Lazy Man and Money

Kosmo 2022 Financial Year in Review

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It’s Lazy Man here with another post from regular writer, Kosmo. This is a good run-down of how his finances look going forward five, ten years, and beyond. If you are looking for something similar from me, I wrote about my retirement income back in June. In the new year, I’ll update my 2022 resolutions and make some new ones for 2023. Kosmo has already written a couple of other articles for you.

It’s hard to believe that we’re already rushing headlong into yet another year.  Well, the years start coming, and they don’t stop coming.  It has been an interesting year.

Kids

My daughter began high school this fall, and my son started junior high (7th grade).  My daughter had a 3.95 GPA in junior high and a 4.14 in her first trimester of high school.  She’s on the advanced track for math and science, plays the flute in the marching band, has an interest in art, is active in Girl Scouts, and has begun volunteering at the local food pantry.  Marching band has become her passion.  She’s quite introverted by nature, so it’s great to see her enjoy performing in front of a large crowd.  One of the high school football games was played at a college stadium this fall, so her first-ever marching band performance was in front of about 15,000 people.

My son fell a bit short of his sister’s GPA, but only because they don’t have AP classes in junior high, which limits the highest GPA to 4.0.  In addition to achieving a 4.0 GPA, he takes a seminar class that is essentially an extension of the gifted program he participated in during elementary.  They do a lot of group projects, including a project where they designed carnival games and rigged them so that the success rate would fall into a specific range for success rate.  They intended to have one group of elementary kids play the games for an hour.  It was such a success that the elementary school principal invited them to stay for the entire day.  He also plays saxophone, both in the standard school band and the jazz band.

How does this bragging have any connection to personal finance?  The kids are becoming well-rounded enough to put themselves into a position to get some merit-based aid for college.  My wife and I aren’t rich, but we earn enough to make need-based aid unlikely or very limited.  If the kids are able to get some merit-based aid, it will lighten the load a bit.

We do have 529 accounts for both kids and have been contributing since they were born.  While it’s difficult to keep up with the rising costs of higher education, the 529s will likely be able to pay for a substantial portion of their education.

It’s crazy to think that my daughter is only 3 1/2 years away from high school graduation.  It seems like only yesterday that she was a baby.  Time flies.

Retirement

Our retirement accounts have not had a great year.  However, I’m a long-term investor the bulk of our retirement assets are in date-targeted funds.  I’m still about 18 years away from retirement, so there’s plenty of time for the market to bounce back.

I don’t max out my 401K contributions, but I contribute quite a bit, and I’m starting to boost the percentage every year.  My wife is a state employee and makes a great contribution to her retirement account.  Additionally, I have a defined benefit pension from a previous employer, where I worked for 20+ years.  I’d actually be eligible to start receiving the pension at age 55, but I will defer to age 62 since the payments are much larger at 62.

My job has profit sharing, and one nice aspect is that the profit sharing is done in the form of a 401K contribution.  The company had a good year, and the profit-sharing contribution was 15% (of my salary) this year.  While that didn’t completely offset the overall 401K losses, it was a nice silver lining.

I run a lot of calculations in a spreadsheet.  Barring a long-term bear market, we should be well-positions for a comfortable retirement.  We won’t have enough money to live in luxury, but we won’t need to worry about where the next meal is coming from.

A team member is going to shift to part-time in 2023 instead of following her original plan of retirement.  In the past few years, I have come to the realization that this will likely be the path I take as well.  As I get closer to age 65, I realize that it will be impossible to just power down my computer and walk away.  I will almost certainly shift to a part-time schedule and/or teach a class at a local community college.  As much as I enjoy sleeping in and doing nothing, I’m going to need some sort of intellectual stimulation.

Employment

I’ll celebrate two years at my current job in January.  I’ve written a number of articles about the experience, and it’s no secret that I enjoy working for the company.

I’ve recruited two friends to join the company and am working on recruiting some others.  While I wish I could wear jeans to work, I’m a fan of the company culture.  There’s much more of a fan of various teams working together to achieve common goals rather than taking on adversarial roles.

Officially, I shifted to supporting our e-commerce technologies several months ago.  However, I’m still wrapping up several large projects from my old area.  The e-commerce area is still in its early stages, so I’ll get to be a key contributor in getting it off the ground.  I’ll be attending a conference in February to learn more about this space.  The conference is in Palm Springs, which will provide a nice break from the Iowa winter.

My employer seems to be one of the few companies that actively celebrate employee retirements.  A colleague from our department is retiring.  There was a formal celebration a couple of weeks ago.  The event was held at the company’s conference center.  Hors d’Oeuvres, sandwiches, and an open bar.  It was great to see a company spending time, effort, and money to celebrate the contributions of any employee.  This particular employee had been with the company for 27+ years.

Vacation home

We had been kicking the tires on the idea of a vacation / rental home in Door County, Wisconsin.  We love the area, and we’re at the stage of life where we’re fairly financially secure.  Sister  Bay is our favorite town in the area, but we had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t feasible.  Either properties were too expensive, had too many restrictions, or both.  We could probably make a small profit on a rental.  However, the restrictions on usage would limit the amount of time we could spend there and would prevent us from pivoting from rental to retirement home in a few years.  The whole point of having a property there is so that we can use it, with rental income, as a way to defray costs.  If we can’t have unfettered use, there’s not much point in owning the property.

We took a short trip back up to Door County this summer to take a look at some of the surrounding towns.  We needed to expand our horizons beyond Sister Bay.

Ultimately, we decided that we simply didn’t like any of the surrounding towns enough to make that sort of financial commitment.  Several of them are quite nice but don’t quite have the appeal of Sister Bay.  At this point, we’re just going to make occasional trips up to Door County and stay at AirBNBs.  If the housing market there cools down over the next 5-10 years, we might find ourselves in a position to buy.

The Importance of Company Culture

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Every company brags about its culture.  But when you pull back the curtain, does it really walk the walk?  Or is it just a smoke screen?

My Old Company

Company culture was the primary reason I changed jobs in January 2021.  My old job had just laid off many friends, and morale was in the toilet.  I sold all my company stock the day after the layoffs were announced.  (Note: my 401K is very diversified, and the company stock wasn’t a huge percentage of the total.)  When I saw the type of employees who were affected, I lost confidence in the company’s direction.  Within a couple of months, I had left.

I made the right decision.  Company morale cratered, and even more, people were affected by layoffs that were announced this past June.  That round of layoffs affected a lot of loyal, “rock star” type of employees.  I was stunned at the caliber of people that were targeted.  The layoffs seemed incredibly short-sighted.  The internal IT department had been reduced to less than a skeleton crew.  The internal staff had been supplemented with contract employees, but they simply don’t have the years of experience that the departing employees had.

Culture At The New Company

At the new company, things are very different.  It’s a privately owned company and not at the whims of the stock market.  If the company has a rough patch, it doesn’t react by laying off employees – it rides out the storm.

The expectation is a forty-hour work week.  If there is a big project, it might be necessary to work a few more hours – but the hours dip back down once the implementation is complete.  Time off is granted pretty liberally – for doctor’s appointments, kids’ sports events, etc.  The organization is much more results-focused, and nobody worries if you only worked 37 hours last week – they know that you’re a productive employee and will still be on track to meet your deadlines.

Procedures are used as general guidelines, with the understanding that there will occasionally be exceptions.  When there is an exception, it is considered and most often approved.

My specific role is quite different at the new company.  I am an IT Business Architect – very similar to what many companies refer to as an IT Business Analyst.  At my previous employers, I had limited exposure to company leadership.  There was always a project sponsor who approved various aspects of projects, but they were rarely very involved with the actual work.  I very rarely met any of them in person.

At the new company, my role is considered to be leadership-adjacent.  I have frequent contact with company executives.  While the projects get staffed with subject matter experts who know the minutiae of the requirements, the executives pay attention to what’s going on and provide direction to ensure that the work aligns with longer-term strategic goals.  At previous companies, it was common for project team members (including me) to have limited insight into the future direction of the company.  This makes it more difficult to “future-proof” a system – to minimize the need to re-architect a solution in the future.

Recruiting

You can probably tell that I’m a big fan of my current employer.  One area where we sometimes struggle is recruiting top-shelf talent.  There are a few reasons for this:

  • The company headquarters is in a small city that has several other large employers.  There’s a lot of competition for limited talent in the local labor pool.
  • The nearest metro areas are 45 miles away in either direction.
  • The bulk of the company’s business is B2B (business to business), so it doesn’t have as much name recognition for similarly sized companies that are more consumer-facing

I’ve been doing everything I can to help the recruiting efforts.  The layoffs at my previous employer affected two former team members.  I made it my goal to get both of them hired by my employer.  This meant that I had to convince my management to hire them, but I also needed to convince them to work for my employer.

Candidate 1

When I learned that candidate 1 was affected by the layoffs, I started keeping an eye open for potential opportunities.  As luck would have it, my department did a strategic restructuring that created a new position that this guy would be great for.  I reached out to him, gave him some background on the company, and got his resume.  The hiring manager was very interested and lined up an interview.  Due to a backlog with HR (we were hiring many people), the interview was scheduled for a couple of weeks in the future.

In the interim, my friend interviewed with another company and got an offer.  He reached out to the hiring manager to see if there was any way to have the interview sooner.  The hiring manager had been so impressed with my friend that he had the interview panel shuffle their schedule and scheduled the interview for the very next day.

He got a job offer and joined us a couple of months ago.  He jumped in feet first and has already been able to fix a couple of long-standing problems.

Candidate 2

I’ve been working on candidate 2 for even longer.  I worked very closely with him at my previous employer, and I knew that he was really getting beaten down by the daily grind.  He was an expert on many technologies (and always willing to learn a new one) and consequently worked a ton of hours to get everything done.  I’d been trying to find a position for him even prior to the recent layoffs that eliminated his job.

It was a shock when the company announced that he was going to be laid off.  As I write this, the company is getting through its first day without him.  I won’t be surprised if there is a major outage this week.

It was harder to place Candidate 2 because there wasn’t an opening that matched his skill set.  But I kept sharing his resume with various managers in the department, confident that there was a spot for him with the company.  I knew that he would make any team stronger.

Finally, a newly-minted manager reached out to me to ask about “this guy you know”.  He was looking to hire someone, and one of the other managers had mentioned my friend.

My friend’s current skill set wasn’t a complete fit for the role the manager was looking to fill.  However, he believed that my friend could quickly work his way into that role.  He had another manager interview, my friend, for a different role, with the idea of moving him to a higher role in the near future.  They could see that he was top talent and didn’t want to let him walk out the door simply because he wasn’t a 100% fit right now.  The skills required for the job evolve quickly.  Even if a candidate is perfectly aligned with the current needs, they’d have to learn new skills in the future.  To use a hockey analogy, they knew that my friend had the ability to skate to where the puck was going to be, even if he was currently a step or two behind some other skaters (candidates).

Remote work

My company is reluctantly accepting remote work for some roles.  I work from home 60% of the time, while many other roles are completely in the office.

My friends were both going to push for a lot of work from home.  One of them lives 70 miles from the office, and the other one lives 85 miles away.  Neither of these is an acceptable daily commute, especially for candidates with other options.

Both of the hiring managers made exceptions to allow predominantly work from home for both of the new employees.  While the company prefers to have people in the office, they knew that they were going to lose both of these candidates if they weren’t flexible.

Culture is important

What is the company culture at your workplace?  What do you like or dislike about it?

Other People Shop For Me – Am I Lazy?

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Today’s article is from Kosmo. My answer to his question in the title is yes and as Lazy Man, that should carry some weight. Can he convince you otherwise? Read on to find out.

A while ago, there was an article on my local news station’s Facebook page about the trend toward stores providing drive-up service. One person commented that the people who took advantage of this service were lazy unless they were disabled or elderly.

I’ll admit that we use this service pretty regularly. We really hadn’t before COVID, but when we went into lockdown mode, we started using drive-up and delivery services regularly. For a period of a few months, we almost never set foot in an actual store.

We’ve backed off from the level we were at, but we still use the drive-up services a lot. If we need laundry detergent, toilet paper, and paper towels, we just place the order in the Target app. A couple of hours later, we pull into a designated spot, click a few buttons, and someone loads the items into the trunk.

Every week, we place a grocery order with the local Hy-Vee (midwestern chain). We pull into a spot, they load the loot, and we race home to unload.- This has made life a lot easier.

This means that other people take my lists and do actual shopping – cruising the aisles and collecting the items. Am I being lazy?

Harm to others?

The first question I ask myself is whether we’re taking opportunities away from the disabled or elderly. This would be unethical if the service was restricted to those groups and we were somehow circumventing the rules. That’s not the case in this situation.

I’d also feel bad if this service had limited capacity and we were squeezing other people out. That’s also not the case. The stores are openly advertising the service, and it’s clear (from my observations) that they still have some excess capacity for this service.

Better experience for others?

In fact, I believe that taking advantage of this service actually makes the experience better for other customers. I am not an efficient grocery shopper. I often struggle to figure out where the hell certain items are. Fresh fruit, canned fruit, and fruit in plastic cups are in three completely different areas of the store, despite the fact that they’re all fruit.

Typically, I find myself backtracking multiple times and taking forever to get through the store. Although I try not to be an obstacle for others, I’m sure I am quite often.

Conversely, the store’s shoppers know the store layout like the back of their hand and can zip through an order in a fraction of the time it takes me.

Competitive advantage to the store?

Although there is sometimes a charge for the service if the order is for a minimal amount, it’s typically free if your purchase exceeds a fairly low threshold. Naturally, the stores aren’t doing this just to be nice – they do it because it gives them competitive advantages.

By eliminating inefficient shoppers like me, the store can provide a less crowded experience for other shoppers, which helps the store’s image. Not only are the store’s shoppers more efficient, but the store can schedule their shopping to occur at less crowded times – especially for items that don’t need to be kept cold.

Providing the service also gives them a competitive advantage over other grocery stores in the area, which boosts their revenue. I don’t have a particular preference, but my wife prefers a competing store (Fareway). Prior to COVID, we usually shopped at Fareway. During COVID, we pivoted to Hy-Vee entirely because of their drive-up service, boosting their revenue.  The competing store noticed, and Fareway now has a similar service.  I still prefer Hy-Vee, because the app’s search function is quite a bit better.

Decreased theft?

I wonder if the drive-up service, and the accompanying decrease in foot traffic in stores, makes it easier to spot shoplifters. I don’t have any actual data on this, but it seems logical that if there are fewer people in a store, it would be less work to keep eyes on everybody.

My verdict

You can probably tell by the slant of the article, but I don’t consider the use of drive-up services to be lazy. I don’t see how it’s harming anyone, and it might actually benefit the store and other customers.

In fact, I’m puzzled regarding why anyone would consider it to be lazy. We live in a world where we pay for a lot of different services.

  • I pay someone at Subway to throw some meat, cheese, and mayo onto some bread. I’m capable of making a sandwich, but it’s convenient. Most of us could cook the items that appear on many restaurant menus, from places as basic as McDonald’s to as fancy as Pizza Hut. Yet, restaurants are bustling with business, and nobody considers the customers to be lazy.
  • I can, in theory, change the oil in my car. I’ve actually done it before. Like many people, I pay someone else to do it. It’s just not worth the time and effort to do it myself, and there’s a benefit in having a professional take a look at my car every few months.
  • I’m capable of entertaining myself with my writing. I can write fiction that amuses me, and the cost of creating this content is minimal. Yet, year after year, I pay Lawrence Block, John Grisham, Nelson DeMille, and others to provide this service to me – to say nothing to the fine folks at DirecTV and NetFlix.
  • All it takes to sew clothes is a needle, thread, and some cloth. Most people choose to buy their clothes from a store, already assembled.
  • I could take my garbage to the city dump by myself. I don’t do this, nor do any of my neighbors. As crazy as it sounds, there’s actually a truck that comes by once per week and hauls away all the crap!
  • I cut my own hair, but there are millions of slackers out there who pay someone to do it!

We all use services

Aside from people who are completely off the grid, all of us use various types of services. Everyone uses a different set. I have no need for Geek Squad since I can handle any computer issues on my own. On the other hand, I’m happy to pay someone else to fix a problem with my car’s emission system.

Where do you fall in the spectrum – are you mostly self-sufficient, or do you rely on others for a lot of services?

Cheap Entertainment – Becoming an Expert

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This is another article from frequent contributor Kosmo. I love this idea, but I think I will way too busy this year

I have decided that 2022 will be the Year or the Dinosaur.  Rawr!

I’m still a kid

Most kids outgrow their dinosaur phase.  I never did.  I’ve watched all five of the movies in the Jurassic Park franchise and have read countless books about the beasts.  I have three stuffed dinos (T-Rex, Brachiosaurus, and Triceratops) that can be seen in the background of my work conference calls.  I keep on on the major trends in vertebrate paleontology, but have never dedicated large amounts of time to the topic.  This changes now.

Becoming an expert

I have decided to become an expert on the topic.  Not at the level of an actual paleontologist, of course.  With constraints in my life (job, family obligations, etc) I can’t possibly dedicate enough effort to reach paleontologist-level expertise.  I believe that I can achieve the level of a sub-expert – a big step below a true expert, but far above someone who has a casual interest.

I think about a thousand hours of study should get me to that level.  This is definitely a multi-year goal.

Why am I doing this?  Because I find the topic interesting, and because the internet makes it achievable and fairly inexpensive.

Books

I actually have a few dinosaur books on my Kindle, just waiting to be read.  Dinosaurs 101 seems like a good place to start.  As the name suggests, its a general book that hits the high points without going into great detail on any particular topic.  It has been an easy read so far.

T. Rex and the Crater of Doom is a book written by Walter Alvarez.  Alvarez was a member of the team that put forward evidence for the asteroid theory of dinosaur extinction.  For those who aren’t familiar with the theory, the basic idea is that there is a layer of sedimentary rock that is high enriched with iridium.  This layer appears around the world and appears to have been formed at the same time.  Iridium is much more common on asteroids than it is on earth, leading to the theory that the worldwide deposits of iridium in that layer of rock was the result of an asteroid impact.

Hell Creek, Montana: America’s Key to the Prehistoric Past tells the history of a geological formation that covers part of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas.

Podcasts

I will ease into the process with some podcasts.  I’ve been listening to the I know Dino podcast recently.  This podcast alone has 300+ hours of content.  This will serve as the backbone of my dinosaur podcast experience, but I’ll jump into other related podcasts from time to time.

I know Dino features a married couple (Garrett and Sabrina) who are dinosaur nuts.  In the past six weeks, I’ve listened to 25 of the episodes.  I’m learning a lot about bones.  I’ve always had some trouble keeping human bones straight – especially the leg and arm bones.  Constant references to specific dinosaurs bones is also helping me reinforce my knowledge of human bones, since humans and dinosaurs have a lot of bones in common.

I know Dino is technically free, but there are ways to support it.  I haven’t yet become a Patreon supporter, but I’ll definitely be doing that in the future.  Patreon is a good way to reward your favorite content creators with a few bucks in their pocket every month.

The podcast also sells merchandise.  I’ve bought a mug, sweatshirt, and t-shirt.

Movies

In addition to the Jurassic Park movies, there are a fair number of documentaries about dinosaurs.  Evolution of the T-Rex begins with T-Rex’s earliest Tyrannosaur ancestor, who served as mesopredator, while the Allosaurus filled the apex predator niche.  The Tyrannosaurs eventually grew in size and filled the apex niche when the Allosaurs died out.  (Your homework assignment – look up the word mesopredator.)

I’ve just started on the BBC series Walking with the Dinosaurs.  I’ve also purchased the subsequent movie with the same name.

Costs

At this point, I’ve spent about $50 on books and videos and $10 at Michael’s on a nifty T-Rex skull for my desk.  I spent $60 on the I know Dino merchandise, but those are functional items.  I can wear the shirts and sip hot chocolate from the mug.  Hobbies tend to take a bit of spending in the early stages, so I’m sure I’ll spend a bit more money in the coming moments.  Long term, I’d expect to spend around $10-15 per month – picking up the occasional book that catches my attention.  I’ve been spending 5-7 hours per week on dinosaurs, so that comes out to an hourly cost of about fifty cents.

Hobby

Becoming a dinosaur expert is my cheap hobby.  What are your ways of entertaining yourself and your family cheaply?

[Editor’s Note: I’m going to learn the Python programming language this year and build some kind of tiny/trivial app. This shouldn’t be too difficult because I used to be a software engineer. However, very few people used Python back when I was programming. I’m also very rusty – I’ve spent too much time writing about personal finance.

There are numerous YouTube videos about programming in Python and I think I have a Kindle book that I picked up for free. There are often free Kindle books on programming languages. I’m sure the library also has quite a few books on Python. My library automatically renews the book for months on end unless there’s big demand for it. I think there will be plenty of availability of Python books.

I don’t think it will cost me anything to become pretty good at Python. There’s a potential that I could even make some money with it.]

Teaching Your Kid to Drive

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Teach Your Kid To Drive

Recently Kosmo causally mentioned in an article that he was teaching his 14-year-old daughter to drive. In Massachusetts, where I grew up, the age to start is 16 when you can get a learner’s permit. Fourteen seemed very early to me, but my view of Iowa is that it’s all farms where it’s impossible to get into a car accident ;).

On the surface, this article may seem like it doesn’t have much to do personal finance. I’d argue that safe driving for everyone in the family can save you thousands of dollars compared with the alternative. Even if you already know how to drive you want to avoid these dangerous driving situations

The legal driving age, and the various steps to a full license, vary dramatically by state.  In Iowa, you simply need to pass a written test in order to get a permit.  At that point, you can drive with an adult.

Here are the steps my daughter and I have gone through.

The First Step

The first step is a written test on the basic concepts of driving.  In the past, this was a written test given in the DMV office.  This was typically a nightmare.  Not the exam content itself, but the very long lines at the DMV.  You could wait an hour or more before your turn came up.

(OK, I need to tell this one DMV anecdote.  I was there to renew my license several years ago.  The person in front of me had lost his license.  I don’t mean that he’d had it suspended; I mean that he had misplaced the actual physical license.  Apparently this wasn’t the first time.  The DMV person told him that if he kept losing his license, the DMV would need to investigate him.  The guy couldn’t understand why.  The employee spelled it out for him – the concern was that he wasn’t actually losing the license, but was selling it to minors so that they could use it to buy beer.)

In the COVID era, the process has changed.  The exam is now online.  The teen’s proctor (me) requests an exam time and promises to ensure that the kid won’t cheat.  A few days later, we had a time slot.  My daughter signed on and passed the test.  She turned the screen to show me the message… and it promptly disappeared.  We didn’t receive a confirmation, so it wasn’t apparent if the grade got logged.

Now she needed to actually go to the DMV and get her picture taken.  This is by appointment only, due to COVID.  The first available slot was a few weeks out.  I signed her up, even through I wasn’t sure the grade had been logged.

I sent an email to the DMV to let them know about the glitch.  Several days later, I got an answer – her passing score had indeed been logged.

Licensed (Well, Permitted)

The appointment went off without a hitch.  She had a vision test, got her picture taken, and left the DMV with a temporary paper license.  Her permanent one would arrive in the mail in a few days.

She’s a very hesitant driver, so we started things slowly.  We went to her old elementary school and did some laps in the parking lot.  After fifteen minutes of driving at top speed of 10 mph, with nearly constant braking, we were done.

More parking lots

School parking lots are a great place to practice driving on weekends, because they are typically deserted.  During the next few sessions, we alternated between the elementary parking lot and the larger one at the high school.  We still struggled to get above 15 mph, but she was getting more comfortable with the basics.  Driving forward, turning left, turning right, she had mastered all the skills.

Well, maybe not all the skills.  We practicing pulling into parking spots, and pulling out.  Backing out was confusing – which way to turn the wheel?  I let her puzzle it out herself.  Try it, and if it doesn’t work, try it again.  There were no cars anywhere near us, so I wanted to let her use trial and error to figure things out.  We went over a few curbs in the process, but nothing that my chiropractor can’t fix.

Finally, I had her take the plunge – driving on an actual street.  We exited the school parking lot and she drove a few hundred feet and turned onto a dead-end street.  She was nervous, but it was a big step forward.

I see dead people

A friend of mine suggested driving in cemetery parking lots.  They often have winding roads, and if there is any traffic, it’s very slow moving.  We drove to a town about ten miles away and pulled into the cemetery.  We switched seats and she was ready to go.

The great thing about this cemetery is that it had a huge hill.  We hadn’t previously done any hill driving, since school parking lots typically aren’t on a hill.  Her first challenge was to be able to crest the hill.  The timid pressure she’d been using on the accelerator wasn’t going to cut it.  She had to press down hard, or we’d roll down the hill.  We got some decent RPMs out of the engine, and made it to the top of the hill.  She drove around the cemetery, and then had to go down the same hill, braking slightly to keep her speed under control.

City driving

We live in a town of twenty thousand people.  Small by metropolitan standards, but still far busier than what she’d be comfortable with.  I drove from the cemetery to the nearest town – a burg with a population of about 900.  Perfect.

I had her driving into town and then turn into some side streets.  She had to stop for actual stop signs.  Watching for traffic was another new skill.  She was hesitant at first, waiting longer than necessary.  She was also a bit slow when she was making turns that didn’t require a stop.

We meandered around town.  We practiced parking in various lots.  More than once, the navigator (me) inadvertently directed us onto a dead-end street.  On one of those occasions, I had her practice a three point turn, which she executed flawlessly.

Get out on the highway

Next, I had her get on the highway.  She was very hesitant, but eventually got on the road and eventually got her speed up to almost 55 mph (the limit).  She had a tendency to go a bit too far to the right, and she was able to practice this as we drove into the middle of nowhere.  After about ten miles, we turned around and headed back into town.  I told her to drive back to the cemetery on the other side of town.  She’s driving 25 mph as we exit town, since that’s the speed limit.  An impatient driver races past her – in a no passing zone, uphill, and with ongoing traffic.  His stupidity created a nice learning opportunity for my daughter.  She correctly explained all three problems with the pass.

A long way to go

We still have a long way to go.  It will likely take a few more lessons before she’s comfortable driving in our town.  I start in some of the more remote areas and eventually migrate to more congested areas.  At some point, we’ll actually get out on the interstate and practice lane changes and merging.  Finally, we’ll practice some driving at night.

Tools of the Trade

There’s more to driving than just the physical tasks behind the wheel. You have to know about all the things that go along with keeping a car in good running order… in good times and in bad. [Editor’s Note: Kosmo’s got a few links to Amazon coming up. If you buy something, I may make a small commission.]

I’ve had her pump gas once, and walk through the basics of the pay at pump process.  Then I popped the trunk and walked her through the various tools inside.

Although it’s always a good idea to have jumper cables in your trunk, they’re only helpful if there’s another car nearby that can help you.  A starter pack relies on a rechargeable battery and can jump a dead battery in seconds.  I’ve had one in each car for years.  I recently replaced the bulky old ones with a lightweight DB Power units that aren’t much bigger than a VHS tape.  Note that you must charge these on a regular basis, or they’ll be dead when you need it.  We recently had a battery issue with one of the cars.  The battery was only a few years old, but ended up having a bad cell.  I used the starter pack a half dozen times in the span of a couple of days.  I had just bought them a few weeks earlier, and they passed the test with flying colors.

Most cars come with a jack that is… terrible. [Editor’s note: Kosmo used more descriptive and colorful language here.]  Get yourself a hydraulic bottle jack and you’ll thank yourself the next time you get a flat.  Sure, you could wait for roadside assistant, but a friend of mine recently had to wait for six hours.  With a bottle jack, you’ll quickly have the car jacked up.

The lug nut wrenches in most cars are also pretty crappy.  If your lug nuts are on tight, it can be almost impossible to loosen them.  A four way cross wrench can give you far more leverage.  Seriously. it’s like you hit the “easy” button.

It’s never a bad idea to have a set of wrenches in the car.  You may need to loosen battery cables or any of the other various nuts and bolts.  You don’t need mechanic quality, since you’ll have infrequent need of them.  However, it’s a good idea to get a set that has both “standard” (SAE) and metric wrenches.

None of these are particularly expensive.  You can get a decent start pack for under $100, and you and get the other three items are around $60 total.  They also don’t take up much room.