Bridging The Gaap

Part 1 - Don’t Neglect Your Professions - Part 2 - One Crunchy Serpent At A Time -

Part 3 - Don’t Touch Your Money!

2) How Do You Make 5000 Gold? One Crunchy Serpent at a time…

I should explain. I took advantage of Chainface’s marketable skills as a cook: cooking and selling food became the main source of my income very, very quickly. Specifically, I sold Crunchy Serpents, a delectable morsel which has the ability to increse a spellcaster’s damage by 23. This increse in damage, I soon found out, was highly sought after by high level players, for whom even a slight increse in damage can mean the difference between being useful or useless in some of the endgame dungeons.

For whatever reason, almost nobody is able or willing to make it and sell crunchy serpents. There was a hole in the market.

Ohhhhhh yeeeeeeah…Jackpot!

A stack of 20 crunchy serpents sells for 29.99 (29gold 99silver). Individually, 30 gold a piece doesn’t seem like much, especially with a lofty goal like 5000 gold. But as I began to take advantage of my marketable cooking skill, selling Crunchy Serpents for 29.99 a stack, I noticed something.

Small amounts, in large volumes, add up to large amounts!

Here is what 20 stacks of Crunchy Serpents looks like. Recall that each stack (of 20 individual units) sells for 29.99.

 

You are looking at just under 600 gold worth of food.

Individually the stacks are not worth much, but when you add them all up, YOWZA!

It’s the same thing in real life. A lot of people feel that because they do not make large incomes, they cannot save for retirement, for emergencies, for purchases, for anything.

The trick is to start getting into the saving habit by saving small amounts at first, and work up from there. Start by finding some way to save even a little bit (you could, say skip buying a drink everyday at school like I did!), and plunk that into a no-fee high interest saving account. You can see the effect of saving small amounts for yourself by palying around with ING’s Savings Calculator, which I have used to illustrate the following example:

If you save even a dollar a day, you’ve just saved ~$30 a month, or an incredible $365 a YEAR. If you continued this dollar a day savings plan for 5 years, earning an interest rate of 3%, you’d have just over ~$1900, $139 of which is pure interest!

If you save 2 dollars a day it’s even better: after 5 years at 3% you will have a total of ~$3800, $278 of which is pure interest!

So the lesson here is that even small amounts add up, and add up quickly! This is how Chainface was able to gather 5000 gold, 29 gold at a time. And here’s a real world bonus: Chainface didn’t have the advantage of compound interest! She didn’t get to earn free money from the interest earned on her money sitting in the bank. So what are you waiting for? Start saving today!

Speaking of money sitting in the bank, that ties into our third and final lesson, which we’ll discuss in Part 3: Don’t Touch Your Money!

Part 1 - Don’t Neglect Your Professions - Part 2 - One Crunchy Serpent At A Time -

Part 3 - Don’t Touch Your Money!

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