 Well hello again friends! It is spring and to be more specific, April here in the lovely United States of America and that means a couple of things. First off, the sunshine is out, there are new flowers in bloom and it means that one half of the procrastinating Americans have finally paid their income taxes. Since it's tax time, I have all kinds of useless information that I'm prepared to share with you about what it's like to be a small business owner and a content creator who generates a little bit of revenue from the internet. Today I'm looking at my expenses report from the Retro World Expo that I went to in 2022 and I thought it would be a great idea to show you the amount of costs I incurred from going to this convention and just being there my only connection to this convention for the most part is Bob from Retro RGB. I was there to hang out with him and a lot of other people and that was my main connection to this show. So I did purchase a ticket as a regular attender and that cost me a total of $57. I drove up to Connecticut because I had a lot of CRTs to bring there and to bring back and that way I was able to get the car rental comped for me by people involved in this deal where I was transporting these CRTs. So the cost for the rental car for that trip was $585 but I did not have to pay that so that's not going to be part of my expenses at the end here. All right now outside of that rental costs I did have to pay for fuel and then parking. So my fuel costs were $140 for the trip and my parking costs came up to $60. So how about my lodging? Well I decided to stay four lovely nights in downtown Hartford Connecticut but I did not take advantage of the like Marriott Hotel price break that Bob had arranged. I decided to go to my own and get an Airbnb nearby and it was a really dodgy situation. I've talked about it a bunch on the Katharine Ray podcast but anyway the cost for me to be in that Airbnb for four nights was $581. All right the other thing I did was I spent $291 on all my food and beverage purchases that includes my meals, my beers. So since I wasn't staying at the Marriott that's where everybody else was and I had to end up taking Ubers over to the Marriott from my Airbnb and that cost me an extra $60. Now when I got to the convention I did buy some stuff. I bought a couple of items for me personally but I also was able to pick up some important things for the show and these are definitely costs on the business so I spent $111 on just some parts and goodies for content that's coming up this year in 2023. So if we add up all those costs I spent a total of $1300 of my own money. That's pretty high for just going to a convention where I drove to the convention and that does not even include the $585 that I worked out for my rental car expenses. So thankfully I was able to recoup these costs by arranging for restoration jobs. That was on a PVM 1342Q, 1343 MD, 1344Q and finally a 1354Q. So once I was able to do all those jobs I actually made $1400 in profit from those four restorations and because that was directly related to the convention I offset the cost of that $1300 with the $1400 in profit. So at the end of the day I made a lovely fresh $100 bill and don't tell my wife that or she'll never let me go to another convention. These conventions are not about making money. I was extremely fortunate to be able to have a business where I could pick up some extra work while I was there and offset all the costs of this or it would have just cost me $1300 to go and kind of promote my business. So remember that next time when you ask how much does this creator have to be paid if they want to come to a show or if they're doing it on their own dime, which a lot of us are. We're just doing it to kind of promote ourselves and we're given an opportunity to hopefully grow our brand and get ourselves out there and also have the experience of doing these live shows and live classes with people or live podcast style things that we're doing in these conventions. That all comes with a big price tag. I mean $1300 for me, just a little old me. So yeah, that's how much this one costs. This was definitely the most expensive of the two that I went to this year, but it's a great thing to look at from this kind of a perspective. Yeah, so that's everything. I wound up making $100 and these are all my lovely expenses and incomes for this trip. And so on the next episode like this, we'll look at another convention I went to, which was the Music City Multicon outside of Nashville. The economics on that are going to be slightly different because I do get some comps for that show because it's something I've been doing for a while, but it's still an interesting thing to think about. Anyway, thanks for hanging out with me. I know this is like an unconventional, weird topic to be talking about what the actual costs are on things, but if you enjoyed it, please do me a favor, hit the like button and make sure you're subscribed to the channel because I do have a lot of great live shows coming up as well as full-on feature content here at Retro Tech. And I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content. Well, Brutus, next month you turn 15 years old. Can you believe it? 15 years old? Nobody thought a bulldog would live that long, right? And this, this little rascal, you just turned one. It being an old geezer dog, ain't exactly what it cracked up to be, is it? Is it? Little fella. Oh, you just don't win a fella. Oh, get him. You will get that Brutus. You will get that Brutus. Oh, he's up for it. Good boy. Good boy. Well, before I take off, there are a couple more things I want to bring up. First off, I could have saved a little bit more money if I would have only gone for Friday through Sunday instead of Thursday to Monday. So I probably could have saved $300. And the other thing I wanted to mention is I did actually get comped this all access backstage pass where I was able to get in and out of the show freely. That was very awesome. Did any of you guys go? Did you track your costs? How much money did you end up spending? And also, what about my other fellow creators? Let's all talk about this. Come on, I'm calling you all out right now. If you were at the show and you want to talk about how much the show actually cost you, I think it would be a good thing. And maybe it would let the show promoters know that we are all out here and it does cost most of us money to come and promote ourselves. And getting little treats like the all access backstage pass is awesome and goes a long way when you're going out of your way to do some extra things to help some people out. And at the other end of that, what about you guys who are bigger? How are you getting paid? How much are you getting paid? Do you have an agent? Do we need to talk to the agent? Is it like baseball and like we need A-Rod's agent to go and sign the big deals with the promoters? All right, everybody. As you can tell, we're pretty tired. So we're going to do some kissing and then take a nap. Come on, Cole. Come on.