Look at this picture of a young Indonesian boy who has found a doll in the trash at the village dump. He’s smiling. He feels joy or pride or both. In the background you can see a woman. Maybe a mother. Maybe a grandmother. She’s also smiling, happy for the child possibly. Do you feel pity for them? These people are happy about items they’re finding in trash and we look at them, at their happy, smiling faces, and we pity them. We wouldn’t want to be them. Yet we don’t know the last time we smiled; the last time we felt happy about anything, however small, because for us happiness is measured in how much money we have, how many high tech toys we can go out and purchase. Our lives are reduced to our need to make money so we can afford to have brand new shiny gadgets; and if we’re not making money, if we can’t afford the gadgets, we go through life sulking and complaining.

Everybody is looking to make money. In many cases money is as necessary to sustain life as oxygen. Unless you live where you can grow your own food and build your own shelter, you need money to in order to fill two of most important human needs. For this reason, to ensure their survival and the survival of their offspring most adults are forced to prioritize making money over any other interest or preoccupation. Even the rich people who have money work every day to make more money. We live in a world where everything is about money.

But for many of us, it isn’t that we don’t have money enough to feed and clothe and shelter ourselves. We just want to have a certain amount of money so we live at a certain level of life and for as long as we don’t have that certain amount of money we’re depressed and angry and disenchanted with life.

For some people, lack of money is so much the reality that there isn’t that sense of abject misery or those feelings of hopelessness and desperation the rest of us feel when our bank account balance drops to zero. The idea of a bank account for these people is unheard of. They struggle to scrape two coins together and yet they can still find reasons to smile. We shouldn’t pity these people. We should learn something from them. We should take note of how genuinely happy they look and we should realize that, while it’s perfectly acceptable to want to make money and to wake up everyday and set off on a mission of making money, we shouldn’t be allowing money to control our lives to the point where we can’t get any joy out of life because we only have five dollars in our wallet.

Photo credit:

A boy from an East Cipinang trash dump slum shows his find, Jakarta Indonesia. Picture taken by Jonathan McIntosh, 2004.

If you’re trying to decide whether or not to bite the bullet and buy that “Rich Jerk” program, take some time to do your research. There’s plenty of information on the Internet about the program; and what I find interesting is that there’s nothing out there that says clearly and certainly that the program is a scam. It’s an interesting little strategy they applied there, creating as much positive buzz as negative so as to confuse people like you and me who really want to find programs that work. When we’re faced with uncertainty about the legitimacy of the program, as long as the price is right we’ll probably take the risk and buy it.

I haven’t bought the program though I’ve gone through that conversation in my head, “well it’s only $10 bucks. It’s no big loss if it turns out to be the scam I expect it to be.” But then I thought to myself there’s probably 500 other people who will take the risk and buy the program today, another 500 tomorrow, another 500 the day after that, and this program has been around for a number of years. So year after year this so-called rich jerk is making millions and his affiliates making tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands just capitalizing on the uncertainty of desperate people. And that is the strategy that’s working for them.

Maybe the program contains useful information like some who have bought it claim; but so do most such programs. You can go to a book store today and pick up 100 how-to guides. The guides will contain useful information, but it doesn’t mean you’ll be able to take the information and use it successfully yourself. You’re likely to have more success making money by turning around and selling the information in the how-to guides than in applying money-making strategies outlined in the guides. And from all appearances, that’s precisely how the majority of the people who have made money after buying the Rich Jerk’s program, have made their money. They’ve turned around and sold the program itself as affiliates.

My advice to you is to consider the fact that the price of the program has apparently dropped from over $100 to $10. If sales were as high as ever for this product it’s more likely that the price will have gone up. Such a huge drop in price suggests sales have dropped significantly and usually when sales are dropping to such an extent there’s a reason for it. The biggest reason is that this program and the system it brags about isn’t timely, but the website doesn’t make this clear because their target market is primarily the uninformed individual who will tend not to investigate the program and the website before they buy the program.

On the site it says:

$9.95 is a ridiculously low price for this life-changing information. I feel like I’m practically giving you the keys to the kingdom here. I’ve already done all of the hard work, and now all you have to do is follow simple instructions.That is why I reserve the right to increase this price at any time. I have sold my Rich Jerk program very successfully at $49.95, and even for quite a while at $199, so don’t be surprised if you return and see it back at a higher price. I’m planning on increasing the price in the next few days, so to lock in the low price you need to order TODAY, if you want to take advantage of the current discounted price of only $9.95. Compared to the programs of those other “guru” marketers, my price is EXTREMELY low.

FACT: If you can’t come up with a measly 10 bucks to change your life, you deserve your miserable existence, and you should leave this website NOW.

The hope here is that you won’t be the type to wonder what could be wrong with the program that would have caused them not to be selling it for the higher price anymore. They’re banking on you being the type who will think to yourself that you’d better grab the program fast before they raise the price again. But you should ask yourself why, if the program is doing so well that the person behind it doesn’t need to sell it for a measly 10 bucks, is it being sold for a measly 10 bucks? Is it because the rich jerk is a nice guy? Does the rich jerk sound nice to you? The entire “rich jerk” program is founded on the “I’m a jerk. I’m obnoxious. I’m mean. I’m nasty, but I don’t care” attitude that for some reason effectively convinced many people that the individual behind the program had to be honest. After all, who would take an approach like that? A clever person who understands how to get to people would take an approach like that. And make no mistake, the person who originally founded this program is rich, and he’s rich because he knows what people want and he’s good at convincing them that he has magic beans that will help them get what they want. He’s also good at using other people to sell his magic beans for him.

It’s tempting to believe there’s a program out there that contains the answers we can’t seem to find in any other program we’ve tried, any other book we’ve read; and with a price tag of just $9.95, we might figure there’s nothing to lose; but that’s just what vendors of programs like these are counting on. They are looking for people just like us, desperate to find the answer to our nagging money problems and willing to take a risk on something we’re not too sure whether it’s legit or not, and we can’t find any firm answers one way or another. Some people swear by the program, some say it’s a scam. Since it’s only $10 we go ahead and check it out for ourselves because we really want to find something that’s going to work.

Personally I would never buy the rich jerk program. I take exception to being called a moron and a loser for wanting to be cautious and safeguard against being ripped off by scam artists. It simply doesn’t motivate me to have someone insult and degrade me and tell me they’re better than me, whether or not it’s just a reverse psychology strategy. Additionally, having spent some time on the website therichjerk.com I’ve noticed that the site is not maintained daily; and for having millions of dollars, you would expect even if the owner prefers to spend his days on the beach sipping martinis, he’ll employ someone to maintain the site for the benefit of people who visit every day looking for more information.

There’s a blog and a forum on the site. The blog was last updated in August. There were two posts made through the whole month of August, both having to do with a party and networking event at the Playboy Mansion. Presumably these posts weren’t for the benefit of people like you and me who are looking for real answers to the question of how we can legitimately make money online. It seems to be more for the benefit of potential scam artists who might want to get into selling the rich jerk program so they too can enjoy the lifestyle of partying at the Playboy Mansion.

Here’s a short excerpt from the August 24th 2007 therichjerk.com blog post:

Rich Jerk Playboy Mansion Mastermind / Party Feedback

The Playboy Mansion Party & Mastermind are over.

One word comes to mind: EPIC

The press was there on the red carpet as Hollywood
Celebrities, Athletes, Socialites, Mega-Wealthy Entrepreneurs
and even famous Politicians flooded into the grounds to
party with the man of the hour - ME.

The playmates were also out in full force, along with
hundreds of other beautiful women. The grotto held
true to its infamous reputation, and many pictures/videos
will need to be edited before they are released to
the public.

Including a few gurus who got a little sloppy and have
asked that their heads be blurred out. HaHa. Oops.

These folks are living it up on money they make off of people like you and me. The number of people who buy their programs and get nothing out of it so significantly outnumbers the number of people who might have made a few hundred, a few thousand, maybe even a few tens of thousand, that it’s impossible for their programs to be what they claim. It isn’t that you’re too stupid to understand how to make it work. It isn’t that you’re too lazy to apply the strategies they outline. These are just the excuses that they make, the way they shrug off any responsibility for customers failing to get out of their program what they promised the customer would get out of the program. It’s not their fault. It’s yours. Their program isn’t a big giant waste. You’re just a stupid, lazy loser.

Seriously, do you really want to help make someone richer who will tell you not to talk to him if you see him in the real world because he’s far too rich and important to be seen with you. It may all just be an act and an evidence that outraging people can work as an effective marketing strategy, but his dialogue is still completely inappropriate and would never be a strategy applied by a reputable business.

Feelings of desperation and hopelessness tied to financial problems can lead otherwise law-abiding citizens down criminal paths. The 2005 film “Fun With Dick & Jane” starring Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni is a good illustration of the point. As the IMDB plot outline describes:

The day before Globodyne’s stock tanks, a la Enron, and its pension fund evaporates, the corporation’s CEO and CFO setup middle manager Dick Harper to be the public face of the disaster. Jobless, and with no savings, pension, or home equity, Dick and his wife Jane sink slowly into poverty. He looks for work (as do all former Globodyne executives); he even tries day labor with the relatives of their Mexican nanny. A foreclosure notice sends Dick and Jane over the edge into a life of blue-collar crime.

While Dick and Jane managed to get away with holding up stores and robbing banks, most people who resort to crime as a last desperate resort to get money usually get caught and end up spending years behind bars. So if you’re feeling desperate and hopeless and you’re considering holding up a convenience store, robbing a bank, or committing some other crime involving theft of money, consider how much more desperate and hopeless you’re going to feel when your freedom gets taken away and you’re waking up every day in a jail cell. And if it’s another action you’re contemplating such as committing suicide to escape your money troubles, consider the mental, emotional and continued financial difficulties that will forever plague the loved-ones you leave behind after you take your life. They will still have the reality of no money with the addition of grief and a new level of desperation and hopelessness that will linger for years, if not for the rest of their lives.

When weighing the burden of having no money right now against the consequences of acting in desperation on account of having money, and feeling hopeless because you can’t seem to find a solution to your money problems, it becomes plain to see that there really are worse places you can be than where you are right now. There are worse situations you can find yourself in than your present situation. Admittedly this brings you no closer to resolving your present conflict, but it can certainly help you avoid making a bad situation worse.