Joe Levi presents Greener Living through Technology

I was told about an iPhone app expirament  called “I Am Rich” which cost $1,000 to purchase. Buying this app did two things: it added a pretty jewel icon to your app list — and it made the app developer a bundle of money.

I stumbled across an app in the Android Marketplace called “Pay Off My Mortgage” by Karl Rivers. He charges £100.00 for the application — the proceeds of which go directly to paying off his mortgage. All the app does is show how much money he has raised.

Others have done similar things (Paid By Pixels, One Million Pixels, etc.), but none have tried to unite a goup of people together to accomplish a specific task.

So I figured I’d try a social experiment called Pay off Joe’s Mortgage. The difference here is that the web is a much larger place than any mobile application platform (iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, etc.), and I’m not asking for a specific amount for you to be able to participate.

So, how do you participate?

First off, if you don’t want to donate money, that’s fine, just share this with your friends and pass-it-on. Share this page on DIGG, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, (use the “Share This” link at the bottom of this post), etc. You can send it to your email list (all the people that you sent the email about Bill Gates “sharing his fortune” if you just forward the email to all your friends). Let’s see how far we can make this go. It’ll be interesting to see just how far it reaches. Here’s the URL to spread around: http://bit.ly/joes-mortgage

Next, if you do want to donate, you can donate as much or as little as you want!

I’m going to update this post every week or so with a list of everybody who donates with a hyperlink to whatever address they want it to go to, categorized by amount donated (I’ll respect your privacy if you want to remain “anonymous” or don’t want me to brag about how much you donated, what ever you prefer).

How Can You Donate?

I’ve provided these easy links! I’m using PayPal as my payment gateway (don’t worry, you can use a credit/debit card, you don’t even have to have a PayPal account).

• Donate $1
• Donate $5
• Donate $10
• Donate $25
• Donate $50
• Donate $100
• Donate $250
• Donate $500
• Donate $1,000
• Donate $2,500
• Donate $5,000
• Donate $10,000
• Donate $12,000
• Donate any amount you choose, just fill in the amount you want and click “update amount”

Will a good chunk of your donation go to Uncle Sam in taxes?

NO! As I understand the tax code (and I am not a lawyer), any person can donate as much as $12,000 in income-tax free GIFTS to family, friends, and others. So, by contributing, you are stating the following for tax purposes:

In appreciation of your efforts, I choose to make this GIFT to you. I am permitted by the tax code to make income tax-free gift transfers to family, friends and others as long as they do not exceed $12,000 per year. Because this is a GIFT and not a TIP, you do not need to report it as income on your tax return.

Of course, donations and gifts to me are not tax-deductible on your part, it just means that your full amount (up to $12,000) will go toward paying off my mortgage.

Total Raised So Far? Who’s Donated?

Total Raised So Far:

$1.⁰⁰

First to donate:

Anonymous

$12,000+

…

$10,000+

…

$5,000+

…

$2,500+

…

$1,000+

…

$500+

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$250+

…

$100+

…

$50+

…

$25+

…

$10+

…

$5+

…

$2.50+

…

$1+

Anonymous

Less than $1

…

So what are you helping to pay off?

My nuclear family and I live in Syracuse, Utah (a suburb of Salt Lake City, Utah). Zillow says the home is worth somewhere north of $350K; the mortgage is for a lot less than that. There’s a picture at the beginning of this article…

Why should you participate?

You’re asking yourself, “isn’t this guy just begging for money?” You bet I am! But I’m not “guilting” anyone in to it. The bank isn’t going to repo my house if you don’t donate, or anything like that.

This is your opportunity to participate in something bigger than just you. How long does it take the average person to pay off their mortgage? Around 30 years, give or take. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could brag to all your friends that you helped some guy pay off his entire mortgage in a week (or a month, or whatever).

A million donations of $1 per pixel made a guy a millionaire in a short amount of time, and that was just to buy a pixel and a link on a web page. The same contribution here not only nets you a name and hyperlink, but goes towards something tangible.

Why not skip out on soda for a day, donate the $1.00 that you would have fed the vending machine. Skip Starbucks and donate the $5.00 you would have paid for that double mocha espresso latte. It’s not much to you, not much at all.

But, if ten thousand people skip their coffee for a single day, that’s fifty grand! If they donate $25 (or each one gets 5 of their friends to donate), that’s it, done, mortgage GONE!

This is really an experiment in numbers. Currently 1% of all visits to this page end up donating. That ratio isn’t bad! We just need to get the word out to more people! How many have you told?

.CM is the top-level domain extension assigned to the country of Cameroon. Just like the Tuvaluan’s with their .TV domain extension from years back, the Cameroonians wanted to make money.

As a money-making scheme, the Cameroonians were allowing some typo-squatters to register names like “google.cm” to capture all the traffic from people who mis-type “google.com” as “google.cm”.

By offering the .cm name to the general public at $350/2-yr (as the starting bid, if two or more people bid on the same domain, the name goes to the highest bidder).

This is nothing short of domain name extortion. They’re essentially saying “your web visitors are stupid and are going to mis-type your domain name, if you don’t buy this new domain name then someone else will steal all your (stupid) customers and send them to your competitors”.

The level of potential impact is limited to those who mistype the .com as .cm, and they are not going to believe they’ve landed on the right site when they hit a page full of links (the current practice), so they’ll hit the back button and try again.

So, skip on this “exclusive offer” if it hits your email box.

You can thank me later™.

Here’s my first blog post from my android phone…