forget about it which really messes up the total amount of time spent on a task.