{"id":15239,"date":"2018-07-12T08:38:51","date_gmt":"2018-07-12T12:38:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/?p=15239"},"modified":"2018-07-12T12:45:52","modified_gmt":"2018-07-12T16:45:52","slug":"a-walk-through-cashland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/a-walk-through-cashland\/","title":{"rendered":"A Walk Through Cashland"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Walk Though Cashland<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Do we ever really get things figured out? I wonder. Yesterday, on my four-mile walk, I noticed that my little town has quite a few payday loan shops, rent-to-own stores and places where you give them the title to your car or motorcycle and they give you cash loan. Seems odd to me that we have so many in a town of so few.<\/p>\n

Maybe I noticed it yesterday for the first time because I was reading an article that was ranking the world\u2019s richest men (and women). And I was shocked to see that Bill Gates was not precariously clinging to second place, and far behind Jeff Bezos (Amazon). Jeff is worth about $120 billion; Bill is worth but $90 billion -slightly ahead of Warren Buffet who\u2019s worth 88 billion and relative newcomer Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) steadily gaining on the enclave of the richest \u2013 Mark is worth $71 billion. The 2208 billionaires are worth $9 trillion. \u00a0I suppose it would be Un-American to put some kind of limit on what people can make, on the other hand someday all the world\u2019s wealth will be controlled by a very few \u2013 maybe it already is.<\/p>\n

Anyway, between the unfathomably wealthy people like Gates and Bezos,\u00a0 are the \u201cordinary rich\u201d and the very poor are the people like you and me. We pay our bills, we make ends meet, and we generally live within our means \u2013 and if we\u2019re lucky, once in the while we get to splurge.<\/p>\n

And yesterday when I was walking it dawned on me that some people who have money\u00a0 got that way by taking advantage of the poor, the uneducated, and the undisciplined. Someone with money saw a way to provide what they call a \u201cservice\u201d to the disadvantaged by figuring out a way to take the little they have away and bating them into a trap from which few will ever escape.<\/p>\n

On my walk, I passed 3 payday loan stores and 2 cash-for-your-car-title-loan stores, and 2 rent-to-own stores. All in a town of less than 25,000 people. From this I deduced we have a lot of poor and\/or undereducated, or undisciplined people living in my little town.<\/p>\n

The payday loan industry here in my state used loopholes in the ursury law to charge interest rates of 300% or higher. Rent-to-own stores are charging $2000+ for a $600 computer. And cash loans for (mainly) car titles rip folks off by charging \u201cprocessing fees\u201d, \u201cinsurance fees\u201d and security deposits. All of these are, of course, added into the loan \u2013 on top of the 30%, 40% or higher interest rate.\u00a0 So a poor soul with no credit who needs cash has old car worth $2000. He gives the store the title, they give him $500, and he now has to pay back a loan for $800 – at 30% or higher interest. And, of course, many cannot keep up with the payments, so the lender takes possession of the car \u2013 and does not have to return any monies to the borrower. And that’s how some people get wealthy.<\/p>\n

This kind of thing goes on every day. Business people will say \u201cSo what? It\u2019s business. It\u2019s not our fault people have poor credit (or make low wages, or are ignorant). People who have bad or no credit may have dug the hole in which they find themselves. People who are poorly educated and unskilled may indeed work for low wages. And the uneducated and ignorant are always with us. But it takes a certain kind of person to take advantage of the disadvantaged and still be able to sleep at night.<\/p>\n

Of course, many people don’t become wealthy this way.\u00a0 Buy on my walk, I didn’t see any Gates, or Bezos, or Warren Buffets, I just saw a lot of places taking advantage of others and getting rich.<\/p>\n

As I sit here writing this today, I think back to 2005 and 2006 when Thundercloud.net (Cloudeight) welcomed over 3 million visitors every month. Our mail list was over 250,000 and we were doing well. Back then, there was seldom a week that went by when some company or another wasn\u2019t offering us 50 cents or a dollar per download to bundle their \u201csoftware\u201d with our installers. At that time, we were averaging 5000 downloads every day, and in December, close to Christmas, we were averaging twice that. We had days when we went over 50,000 downloads per day.<\/p>\n

We could have been generating $2500 a day on an average day \u2013 even at 50 cents per download. That\u2019s nearly a million dollars a year\u2026 and that’s just based on the average day. All things considered and counting the busy days, we could have been making close to $1,250,000 every year. We could have justified bundling our stationery and other programs with questionable software, adware, etc. by reasoning that we put a lot of hours and work into our site and our stationery \u2013 we deserved it – we deserved to be wealthy.\u00a0 But we never felt right about that and we never ever bundled anything with our downloads. Getting rich by taking advantage of people was never in our DNA.<\/p>\n

In 2009 when Windows 7 was released without an email program, we knew the end of our stationery site would come within a few years — when the number of people using Outlook Express and\/or Windows Mail dwindled from hundreds of millions to just a few million and eventually a even less. And, sadly, it happened just like we thought it would. Once we realized that our magical, musical, scrolling stationery was no longer compatible with other email programs, we had to reinvent ourselves and that\u2019s when we started Cloudeight Direct Computer Care<\/a> to provide an affordable, reliable, honest service to help people who had problems with their computer.<\/p>\n

While others were charging hundreds of dollars, we decided we would keep our pricesa as low as we possibly could\u00a0 – and we never charged nearly that much for our services.<\/p>\n

Honestly, we don\u2019t look back and think \u201cif only we have bundled 3rd<\/sup>-party software with our installers we\u2019d be rich\u201d because we are not that kind of people \u2013 and maybe that\u2019s why we\u2019ll never get rich, and that’s OK with out. Our hope is to make ends meet, pay our bills and make a living.<\/p>\n

We never once considered breaking the trust we spent years building, even if it would have made us both millionaires.\u00a0 We never sold out those who trusted us to provide them with clean downloads and beautiful stationery. And though today we\u2019re a much smaller, much less well-known company than we were 10-15 years, we are so grateful that we still have the support we do.<\/p>\n

My walk among all the money predators yesterday was a reminder that money does not buy happiness. Money does not buy trust. We\u2019ll never be rich \u2013 but no matter how bad things get \u2013 we\u2019ll never be poor either.\u00a0We\u2019ll never be in Forbes\u2019 list of the world\u2019s richest people but being rich doesn\u2019t always have to mean having a lot of money. We are\u00a0 rich because of what we do have \u2013 great families and a lot of good friends \u2013 friends like you.<\/p>\n

Do any of us really get things figured out? Do any of us know why things work the way they do? I wonder.<\/p>\n

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A Walk Though Cashland Do we ever really get things figured out? I wonder. Yesterday, on my four-mile walk, I noticed that my little town has quite a few payday loan shops, rent-to-own stores and places where you give them the title to your car or motorcycle and they give you cash loan. Seems odd to me that\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13582,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[228],"tags":[1720,2506],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15239"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15239"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15247,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15239\/revisions\/15247"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thundercloud.net\/infoave\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}