In high school, I loaned my best friend my life savings, $7000, with interest, $6k of which was used to purchase a CD writer, which he was planning to use to run a data backup service for local businesses (the other $1k was used to buy RAM... I think maybe 16MB?).
Personally, I find several facts in that paragraph kind of remarkable.
In retrospect, I think the interest rate did not reasonably reflect the high level of risk involved. The CD backup business didn't work out, and we had to renegotiate the terms of the loan, but he did pay me back.
I had a job with MCI (hell that screams old right there) back in the early 90's. They were developing a new project (Perspective, I believe it was called) that would revolutionize the way that billing was done. So instead of shipping a truckload of paper bills to a company like JCPenny, they would just burn the information onto a CD and deliver it. I recall being told that the CD burner they had bought (which was a box the size of a nightstand) was 100k+.
oh and I think the media cost like $50 per burnable cd (or something like that).
Ahh...CD-ROMs. Those PC-GAMER demo discs are the biggest reason I volunteered to go to the grocery store with mom. Getting them through the plastic wrap and into my pocket was effortless. Sorry, grocery stores.
In high school, I loaned my best friend my life savings, $7000, with interest, $6k of which was used to purchase a CD writer, which he was planning to use to run a data backup service for local businesses (the other $1k was used to buy RAM... I think maybe 16MB?).
Personally, I find several facts in that paragraph kind of remarkable.
In retrospect, I think the interest rate did not reasonably reflect the high level of risk involved. The CD backup business didn't work out, and we had to renegotiate the terms of the loan, but he did pay me back.