Profit: What It Means For You

I’m sure everyone has either heard or said the following at some point: “I can’t meet my goal because *insert reason here*.” Sometimes the reason is “I’m not good at games/restocking,” sometimes it’s “I don’t get much time to play,” or maybe it’s “I have no self-control and like to go on spending sprees.” I’m here to tell you the method I used to meet all of my goals, and I believe that it can work for everyone. I call it the Daily Profit Method, or DPM.

Now, I can hear you asking “Daily Profit Method? What is this insane girl talking about?” Well, profit is simply making more money than you spend. So, in Neopets, daily profit is earning more neopoints than you spend on any given day. Sounds simple, right?

“Well, how are we supposed to earn more than we spend if we’re not good at earning neopoints or if we love to spend them,” you ask? Well, I have an answer for you, my friends. You keep track. Yes, there is work involved in this method. Personally, I usually used a spreadsheet program, but a notebook works fine as well. Whenever you spend or earn neopoints, make a note of it. When you’re done, total up all the neopoints you earned and subtract the ones you spent. Hopefully, you’ll have a positive number, but, if you’re like me, you won’t after just doing dailies.

What you do then is you do whatever you do best to make neopoints. For some it’s restocking. For me it was gaming. Don’t get me wrong, I have only once or twice been on the high score list for a game, and I was bumped off in minutes, so I don’t think anyone could consider me a good gamer. I tried, though. I looked at the neopoint ratio and figured out how high I needed to score just to get 100 neopoints, and shot for that. If I got more, then that was wonderful. If I got less, I didn’t send the score. Every neopoint reward was recorded on my spreadsheet (or if I was on a different computer, a notepad). Once I got over my goal of 1,000 neopoints a day, I assessed if I still had time to play. If I did, I kept going. If I didn’t, I logged off guilt-free.

“Wait,” I hear you shout, “Did you say your goal was only a thousand neopoints a day? How did you get all your pets painted?” The answer is simple. I was persistent. Sure, I got a stroke of luck now and then, but those 1,000 neopoints a day probably made up the majority of my earnings. That goal was back before Key Quest, back when I had an old computer that crashed about every five minutes. Yes, it was really difficult for me to earn neopoints, but I didn’t complain on the boards. I kept working at it.

A very important step in this is depositing your neopoints into the National Neopian. I am a firm believer in the old adage “Out of sight, out of mind.” Keeping your money in the bank makes you less tempted to spend it. Collect your interest every day, but then get out of the bank until you’re ready to make a deposit. Do not withdraw neopoints from the bank until you have your goal. You can deposit however often you would like. I usually deposited when I had over 10k on hand. This left me with enough neopoints on hand to pay for my dailies and to meet unexpected expenses like faerie quests, but did not leave me with too many neopoints in case of money-stealing events like the Tax Beast or Sloth’s Invasion Tax. It is much easier to make up ten percent of 1,000 neopoints than to make up for ten percent of 10,000 neopoints.

Earlier, I mentioned that I had a goal of how much I wanted to earn in a day. This is perhaps the most important part of DPM. You need to set a Daily Profit Goal, or DPG. How you set your DPG depends on your ultimate goal. There are two types of goals: Time-Sensitive and Untimed. Time-Sensitive Goals are goals you want by a specific date. These goals are phrased like “I want to get my friend a(n) *insert item here* for the Day of Giving.” Untimed Goals are goals that you just want to complete eventually, not by a certain date. They sound more like “Someday I want to get a(n) *insert item here*.” These two types of goals require different strategies for formulating your DPG.

Untimed goals are the easiest to set a DPG for, since you don’t want them in any specific amount of time. To set this goal, you need to figure out how much you can reasonably earn in a given day. For this, you need to look at your schedule and figure out what day you are usually on the least amount of time. When this day next comes around, record all your earnings and expenses for the whole time you can be on, and figure out how much you made. Hopefully you made more than you spent, because if not, you need to take a close look at where you can cut expenses. If you did earn more than you spent, you should set your DPG at right around the amount of profit you earned. Now all you need to do is keep earning at least that much every day. If you find that on a given day you cannot make your DPG, you should make up for it the next day. When I failed to earn 1,000 neopoints in a day, I acted as though I had spent an extra thousand neopoints the next day, so that I would make up for the day I “lost” and the current day. Keep up your goal for however long it takes to get what you want.

Time-Sensitive Goals are a little trickier. Because you want it by a certain date, you need to figure out how many neopoints your goal costs and how many neopoints you have to earn every day to get it. The simple way to do this is to first determine how many days you have and how many neopoints you need, then divide the number of neopoints you need by the number of days you have to get them. Then you need to do the steps above for determining a DPG for an Untimed Goal to make sure that your DPG and your overall goal are reasonable.

For example, let’s hypothetically say that I wanted to get a friend a Lord Darigan Plushie from the Hidden Tower by the Day of Giving. From the Hidden Tower, this plushie costs 2,500,000 neopoints. Since I know I have parties on the 24th and 25th of December every single year, I want to get it no later than the 23rd. Thus, if I made this goal on December 1, I would have 23 days to achieve my goal. If I was starting out with no neopoints, in order to meet this goal I would need to make over 100,000 neopoints a day. Even though I am on a better computer now and have more time to play, I know that 100k a day is just not usually reasonable for me, and therefore the goal is unreasonable. However, if I already had 2 mil and only needed 500k, that equals out to about 22k a day, which, while still a lot, is probably not completely out of my league anymore. Thus, that goal would be reasonable.

Once you have your DPG for your Time-Sensitive Goal you can either continue to make that number of neopoints every day, or you can alter your goal daily. I highly recommend that you alter your goal if you miss a day rather than trying to make up for it all the next day as you would in the Untimed Goal version of this method, as your goal may be higher than in an Untimed Goal. When I used this method for an expensive Day of Giving present, my DPG was much higher at first than my DPG for my Untimed Goals of paint brushes and a complete lab map. Personally, when using this method, I altered my goal daily whether or not I met my DPG. If I exceeded my DPG, that lowered my DPG for the next day, but if I didn’t meet the DPG it went up the next day.

To alter it daily, it really is easiest to use a spreadsheet, but if you want to do it the low-tech way, there is a way to do that, too. Simply create a calculator in the spreadsheet (or do the following calculation by hand) where you can enter in the number of neopoints you have in the bank, the number of neopoints you have out of the bank, the number of neopoints your stocks are worth (if you have them and are willing to sell them all, even at a loss, if you need to in order to meet your goal), the cost of your goal, and how many days you have left. Then make it add together the neopoints you have total, subtract that from the number of neopoints your goal costs, and divide the answer by the number of days you have left. This will give you your DPG for the day. The next day, just update the information and it will tell you your new DPG. Now all you have left to do is keep track of how much you spend and earn that day so that you can be sure you’re meeting, if not exceeding, this goal in order to keep yourself on track and lower your DPG in the long run.

To summarize, here are the steps you need to complete in order to use the Daily Profit Method:

1. Determine what type of ultimate goal you have--Time-Sensitive or Untimed.

2. Calculate an appropriate Daily Profit Goal to meet your ultimate goal, making sure that if your ultimate goal is a Time-Sensitive Goal it is reasonable.

3. Record all the neopoints you earn and spend in a day to make sure you’re meeting or exceeding your Daily Profit Goal.

4. Put all of your hard-earned neopoints in the bank and don’t forget to collect your interest. Make sure to leave those neopoints in the bank until you have your goal.

5. Reap the rewards of your hard work when you get your goal.

Well, now you know my secret to earning neopoints. If you have any further questions or feedback on this article, feel free to neomail me. Neomails are always welcome. I wish you the best of luck at meeting all of your goals.

My sincere thanks to my good friends torkie10 and krimz0n for their great feedback on this article.