Alright guys, I try to only share valuable, actionable intelligence with you on this blog, and I feel inclined to give you a quick piece of financial advice that you’ll be happy to have been made privy to. A dude from Primerica (an investment & financial advice company) just stopped by our house to tell us about their company & the services they provide.

I wasn’t very happy to listen to what he had to say, because A) he’s obviously a commission-based marketer, just like me (and us marketers don’t really like being pitched to) and B) I’m not a fan of meeting with anybody outside of my computer. Primerica seems to be a pretty legit, down to earth, no pressure company that offers sound financial advice without any hype. Anyways, I’m not trying to talk about how great Primerica the company is, I’m going to tell you something that you can thank me for in 50 years:

As soon as you turn 18 (or if you’re older than 18, now!), you need to start a Roth IRA & contribute the max amount possible. Max annual contribution = $5000. Max That Shit Out! I don’t care if you do it through Primerica, Sharebuilder, TD Ameritrade, or any of a number of other companies. Just do it. Do it as soon as you can. I don’t care to go into the details of why, or provide a fancy column of numbers that show how much the investment will make you, you can Google that all on your own. All you need to know is that you need to start a Roth IRA…like 2 years ago (in my case).

The guy showed me a chart that showed person A that started maxing out a roth at like 22 years old, then stopped at 30 and didn’t invest a cent more after that until retirement. At the bottom of the page it showed that after all those years his investment amounted to like 1.5Mil. Then he showed another person, we’ll call him person B, that started at 30 and maxed their roth out every year, and then retired at the same time that person A retired. Guess what? His investment only ended up being around the same 1.5Mil amount. What does that mean? That it’s super duper duper important to start a roth IRA and max it out as young as you can possibly start one!

If you don’t believe me, do some Googling and read about Roth IRA’s. I have nothing personally to benefit from writing this post (not that I usually do or anything), but I really think you should take my advice.

I’m going to meet with an accountant in the next day or two to get my finances in order so I can start being a responsible human being and contributing to a Roth IRA myself. I’ll probably meet with the Primerica dude a time or two more so he can advise me on some more wise investments. Looking forward to it. I swear, it’s all about the people you know so that you can get the information that you need to know that is vital to your success in life. It’s all about learning…and then taking action.

oh man guys. If you’re ever doing anything with your website, whether it be adding a new ftp user, or deleting old junk, just do yourself a favor and backup your site. Here I am sitting here stressed out, waiting for my web host to restore my site from their nightly backups. I totally just deleted my holy grail site that has made me a consistent $X,XXX a month so far this year.

credit: jeffwilcox

How I got in this predicament:

With the success of my site, I’ve had a few ideas for custom development to better meet the needs of my visitors. Yesterday I posted a job on elance to finally get a custom project underway for my site. Fast forward to today…about an hour ago when I awarded someone the job. I figured I’d do everything right this time with outsourcing development work. This included scolding the developer to make a backup (or two) of my site before making any changes just in case anything went wrong because I couldn’t afford anything to go wrong with this site.

So I award the job. I make him his own login to my WordPress site, then I figure I’ll make him a custom FTP Login so that I won’t have to share mine with him (not like it even really matters!) So I make him a login, but I try it out and I didn’t give him access to the public_html folder. So I did a few other things (wasn’t really paying attention) and I ended up seeing this message:

Are you sure you wish to delete the FTP account (……)?

Yes | Yes & Remove All Files in /home/…/public_html Two options.

I wasn’t really paying attention, so guess which one I clicked? Yep. I deleted the whole damn public_html folder of my website. This sucks. Funny that I should have been more concerned with telling myself to back up the site than telling the developer.

Anyways…WiredTree (excellent, on the ball web host by the way) is in the process of restoring my site to one of their server backups from earlier today. Awesome that they have a backup, cause I sure as heck didn’t. Every time I go through this freaky process I always tell myself that it will never happen again. I always tell myself to back up the site before doing anything that may cause damage. But I’m pretty awesome so I never think that anything bad will happen. And it always does.

All of my eggs are pretty much in one basket right now, and the only good thing that has come out of this downtime is making me realize that I totally need to diversify my web portfolio. My goal is to build a website that does $500 daily…in addition to the site that is doing well for me now. (no, my site isn’t doing $500/day right now…but I’m working real hard to get it there)

Save yourself the mental anguish. Make daily backups of your databases, and at least bi monthly backups of the files on your server.

Just back it up…