Lazy Man and Money

Passive Income Update: March 2021

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Passive Income Pyramid
My Passive Income Pyramid

I usually begin this with a long personal life review. It’s going to be shorter this month. I wrote an extensive post on our trip to Hawaii. Even though that was only one week of the month there was a lot of preparation before. Coming back, the kids still had another week of school break, so I was effectively barely working for half the month. No wonder why I feel like I can’t get anywhere.

Kids hiking Diamond Head in Oahu. Perfect with the rainbow in the background.

While that’s worthy enough to be the highlight of any month, we did a lot of other things. My wife and I had our favorite bed and breakfast (where they shot the final season of How I Met Your Mother). They were having a discount and grandma was double vaccinated to take the kids.

First the Pacific Ocean, now the Atlantic. This was a hike while at the bed and breakfast. The path is hidden and most people probably don’t know it’s possible to get this side with the Pell bridge in the background.

On the kid front, my 8-year-old learned how to tie his shoes and got a cool pair of Pokemon shoes that he loves. He also started learning a little about money with a Money Time Kids class (I’ll review this later). The 7-year-old wasn’t left out as we did the Dole Plantation Maze together. Both kids earned their orange belt in karate. We went to a Hot Wheels monster truck drive-through. My wife said that we should never do it again until she learned it was $20 per carload, not person. That’s a price, especially if can’t do a real monster truck show and see them in action.

The 7-year-old was proud of completing the Dole Plantation Maze, 8-year-old opted out.

March always closes out with my birthday. My wife had a funeral to go to this year. (I didn’t know the person, it was out of state, and both of us can’t be too far from the kids.) She felt guilty about not being around, but I had some fun alone time. She came back with an overabundance of gifts and we had a good family dinner and a movie. The biggest gift was an inflatable hot tub spa like this one. I had a cheaper spa on my list for awhile, but it seems like the pricing has gone up with COVID. (In the interest of full disclosure, if you decide by a $1,000 spa-like that one, I’ll get a few dollars back from Amazon.)

My wife got these Adirondack chairs and moved our firepit. Now we go outside more and make s’mores by the fire and run and play.

It’s a good thing I don’t list all our spending here like many other personal finance bloggers. March wouldn’t have looked very good. We saved a lot of money over what it would normally cost to go to Hawaii, but Hawaii’s not cheap on any level. Throw in the bread and breakfast and the spa and we probably didn’t save any money this month. (That wasn’t a problem as our net worth still grew a lot – see the update at the end of this post). At least one vacation in 16 months doesn’t break the bank compared to what our typical vacation spending would be. I’m hopeful that the spa will help increase our quality of home life, maybe even our social circle once everyone is vaccinated.

That’s enough lead-in… let’s start the Passive Income report. I used to call this the Alternative Income Report, but everyone loves passive income better. While I transition to the new terminology, there may be some “alternative income” mentions including the FAQ. If you are a new reader, you’re going to want to refer to my Alternative Income FAQ as you’ll likely have a lot of questions.

The way I calculate these numbers requires that long explanation – it isn’t intuitive at all. The reason why I do things a little differently is that this catalogs a journey. For example, we don’t have passive income from our rental properties while we are paying down their mortgages. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where on that journey we are. Each month you see that the bank owns less and we own more. When we get to owning 100% there will be no mortgages and all that rental income can be used for living expenses.

Lazy Man’s Passive Income – March 2020

I categorize our passive income into 3 main sources that are largely represented in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job” – that’s not passive at all. (I do have some income in that area, but that’s not the focus of this report.) I combine dog sitting and blogging into one section of “somewhat active” income. I leave real estate and investment income as their own separate main sources of very passive income.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

Blogging income continued to rebound to March. I had a couple of articles that got attention from other writers and got a nice bump in traffic for a few days.

Dog sitting income started to return. We would have done even better if we weren’t in Hawaii for a week. While we were in Hawaii, I got more requests to sit dogs (over this summer) than I had gotten in the last year. It was hard to keep up with it and explain to people that I can’t meet their dog for a bit. In any case, we were able to get a few of those bookings and potentially some more since then. The next few months look good.

We’re a dog family because my wife and I are allergic to cats. The kids loved the idea of a cat cafe in Hawaii, so they went. 8-year-old is going to invent a senior dog cafe, which sounds like a winning idea to me.

Getting back to March though, we were still able to book a few dogs around the Hawaii trip.

In February, dogs and blogs combined for a total of $887.91 – the lowest in years. (Though some of that is due to the short month.) In March, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $1,176.09

I’ll take the $300 gain. It’s still a long way from the pre-COVID levels that were triple that, but we can see this starting to come back.

When dog sitting comes back my kids can pitch in to help. My 8-year old is extremely good with dogs at this point. He can feed them, let them out, and play with them in the yard. My 7-year-old is good too. This help means that I can pay them a legitimately earned income (a small percentage of the overall dog-sitting income). Because the income is earned they can save money in their kid Roth IRAs and it will be money that they’ll never pay tax on. I want to get them more involved in blogging, taking pictures and things like that, but it’s going slow. They get enough school work, homework, and extra-curriculars.

(Note: The blue line is the monthly number. It looks like the graph didn’t add in this last month’s uptick. I’ll have to fix it for next month. The red line is a 3-month average which helps smooth the curve.)

2. Rental Property Income

For March, Zillow’s estimates on the property values went up a lot again – nearly $15,000. We paid down the mortgages as we always do. Due to the growth, we’ve made over $45K in equity for the year. That’s a lot better than what I’d make a whole year in my software engineering career when I was starting out. The housing market is really moving.

It can be difficult to deal with tenants, but I like to think of those equity gains as a salary. The “work” for last year’s $60,000 of equity is pretty minimal. We had to work a little more for the $45,000 this year, but ~$11,000/mo. isn’t bad. Of course, equity isn’t really salary – we can’t spend the money, because it isn’t liquid.

8-year-old learning about compound interest in Money Time Kids. I believe rental properties come later. For helping me review their software, I’ll give him some money and we’ll put some in the kid Roth IRA that I mentioned above.

This month we went from 63.51% to 64.56% ownership of the equity in our properties. If we owned the rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), I calculate that, after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance we’d make about $3,400 a month. That number represents our net gain.

If you multiply our expected net rent $3400 by the amount of equity we have (i.e. where we are on our journey), 64.56%, you get $2,195 in estimated monthly passive income. When I started tracking this (January, 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties and they had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 back then. So in a little more than 4 years, we’ve seen the number grow $1000+/mo. That’s good passive growth in ~4 years.

As the years march on, the ratio will grow to 100% of a rent that should net $3,400 monthly after expenses. Since rent is inflation-resistant, we can raise it as costs of living go up. We don’t have to factor in inflation like other investments. So we can think of it as around $40,000/yr. of income in today’s dollars buying the same value in the future. That should be enough money for us to live on with our own home paid off (plus our solar panels, frugal shopping habits, and military healthcare.)

In the previous report, the rental property income was $2,159.

Total Rental Property Income: $2,195

3. Dividend Income

For this section, I assume we will earn a 2.5% dividend yield on our holdings. That could be from a high-dividend ETF or from simply holding strong companies that have a long history of dividend growth. There are some income investing ideas here. We can also look at making passive income with dividend kings. If I wanted to simply retire on this dividend income, I would get Sure Dividend’s newsletter to try to get closer to a 4% average dividend yield. That link to the newsletter has a special discount rate and in full disclosure, I make a few dollars if you sign up for it.

The market is still doing great. Last month there was a concern about the yield curve, but that seemed to disappear. Also, some of my satellite stocks have done really well, but they’ve been giving up their gains. I took my financial snapshot on 4/4, but the markets have even improved since then.

Identity Theft has to be the scariest monster truck name of all time, right? Skull Krusher is tame.

Last month, our portfolio hovered around all-time highs. As I mentioned, I was getting nervous that the markets were too high. I executed on my plan to continue to stay fully invested, but moving more money to bonds. It was small move of money from stock to bonds mostly for the psychological effect of being active. The small amounts seem to add up and when stocks dropped last March, I was able to buy in at lower prices by cashing in some bonds that didn’t drop as much.

With emerging markets dropping 10% from their highs, I started to move a little of that bond money to buy more of those shares at a discount. I hope most investors are not doing what I do and just leave the money where it is passively. That’s what we do with my wife’s retirement accounts. For investors who want to try to do a little better, I think I’m doing well in buying low and selling high.

The timing of buying the emerging markets seemed to do well. With most other major indexes near the top, we once again saw record highs in our equity portfolio.

We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The business was almost ideally positioned in this pandemic due to its virtual nature. The investment income from this is essentially the same as dividend income. It is taxed differently, but for the purposes of this report, it makes sense to group together all stock ownership in this bucket.

Total Dividend-ish Income: $3,601

Last month, it was $3,527. A gain of almost $75 is extremely good. This number rarely moves that much, but slow and steady wins the race. When I started tracking this in 2017 we were at $1180/mo. Wow, it’s more than tripled.

Annualized, this monthly $3,601 is $43,210. If our mortgage was paid off, we might be able to live on this by itself. However, because most of our investments are in retirement accounts, we can’t use much of this potential income for now. (We can use the profit-sharing check as it goes straight to our checking account.) We’ll probably let this investment continue to compound for another 14 years until we are age 59.5. Then we’ll have to see if we want to tap it or let it continue until we are required to take some of it at age 72.

Very Close to Passive Income

Our “very close to passive income” is a combination of rental property income and dividend income. If there were some royalty income from books, movies, or music, I’d include that as well. I’m too tone-deaf to have a rockstar music career, but I keep the idea open that I’ll write a book someday.

The stock market has been steady since the drop and recovery when COVID first came around. The rental property income typically keeps going up because the mortgages are always getting paid down every month and they generally appreciate a little. Unless there’s a housing market crash, this should continue to happen.

I failed at finding Jack Johnson in his town, but the local Hard Rock had this 2008 album and a surfboard from it. I got the album two years ago for my birthday and it hasn’t left my car since. Last year, I featured the first song, All At Once on Earth Day to illustrate how his song about the environment seem to describe the COVID-19 epidemic.

I love having both types of income working together for us. I think everyone interested in FIRE should have stocks and real estate income streams. The diversification gives me great confidence that we’ll be better prepared than most people in the case of an unfortunate economic event. We’ll still likely get rent checks if the stock market crashes. We’ll still get dividend checks if a tenant is late paying for awhile. Of course a bad economy may impact both at the same time, but that’s what an emergency fund is for.

We are a full year into the most ginormous unfortunate event that I can remember in my life. Stocks went down a lot, but then went back up due to government stimulus and money on the sideline. Real estate has simply just gone up. We’ve been lucky to have tenants who are still working and able to pay rent. Well, one couldn’t, but used the opportunity to sell at a market high and buy a property closer to us at a relatively low price. Overall, the plan keeps rolling along, even during COVID-19.

I’m starting to get very encouraged about the future. I know the variants are a major monkey wrench, but the vaccines are getting out there as well. My wife is away shooting everyone in the arm. There are so many more like her – seems like the whole military, not to mention millions of civilian health care workers. I can’t wait to see what everything looks like in 4-6 weeks.

Very Close to Passive Income: $5,796

Last month it was $5,686. The $5,796 extends our all-time high yet again. As you can tell from the chart below, it just keeps moving in the right direction. It had been the stock market driving the gains for awhile. However, real estate is starting to roll too.

Kids really love their karate class. I find it’s great self-discipline.

This would be almost $70,000 a year of almost completely passive income. What’s better is that there would be no need to touch the investments themselves. We wouldn’t have to sell stocks or get a reverse mortgage. Property maintenance and property taxes for rental properties are already factored in. We would still have all the underlying assets (property, stocks, etc.) and be able to pass these on to the kids for them to build on – unless we choose to draw them down for more fun, charity, or other spending.

This “very close to passive income” has grown from $2,354/mo. in January 2017. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet (except for the profit-sharing check). We have gained more than $3,000 in passive-ish income in about 4.2 years. I wonder if we can get to $8,000/mo. in passive income by the start of 2025, another 4 years. That’s a little aggressive, but it would give us something to hope for.

Final Passive Income

When you add up “dogs and blogs” to the “very close to passive income” you get:

Passive Income: $6,972.09

Last month it was $6,565.91. For the first time in a while we’re moving this in the right direction. Let’s hope it’s just the start.

I’d like to see this average $8,000 this year. I don’t think dogs and blogs is going to get me there to average it for the year. It’s been down too many months. For now, I’ll just be happy that with four different income streams (and two consistent ones), there isn’t much room for everything to drop.

This ~$7,000+/mo income is nearly $84,000 a year. That largely hypothetical annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of one dog, and investing is really nice. In the long term, $78K would be a lot more income than we’d need – given our necessary expenses for the next 45 years. Of course, those necessary expenses aren’t going to cover all our spending, but it’s a large percentage of it.

As 2020 has proven, you never know what bad news is lurking around the corner. This preparation gives us the financial flexibility to fight it.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning pharmacist income, her vested military pension (more passive income when she retires), or the freelance work I’ve been doing over the last couple of years (which isn’t passive at all). That’s the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well and invest. My income doesn’t match my wife’s, but I’m good at stretching a dollar in almost all our spending.

A really large tree at the Hale Koa military hotel in Hawaii.

As always, I’m still hoping to write a book someday. That would add some more passive income. My wife will probably get her book out first. She’s had an incredibly interesting life until she met me – I am so boring. I may tip my toe into self-publishing sometime this year. I would love to talk to a real publisher, but I don’t want to take on the “job” of writing. That’s probably a deal-breaker. If you know someone who I could talk to contact me.

My favorite thing about the graph below is that it doesn’t dip down too far. It’s been above $6,000 for a while now. It’s good that we are turning this ship around and moving it back in the right direction. If it dips below $6000 and touches $5000, we’ll have to examine some things.

(Once again, the blue line is the monthly number. The red line is a 3-month average which helps smooth the curve.)

Net Worth Update

My net worth updates aren’t very exciting as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s just a footnote here.

I truly believe that net worth is one of the most important numbers in personal finance so it is worth sharing in some way. Showing relative growth can be useful.

March was another great month for our net worth. We saw it jump 3.36%. For the year overall, our net worth is up 7.92%. It’s very odd to have these kind of gains when our numbers have been growing for so many years. In terms of dollars, sometimes the monthly gains are more than I’ve made in a year as a software engineer.

Diversification helps a lot in bad times. Even when the stock market was way down, we were still grounded with our real estate. We can’t control the market, but we can be happy that the amazing river of compound interest has been working well for us over the years.

I feel it’s important to acknowledge that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 15 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back then, but it’s in the news a lot now. We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be just starting out. If you are one of these readers, I hope you won’t be discouraged by some of the numbers above. I didn’t start many of these graphs until year 11 of blogging (year 13 of early retirement planning). Please try to use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances and market luck) over 10-15 years.

There’s a big wild card in calculating our net worth. Now that my wife’s pension is vested, it’s reasonable to ask whether to include it in our net worth. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned more direct monetary compensation if she didn’t work for the government. That would have boosted all the numbers across the board. Calculating pension value is not easy, but here’s the best way to know what a pension is worth. In the end, it seems my wife’s pension may be worth $2.3 million. However, like most of the money mentioned in this article, this isn’t money we can spend right now.

Because the pension would dominate our net worth, I’ll note two separate numbers in my personal spreadsheet. I don’t share the numbers anyway, aside from these hints, so I don’t think it should matter much to you. It’s not like I’m suggesting that you might want to make a financial-based decision on a pension.

How was your March? Let me know in the comments.

Stay-at-Home-Dad, Wifeless-Style

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On Tuesday of last week, I celebrated my birthday, very happy with a fully vaccinated wife, a single shot of my own, and two healthy kids. The kids have been in school since September. I don’t want to pretend it is all a picture-perfect family. I don’t think anyone’s is, but, in general, we had the river current of luck/awesomeness flowing in the right direction.

There are a lot of families whose lives have gone in the opposite direction since the pandemic started. My wife and I were mostly stay-at-home workers before, and we continued to be over the last year. It didn’t change much, except that I had to teach a 6-year-old how to read and 7-year-old multiplication, but I was fortunate that I could keep a little part of my career going on the side. That was only a couple of months nearly a year ago though.

My birthday celebration went south fast.

I’m usually not a fan of promoting the obvious things that everyone knows. (What’s the fun in that?) I’ll make an exception this time. Though it’s been quoted hundreds of times, this is the best quote for how I feel right now (well at least part of it):



“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Sometimes you don’t have time to look around. My wife got some vague notice that she could be deployed in a few days. In less than 24 hours, we were waking up the kids at 5 AM and bringing them to the airport in their pajamas. “Mom’s” cattle-plane wasn’t going to wait. (There were no Ubers or taxis running in our area of the suburbs, it simply doesn’t make sense at that time in the morning. In fact, all our local taxis are closed due to COVID. We could have stuck the gov’t with the parking for more than a month (it’s fair to expense it), but maybe $1000? That is crazy! With the last-minute information coming down, there was little time to think.)

I wrote a hasty note to the kids’ school that they may be grumpy. The kids seemed to rise up to the situation though, because they were extraordinarily well-behaved according to the school.

That school day wasn’t just a flash in the pan, they have become almost completely different people. They (mostly) have gotten along. I’m at 12% confidence that the government has some kind of behavior ray that they use on families when a parent deploys. Maybe they use it more when there are young kids going without their mothers? I’m also at 100% confidence that I’ve jinxed myself with this. They will likely harm each other greatly later today.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t say why my wife is away. I respect the secrecy of our government operations. However, in this case, I think we all know the deal. If it was a secret it would be the worst-kept government secret of all time. Our President has made it clear that his top goal is getting vaccines in people’s arms. My military pharmacy wife obviously can play a role in that.

My wife has been “virtually deployed” a few times before this year. There was a need for policy and planning a lot of COVID-19 stuff. This time is different. EVERY ACTIVE DUTY personnel needs to move to get the shots in arms. I put that last part in bold/caps to emphasize again that we all to work together to get this done. Also, it’s not just a few military people… everyone is getting called in on this. In 20+ years of military service, my wife has never seen anything like this. That’s fair because we have never seen anything like COVID-19.

My kids won’t see their mother for the next 5 weeks. Five years ago, my wife was deployed for two weeks. That was tough. At 2 and 3 they weren’t able to “wiping their own butts” (our terminology for being able to take care of oneself). They are older now (7 and 8-year-olds for the math-lazy). We have some systems in place. They can feed themselves a bit (cereal) and make their own drinks. They can dress themselves. For those of you with younger kids, life gets a lot easier when they can dress themselves.

Kids (maybe just boys?) at this age have their own set of challenges. There is a constant need to escalate wrestling moves until one kid cries of unbearable pain. I try to mitigate this, but I’m fighting thousands of years of evolution. Fill in your favorite cliche here. Two suggestions: “Boys will be boys” or “It is what it is.” In the end, they are each other’s best friend. However, they are their own worst enemies.

As you can tell by now, my brain isn’t working on its typical levels. I’m better than Buffy’s “fire bad, tree pretty”, but definitely 100%. Sometimes it seems to super-charge itself into some kind of survival mode of “Do everything now!” That’s great for getting stuff done around the house, but it’s not conducive to writing a blog post.

I’ve rambled so very much, but it is time to put a bow on this. Here are my main thoughts to pass on:

  • Money – Money is the least of my worries right now. Part of having good money systems in place above means that I don’t have to think about it much. Err… except for the fact that I need to write about money most days. At least I don’t have to think our money for awhile.
  • Hawaii – When I wrote about our Hawaii trip during COVID, I was expecting so much hate. I didn’t get it, so maybe readers simmered a bit inside? If any of this sounds like you (or not), my wife opened up and said that she felt this was coming. She said this was a big part of the reason why she made the judgment call of traveling to the safer state for time away to enjoy family. (She’s at least 10x smarter than I am.)
  • Career Opportunities – I need to put pause on two exceptional career opportunities – the best two I’ve seen in 10+ years. The job descriptions seemed to be tailor-written to me. I haven’t seen anything more perfect since my old engineering days of running a search engine and applying to be the boss of myself. (I got the job!)

    It’s very weird that both of these jobs came in at the same time. Unfortunately, that was over the last couple of weeks. I had to tell one of the jobs that I simply wasn’t going to be reliable for the next month and a half. I got a sense that their ship was already moving a certain direction, but I had a strong chance of changing it. Sometimes you just have to own up to the bad timing.

    As for the second job, I don’t know them as well. They don’t know me either. We were doing the get-to-know-you dance like some mating rituals. Things were really going great, but then Hawaii happened fast, and now this. I don’t know much about life, but I do this… when you use the moniker of “Lazy” for your brand, you lose any benefit of the doubt.

    I won’t hide it, I extremely miss being part of a team doing great things. Also, my social skills have devolved to saying stuff about Pokemon, Gumball, and Teen Titans Go!. Maybe I’m evolving from talking about how Henry getting bricked up is so wrong in Thomas the Tank Engine.

  • Military Service – I appreciate all the “thank-you-for-your-wife’s-service” comments that I’ve gotten in person. I really do. I’m very fortunate she’s a military pharmacist who doesn’t have to go typically go into war zones.

    That said, there are places in the United States where military service members are not particularly welcome. My wife is going to one of these places. Some friends and family have asked me whether I’m concerned about her safety. I trust the system and I hope that Americans will respect other Americans trying to provide them with life-saving medication. On a national level, Americans helping Americans is an easy win. On an international level, people helping people is also an easy win.

    This is the first time in my lifetime (and probably anyone’s alive today) where everyone SHOULD BE UNITED to fight a common foe. (The alien invasion is 7 years away so we have time to prepare after this.) We can get this done.

    If you can, please support support the USO. In a world of partisan politics, I think that’s one thing that I hope we can universally agree to.

On that last note, a lot of people have asked how I feel about my wife going away. One of them said something like, “Why would they take a mother from their kids? Why 5 weeks?” I’m not particularly excited about the situation or how the deployment was managed. However, I can’t be too upset. We receive a lot of military benefits. Our health care is very good and very cheap… and we can keep it after my wife retires. There’s a very good pension. I can shop for cheap groceries on the military base. We receive a generous discount on the kids’ private school. We can use my wife’s GI Bill to pay a substantial part of their college. The kids have been to Disney so many times. I’m probably missing a lot, but you get the idea. There are so many positives that would be a real jerk to hold it against the military when there is a time of need. (I can be a jerk about a lot of things, but this is a hard one.)

As the saying goes, you take the good. You take the bad. You take them both and there you have the facts of life.

I Sold a Fungible Token for Millions!

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You may have seen the news about non-fungible tokens or NFTs. These seem to be everywhere today. There was a Saturday Night Live skit on them this weekend.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t understand why you’d want to deal in non-fungible tokens when you can get fungible tokens. As my friend says, “What’s not to like about 100% more funge!”

The great part about fungible tokens is that it is a completely untapped market. I think I can own it all to myself.

It took me some time to figure out what was the best thing to sell. Some famous people like Jack Dorsey sold his first Tweet. It seems like firsts go for a lot. So maybe I should sell my first post on Lazy Man and Money? It’s nearly 15 years old now and starts off with a sentence that might make me the first FIRE blogger:

“This blog is about a man, a lazy man, and his quest to not only retire early, but to retire rich enough to live a comfortable lifestyle.”

That’s too easy though. I think I may sell that second. No, my best post for selling fungible tokens would definitely be my bitcoin article from 2011. It’s almost 10 years old now. I could have bought a bitcoin for $13, but of course, I never did. I missed my chance for millions and millions of dollars…

… at least until recently. I’m a big fan of recycling, and fungible tokens (along with non-fungible tokens) gave me that chance. I was able to sell the bitcoin article for $2,021,040.10. I can’t believe that I was able to get so much from just a little work back then. I guess some people really like the idea of using the blockchain to buy an old article about the blockchain.

The good news is that this extra $2M puts us firmly into the early retired territory. It has always been close, especially if we continue to send the kids to private school. This changes the math considerably. It gives us some money for now, and should completely fund their college.

They’ve still got a decade before the college expenses come rolling in. This should give me more time to reinvest the funds into more fungible tokens from others and make 10x more money!

What’s in My Lazy Portfolio?

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Usually a “lazy portfolio” refers to investing in two or three well-diversified index funds. You can be very diversified if you invested in VTI (Vanguard Total Market), VEU (Vanguard Ex-US), and BND (Vanguard Total Bond Market). You could divide it up 30-30-40 and never touch it again (though you should continue to try to add new money to the investment). Historically, that’s been a very safe and profitable strategy.

However, since I’m Lazy Man, my “Lazy Portfolio” is a little different. It’s actually not so lazy at all. I enjoying picking satellite stocks. So while I may recommend people go with the traditional lazy portfolio because it’s easy, I don’t take my own advice.

I think it’s always interesting when a personal finance writer says one thing, and then does something different. In my case, I do something different for three reasons:

1. I’m doing well with my satellite stocks. Here’s what my actively managed portfolio performance looks like:

Personal Capital - Portfolio Performance

2. I don’t have many hobbies, but one of them is following the markets and seeing if I can make a percentage extra or two.

3. I have significant protection with my core holdings. I’m only managing retirement money, so I don’t have to worry about tax consequences. My wife has more retirement money in her government TSP which has a lazy portfolio allocation. She has a government pension providing long-term income security. We have investment properties that can provide us with income in the future. The satellite stocks in general make up a small amount of our overall portfolio.

Today, I thought I’d pull back the curtain and explain what my investments are and how they got that way. I think you’ll find that it is far from a perfect portfolio.

What’s in My Lazy Portfolio?

lazy portfolio

This mess of stocks and ETF doesn’t make much sense at the first glance. I have a lot of explaining to do. So here goes:

Vanguard Emerging Markets ETF (VWO)

The only reason why I have more in emerging markets than VEU (see below) is that it has performed worse and I feel there’s more opportunity for growth in those markets in the long-term. This is a long-term position, so I’m not too worried about COVID hitting those countries hard, right now.

Vanguard FTSE All World ex US ETF (VEU)

This holding makes up another large chunk of my international stock holdings. These first two holdings are 24% of my portfolio. With some of the stocks below, my international holdings are around 30% overall.

Vanguard Total Bond Market ETF (BND)

Whenever market indicators point towards a stock market crash, I increase the amount of money I have in bonds. I usually keep less than 5% of my portfolio in this, because I’ve got time and other safety nets. However, I’ve been selling off the indexes as they reach new highs and adding more bonds.

I did this strategy in early 2020 and when the markets crashed with COVID, I was able to sell bonds (which didn’t drop as much) and buy stocks at nearly half the price they are today. I know that I can’t call the bottom, so every time the stock market dropped about 10%, I would sell another 2% of bonds and buy-in.

Twitter (TWTR)

I invested in Twitter a long time ago, with most of the shares around $15. I sold some at $40, $45, $50, $60, and $75. Even though I keep selling shares, the overall value has grown, so it’s still a large percentage of my portfolio. Perhaps I should have sold off more, but I think it’s still undervalued.

iShares Core High Dividend ETF (HDV)

This forms part of my core United States index holdings. I like high dividend ETFs for three reasons:

1. They produce solid income. HDV has about a 3% yield right now.
2. They are typically more boring companies that earn good cash and profits which I feel protects me in most market crashes.
3. They help me remove tech risk from my portfolio. As you’ll see with this list of stocks, I’ve got a lot of technology and the market indexes have plenty of tech at the top as well.

Invesco Solar ETF (TAN)

I bought this years ago when I got solar panels on my house. The last year has seen solar stocks skyrocket. I could have sold some off and redistributed the money across broader indexes, but I don’t mind holding solar stocks for another 20, 30, or 40 years (if I’m still around that long).

Vanguard Small-Cap Index Fund ETF (VB)

Most of the big indexes (VTI, I’m looking at you) strongly favor big companies. However, over the long haul, smaller companies tend to perform better. This is a way to give me a little more diversity and better performance than if I had just bought VTI alone. My overall US stocks are still mostly large-cap, so an argument could be made that I should increase this allocation.

Alphabet Class C (GOOG) and Alphabet Class A (GOOGL)

I bought Google a long time ago and it split into two voter classes. These never differ by much and it’s about 9.5% of my portfolio which would bump it up the list towards the top.

I decided not to touch it and it has performed well. Investing in Google is almost like investing in the entire internet and smartphone markets. It almost feels like its own index fund.

Vanguard Total Stock Market Index Fund ETF (VTI)

Finally, the staple of most lazy portfolios shows up. I used to have a lot more in this, but I sold a lot and put in HDV (see above). If you were to combine my VTI, HDV, and VB holdings, that’s 17% of my portfolio in US indexes.

Snap Inc (SNAP)

I bought at lot SNAP at under $10. Much like Twitter, even though sold off more than half, it is still a significant holding. Whenever SNAP and Twitter reach new highs, I sell off about 5% or 10%. At this point, I’m playing with the house’s money.

United States Oil Fund LP (USO)

I had been buying this oil ETF for far too long. I lost a ton of money when COVID hit and the price of oil went negative. However, I continued to dollar cost average into it. About a month ago, I sold off half since it I was finally solidly in the profitable area. I am holding to the rest with the idea that vaccines will spur a lot of pent-up demand for travel.

Over the long-term, I’d rather not invest in the oil industry.

Apple Inc (AAPL)

I bought some of these several years ago and sold off enough to just play with the house’s money. It’s split once or twice as the company became the first in the US to hit 1T and 2T in market cap.

There’s really no need for me to keep this since it’s well represented in the indexes. It feels like a safe holding though.

IBM (IBM)

I bought this because I thought that Watson would revolutionize the world. It didn’t happen, but IBM has paid out 5% dividends (or more) for years that I’ve held it. In theory, if I put my entirely portfolio in this stock, I could live off the dividends as it would be higher than the 4% rule

General Electric (GE)

I bought this years ago because I thought it was cheap after it had followed it a lot. Then it fell more and more. I bought more and more, dollar cost averaging in, and I’m up about 30% at this point. I have sold some since I’m up. I would sell more, but the pandemic hit their businesses harder than many companies. I’m hopeful that when things fully open up, this stock will out-perform.

Vanguard Real Estate Index Fund ETF (VNQ)

I like to diversify with some real estate holdings. This pays a decent dividend of 3.88% as well.

iShares MSCI Frontier and Select EM ETF (FM)

Yes, 1.5% of my money is in frontier markets. These are countries like Kuwait, Vietnam, Morocco, Kenya, Romania, and Nigeria.

It has not performed well. I’m down about 5.71%. This is a very, very long-term growth investment. It also diversifies my holdings so that I’m invested in probably 100 countries.

Alibaba (BABA)

There was one day (around 2015 or so) when the stock market dropped a bunch for just about 10 minutes. I had a little liquid money and saw that Alibaba dropped more than most. I don’t mind having 1% of my money in “the Amazon of China.”

Lyft Inc (LYFT)

When Lyft dropped to being worth about $8 billion dollars I thought that Google (or another company work on self-driving technology) might acquire it. That didn’t happen, but Lyft’s stock has jumped a lot. I’m not sure how ride-sharing will be profitable as it is now, so I’ve been selling off shares to protect myself if it should drop to $0.

Altria Group (MO)

I was in a forum a couple of months ago and nearly everyone said this was the best dividend investment paying around 8.5%. They had some good news in the last earnings and I’m up 25%. It’s better to be lucky than good sometimes I guess.

I’m very morally conflicted about investing in cigarettes and will probably sell this off soon.

Pinterest Inc (PINS)

This was another case of being lucky. I saw it get down to about $18 a share and thought that it was much less than the IPO, so let’s invest a little. It has been up nearly 500%, so I sold off some to play with the house’s money. (If you hadn’t noticed, this is something I do a lot.)

Kraft Heinz Co (KHC)

Warren Buffett gave up on the company, so I jumped in at a share price lower than him. It has a dividend yield of 4% and my cost basis is about $22 a share (it’s trading at $39). I have been happy with the returns for a couple of years.

Ford Motor Company (F)

I bought Ford because it was paying a 12% dividend due to the COVID-19 impact on its stock price. Ford needed to keep the money to run operations and decided to eliminate the dividend. What could have been a disaster has turned into a blessing, the stock is up 80% from where I bought it.

AT&T Inc. (T)

I bought this about a year ago for its 7.5% dividend yield. I felt like people would still need their cell phones and cable service in a pandemic. It also looks like HBO Max is a good streaming service. The stock itself is up 7%, so with the yield, it is looking good.

Under Armour Inc Class C (UA)

I bought a few shares at around $6.50 when it was looking like a disaster. It’s around $19 now. I sold a little to play with the house’s money once again. It used to be a $20 billion-dollar company, so maybe there’s still room for it to grow.

Carnival Corp (CCL), Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd (NCLH), Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd (RCL)

I bought a little of each of the three major cruise lines when they tank due to COVID. At the time it was less than half of a percent of my portfolio. I just wasn’t sure the entire industry would go away forever. Now they are a little over 1% of my portfolio. I’ve been selling some of them off at highs and it’s close to playing with the house’s money.

Boeing Co (BA)

Similar to the cruise lines, I bought in at $109 as it was a bargain from its $300+ highs. I was counting on COVID getting solved at some point and them being able to figure out their plane troubles. I sold some to play with the house’s money or this would be a bigger percentage.

Uber Technologies Inc (UBER)

Uber seems to lose billions of dollars a year. Still, I thought that at a $50 billion market cap, it had significant assets and would be acquired if nothing else. Guess what? Sold some for house’s money sake again.

Cash – Cash – Cash! (Cash)

I don’t like to keep a lot of cash around. I’ve been putting most of it into BND, so I can at least earn some income on the dividends.

Lazy Man’s Portfolio Recap

So that’s the rundown of how I invested my money. As you can tell, things got a little messy in some places and I got lucky in other places. The overall trend right now is to try to sell some of the individual holdings at highs and invest them in index funds.

I would also be willing to invest in new satellite stocks, but I haven’t found anything that’s a good value recently. Most of the companies that seem cheap to me (AT&T for example) aren’t likely to grow much. That’s another reason why I am content to keep the money invested in a place in bonds or dividend stocks while I wait to find a new opportunity.

My Hawaii Vacation During COVID

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I usually don’t aim to get hate clicks. Life is too short to make other people angry for no reason. I’m certainly not aiming for hate clicks now, but I wanted the title to be honest. I understand how “My Hawaii Vacation During COVID” looks. It’s probably an 8 of 10 on the Ted-(Can)Cruz-trip to escape the dangerous deep freeze and power outages of Texas last month.

I was hesitant to write about it at all, but in the end, I decided that it is best to be honest. This website is (partly) about my financial journey and a Hawaii vacation is a big part of that. However, before we cover the finances let’s get to the decision to travel during COVID. By now you probably know the drill. The three most important things during COVID (in no particular order) are:

1. Wear a Mask
2. No gather in groups
3. Don’t travel

One of my favorite quotes from Tom Brady is, “I didn’t come this far to only come this far.” I barely left the house for the first few months. Like most everyone else, I haven’t seen (non-immediate) family or friends in more than a year. While I’m near the bottom of the list for vaccines, it seems that I could get my turn within 2-3 months. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not too long.

So why, despite all this, did I spend the last week in Hawaii on vacation? When assessing the risk, all of the following came into play:

  • My Wife’s Expert Opinion

    My wife’s a pharmacist with the US Public Health Service (USPHS). USPHS does a lot of good work, but this their thing. She’s led a team that authored a COVID report that went to the Vice President. I try to follow all the news and details about everything, but she knows many times more than me.

    She was the one who came up with the idea to travel to Hawaii.

  • Hawaii is One of Two “Safe” States

    My wife said that there were only two states where we could go. Rhode Island had blocked just about every state. However, Hawaii has done extremely well limiting COVID. They have 10% of the case of Rhode Island, and a similar amount of people (~1,000,000). They have great testing, quarantine, and natural benefits like isolation (Pacific Ocean) and warm weather year-round.

    We had originally planned to go to Lake Placid, but it would have required driving through several quarantine states. We took that off the table because then the kids couldn’t go back to school when the vacation was over.

  • Planes are Cleaner than a Drug Lab

    My wife explained that it is a better environment for making IVs than many IV labs. Having made those IVs as a pharmacy technician 20-25 years ago, I know that this is a big deal. It turns out that planes are circulating all the air through HEPA filters every 3 minutes. Not only are planes well equipped, but everyone had to have a negative test 72 hours before boarding. Everyone was required to wear to mask (except for eating).

    Our plane was only about half full. My wife and one kid had the center four seats of one row. I and the other kid had the center four seats of another row. That happened both there and back. With the exception of the row in front of us and behind us, we had a good amount of distance.

The safest thing would obviously be to stay at home and never leave the house. With the kids having two weeks of no school, I don’t think that was likely to happen. As an alternative option, spending time in a state with 10% of the COVID cases seems like a defensible position.

Benefits of the Hawaii Vacation

It’s Hawaii. It’s vacation. Those benefits are a given in any year, but more so after the last year. I know that everyone has had to cancel travel. We canceled our March vacation last year as things were getting bad. (We’re also unlikely to be able to recoup our timeshare annual expenses, which we couldn’t use.)

Our kids have been fortunate to be in school this year. Private school has been a great value, especially this year. (It’s so much better than the end of last school year, paying thousands of dollars a month so I could run around a teach a 6 and 7-year-old different curriculums at the same time.)

However, the kids are also on a two week break. That’s a long time to be sitting at home watching TV and playing video games. Yes, I can try a version of my own COVID-19 homeschool, but the kids needed a break of some kind. I didn’t realize it until I was wearing a mask for 12 hours on the plane (plus all the time to and from the airport), but I’ve essentially only worn a mask for about an hour at a time to run a small errand like getting groceries. The rest of the time I’m at home. My kids have worn them for about 8 hours a day, almost every day. Maybe wearing a mask for long periods is something you get used to, but I now have a new respect for what they’ve been through.

My wife has been “virtually” deployed, which means she works from home, every day, even weekends. There’s been a little time off, but she’s running other pharmacist committees and other professional groups. Personally, I could have done without the vacation. I was stressed with deadlines and blogging before and after the break. (I’m stressed writing this now on Monday morning hoping to publish in a few hours.) Traveling always makes me stressed. I always say that flying is designed to make it as uncomfortable as possible so that you’ll pay for the comfort upgrades. For example, the cost to upgrade to first class was almost twice as much as the actual ticket itself.

This was also a unique opportunity. We had tossed around the idea of going to Hawaii again someday, but flying from Rhode Island with two kids is a whole different ball game than when my wife and I flew from San Francisco 13 years ago. I can’t remember what the price was, but it wasn’t very much. Now, the flight is twice is as long and we have twice as many people. I can’t seem to find what the non-COVID pricing would be, but I would guess that it would be between $800 and $1000 per person. At $3200-$4000 in flights, our vacation dollar goes a lot further elsewhere.

Hawaii became an opportunity because we got great pricing due to COVID-19… and it was one of the few places we could go and not have to quarantine either way.

Finally, we don’t live in an area of great diversity in Newport, RI. In fact, that is a big understatement, there is almost no diversity here. Hawaii is one of the few places in the United States with its own distinct culture. The kids can read about different cultures in a book or watch a YouTube video, but experiencing it “hands-on” is so much more valuable. There’s a big difference in the educational value of a week of Hawaii culture vs. watching reruns of Gumball on Cartoon Network.

The Costs of Our Trip

I don’t have all the numbers available unfortunately. My wife made most of the travel arrangements, and I’m writing this jet-lagged and close to when I usually publish my articles. However, I do know the following costs:

  • Flight: $580/pp
  • Hotel: $180/night
  • Car Rental: $700
  • Hotel Stay Before Flight: $120
  • Meals: One billion dollars.

I’m exaggerating the billion dollars for meals. We could have done it a lot cheaper, but we went out a lot. The kids wanted to experience malasadas. (They didn’t want to experience Hawaiian plates for some reason.) We couldn’t cook much because of the hotel room. However, we were able to eat leftovers with access to a microwave. We also had cereal as the kids prefer that to almost anything.

The flight was $580 per person or around $2400. We were able to cash in some credit card points for one ticket. I don’t like to count that because it’s like cashing in a gift card – we’re making an exchange of someting that has value for a flight.

My wife was able to get us the military hotel on Waikiki in Honolulu. The Hale Koa Hotel is right next to the Hilton that costs $500 a night or more. We stayed for 5 nights – $900 with all taxes included. I suspect most people would pay $2000 or choose to stay in a cheaper area of Oahu.

The car rental was the big killer. My wife planned a lot of this trip at the last minute and just got a car because she knew I wanted to stalk Jack Johnson we would want to see sea turtles on the North Shore. If we had to do it all again, we’d probably use a lot more ride-sharing. However, then again, that would increase the COVID risk. As it turned out my wife and kids took ride-share once in Hawaii. They woke up at 3 AM (due to the time zone difference) and went for a long, long walk to get coffee. The driver said he wasn’t going to get vaccinated, but my 8-year-old convinced him that his mother works with the experts and it is really safe and effective. I missed the whole thing, but I hear it was a convincing speech.

Finally, we paid $120 for a hotel the night before. There’s a hotel near the airport that includes parking (they shuttle you to the airport), so it’s actually cheaper to get to the hotel with free parking than it is to park at the airport.

Overall, I’d say we got about a $6,000 vacation for $4,000 (less if you count the points we used for one flight) not counting the meals. Yikes, even though it seemed like we were getting deals along the way, it still wasn’t cheap. That said, we had a lot of money in our travel budget after not traveling over the last year. We don’t have any plans to travel in the future either. If everything works out, we might take a road trip this summer.

What Did We Do in Hawaii?

We actually weren’t in Hawaii too long if you count the traveling. My wife had to be back for work the kids had to be back in case the school decided that quarantine was necessary anyway. We left on Sunday and came back on Friday.

Sunday – Due to the long flight and time change, it felt like nighttime to us. However, it was still early afternoon. We walked around the hotel and beach and then went to sleep around 6 PM local time (midnight our time). This is why my wife and kids became streetwalkers at 3 AM. (I had woken up at 11, worked a little, and went back to sleep.)

Monday – After my wife and kids’ journey to get coffee early, we went to an early breakfast and then drove to the Dole Pineapple Plantation soon after it opened. It was a bit of a drive as we had to go around the island to get to the north side. The place was packed, much more than it was 13 years ago when we were there. They have a big pineapple maze (like a corn maze), a train, and a garden. The train was a 90-minute wait in line, so we skipped that. Our whole family found the garden fairly boring. I think if gardens are your thing you’d like it? The 7-year-old and I did the maze while my wife and the 8-year-old opted to sample some pineapple and go through the gift shop. The maze took about an hour to get through and it got a little hot towards the end. My son wanted to do it all over again, but that wasn’t going to happen.

We went through the gift shop and I told my son that he couldn’t get the blue turtle at the pineapple store. There would be other places to get turtles, but this is about the pineapple. We all got Dole Whips. At age 7 and 8 my kids completed their quest to have Dole Whips at the only two places (to the best of my knowledge) that you can get them – Disney and Hawaii. They really have no idea how lucky they are.

Random side thought: Rhode Island recently changed its name from Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations to have sympathy with the negative connotations of “plantation.” The “Providence Plantations” were named in the 17th century to refer to being a “new settlement” and not related to any slavery activity. Somehow the Dole Pineapple Plantation is fine and no one has come after the company to change that name. It seems a little inconsistent to me.

After the Pineapple Plantation, we went to musician Jack Johnson’s town of Haleiwa to see some sea turtles and have a local lunch. The tide was high and there were no turtles. The lunch was good until a local chicken spooked my 8-year-old and jumped up and ate his lunch. Fortunately, he had chosen the nachos instead of his usual chicken tenders. That would have been awkward.

We got caught in a flash flood on the way back and everyone had a long day (having been up since 3 AM). We settled for a quick dinner at the hotel and everyone went to be early again.

Tuesday – We had a pool reservation for 11, but we once again woke up early. We went to Leonard’s for malasadas, which was a highlight of the trip for the kids. After watching Pokemon Sun and Moon, the kids have wanted to try the malasadas from Jessie and James’ food truck in the Alola region.

We decided to hike Diamond Head, a famous trail. My 8-year-old had a really bad attitude to start because he thought he would die. (He thinks everything will kill him.) Somehow he was able to turn it around during the hike as I held his hand and he talked about the souvenir he wanted after he completed it. Before long he was the most enthusiastic hiker of the whole group. He got very excited near the end when he saw the yellow steps that he recognized from the Pokemon anime.

After Diamond Head, we went to see the Halona Blow Hole, but it wasn’t doing too much. Maybe the tide was too low. We went back for our pool reservation, which was great fun. The lifeguards were very strict, but not for any particular COVID-19 reason, just regular procedure like making sure that everyone is in an exact line for the water slide. My 7-year-old is a decent swimmer and can stand anywhere in the pool. I was with him and they still made him put on a life jacket for the 10-foot swimming distance from the water slide to get back in line. I guess that’s what you get at the military hotel.

We went to the Rainbow Drive-In for a traditional Hawaiian plate lunch which was fabulous. The kids wanted to go a local cat cafe because they had never seen one. I’m allergic so I got to watch them play with cats from outside. Most of the cats were their typical cat-selves and wanted to sleep with no interaction with people. While the kids had a lot of fun, my 8-year-old wants to open up a therapy dog cafe with older dogs. I think that’s a much better business idea than a cat cafe, but I’m biased.

We had dinner back at the hotel at a place called the Pool Bar. It has a great sunset view of the ocean. However, it only has three hot food options, chicken tenders, a pulled pork sandwich, and nachos. The kids didn’t like virgin lava flows, but my wife and I did.

Wednesday – We had another 90 minutes of pool reservation, this time in the morning. The water was colder and we ended up not using the whole 90 minutes. (In case you were wondering, they limit the number of people to around 50 or 75 for the big pool area during this time. It isn’t like one family at a local hotel.)

We went to the mall and its amazing food court for lunch. They had food from everywhere – but specifically over a dozen Asian restaurants. I couldn’t decide so I went with the Mokoloco. My son got tricked by an Americanized restaurant called Holy Cow. It’s really Korean street food (we had no idea) where he had a mozzarella stick on a stick wrapped in a sugar dough outside. It was the highlight of the day. We’re going to try to make them at home with the help of this YouTube video:

The kids also had shave ice (for some reason Hawaii doesn’t believe in the “d” in “shaved ice”) and that went over well too. The food was the big highlight for the 8-year-old.

After lunch, we went out to the beaches. We tried Makapu?u Beach, but the waves were too crazy and it was far too dangerous for our swimming level. We went a little further down the coastline and found a beach with plenty of people. The waves were still big and crashed on the kids quite a bit. I got them far enough out (they had life vests on) so that the waves wouldn’t break on them. We didn’t stay out too long though, because I realized that it would be a bad situation if I got tired and had to fight the current to bring them in. I got back and rested and my wife took them out, but the lifeguard quickly warned them that they should come back in. They were fine at the time, but we were a little out of place compared to the locals who had older kids who grew up with these waves.

Before dinner, we tried to make reservations for Hard Rock Cafe, but it was closed until Thursday. We tried another place, but it turned out to be more of a club/adult place rather than a family place. We walked around and found the Yard House, but it was a two-hour wait. Ruth’s Chris was available right away, but there was literally nothing on the menu my 7-year-old would eat and I didn’t want to spend $200 to hear complaining. We left. Literally, every place was a bust and we had walked two miles, so the kids were in a very bad mood at this point. So we went back to the hotel restaurant. We figured it would be easy since you have to be military to go there. It was still an hour wait and the host chewed us out for not getting reservations.

Finally, we ended up at the same Pool Bar as we did the night before.

Thursday – We went to the beach in the morning. For having a hotel on the beach we didn’t spend that much time at the beach because we were always out and about. It was rainy though, so we ended up back inside.

We went to go snorkeling with the turtles (one of my kid’s favorite animals). It was windy and rainy and the captain decided the ocean current was too strong to let the kids snorkel. We ended up seeing one turtle up close to the boat and another a bit in the distance. The youngest kid loved it anyway. We were able to get the price changed to the observer rate since we didn’t actually get to go snorkeling.

At dinner time we went to the Hard Rock Cafe. Yes, it is a tourist trap that we would typically avoid, but the kids had never been. Also, this was my last chance to find anything related to Jack Johnson. I struck gold as they had his autographed Sleep Through the Static CD and a full-size promotional surfboard. This CD had been in my car’s CD player for the last month or more. I wrote about the first track, All at Once, last year for Earth Day.

The kids loved Hard Rock Cafe and the gift shop had everything deeply discounted. I got a T-shirt for $10. My son got a $50 sweatshirt that was marked down to $15. We didn’t need new clothes

Friday – Everyone was adjusted to the time, so I was the first one to wake up for a change. We started packing in the morning and then went out to the beach for about an hour. That’s all we had until it was time to check out and get to the airport. At the airport, I wandered off on my own and bought my 7-year-old the blue stuffed turtle that he wanted at the Pineapple Plantation, it turned out that we hadn’t seen another one. I surprised him with it when we got home.

In the end, we ended up packing a lot into a few days. I would have liked to do a little more slow travel and relaxed a bit more. Like many vacations, some things didn’t cooperate, but we’re fortunate to have any kind of vacation at all.

This is a long article and I think it covers most of everything. Let me know if you have any questions about Oahu or traveling during COVID. And if you’ve read the 3500+ words this far and still want to leave a hate comment, you’ve earned it.