Lazy Man and Money

The Cost of Summer Camp (2023 Edition)

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The Cost of Summer Camp (2023 Edition)

Last year, I wrote about the cost of summer camp, and it generated some interesting conversations. Most of the article was about how expensive camps are nowadays compared to when I was a kid. I think I remember a story saying she paid $25 to send me to camp for a whole week. It was 40 years ago and must have been subsidized.

That camp had the typical things like sports, arts and crafts, hikes, and some swim lessons and “free swim.” It was terrible doing swim lessons at 9 AM in a 60-degree pool, but it was a requirement for afternoon free swim. That was the best because by then, it was 90 degrees out, the water was nice, and we got to do whatever silly pool stuff we wanted.

We tried the local YMCA for years here. It was the closest thing to that. The price for the YMCA is reasonable, and they have long hours, which is good for us parents. I think they have a lot of donors and subsidies to keep the cost of camp low, so the most working family have a more affordable option. I suspect that the camp counselors aren’t paid very well, and they have a lot of kids in one group. It makes sense. That’s how they can keep the costs low and have long hours. Unfortunately, the kids hate the YMCA camp. The camp counselor takes away anything fun if one kid misbehaves. Because of the big groups, there’s always one kid that spoils it for the whole group.

We gave up on the YMCA camp two years ago and went with specialty camps. Last year my youngest (then 8) ended up doing a lot of camps at his school, but he was often the oldest of the kids, and some of the weeks weren’t fun. They wouldn’t let him work with scissors strong enough to cut cardboard for the safety of the younger kids. Ironically, his school now has a woodworking class, and he’s working with power tools. It was quite a change in 2-3 months. This is the first year we aren’t doing those camps for grades 3-4 and under. They grow up so fast, right?

Putting together summer camps for us is a complex logic puzzle. They like some of the same things but can’t be in the same class at the same time. Whenever they are, fighting and calls home ensue. However, they are naturally very different personalities, so that doesn’t become a problem. It only creates a problem of dropping off and picking them up when they all start around the same time. Naturally, the camps they like tend to be the most expensive ones. At least there’s some enrichment to them. I like when they learn or improve valuable skills.

Kid 1: Ten-Year-Old

Last year, I insisted he try sailing camp. Sailing is big in Newport, Rhode Island. It’s so big that the National Sailing Hall of Fame has moved here. It was a massive failure at first. He got anxious and wouldn’t do anything. We had to commit to a two-week session, so it was scary that they could just cancel everything. Fortunately, with two strikes, he got better. By the end, he was okay with sailing… but not okay enough to want to do it again. At least he tried it and is now comfortable enough on some small boats. It was good growth to overcome the fear. Even though sailing may not be for him, I’ll consider it a win.

He also started with a theater camp which is run by his school. It started off like sailing, “It’s all girls here! This is the worst!” After that initial drop-off and sign-in, he must have worked it out. He LOVED it when I picked him up at the end of the day. It has a lot of older kids (all the way to 17 and 18, I think), which is generally good for him. Over three weeks, they created their own musical – plot, songs, everything. I legitimately enjoyed it. I would have paid at least $10 to see it. Turns out that we paid a good deal more – LOL.

Kid 1 at cooking camp two years ago
To round things out, we did two things that worked well the previous two years: veterinarian camp and cooking camp. The vet camp works well with my dog boarding business. I’m a huge fan of kids learning cooking – it’s a lifelong skill that will save them a lot of money.

This year, we’re building on the success of the theater camp. He’s doing the musical camp again. After that, he’s going to do Shakespeare camp. I feel that Shakespeare may be too tough for an almost fifth-grader, but Shakespeare, when performed as a play, was always easier to understand for me. Also, it’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is an easier, fun level of Shakespeare. We’ll see how it goes.

We’re ditching the sailing and keeping cooking and vet camp. The cooking camp is technically for 11-16-year-olds, but I emailed them, and they are confident that my kid can handle it since he has two years with them and has familiarity with the kitchen. Plus, he’ll only be a couple of months shy of being officially 11 by the time camp starts.

Kid 2: Nine-Year-Old

Since he’s too old for all the weeklong activities that his school had last year, we have another four weeks to fill.

Like Kid 1, I insisted Kid 2 try sailing camp last year. Since they are very different people, kid 2 LOVED it. It was easy to sign him up for that again.

He also enjoyed the vet camp last year. He only fit the 1-3 grade range last year, but this year, we got him doing more difficult pet care with the 4-7th graders.

We had him signed up for a short e-day cooking camp last year, but we had to cancel for our Disney Cruise. They were able to refund all our money, which was great. This year, he’s getting a full week, the same as Kid 1 got the last two years. He loves cooking with mom, so I suspect this will be a win. Fortunately, he’s doing a different level and different week than his brother, so their streams won’t cross (surprise Ghostbusters reference!). We did the same thing with the vet camp above.

That takes us through half the summer, but we still have four weeks to go.

We signed him up with the local art museum’s Animation Camp. Kid 2 loves art, and he went there two years ago. Nothing worked out at the art camp last year. We got lucky that this worked out. A lot of what they have are finger painting and pottery. This is the perfect activity at the perfect age (9 to 12-year-olds).

Lastly, he’s going to musical camp with Kid 1. Streams crossing alert! It actually works out that he’ll be separate from his brother as he’ll be working on “techie” side – stage design, lighting, sound, etc. They don’t work together that much with the actors. It’s perfect as they can be there to support each other as necessary, but they won’t be getting in each other’s way.

The Cost of Summer Camp

Summer camp has become a big business. Consumers will pay for the education of their kids. Perhaps it is a trap, but I’ve fallen for it.

I don’t really believe that. I think it’s genuinely expensive to provide some special training and kid care. Also, if the vet camp makes some extra money, it’s going to help the animal shelter. If the theater camp makes extra money, it’s going back to my kids’ school, so they’ll benefit that way.

Each kid is signed up for eight weeks of camp. Kid 1’s camps are $2,810. Kid 2’s camps are $2,595. That averages to $351 and $324 a week each. Ironically the sailing camp for Kid 2 is cheaper than the other camps, so we save a little money on him.

That’s $5400 in camps. Last year we only did seven weeks of camps. The average weekly price back then was $321 and $307, so this is more expensive. It would be easy to blame inflation, but when I look a little deeper at each camp, it’s more about them going with more expensive choices this year.

It’s tempting to say that it’s too much money, but the alternative is often travel – which is a lot more expensive. We can’t travel too much, though, because my wife doesn’t get unlimited vacation time. I also do my best business during the summer tourist season. It’s also impossible to compare camps to the experience of traveling with family full-time.

Passive Income Update: February 2023

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Happy March everyone! I’m getting excited for the weather to get better. It’s still too cold for me up here in New England. At least the days are getting longer. I recently gave an an update here about little stuff going on in our life. I’ve been a little down lately, but can you tell that I’m trying to be more upbeat?

We started February by watching Punxsutawney Phil’s Groundhog Day routine. I took a picture of the kids with my laptop, but I couldn’t figure out why until just now. It worked out well that it happened before school. It looked like they had a good party going on down there. Maybe one day we’ll go in person.

We went into Providence to do some ice bumper boats. It’s like bumper cars, but you do on ice. It’s expensive, but it’s become a tradition now. We also use it as an excuse to get up to Providence to do some other things that we wouldn’t normally do down in Newport.


(Here’s what the ice bumper boats look like.)

I started co-teaching Lego Robotics with another parent for my younger kids’ class. It’s a bunch of 2nd and 3rd graders meeting at 5:30PM. At that point, they are barely evolved Gremlins, but we’ve managed to learn something. Perhaps more importantly, they kids are having fun. The high school class is there at the same time and they’ve built some very impressive things, which is always entertaining. The group got a grant or somehow bought a $100,000 Boston Dynamics dog (Spot), but we didn’t play with that until March, so you’ll have to come back next month to see it.

My wife and I also celebrated Valentine’s Day at the Officer’s Club on the base. We were married there almost 16 years ago. We first went that dinner 16 years ago, because they wanted us to see what a function was like before getting married there. We’ve been trying to go whenever they have offered it. It’s a little like an anniversary of sorts.

We finally got a little snow, just a few inches – enough for the kids to get some sledding in. It was fun for about the first 45 minutes and then they proceeded to try to kill each other. This happens a lot.

Let’s start the new and improved Passive Income report. I’ve streamlined this a bit, so hopefully, it will be a faster, easier read. I’ll try to continue to trim it down through the year.

I used to call it alternative income, but that idea didn’t catch on as it did when I used it back in 2008. Everyone loves “passive income” better. If you are a new reader, you’re going to want to refer to my Alternative Income FAQ as you may have some questions about the math that I’m going to use in this post.

The way I calculate these numbers requires that little explanation – it isn’t intuitive. I do things a little differently to show the journey. For example, we don’t have much real passive income from our rental properties. We still have mortgages to pay off. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where we are on that journey. Over time, the bank owns less of the properties, and we own more of them. There will be no mortgages when this number gets to 100%, and all that rental income can be used for living expenses.

When calculating the percentage of rental income, I take the rent (minus estimated expenses) and apply it to the portion of equity we own. Think of it like you and a friend owning a property 50/50. This would be how you’d handle it, with each of you splitting the profits at the end 50/50. If your friend is the bank and it owns 80%, you should only count on 20% of that net rental income. We used to be in that 20% range, but now it’s closer to 75%.

Lazy Man’s Passive Income

Passive Income Pyramid
My Passive Income Pyramid

I categorize our passive income into three primary sources that are represented mainly in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job,” – that’s not passive at all. (I 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 my “somewhat active” income. They are a little passive because I can make money even when I’m not immediately tending to them. I can do other money-making activities while I board dogs. When I’m on vacation, some blog money still comes in. I combine real estate and investment income as their separate main sources of very passive income. This way, if you want only to count those, you can do that.

New for this year, my passive income is only going to be 50% of blogging and dog-sitting income, 80% of real estate, and 100% of dividend income. That rewards types of income that are truly passive and punishes my quasi-passive sources like blogging.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

February is often a good month for dog sitting. A lot of schools have a February vacation. Our kids’ private school is unusual because they have a March vacation. That means that I’m around for when everyone else goes on vacation – which works out very well. My dog boarding income was 75% more than February of 2022, so that’s fantastic!


(I like when the dogs run like this, because they come back in and sleep for a few hours. That’s the easy money!)

Blogging income continues to go downhill. You may have noticed, but I haven’t been motivated to write a lot lately.

In January, “dogs and blogs” combined for $2,226.37. In February, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $5,521.50

That’s a really good number, but I needed it. January is typically bad. We’re going on vacation in March, which means limited dog boarding. Things will hopefully pick back up in April.

My kids help with the dog sitting. My 10-year-old is extremely good with dogs at this point. He can feed them, let them out, and play with them in the yard. He’s spending more time in front of the clients as a helper at pick-ups and drop-offs. My 9-year-old was a little slower to develop dog skills, but he’s carved out a household niche catering to the smaller dogs – he just loves them.

Their help means I can pay them a legitimately earned income (a 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. Here’s why kids should start a Roth IRA as soon as possible.

2. Rental Property Income

Rental property income is very boring lately. When mortgage rates are high, we don’t see any gains in pricing. So we continue to build equity by paying own the mortgages. It’s slow going.

Unfortunately, one of our properties has had a few problems lately. I guess the boiler was never properly vented and that’s creating an issue that requires repiping a bunch of stuff. I think it might be better to just sell the properties and invest in the market. We’ll have to run the numbers and see what kind of return we’re getting from rents. We haven’t raised our rents in a long time and they are way under market value. Why deal with headaches and stress if we can make the same money more passively?


(It’s always fun to look at my kids’ homework. He didn’t get too far with regrouping/borrowing here, but it worked out in the end.)

In the last month, we went from 75.76% to 76.05% ownership of the equity in our properties. It’s a very tiny change from month to month. In a year, we might only get 3% more equity. If we owned both of our rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), we’d make about $2,200 a month after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance.

If you multiply our rents of $2,200 by the amount of equity we have, 76.05%, you get $1,673/mo. in estimated passive income. Last month it was $1,667/mo. This $6 in passive income isn’t going to do too much, but it adds up over time.

When I started tracking rental property income this way (January 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties, and the properties had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 of passive income back then. In six years, it grew a ton. We sold our biggest rental property last year and invested that money in the stock market. It’s much more passive now. That was a strong driver as to why I started to count certain passive income sources as less valuable than others in this report.

When we get to 100% ownership of the two properties, they should bring about $25,000 after expenses. Rent is inflation resistant as it’ll rise over time. That means that even though this is $25,000 in today’s dollars, it will still have that buying power in the future.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,673

3. Dividend Income

For this section, I look at our stock market investments. I assume we could earn a 2.5% dividend yield on those investments. That assumption is a conservative number that helps us think about what kind of cash we can expect. It should be easy to get that 2.5% number as we could simply put all of our portfolios in a high-dividend ETF. For example, the high-yield ETF, HDV, is currently paying a 3.52% yield.

With today’s interest rates, a 2.5% yield seems ridiculously low. I need to remember that interest rates could go back to where they were a year ago.


(I guess the kids are still young enough to enjoy a fun game of box! They ended up cutting this one into a house with a door they could call through. It was an access tunnel into a kids’ room for a few days.)

Most bloggers use the actual dividends they earned that month. I have quite a few accounts, and I’m too Lazy to add up the dividends on them. Even if we aren’t getting the 2.5% number now, we could always move the money around from growth to dividends if we needed to live off the cash flow. A vast majority of our money is in retirement accounts, so cash flow isn’t important to us now. I also combine all the taxable and retirement account numbers. It’s too much work to separate them out.

We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The company is doing well, and they occasionally throw an extra profit-sharing check to me. The investment income from this is essentially the same as dividend income. It is taxed differently, but for this report, it makes sense to group all stock ownership in this bucket.

The markets moved down a bit, so this is going to go down too. Oh well, at least it generally moves up.

With the market recovery, our dividend-ish income grew quite a bit:

Total Dividend-ish Income: $3,960

Last month it was $4,031. That’s a loss of $71. So much for last month’s gain of over $180. It’s two steps forward and one step back.

In January 2017, the dividend income was at $1,180/mo. We’re almost at $50,000 a year – enough for us to live fairly well, especially if we paid off our mortgage. For the 35th month in a row (?), we’re looking into estate planning, but they gave us a lot of paperwork to do before we can move forward. I’m still not making any progress on this. For the first time in about 15 months, I got to a point where I thought I might be able to get the paperwork back out. One of my main goals for the year is to work on this, so hopefully, it won’t just become another wish.

Adjusted Passive Income

I used to combine real estate and dividend income into “very close to passive income.” However, now I’ll simply add up the 50% dogs/blogs, 80% real estate, and 100% dividend income. This makes things a lot easier.

Dog/Blogs: $5,521.50 – Adjusted to $2,760.75
Rentals: $1,673 – Adjusted to $1,338.40
Dividends: $3,960 – Remains at $3,960


Dogs/Blogs Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line

Total Adjusted Passive Income: $8,059.15

Last month it was $6,477.79. So you can see that even if I count dogs/blogs at 50% that’s the main difference here. The rental and dividend stuff didn’t move too much.

Annually, this $8k-ish number is about $96,000 of passive income. As you’ll see in the chart below our 3-month average of this number is almost always in the $8-9k range. So I guess it’s reasonable to call it $100k a year.

It’s very useful to have different income streams. As blogging income becomes more difficult, dog boarding income has grown to supplement it. For a long time, real estate didn’t grow much at all; then, in the last couple of years, it grew a ton. The stock market grew for more than a decade from 2010 to 2021 but had a little setback last year. When something goes down, it seems another thing jumps up and over time we are making consistent progress.

The chance of all the income streams falling on hard times is low, but certainly not impossible. If we had another event like the Great Recession in 2008, they’d all be impacted quite a bit. In that case, we’d have to rely more on active income (the other 50% of our dogs/blogs, 20% of rental income, and other jobs) or rely on savings for a while. Also, dog boarding went away completely with COVID, so something like that can be just around the corner.


(The Valentine’s Day dinner was $85 (including a bottle of wine), which is a very, very nice for a date night.)

It’s also important to remember that these numbers aren’t “real” because much of the money isn’t liquid. We can’t spend those retirement investments without penalties. We can’t access the equity we have in properties without selling them or opening a HELOC. There are some money moves around these, but it’s not worth making any of them until my wife retires.

You’d think we’d feel “rich” having won the money game. We don’t. Our social circle tends to have generationally rich people. However, we are “rich” relative to many people’s circumstances. Money is relative. It’s nice not to have to worry about emergency bills and make reasonable splurges.

(The blue line represents the total adjusted passive income. The Red Line represents the three-month average.)

The three-month average in February 2021 was $5,678.80. In February 2022, it was $7,381.33. Now in February of 2023, it is $8,109.95. I think we can grow it more in 2023, but we shut down for renovations for half of January and lost some dog income. This helps me feel a little better about losing the blog income.

I don’t know how long dog boarding will last. It was a lot of work last year. This year has been easier with the lighter schedule. I think that with dog boarding, either the market will change or I’ll change. Perhaps I’ll want to travel more. Perhaps, I’ll want a different challenge. I’m on my third career (software engineering, blogging, and dog boarding), so it would be naive of me to think it might be my last.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning day job as a pharmacist or the minor freelance work I’ve been doing over the last few years – neither is passive at all. When my wife retires, we can count her vested military pension as more passive income. It looks like it might be worth around $68,500 and includes access to a good health care plan. A pension is like a passive income cheat code. They are so rare nowadays.

For now, this active income (including the dog boarding) is the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well, get our kids a top education at a privaet school, pay off our mortgages, and invest. My income doesn’t match my wife’s, but the flexibility gives me the time to stretch almost every dollar in much of our spending. It also allows me the flexibility to bring the kids to school and to after-school activities.

Net Worth Update

My net worth updates aren’t fascinating as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s just a footnote, not its own article.

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


(Finally, the proof of sledding. Good free fun if you already own a couple of sleds as we do.)

This past month, our net worth was down 1.25%. For the year it’s up 1.81%. We’re getting close to our all-time highs. That’s great, considering that the markets are still off their highs by nearly 10%. I feel like I can truly say that we’re in the best money situation we’ve ever been in. I know a lot of people can’t say the same – inflation and the down market can be difficult.

There’s a big wild card in calculating our net worth. Now that my wife’s military pension is vested, it’s reasonable to ask whether we should include it in our net worth. If the U.S. government didn’t back it like treasuries or FDIC, I may feel I should account for some uncertainty. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned a larger immediate salary 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.

It’s important to recognize that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 16 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back in 2006, but that’s been my goal since the first sentence of this blog.

We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be just starting. Many of those readers are saddled with huge student loans that we didn’t have to deal with. 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 10 of blogging and early retirement planning. Please try to use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances and market luck) over 15-20 years.

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

Odds and Ends Update

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I’ve been quiet with the posting here. That’s odd for this season. In the past, I’d spent my spare time focusing on following football or baseball.

In the last couple of weeks, the kids have discovered the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Most of the movies are rated PG-13 for language or violence, but it isn’t something they haven’t seen before. To be honest, some movies from the 1980s (Teen Wolf, for example) were more cringey. The Marvel movies remind me more of a G.I. Joe cartoon I watched as a kid – there’s a lot of fighting, but it’s not too bad.

Anyway, they want to watch all of them, all at once. We’ve been doing about one a night and are on Black Panther, the 18th movie. That’s a lot of movie-watching in less than 20 days. They’ve been getting their homework done and behaving well, so it is hard to say no. They will run out of movies in the next couple of weeks, so things will go back to normal (unless they go on to watching all the Marvel television shows).

I want to watch them all with them. It’s hard to believe that the original Iron Man is about fifteen years old. Watching all these movies is also a big chunk of time out of my day.

Additionally, it was school vacation week last week. My kids have their break later, but everyone else sent their dogs to the House of Lazy Man. I made good money, but it was a lot of work.

To complicate things, one son got a stomach virus that was going through the third grade. Poor kid couldn’t do much. We made up crazy stories using artificial intelligence. We’d take turns giving it silly prompts and trying to make each other laugh. The hampster defeating the giant frog made of toast by gnawing on its back for hours still makes me laugh! When he started to feel better, we did a lot of Science Max videos. They are fun for kids who love science.

I was ready to begin this week strong, but on Monday, my web host, Siteground, decided to shut down my website. They claimed that there was malicious code that could infect users. In reality, their system scan pointed to an area of files that weren’t open to the public and hadn’t been available for more than three years. The files hadn’t been updated in 3.5 years, which means that code existed all this time. Siteground claimed this code was an emergency and required immediately shutting down the website. However, why did they ignore it for three years if it was so dangerous, requiring immediate action?

I believe the answer was clear in the email they sent. I could bring my website up immediately by having them resolve the problem by subscribing to a $100/mo. plan*. It’s VERY BAD whenever your website is down, as it sends a sign to search engines that you aren’t a trustworthy site. Siteground manufactured a fake problem, effectively poisoned my business, and then offered to sell me the cure. I’m not a lawyer, but it feels like extortion.

I fixed the problem myself, which wasn’t easy since they disabled the usual tools I would use. However, it was pretty disturbing that this practice is legal. I’ve called them out on Twitter, and so far, they have responded with many lines from a customer service script that doesn’t apply to the situation.

I thought I was in the clear, but Monday night, we got word that the snowstorm would be bad and school would be canceled the next day. I can’t get much work done when the kids are home. I also want to bring them sledding and have a snowball fight. We’ve only had two days of a few inches of snow this year, so why not make the most of the rare moments?

We finished up last night (Tuesday) watching Black Panther. It was perfect for my son’s Africa unit in the fourth grade. I pointed out that we were lucky to fit in for Black History Month. As Bob Ross might say, it was a “happy little accident.”

As you may have noticed, there wasn’t a big financial message in this. If you look a little deeper, there were more tiny ones than I initially thought:

  • Maximizing our Disney Subscription – What would it have cost to rent 18 movies in a month back in the old days of Blockbuster, even Netflix by mail? It might be more than $100, right? This is definitely an outlier month, and we have other subscriptions being neglected.
  • Preview of this month’s dog business – It’s good!
  • I could stay at home with a sick kid and do activities with him when he was able. The flexibility of my work is very helpful for that.
  • Free things to do at home with a sick kid. I’m sure I’m the first to binge Science Max on a sick day, but I don’t think too many fire up ChatGPT. Hopefully, that’s a free trick you can use.
  • Free snowboarding for a fun day off from school. I uploaded a couple of quick clips to YouTube (free!) to share with my mother, who bought them the snowboards a few years ago.
  • Getting extorted by your web hosting company. I doubt many of you will come across that one, but it was an interesting financial trick. Maybe you can create your own mafia and solicit protection money?

That brings you up to date. Wednesday is usually my busiest day, with a networking group meeting in the morning and teaching Lego Robotics in the evening. In between, I have a few dogs coming and going. I hope to get something posted with a more focused financial message.

* I believe that was the pricing. I’m not going to look it up for accuracy. The dollar figure isn’t essential.

Save Money at McDonald’s

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I was hoping to make this bigger and more extensive, but we’ve had a stomach bug come through the house. It’s also one of the busiest dog boarding weeks of the year. Sometimes you just try to get by and fight another day.

It used to be extremely easy to save money at McDonald’s. They seem to have caught up to many of my tricks and it is more expensive now. Nonetheless, there are still a number of ways to save some money if you are smart.

One thing to note is that the idea here is to save money. This means ignoring nutrition much of the time. McDonald’s should be a “sometimes food.” I like to do a penance later by eating a bowl of broccoli and carrots.

Basic Tricks To Save Money at McDonalds

  • Get Deals on McDonald’s App
    I love the McDonald’s app. It’s much easier to order my favorites and then go to the drive-thru and give them a code. I don’t have to stop to give them my card or get a receipt. I just put my favorite restaurant rewards card in the app and I know I’m always saving at least 3%.

    The best part of the app though is the “Deals” section. The app offersexclusive deals and coupons. Lately, there’s been a chicken crispy sandwich free with any purchase of $2. My son loves the chicken crispy sandwich, so I’ll by a McDouble for $2.29 and we’ve got a solid meal. It’s great on the way to those after school activities.

  • Use Rewards on McDonald’s App
    Each of the purchases on the app earn us rewards points that can be cashed in for freebies. If I don’t see a good deal like the one above, I’ll cash in 1500 points for a free McChicken. I’m usually not a fan of paying for mayonaise calories, but it gets the job done when your in a rush. Some people may prefer to cash in 6000 points for Quarter Pounder with Cheese or a Big Mac, but I think the McChicken is a better value.

    I’ll make an exception and use 6000 points for a Happy Meal when the kids need a pick-me-up or deserve a celebration meal. I always avoid everything in the 3000 point tier. The 6-piece chicken nuggets seems like a bad use of points.

    It’s free food, so you might as well get it.

  • Order from the Value Menu

    A time-tested trick to saving money at McDonald’s is the value menu. I liked it a lot better when it was a Dollar Menu and you could get a double cheeseburger for a dollar. Inflation is tough, so we have to make the most of what we can. In the morning, I find the best value is a Sausage McMuffin for $1.89. The Sausage Biscuit may be 20 cents cheaper, but it is nowhere close to as good in my opinion.

    During the regular (non-breakfast) hours, the McChicken or McDouble is my go-to pick.

  • Skip the Soda (Drink water)
    All restaurants charge a ton for a little syrup added to water. McDonalds is actually one place where the dollar any-size isn’t too bad. I always ask for no-ice so I can get the most amount of drink.
  • Avoid the Combo Meals
    They may appear to save some money, but it’s easy to overspend. They are often $7-8. At that price, I’d rather go to Subway. Or I could also pay an extra buck or two and have Chipotle’s.
  • Use coupons
    McDonald’s sometimes distributes coupons through flyers, newspapers, or online. Keep an eye out for these coupons to save money on your next visit.

Advanced Tricks To Save Money at McDonalds

  • Breakfast Family Hack
    One of my favorite tricks to saving money at McDonalds happens at breakfast. For example, we’d be traveling (perhaps taking a red eye) and have a layover in an airport like Orlando. The food court there is very expensive and not a ton of food is very kid-friendly.

    I would buy the Big Breakfast with Hotcakes for around $7 (maybe more with the airport mark-up). It’s 1350 calories and it is very versitle. One kid doesn’t eat meat or eggs, so he chooses from the hotcakes/biscuit/hash browns. The other kid eats eggs and sausage and the left over carbs the other kid didn’t eat. For kids 5-8, this was more than enough food for mom and dad to have some leftovers. We generally buy something on the value menu like a Sausage McMuffin.

    • Blast From the Past

    One of the (very few) benefits from being a dinosaur blogger is that I have written about this in the past. Some people refer to this as “wisdom.” In any case, here are some ideas from previous blog posts. Perhaps they’ll be relevant again as you read this. Perhaps they are simply for historical purposes. Either way, let the fun ensue:

    Passive Income Update: January 2023

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    We’re at the point in the new year where I’m no longer writing 2022 on my checks. Wait, I don’t write checks – all my money has been automated for years. Well, at least I generally know what year it is now. This is an excellent time to review those 2023 goals and resolutions.

    Usually, I use the Super Bowl as a reminder to get stuff into gear for Valentine’s Day. That wasn’t very helpful this year. Valentine’s Day snuck up on me very quickly. Fortunately, the local Navy Base has a fancy dinner for a reasonable price. I got reservations a couple of weeks ago, so at least there’s a bit of a plan.

    January was a busy month for us. Half the month, we renovated the house. Clarification, we paid for people to come to renovate the home. We had 90% of the interior painted and fresh pet-friendly carpeting upstairs. That required shuffling everything from one room to another while they worked.

    We celebrated two birthdays. Our youngest turned nine, and we had lunch and a trip to an arcade with a few friends.


    [This is actually both our sons, but the other friends were there.]

    Our dog celebrated his 14th birthday. I brought him to the beach, and a wave crushed him. It surprised me too. It wasn’t the most fantastic birthday present. We got him a new vet recently, so we’ll see if that helps him to get to a 15th birthday.

    We had our usual bunch of events. The kids continue their martial arts. They were getting bored of it, but they introduced swords (big wooden sticks for them) this month, and that got them excited again.

    My oldest finished his Lego Robotics class with a team win of the Core Values trophy at the state championship. It’s funny because he was the only fourth grader, and I felt like he was mostly on the sideline sitting and watching the older kids do everything – not award-winning sportsmanship. My youngest just started his robotics, and that’s more his thing. I’m a co-coach, and most of the kids are way more advanced than the Lego Explore curriculum.

    Let’s start the New and Improved Passive Income report. I’ve streamlined this a bit, so hopefully, it will be a faster, easier read. I’ll try to continue to trim it down through the year.

    However, that idea didn’t catch on as it did when I used it back in 2008. Everyone loves “passive income” better. If you are a new reader, you’re going to want to refer to my Alternative Income FAQ as you may have some questions about the math that I’m going to use in this post.

    The way I calculate these numbers requires that little explanation – it isn’t intuitive. I do things a little differently to show the journey. For example, we don’t have much real passive income from our rental properties. We still have mortgages to pay off. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where we are on that journey. Over time, the bank owns less of the properties, and we own more of them. There will be no mortgages when this number gets to 100%, and all that rental income can be used for living expenses.

    When calculating the percentage of rental income, I take the rent (minus estimated expenses) and apply it to the portion of equity we own. Think of it like you and a friend owning a property 50/50. This would be how you’d handle it, with each of you splitting the profits at the end 50/50. If your friend is the bank and it owns 80%, you should only count on 20% of that net rental income. We used to be in that 20% range, but now it’s closer to 75%.

    Lazy Man’s Passive Income

    Passive Income Pyramid
    My Passive Income Pyramid

    I categorize our passive income into three primary sources that are represented mainly in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job,” – that’s not passive at all. (I 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 my “somewhat active” income. They are a little passive because I can make money even when I’m not immediately tending to them. I can do other money-making activities while I board dogs. When I’m on vacation, some blog money still comes in. I combine real estate and investment income as their separate main sources of very passive income. This way, if you want only to count those, you can do that.

    New for this year, my passive income is only going to be 50% of blogging and dog-sitting income, 80% of real estate, and 100% of dividend income. That rewards types of income that are truly passive and punishes my quasi-passive sources like blogging.

    1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

    January is always my worst month with blogging and dog-sitting. Most people are finished with their holiday travel and don’t need a lot of dog boarding. Advertising agencies are resetting their budgets, so they aren’t spending much on bloggers. I would be nervous, but now I recognize that it happens every year.

    Knowing that January was going to be a slow month, we closed the dog boarding business for two weeks so we could paint much of the interior of the house and install new carpeting. We ended up turning away significant business. Oh well. As my wife says, “We need to renovate sometime.” I took the opportunity to raise prices by about 7% – we had too much demand, and I’d rather have fewer dogs pay more.

    The blogging income for the month was the lowest in years. Yikes! Blogging is trending towards zero while dog boarding goes up.

    In December, “dogs and blogs” combined for $9,168.65. In January, it was:

    Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $2,226.37

    Even with that big drop, I’m happy with the number. It was almost a perfect storm of terrible circumstances, but that kind of money still works well with our investments and other income. Sometimes it’s good to test the bottom.

    My kids help with the dog sitting. My 10-year-old is extremely good with dogs at this point. He can feed them, let them out, and play with them in the yard. He’s spending more time in front of the clients as a helper at pick-ups and drop-offs. My 9-year-old was a little slower to develop dog skills, but he’s carved out a household niche catering to the smaller dogs – he just loves them.

    Their help means I can pay them a legitimately earned income (a 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. Here’s why kids should start a Roth IRA as soon as possible.

    2. Rental Property Income

    Our rental properties have been very boring for several months. With mortgage rates high, property values have come down a tiny bit. We’re not seeing the great appreciation that we saw last year. However, we continue to pay down the mortgages every month. The result is a lot like running in the place – we aren’t going very far.

    We might be able to raise rents this year. Our rents are far below market rates. Unfortunately, it is a tough time for a lot of renters, so we don’t want to move up rates too much.

    In the last month, we went from 75.55% to 75.76% ownership of the equity in our properties. That seems like a small amount, but that’s what happens month-to-month. I calculate this number as a fraction, with equity we own as the numerator and total property value being the denominator. If we owned both of our rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), we’d make about $2,200 a month after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance.


    [My newly 9-year-old can build anything. Here he’s showing off the Lego Minecraft kit he built in the physical world and then the virtual one in Minecraft world.]

    If you multiply our rents of $2,200 by the amount of equity we have, 75.76%, you get $1,667/mo. in estimated passive income. Last month it was $1,662/mo. Obviously, the $5 doesn’t matter much. It could maybe buy a cheap streaming subscription. However, it adds up over time.

    When I started tracking rental property income this way (January 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties, and the properties had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 of passive income back then. In six years, it grew a ton. We sold our biggest rental property last year and invested that money in the stock market. It’s much more passive now. That was a strong driver as to why I started to count certain passive income sources as less valuable than others in this report.

    When we get to 100% ownership of the two properties, they should bring about $25,000 after expenses. Rent is inflation resistant as it’ll rise over time. That means that even though this is $25,000 in today’s dollars, it will still have that buying power in the future.

    Total Rental Property Income: $1,667

    3. Dividend Income

    For this section, I look at our stock market investments. I assume we could earn a 2.5% dividend yield on those investments. That assumption is a conservative number that helps us think about what kind of cash we can expect. It should be easy to get that 2.5% number as we could simply put all of our portfolios in a high-dividend ETF. For example, the high-yield ETF, HDV, is currently paying a 4.17% yield.

    With today’s interest rates, a 2.5% yield seems ridiculously low. I need to remember that interest rates could go back to where they were a year ago.

    Most bloggers use the actual dividends they earned that month. I have quite a few accounts, and I’m too Lazy to add up the dividends on them. Even if we aren’t getting the 2.5% number now, we could always move the money around from growth to dividends if we needed to live off the cash flow. A vast majority of our money is in retirement accounts, so cash flow isn’t important to us now. I also combine all the taxable and retirement account numbers. It’s too much work to separate them out.


    [My dog wasn’t happy with his unexpected polar plunge!]

    We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. The company is doing well, and they occasionally throw an extra profit-sharing check to me. The investment income from this is essentially the same as dividend income. It is taxed differently, but for this report, it makes sense to group all stock ownership in this bucket.

    I found an error in my spreadsheet. It seems that I was double counting one account for a few months. I’m not going to fix all the old posts, but it was easy enough to fix the charts here and going forward. With my new system of only counting 80% of real estate and 50% of dogs and blogs, it is another reason not to look back.

    With the market recovery, our dividend-ish income grew quite a bit:

    Total Dividend-ish Income: $4,031.00

    Last month it was $3,847. The easy math shows that it was up $184. That’s a very big gain for one month. I don’t know if we’ll have too many of those this year. I guess that’s part of the beauty of the situation though – no one knows what to expect with the markets.

    In January 2017, the dividend income was at $1,180/mo. It’s been a tremendous six years. If you think about it, that amount of dividend income couldn’t offset some expenses, but it wasn’t enough for many people to say that they live off of that completely. We’d have to make some significant lifestyle changes, but the $4,000 income is nearly $50,000 a year – enough for us to live fairly well if we paid off the small remaining part of our mortgage first.

    For the 35th month in a row (?), we’re looking into estate planning, but they gave us a lot of paperwork to do before we can move forward. I’m still not making any progress on this. For the first time in about 15 months, I got to a point where I thought I might be able to get the paperwork back out. One of my main goals for the year is to work on this, so hopefully, it won’t just become another wish.

    Adjusted Passive Income

    I used to combine real estate and dividend income into “very close to passive income.” However, now I’ll simply add up the 50% dogs/blogs, 80% real estate, and 100% dividend income. This makes things a lot easier.

    Dog/Blogs: $2,226.37 – Adjusted to $1,113.19
    Rentals: $1,667 – Adjusted to $1,333.60
    Dividends: $4,031.00 – Remains at 4,031.00


    Dogs/Blogs – Blue Line
    Rental – Red Line
    Dividend – Yellow Line

    Total Adjusted Passive Income: $6,477.79

    In the past, that used to be much higher. However, this is more accurate. It’s also particularly low because January is a slow month.

    Annually, that’s $77,733.48. That’s significant because, at the start of this blog, I aimed to have around $75,000 in passive income. That was my definition of “winning the money game.” It would be enough to cover our needs and most of our wants.

    I think it’s very useful to have different income streams. As blogging income becomes more difficult, dog boarding income has grown to supplement it. For a long time, real estate didn’t grow much at all; then, in the last couple of years, it grew a ton. The stock market grew for more than a decade from 2010 to 2021 but had a little setback last year.


    [I had this Hamilton Beach Sandwich Maker gathering dust for years. In January, I made breakfast for myself and a school lunch for my oldest at the same time.]

    The chance of all the income streams falling on hard times is low, but certainly not impossible. If we had another event like the Great Recession in 2008, they’d all be impacted quite a bit. In that case, we’d have to rely more on active income (the other 50% of our dogs/blogs, 20% of rental income, and other jobs) or rely on savings for a while.

    It’s also important to remember that these numbers aren’t “real” because much of the money isn’t liquid. We can’t spend those retirement investments without penalties. We can’t access the equity we have in properties without opening a HELOC. There are some money moves around these, but it’s not worth making any of them until my wife retires.

    You’d think we’d feel “rich” having won the money game. We don’t. Our social circle tends to have generationally rich people. However, we are “rich” relative to many people’s circumstances. Money is relative. It’s nice not to have to worry about emergency bills and make reasonable splurges.

    [The blue line represents the total adjusted passive income. The Red Line represents the three-month average.]

    The three-month average in January 2021 was $5,605.67. In January 2022, it was $7,612.64. Now in January of 2023, it is $8,984.80. Those are some good gains for the worst month of every year. I hope to get that adjusted passive income to average $10,000/month for the year 2023. I had just about ended December at that high, so we’ll see how it goes all year on average.

    That kind of income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, investing, and landlording is awesome. I don’t know how long dog boarding will last. It was a lot of work last year – this year has been easier with the lighter schedule. I think that with dog boarding, either the market will change or I’ll change. Perhaps I’ll want to travel more. Perhaps, I’ll want a different challenge. I’m on my third career (software engineering, blogging, and dog boarding), so it would be naive of me to think it might be my last.

    None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning day job as a pharmacist or the minor freelance work I’ve been doing over the last few years – neither is passive at all. When my wife retires, we can count her vested military pension as more passive income. A pension is like a passive income cheat code. They are so rare nowadays.

    For now, this active income (including the dog boarding) is the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well, get our kids a top education, pay off our mortgages, and invest. My income doesn’t match my wife’s, but the flexibility gives me the time to stretch almost every dollar in much of our spending. It also allows me the flexibility to bring the kids to school and to after-school activities.

    Net Worth Update

    My net worth updates aren’t fascinating as I don’t share the exact numbers. That’s why it’s just a footnote, not its own article.

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

    In January, our net worth was up 3.16%. We’re now about half a percent from our all-time highs. That’s great, considering that the markets are still off their highs by nearly 10%. I feel like I can truly say that we’re in the best money situation we’ve ever been in.


    [The sportsmanship award is almost as big as the biggest overall trophy!]

    There’s a big wild card in calculating our net worth. Now that my wife’s military pension is vested, it’s reasonable to ask whether we should include it in our net worth. If the U.S. government didn’t back it like treasuries or FDIC, I may feel I should account for some uncertainty. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned a larger immediate salary 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.

    It’s important to recognize that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 16 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back in 2006, but that’s been my goal since the first sentence of this blog.

    We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be just starting. Many of those readers are saddled with huge student loans that we didn’t have to deal with. 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 10 of blogging and early retirement planning. Please try to use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances and market luck) over 15-20 years.

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