I’ve recently discovered the website digital point. It’s a marketplace of sorts where Internet business people, hobbyists et al converge to network.

I’ve made a few dollars there selling odds and ends, which in this business can be anything - a text link, a website template, an actual website, an ebook - mostly digital products that get traded between buyers and sellers. I would be classified as both a buyer and a seller, as would many of the digital point members I’m sure.

Coming from a background of earning more than $100,000 as a software developer with several products on the market, having to resort to selling myself on a forum like digital point is more often than not frustrating, mainly because of the very thing that caused me to decide to get out of the commercial software development industry. After my software products started showing up on warez sites and people started contacting me for support who hadn’t bought my programs legally, I decided it was time to bring an end to my adventures as a commercial software developer. I’m just one person after all, and if Microsoft couldn’t bring a complete stop to the piracy of their products, what hope did I have? So I took my products off the market and gave up the 50% share I owned in a popular dating application I’d originally developed then later hired a programmer to improve for me. That programmer has now taken my original product and created an even more highly competitive dating application that will no doubt make him some decent money. I am thrilled for him, and I don’t regret my decision to move on to something else; but when I’m faced with situations where, in trying to sell my merchandise on places like digital point, I’m getting asked if it’s really mine, if it’s original content and so forth, it is excruciatingly disheartening considering the reason I am on a site like digital point to begin with.

Obviously, having had my products stolen and distributed on warez sites, pirated and sold for money, I know from experience that theft is a highly common problem across the Internet. Every time I write a post on any of the blog sites that I struggle to maintain, that post instantly becomes at risk for theft, unless of course it’s just so badly written; but even then there’s always someone who’ll take your material and use it for their own gain and you’re seldom able to do much of anything about it. I learned that the hard way.

Sites like digital point are useful if you’re able to get past the tendency to suspect that everyone who tries to sell is a shady character. I suppose I can understand considering shady characters seem to dominate. There’s always someone trying to trick you out of money, out your ideas, out of anything they can conceivably trick you out of. That’s the nature of the Internet. It’s really not unlike any other kind of marketplace. On both the buyer’s side and the seller’s honesty is rare, and everyone is held under suspicion. Everyone is a potential con artist until proven an honest business person.

A lady I know named Janine makes $30,000 per year selling fruits and vegetables she grows in her own back yard. She says she was sitting around one day trying to think of ways to make money from home so she could stay home with her boys, when one of her sons said something to his dad that turned on a light bulb in her head.

The son had asked the dad for money to buy a new video game, and the dad replied something to the effect of, “Didn’t I just give you money to buy a new video game two days ago? Money doesn’t grow on trees you know.” At that the son, an 8 year old, replied, “Well, in a way money does grow on trees,” and when asked to explain himself, went on to state that his friend’s dad grows peaches and sells the peaches for money so in a way you could say money grows on trees indirectly.

Janine found herself repeating the thought “money grows on trees” for the rest of that day, and that night she had a dream that she was at the Farmer’s market haggling over the price of some strawberries, insisting the price was way too high and that it was becoming increasingly impossible for people to eat healthily because the price for fresh fruits and vegetables was ridiculously expensive. By the time she woke up the next morning she had decided that she was going to grow fruits and vegetables and sell them for more reasonable prices than they were being sold in the grocery stores and at the local market.

She started small with tomatoes, bell peppers, squash, okra, Cantaloupe and eggplant. She read lots of books and followed expert advice and from her first crop she started making money. She’s now also growing grapes, cherries, plums, nectaries, pumpkins, potatoes, spinach, watermelon, zucchini and cucumbers to name a few and for the last few years has made at least $30,000 in profit from sale of her goods.

So, while money indeed doesn’t literally grow on trees, like Janine’s son pointed out, indirectly money does grow on trees. Maybe you can figure out a way to plant a seed and have it indirectly grow into the millions you desire or at least some extra yearly income.

In my youth there was a game we used to play where an appointed person would go around a circle of people, and pointing from person to person, would say to the first person, “Rich man”, then to the next person, “poor man,” then to the next person, “beggar man”, then to the next person, “thief”, repeating this until each person in the group had been identified as having a future as a rich man, a future as a poor man, a future as s beggar or a future as a thief. I remember always feeling panicked at the thought that I when the appointed person reached me he would be on any of poor man, beggar man or thief. It was just a silly game but I’m not sure I quite fully understood that my financial future could not be determined by being lucky to be next in line for when the appointed person reached “rich man’, or my bad luck to be in the position of having to choose between becoming a poor man, a beggar or a thief. If memory serves correctly on the rare occasions that I would join in playing this game which I tended to avoid playing out of fear that I would not be classed a rich man, I used to reason that if I couln’t be a rich man I’d rather accept the fate of a poor man than accept the fate of a beggar or a thief. But somehow, I was always lucky to end up being appointed a rich man.

What is interesting is that we played these games as children and fantasized about having lots of money when we grew up, but it never occurred to us that we wouldn’t be able to just walk out of poverty and into wealth like turning off one street and onto another. We never realized that it would take more than “intending” not to be poor, not to become a beggar and not to become a thief when we grew up, to achieve the status of “rich man”, so we didn’t go off planning how we were going to become rich because we figured everything would just automatically fall into place once we grew up.

Maybe everything falls into place automatically when you’re born into wealth; but when you’re born poor, you more often than not stay poor until you come to the realization that poverty doesn’t just up and go away one day. You actually need a plan of action for eradicating poverty and achieving wealth. And sometimes even after you make that realization, you’ve been so programmed according to the mentality of poverty that it becomes nearly impossible to believe you can change your financial situation. You’ve become convinced that there’s something about you that predestines you to a life of having nothing and you allow this mindset to sabotage your chances of achieving financial success whether consciously or subconsciously because you believe money is for other people, special people; and for people like you, people who come from nothing, financial freedom is an unattainable goal and a silly dream that will never become reality.

As told by Kathryn Price:

This is my own fault. In 2004 I hired a guy from India to build a website for me. After he was finished building my website he told me he could help me make money by driving traffic to my website.

All I had to pay him was $5000 for a 6-month contract. I agreed. He did what he promised he would do. I made $150,000 off the website in the first year, $250,000 the year after that. So when I was contacted by the same guy 6 months ago telling me he was looking for investors for a big social networking project that was projected to generate 10 million in profit in its first five years, and how he thought of me and wanted to give me an opportunity to get in at $10000 for 10% share of projected profit, I believed, based on some of the emails I’d exchanged with him during the time he was building the site and then marketing it for me, that he genuinely just wanted to give me an opportunity because he remembered how I’d shared with him that I was always on the lookout for a promising start-up to invest in.

I asked for some information about the project and he sent me a professionally done, highly impressive Power-point presentation detailing his plans for the project. I was not only impressed, I was excited about the whole idea. I got back to him right away and asked if I could sign on for a 30% profit share. He told me I was lucky because two of his investors had contacted him saying they couldn’t raise the funds they’d promised to invest so he would go ahead and sell me the 10% shares of profit he was going to sell them.

Never imagining for a moment that I was being scammed, I happily wired $30,000 to a bank account in Texas. He told me he was using the bank account of a relative residing in Texas because it was easier than having the funds sent to his bank in India. I thought nothing of it.

Days after I sent the money I had heard nothing back from him to let me know the funds had been received by his relative in Texas. I emailed him asking him to verify receipt. I did not receive an email back. I emailed again the next day and the day after that. For a full week I kept sending emails; then it started to dawn on me that I might have been scammed. I contacted my bank. They said there was nothing they could do since I’d sent the money voluntarily. It hadn’t technically been stolen. Refusing to accept that answer I went in physically to the bank. They told me the same story, but after I broke down in hysterics the manager agreed to see if there was anything they could do. They picked up the phone and called the bank in Texas, but they learned that the account I wired the money to had been closed 3 days after the money was withdrawn.

There was nothing the banks could do. They told me I would have to go to the police. To this day I haven’t gotten my money back or been able to track down the programmer in India or his relative in Texas.

Jane Burton (not the real name) lost $2500 after PayPal froze her account. I can identify with this story because a few years back it happened to me. PayPal froze my account which had a balance of $1200 claiming suspicious activity. The suspicious activity was just me testing an Instant Payment notification script I was working on for a dating software I was developing. They didn’t have the sandbox testing ground at that time. I kept sending a penny to my account trying to test the communication between PayPal and my server. I can appreciate why they became suspicious, and I’m glad they eventually unfroze my account but it took a while to get my money back. Had to fax them a million and 1 documents first.

Here’s Jane’s story:

I used PayPal to collect a payment in the amount of $2500 for legal services I provided a client. I went to withdraw my payment only to find my account had been frozen for some unknown reason. I called PayPal in a fit. I can admit I probably should have tried to stay calm but even so, just because a customer is having a fit doesn’t make it okay for the customer service representative to retaliate. So I’m shouting at the customer service rep and he starts to get pissed off and starts shouting back at me and hangs up the phone without answering any of my questions.

I called again, this time trying my best to stay calm, but it was as if the first guy had put some kind of notation with my account because the new person was being rude right from the get go. She practically shouted at me that my account had been frozen because of suspicious activity. I asked her what suspicious activity. She tells me I received a large payment to my account. I ask her how is that suspicious? I performed a service for another attorney living in another state and we agreed he’d send the payment via PayPal. What was so suspicious about that? She tells me that I have to fax them my drivers license, bank account statement and several other documents in order to assist them with resolving the problem.

I fax them the documents but don’t hear anything from them so I call them back and they’re still being rude. This new guy starts telling me that the name on my drivers license doesn’t match the name on my bank statement. My bank statement doesn’t have my middle initial but aside from that the names are the same. I’m seeing red by now. I tell him I’m a lawyer and won’t hesitate to sue PayPal. He hangs up the phone on me.

I never did get my money. I got so fed up I told them to close the account. They said they couldn’t close it while there was an investigation pending or some such thing. I don’t know how they resolved it. No one’s contacted me by phone or email and the last time I tried to login to the account I couldn’t get in. I decided to just let it go rather than take on the hassle of trying to sue them. Needless to say I’m one of those who fully agrees that PayPal sucks.