Genesis of "One BLUE Paperclip" (aka start here)

If you're on blogspot, you've probably heard of Kyle MacDonald. If not, you should google him. He's so famous he has a blog, a website, a book, and a Wikipedia article! Too tired to google? Ok. Let's just sum it up by saying he used a childhood came called "Bigger and Better" to make a series of 14 trades over the course of one year to turn a red paperclip... into a house. No, you did not misread that and I didn't type it wrong. Oh yeah, did I mention that he's also in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most successful trade ever? Like I said... Google him sometime. He's how this all started for me.

In the meantime, my story is this:

My name is Keith Fritz. I'm a husband, an author, and a teacher... in that order. :)

I came across Kyle's story on Wikipedia & read the article to my students. They were as intrigued as I was and on a lark I offered to trade my blue paperclip. I got offers of snubby little pencils & pens with chewed caps and, yes, other paperclips, but one kid actually offered me something I thought was better than the blue paperclip, so I traded him. Later that day I shared the article with another teacher & when she asked if I had made any trades yet, I showed her my new item & was partially astounded to hear she wanted it.

Long story short, in two months of the inception of my own paperclip trading, I was in possession of something worth a little under two hundred bucks. Wanna know how I got there? Read the posts.

So what's my goal? I want to give my wife a location for her cake business. You know those shows on tv like Cake Boss & Ace of Cakes? Same thing only my wife doesn't have employees, connections to television executives, ... or a storefront of her own. :(  Ideally I'd like to get her something in the Allentown, PA area as this is where we currently live & quite like it here, but really anywhere in the US near a consumer hub would work. So, yes, just to be clear about this, we ARE willing to move to Hawaii.  I know this may seem far fetched, but if Kyle did it, so can I.

This blog is an archive of my paperclip trading adventures.  Along the way I'll make observations about what does & doesn't work, so if any of you out there would like to try it, you can learn from my experiences.
In the meantime, if you feel so inclined to do so, I'd love it if you'd become a follower of this blog and even share it with your friends. The more the merrier.

-Keith