Equity Skeptic

Say it in writing, be boring about it, and make the next round the reset point. Something like: happy to keep refining — we have now gone past the two rounds in the original quote, so from here I will bill additional changes at X per hour in half hour blocks, or we can bundle everything outstanding into one final round at a fixed Y. Then stop typing. No apology, no justification paragraph, no explaining that you are a small business. The tone that works is the tone your plumber would use. Nine times out of ten the client says fine, and the requests immediately become more considered, because free changes are infinitely cheap and paid ones are not.

It genuinely helps. Nobody sends their plumber eleven small follow-ups, because they can feel the meter running. And keep the bundled final round in the email — it gives them a way to say yes that does not feel like a punishment.

Very common. I only trust the issuer page or the exchange notice now.

Other way around from the buyer's side. The ex-date is derived from the record date and the settlement cycle, and it is the one that decides whether your purchase entitles you to the payment.

The ex-dividend date decides it and nothing else does. If you own the shares at the open on the ex-date you get paid; if you buy on the ex-date or later, the seller gets it. The record date exists for the company's registrar and settlement plumbing, not for you. So buying two days before the ex-date should have meant you got it, which points at one of three things: you are looking at a different quarter's ex-date than the one your purchase falls before, the position settled differently than you assume, or the payment is being routed somewhere you have not looked. Check the trade date on the confirmation rather than the settlement date, and compare it to the ex-date on the company's own investor relations page rather than a data aggregator — aggregators get these wrong surprisingly often.

Add a third ratio: dividends divided by cash from operations before capex. It is not the whole story but it is much harder to flatter than earnings, and comparing five years of it shows the direction of travel better than any single number.

Stop talking to your contact about money. He does not pay invoices, he has no authority over it, and every friendly chase resets the clock without moving anything. The sequence that works:

• Email accounts payable directly, not your contact. Ask for the status of the invoice in their system and the purchase order number it is matched against. Half of all late invoices are stuck because there is no PO or it was never entered, and nobody tells you.
• Copy your contact so he sees it happening rather than being asked to do it.
• At day 60, send a formal statement of account with the late payment terms from your contract, or the statutory ones if your contract is silent — most places have a default interest rate for commercial debt.
• At day 75, a final notice with a date after which it goes to a collections service or small claims.
  Be polite and completely unmoved throughout. Almost everything settles at step one or step three.

It is the most common cause and the least talked about. Ask for the PO before you start work from now on. While you are there, ask what their payment run schedule is — plenty of companies only pay on the 15th and the last working day, so an invoice approved on the 16th sits for two weeks doing nothing at all.

It is the single biggest one. You will cut a three minute story in 30 minutes on paper and then know exactly which b-roll you need instead of browsing for it.

Normal, and the useful number is that you will roughly halve it within five projects. What actually made me faster, in order of impact: transcribe the interview and cut the story in the text before touching a timeline, stop hunting for the perfect b-roll and drop a good enough clip with a marker to revisit, and build a project template with your bins, titles and export presets already in place. The one hour per finished minute figure people quote is for people producing the same format every week.

One warning for a taxable account: automatic reinvestment creates a new tax lot every quarter for every holding. After a few years you have hundreds of tiny lots, and if you ever sell partially or move brokers it is genuinely tedious. Not a reason to avoid it, just know it is coming.

Watch what happens if your basis reaches zero — from that point distributions are generally taxed as capital gains rather than reducing basis further. If you have held a high ROC fund for a long time this sneaks up on you. Track your own basis rather than trusting the broker, because they get this wrong on transfers between platforms.

At some point stop pricing from hours entirely. What was the site worth to them? A local business getting an ordering system that saves someone ten hours a week is not buying 25 hours of your time. Value pricing is not a trick, it just requires you to ask questions in the sales call that most freelancers skip.

Frame them as scoping rather than pricing: what happens today, who does it, how long does it take them. You need the answers anyway and the price falls out of them.

Silence is usually not about you. Budgets get pulled, somebody's nephew turns out to do web design, the person who posted it leaves. I stopped assigning meaning to no-replies once I had seen the inside of a few of these decisions.