Millionaire Quest: Entering The World of HYIPs

Greetings All!

This is my first post for 2007. So let me thank all of you who kept up with reading my blog last year. It does help me going when I'm down, to know that so many of you out there are interested in seeing me progress.

Well last year seems to have gone by pretty fast, and without the results I was hoping for. Imagine, just a year ago I was expecting to retire in 7 to 8 months. Yes, my biggest concern at the time, was how I was going to explain to people, especially my parents, that I was already retiring. Considering I had no money to speak of then (still don't), you'd probably have concluded that I lost a screw or two up there. So what was my plan this time?

Back in the middle of 2005, I discovered High Yield Investment Programmes (HYIPs). I did a search on the web one day, looking for investment opportunities, and came across a very enticing offer in one of the google ads. Essentially I'd become a millionaire in 3 years, with an investment of as little as $50. It was an offer I could not pass up, so I got in! I still wanted to know more about this thing, to see if anyone could corroborate that this was real. In doing research on this programme, I came across a LOT more programmes offering some very high yields in short spaces of time. Of course, some were clearly ridiculous, like the hourly payers (ie. they pay on an hourly basis) that promised some huge returns. Those no doubt would require hourly prayers. But there were some that I thought worth trying out. Afterall, they didn't require much capital to get in, and I told myself that I would not spend more than a specific amount out of my pocket. I would just use the profits from these and build.

Well it wasn't long before I found another excellent offer. This one promised to give $35000 for an investment of $1000, after 6 months. Now $1000 was much more than I had given myself permission to spend on these ventures. But I'm not the pessimistic sort. The way I looked at it, $35000 was too much to pass up, rather than, $1000 is too much to risk. So I was in.

Six months is quite a while to just sit back and wait for the big one. So to occupy myself, I did some more reading. These guys making the $35000 offer, also had another programme going. Basically you could double your money in 4 to 6 weeks. Also, they had options for taking out your money (principal+profit) at the end of each week. Not bad, I thought. I could just put a little in for a week or two, then take my capital, and reinvest the profits. So that's what I started doing. I did it for a week or two, and it worked fine. But then I started to look at their other options. The most lucrative was double your money after 4 weeks. But it would require leaving it for a full month, before being able to withdraw principal, AND, the minimum for this one was...well let's just say thousands.

Ok, that's a lot to be playing around with when you don't have much, and things are so risky. I did some thinking, and weighed my options. I saw that these guys already had a perfect 6 month track record for paying, and I was sure that if I could handle my stock market losses, then I could surely handle this if it turned sour. I guess you already figured that it did go sour.

If I recall correctly, it was less than two weeks before the programme folded up. They didn't disappear entirely in that period. Actually they made it seem that their servers were hacked, and that they'd be returning soon. Well after they had a good laugh, they confessed to being a scam from the start, then had a bigger laugh, and then they were gone. With my money. Well that did hurt a bit more than I was expecting. Yet this was all wrapped up by around September 2005. So how come by January, I was still having grand plans of retiring in just over half a year?

I'll tell you more next time.