I love my friends. I have lots of them, and they enrich my life a lot. Of course, some friends are closer than others, some are basically just acquaintances. For a lot of my friends, I do things to help them, when it comes to earning money, especially in making money online. I give advice to them, tips, even help them set up things. For some, this is very helpful, for others it doesn’t seem to help that much, because they don’t follow through.
Over this past week, I have had experiences where two of my friends could have had a seriously negative impact on my ability to earn money online. I want to advise my readers that you cannot always help your friends, especially it is very important to not let your friends do things that could limit your ability to earn money.
The first incident happened with a very close friend. I am willing to do almost anything to help this fellow if he is in need. Almost anything. But, this week, he asked me to do something for him that could cost me around $1,000 per week worth of business. Sorry, I can’t do that. What did he ask me to do? Well, here is the story:
This fellow is in a bit of a financial jam right now, due to circumstances. Some of the circumstances are beyond his control, some are not. This fellow has some money in his Paypal account. He recently tried to withdraw money from Paypal into his bank account. Somehow, some trouble came up with the transfer, and the money never made it to his bank account. He tells me that due to this transaction, Paypal has put his account under investigation. Now, I don’t know the details of this investigation, but just the fact that there is an investigation worries me. Next, my friend said that he wanted to send me about $500 from his Paypal account to mine. I would then withdraw the $500 to my bank account and give it to him. Red lights started flashing! With this guy’s Paypal account under investigation, I don’t want to have any connection to him. If money is moving from his account to mine, it is very possible that MY account could soon be under investigation. I sure don’t want that. I make significant money through the use of Paypal, and I would not want to jeopardize it in any way. In the end, I loaned my friend some cash, and told him that he needed to work out the problem with Paypal, but not to include me in it!
On another front, I got an e-mail from a reader of one of my blogs. He had a proposition for me. He would start doing unethical things on my site that would cause me to earn money. In return, he was asking me to do the same. Hold on! No way would I become involved in this. What he proposed could have cost me more than $1,000 per month. If he did what he was proposing, I might have made an extra $5 per month but endangering $1,000 per month. Not a good idea.
My whole idea here is that if you are experiencing some success with online money making, don’t let other people jeopardize your ability to keep that money flowing!
Say, Bob, are you sure these two incidents didn’t arrive via an email from Nigeria? You’re quite right to draw the lines where you did – not so much as to keep your earnings up, but to keep your friends honest and ethical. The sign of a real good friend is that friend’s helping you stay on the straight and narrow when you really need to venture off the right path. 😉
@Paul: I believe this is very true. Staying on the right side of ethics is very important, and ends up leading to more success than you could have faked your way into anyway.