Why I shun MLM

My wife and I once tried Multi-Level Marketing (MLM), as we signed up for Herbalife a few years ago. Admittedly we were able to sell several packages, and were able to get favorable profit from it, but eventually we stopped.

Do the products work?

It's not that we don't believe in the product we were selling. I've tried the product before selling it, and I can be one of those who can go in front of a lot of people and say that the product is indeed effective. However, we find some things within the system that aren't 'fit' to what we wanted to achieve as a family.

Work, work

Initially, you can enter the organization as a seller (who does direct marketing) or as a 'supervisor' (who recruits other sellers). Either level requires that a fee be paid in order to be one. Being successful in either level would require us to meet a lot of people, follow up on them, and of course, getting them to buy the product or sign up as another seller. A lot of people are good at this, as I have some friends and co-employees who were able to make more out of it than their regular day job. As for my family, we simply cannot find the time to call out and contact others outside of our day job. We would rather spend time with each other after work. Surely there has to be another way to earn money without much manual labor, without affecting our day jobs.

Financial seminar

One time, our company held a financial management seminar. We were presented several options on how to manage our hard earned money -- store it in a bank, buy foreign currency, build our own business alongside our day job, invest it on our own in a large company, or have someone else 'manage' the investing process for us.

Those last two options rang a bell in my mind. I can invest my money in a company or two, monitor how the company handles its worth, and pull out my money if I see things not going well or if I see another company worth investing in. Not much manual work and the risk can easily be managed! I just need to look at daily trends in the market and call a person or two if I need to 'move' my money. I can still keep my day job, and I can be with my family after work.

Mutual Funds

So we went ahead and invested our money in a Mutual Fund company, as we don't have enough money to buy shares of stocks directly. A mutual fund company does the investing for you to several companies, and your money's worth is represented through the mutual fund company's net asset value (NAV). If the NAV goes up, it means that most of the company's investments were profitable. If the NAV goes down, the investments may be losing. Of course in the world of investments, this can happen day-to-day, and sometimes in a streak of a few weeks to a few months. What I did is that I monitor the NAV every 2 weeks just to see how the mutual fund company is doing, and to see how its competitors are stacking up.

How was it?

We were able to profit enough from our mutual fund investment to say that it was better than storing our money in the bank. Honestly, we were not able to profit as big as that of selling stuff from Herbalife, but we don't mind. We did our day job, stayed at home after work hours, and still our money's worth is going up. It's not a short-term, get-rich-quick scheme, but in the long term, it can prove to be worth the wait.

We pulled out our money to spend for our church wedding a year ago, but we plan on investing again once our 13th month pay and Christmas bonuses are given. I'm monitoring several companies right now so that when the time to invest comes, I can just go ahead and buy shares right away.