Everyone I talk to has a lot of questions about this project. Whenever I've told people what I'm doing their reactions are interesting: a lot of people just smile politely and nod their heads. They don't have to say anything, they already have "SHIT BITCH, YOU CRAZY!" written clearly across their faces.
Then there are the others, the ones who grill me with questions to make me realize that this project is completely outside the realm of reality. This section is dedicated to the naysayers and nitpickers, because their sheer number and the passion with which they have tried to talk me out of this is the greatest evidence I have that this project is a Really Good Idea.
If you have a burning question not addressed here, please feel free to ask me.. I'll post new answers to new questions as I receive them. Come on people, make em interesting.
Who are you?
What is My Million Dollar Year?
Why are you doing this?
How did you come up with the idea?
How are you going to make all that money?
What are you going to sell?
Are you going to sell [insert item here]?
What are you going to do with all that money?
Isn't this just another one of those lame "pay my student loans" websites?
How are you documenting this process?
What do I get for contributing?
Are you just using charities to get people to give you money?
Why don't you just go get a real job?
What about declaring bankruptcy?
Is the million dollars before or after taxes? Are you going to spend it as you get it or leave it alone?
Why don't you get a day job?
My name is Astrid Bin. I'm 25, an artist and entrepreneur, and I live in Toronto, Canada.
My Million Dollar Year is a story about changing my life, about the year that I make a million dollars.
My Million Dollar Year is the name for this whole endeavour - the process of making a million dollars in a year. I'm documenting the entire process online and on camera. The online, interactive documentation that you're looking at now - mymilliondollaryear.net - is the living, breathing process that you can watch and participate in. The video documentation (titled My Million Dollar Year: The Art of Making A Fortune") is being filmed every day.
Like a lot of people my age, I'm out of school and got deep in debt from my education and it's snowballed from there. After a few years of being consumed by debt and having the stress and worry of it all take over my life, I decided that I needed to change things.
That's why I'm going about making a million dollars. Why I'm doing it in the public eye is another story completely. I decided that the best way to make a million dollars would be to let other people get in on it. I'm a huge, huge fan of reality TV and have done a lot of investigating into that medium. I think that the reason people watch it is that they are compelled by two things: the characters and their situation. However, reality TV is becoming more and more formulaic and I noticed that the characters don't have anything real at stake. I thought that it would be interesting to let an audience see my real, long-term challenge and what I go through, both good and bad. The opportunity for documentary compelled me. The reality TV aspect compelled me. The idea of putting this online and making it totally interactive compelled me. The ideas of art-as-life compelled me.
This is business, this is art, this is reality television on the internet. It's something I would want to watch that no one else was doing so I did it myself.
You can read the whole story here. In a nutshell, I got desperate enough. I was walking home in December and in tears because I couldn't afford to turn on the heat in my apartment for the third winter in a row. I decided that I needed to do something drastic, like make a million dollars in a year.
Good question.
I am purposely opening myself up to the possibilities that will happen as this project progresses. I do, however, have a few base strategies: sell merchandise (tshirts, mugs, that sort of thing), play the lottery every week, accept contributions to this project online, pimp it to the press like nobody's business, and sock everything away every month in high-interest GICs. (Yes, my bank manager thinks I'm out of my mind.)
Part of the challenge here is being open to possibilities: if I convinced myself that I had to plan how I was going to make every dollar before I started I would never begin. Instead, I'm letting everything develop as it progresses. Got ideas? You can suggest them.
At present I have a swag shop where you can buy merchandise with the My Million Dollar Year logo on it and pithy sayings. I only sell things that I would buy myself because they're cool and hilarious.
I'm also selling all the artifacts associated with this project so you can own an original piece of what comprises it. For example, I'm only going to get 12 bank statements a year, there are only going to be 52 weekly lottery tickets, only 12 of each credit card statement, only a limited number of original, uncut source video tapes, and so on. If you're interested in looking at those, you can check them out as well.
If there's nothing there that's exactly what you want, you can request an artifact - for a set price of $2000 CDN I'll give you whatever you want (with remarkably few exceptions - see the artifact page for details). This will be a completely original piece of this project and will be completely personal and one of a kind.
Short answer: probably.
Longer answer: You can request whatever you want and chances are I'll accept your money and happily send it to you. The only exceptions are as follows: absolutely no photographs of myself in any stages of undress or in a comprimising position (if I wouldn't want it on the cover of Fortune 500 I'm not going to sell it to you), and nothing that comes out of my body (no blood, urine samples, saliva, etc). Everything else is pretty much up for grabs, but I reserve the right to refuse any request. Barring the above restrictions, however, I can't think of anything that I'll refuse, but I can't promise to sell everything that's requested because I'm sure that there are plenty of people in InternetLand that will come up with craziness that even I'm not fully prepared for.
Pay off debt. Invest. Give a lot of it to my family. Heat my apartment. There are a few frivolous things I think would be cool - buy a proper piano, an Apple G5 (drool), fund my next project (I haven't decided what it is yet so don't ask).
I've got no interest in retiring off what I make from this project. Enough to pay debt, give to those I love and travel a bit would be great. Enough to open a gallery for emerging time-based artists would be great too. Enough to get my masters degree, hey, bring it on.
Personally, I think I'm still too scared of all this to really plan for it.
The only thing I've firmly decided is that 30% of the proceeds from this project is going to be split among three charities: one local (Toronto), one national (Canada), and one international. I believe that in getting the means and opportunity to change my life I have a reponsibility to change the lives of others as well. At the time that I'm writing this FAQ I haven't been able to get hold of the proper people at these charities (you try getting hold of anyone during the holidays!) and I'm not going to mention who they are until I get their full support in this, but as soon as I get that everyone will know.
I sincerely wish that I had the ability to dream that small.
If I was simply trying to pay off my student loans I can think of a bunch of ways that are easier than living in full view of an international audience for a year. This entire project is about money but not really - it's also about experimenting, giving myself over to fate and chance, it's about building something that I can use to change my life and the lives of others.
First and foremost, you get to be part of a cultural phenomenon.
You get to be part of the changing of lives. Not only mine and not necessarily those who I'm going to donate 30% of the proceeds to, but
You also, if you are so inclined, get your name listed in the ending credits of the documentary. (I was going to list every contributor as an executive producer, but those would be extremely long title credits.)
You also get a subscription to a contributors-only newsletter, filled with behind-the-scenes material that isn't on the site. I'm hoping to develop a password-protected contributors section of the site in January.
Of all the questions I've been asked about this project, this is the one that kept me up at night.
I don't want to give the impression that I'm fundraising or that I'm a charity, and I nearly didn't tell anyone at all that I was going to be giving 30% of the proceeds away because I didn't want to seem to be exploiting anybody for personal gain. However, a big focus of this project is honesty, and I didn't feel right not including this factor since it's one of the major things that pushed me into wanting to make far more than I needed: the opportunity to change the lives of others.
Someone pointed out to me early on that a lot of corporations use charitable donations as publicity and give far less than I'm planning to, which made a lot of sense. I think what really made up my mind was that these three charities will get a lot of publicity from this site which will go a long way towards awareness and long-term support for them.
Be honest here: would you hire me?
I've had lots of corporate jobs in my day - retail auditor (probably the worst job I've ever had), receptionist, ER clerk in a psychiatric hospital, audio and video editor at a dot com. After wandering to the corporate brink and back again I have this to report: Despite any amount of money I've been paid, I have never found any of this work satisfying, creatively stimulating, intellectually challenging, and office politics make me want to rip my own head off.
Getting another corporate job wouldn't do much to change my life. I most likely still wouldn't be making enough to manage my debt and I would be completely miserable, more surly than usual, and have no time to do anything about it.
I've often thought that maybe it's immaturity on my part that makes me not want to get a corporate job, that a better and more mature person would suck it up and do it anyway. The conclusion I've reached is that I choose to embrace immaturity in this respect. I choose not to spend my life doing something I wasn't cut out for.
Oh, believe me, I've spent most of the last two years staring at the ceiling at night and thinking that maybe I should just declare bankruptcy, have it all done and over with and have a nice clean start when I'm 32.
The only thing that's stopped me from doing that is a sense of responsibility I have to this debt, this weird kind of "I'll show you who's boss" fascination I have with it. I feel like washing my hands of it and getting other people to write it off would be irresponsible, that I have an obligation to find my way out of what I've found my way into.
My overdeveloped sense of guilt would probably keep me up more nights than the thought of bankruptcy has.
The million dollars is before taxes. Taxes scare the crap out of me so I'm quite happy not thinking about them until 2006.
The million dollars, however, does not include the PayPal fees that are incurred with money transfers. They're not that much, but they're a lot on small amounts (for example, a donation of $1 carries with it $0.59 in PayPal fees, so I net $0.41). If I included the money that goes to these fees it would significantly overinflate my earnings (especially if thousands of people are donating a buck) and I don't think that it's honest to say that I'm making more than I actually am. (It should be noted that these are the only costs I'm subtracting - I'm not subtracting hosting fees, post office box rental, that sort of thing).
I'm not planning on spending this money over the next year (I'm giving 30% to charity so I can't go crazy with it anyway). However, I can't promise that if I'm $50 short of eating that I'm not going to take it out of this bank account, but that will not affect the grand total of what I've earned so far. I think that the best way to make sure this money grows is to keep socking everything away in high-interest GICs as often as I can, and I need at least $1000 to start doing that, so it's simply not in my or the project's best interests to take money out of it.
Why don't you get a day job? I hear McDonald's is hiring.
I have a day job, I work as a freelancer doing design, marketing and PR. I work mostly in the music industry because I find it really fascinating, what makes some things popular and others not so much. I also do corporate design when I think it's interesting. I don't make a lot of money at it.
I could probably make more if I started going agressively after jobs that paid well but I might as well just work a corporate design job, and the reason why I've sacrificed so much and worked so hard at this is because I wanted to do what I love and not have to apologize for it.
For a long time (like, two years) I worked night jobs to fill in the gaps and keep going. I realized that although I was making a bit more a month and bills were easier I certainly wasn't getting out of debt, and I was so exhausted from working 75-90 hour weeks that it wasn't getting my business further ahead either.
I was also fascinated by the fact that I started this business straight out of university and everyone told me that I was "wasting my art degree", although I found being an entrepreneur the most creatively demanding thing I had ever done. I started to wonder about art vs money, art vs. business.
Then I had the epiphany in December while walking home and decided that I was going to actually make the making of money into Art, so now I'm making a million dollars and documenting the process instead of toiling away in some bar at night.
You're right, I could work at McDonald's. However, I believe that this project is a more worthwhile use of my time. It doesn't mean I have no respect for anyone who works at McDonald's. It means I choose to do something different. I choose to take a path that I feel will get me closer to where I want to be than a night job at a burger joint could.