Lazy Man and Money

Exploring My Downsides of Early Retirement

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Beach RetireA while back an old blogging colleague of mine named ESI Money wrote about 10 downsides of early retirement.

Yesterday, Joe from Retire by 40 shared his biggest downside to early retirement. I won’t give you any spoilers. However, when you finish reading it, you’ll see that last sentence was a bit of a pun.

Joe covered all ten of ESI Money’s downsides before giving his own thoughts. Since there are few original thoughts in the personal finance space nowadays, I’m going to blatantly steal the idea, while giving him great credit. It will help if you click on his article, so he doesn’t get mad at me. Just kidding, he’s too happy and nice to get mad.

Exploring My 10 Downsides to Early Retirement

Well first you have to retire early to have a downside, right? Depending on your definition of retirement I either retired at 30 or I will never retire. I like to say that I’m self-employed, but my life isn’t that much different than Joe’s who views himself as retired. Just to make it more complicated we aren’t sure if we are FIRE, leanFIRE, or FatFIRE . For the purpose of this article, let’s just assume that I’m retired.

Let’s look at each of ESI’s top 10:

1. Loss of Income

That’s a natural one. However, my wife has a military pension. We also have a lot of alternative income, which includes side gigs like dog sitting and blogging, along with rental properties and equities. In fact we should have more than $200,000 in annual retirement income with many of our expenses paid off. We don’t have that now, because we have about 8 years of rental properties to pay off. It’s also hard to get to the money in our retirement accounts at our age (43).

2. Reduced Social Security Income

My wife has been a big earner for a long time. I was for awhile, but not as long. I keep paying into social security with my side gigs. We don’t need this income and don’t plan for it, so it’s not a big deal. Last I looked it could be $50,000 a year combined.

3. Health Insurance

My wife’s military retirement comes with a very generous health plan that we can keep for life. We realize how extremely lucky we are to have this, especially in this day and age. We do have to pay for it and I’m sure it will get more expensive. However, it will surely be much better than what ordinary early retirees could get for the money.

4. Mental Decline

Here’s where it starts to go south. It would take a lot of work to be a good software engineer again (if I even was in the first place). I’ve spent the last 7 years focusing on interactions with babies and toddlers. I’ve spent the last 4 years sitting over 200 different dogs. While I have learned some very valuable skills that I treasure, the intellectual challenges are more about patience and understanding, not intense problem solving.

To help combat this, I’m trying to learn Japanese with Duolingo. I’m looking for more things that I can work in to windows of a few minutes of the day. I don’t get a lot of time to sit down and study anything at length.

5. Physical Decline

I’m getting older and that starts a natural physical decline for most people. I try to keep active with lots of dog walks. If I was full-time computer programmer, that wouldn’t be the case. I need to get back to going to the gym and lifting weights.

6. Loss of Social Interaction

This is a big one. I was never very social with my co-workers, but there were adult conversations. This goes back to my main conversations being about Pokemon and Daniel Tiger… or with a barking dog. There’s not a lot of deep peer friendships in my day-to-day life.

I didn’t lose these because of early retirement though. I feel I lost them through a series of moves, my introvertedness, and my old college friends just moving in different directions.

I’m hoping to build some new friendships with other parents through kids’ activities. So far, it hasn’t been very fruitful.

7. Loss of Identity

I very much feel this. I used to be a software engineer who built search engines. It was easy to explain and people understood it in just a few words. Now I’m unexceptional blogger, dog sitter, landlord, investor, customer support specialist, and corporate blog editor. I don’t know if they make a big enough business card for that.

I’m not even “retired” (except for this exercise) and my primary focus is on the kids.

I have no identity.

8. Boredom

You’d think that with all the above that I wouldn’t be bored. If so, you’d be wrong. There are not a lot of “new” things going on in any of those activities. It’s not like I have a new assignment of a special project that requires me to learn a new skill. I suppose that blogging is always changing, but with all the other activities, I have some difficulty in keeping up with the changes.

I’m planning to buy a wet suit next year and take surfing lessons with the kids. The kids joined the Cub Scouts recently so we’ve got a camping trip planned. There are so many new and exciting things in this world, I just need to find them. Many FIRE bloggers love to travel. I don’t like traveling much. Also, it makes sense to wait until the kids are a little older before going to any distant countries. I would want them to remember it.

9. Spouse Overload

My wife already works from home a lot. However, sometimes we do need our space. She’ll go off on a run. I’ll go blog at the library for a bit. We have some different interests, but we share many too. If she weren’t working from home, it might be different. For now we each do our own thing for most of the day.

10. Lack of Challenge/Purpose

This is a little like the identity question above. I did have a good professional challenge in exposing MLM fraud. Unfortunately, we don’t have the freedom of speech in the US that we are taught in school. It’s only available to those who have 3 or more million dollars that they can blow on lawyers.

After being sued several times (and winnning!), I’ve decided that it simply isn’t worth the stress and potential harm to our family. So one of my passions, helping people avoid financial fraud, was thwarted. There’s a happy ending though. More and more media publishers are taking up the cause and awareness of MLM fraud is at an all-time high.

I haven’t found my next true professional passion project. Of course, I have the passion project of the family and teaching my kids new awesome stuff about life.

That’s a very worthy purpose, but it is different from the glitzy career of search engine software engineer or pyramid scheme activist.

Putting it All Together

Early retirement may not be as easy as you think it is. I imagine that’s even more true if it’s pseudo-retirement like mine. If you won the lottery and can hire out all the help you need, that’s a different story.

I’m still hustling quite a bit with all the jobs I’m doing now. As you can tell, there are gaps in my overall happiness, but that’s normal.

Everyone’s early retirement is going to be different. If you are not financially secure, I can tell you that the grass is certainly greener on this side of the street. However, there are at least 50 shades of green and sometimes it can be difficult to compare two.

Alternative Income Update: August 2019 ($6,368.48)

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Who has two thumbs and posts his August update at the end of September? This guy (*points to self with thumbs*)

I’m in a joking mood, because it’s better than being crazy.

Why would I be crazy? I don’t do travel well (especially alone) and just came back from FinCon in D.C. My wife did everything to get the kids going for the start of the school year… while handling her busy workload. Getting the kids going is usually my role. I have systems in place (not the best ones, but systems nonetheless) to help get the kids going in the morning. You do something more than 150 times a year for 3 years and you get better at it, right? (I hesitate to say that I’m “good.”)

I got back from FinCon just in time to give my wife a high-five (literally) as she went on her own trip. That was just overnight, but we had an immediate back-to-school event to go to after that high-five… so it was straight out the door.

It’s my wife’s turn to be D.C. this week… all week. With all of this D.C. travel, you’d think we are politicians, right? At least we are almost through it. It will be great to get back to two parents for two kids.

So in short, September is a mess. Every September seems that way. Maybe I should spend my alternative income on a nanny?

That’s way too much about September, this article is supposed to be about August, right?

(This is my favorite part of the article as I get to journal the moments in life that make it worth living. It’s my personal part of “personal finance.” If you want to get straight to the money stuff just scroll down to the next title.)

August was crazy… crazier than this September, but in a different way.


My wife and I got to see the musical “Hamilton.” She’s seen it three times (twice in NYC), but this was my first time. I guess it is kind of a big deal. I loved it and if you get the chance, it’s worth the money… even though it is a lot of money. My wife was surprised that the touring version, Providence RI, was competitive with the NYC version. She’s a great judge of acting. I mostly focus on whether I was entertained. And I was!

The next couple of days we went to the beach. We made some new friends (I hope)! Actually my wife made new friends since I only know how to talk to 6-year olds or younger. Fortunately that allowed me to take the kids for a second beach day in a row. Our 5-year old decided to wear ALL the mud on the beach at the same time. He was trying to be like Muk of Pokemon fame.

A few days later we had the annual beach party from a local animal conservatory. The fire pit is always fun.


However, the next day we were in Florida. My wife did “a thing” as I think they say on social media. That thing was add an MBA in public health policy (I think) in addition to her Pharm. D. A doctor adding an MBA… I married well… especially when counting her pension.

Maybe she’ll retire soon… but let’s a pin on that for now. We’ll get to it later.

Right after that, she needed to travel. I took the opportunity to be the most productive I’ve been in years. I cleaned almost everything in the house. I even did yard work where a bee went in between my glasses and my eye. What kind of bee does that? I’m deathly afraid of bees (except when bees are currency). Fortunately, the bee decided to only sting my thumb as I ripped off my glassed and tumbled to the ground like an idiot. I like to think a neighbor was watching and good a laugh out of it.

And then we took a break… for about 30 seconds!


My wife decided that it was a good time to celebrate her new degree… and did so in style for a week. It was almost like she was testing out early retirement… and I think she liked it. There’s a reason why so many people flock to Newport, Rhode Island in the summer, so since we’re already here, we might as well take advantage of it.


The following week, we went on a trip with the kids. We drove to New York and spent a day going to the Pokemon store, the children’s museum, and a National Geographic exhibit on the ocean. We also went to the M&M store and were on the Today Show the next morning (in the crowd of course).


From there we moved on to Hershey Park. We stayed at the Hershey Lodge which is a little like a Great Wolf Lodge with an indoor water park… except much better. I can’t remember having so much fun and the kids never wanted to go sleep.

I think we got in just the right amount of mischief in that above Tweet. We cleaned when we were done.

That sums up the very, very busy month of August. Well, except for the money update. That’s why you are here right?

Well, with all the goofing off and traveling, August was not a good month for making money. It’s hard to run a successful dog sitting business when you are in Florida one weekend and New York and Pennsylvania the next. I also didn’t do much blogging.

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 about how I do these numbers.

Lazy Man’s Alternative Income – August 2019

I categorize our alternative income into 3 main sources that are largely represented in the passive income pyramid. I ignore the bottom section of career/job – that’s not passive or alternative at all. I combine dog sitting and blogging into one section of “slightly active” income. I leave real estate and investment income as their own separate main sources of very passive income.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

The last month I reported, July, was a record-breaker. We didn’t get close in August. It would normally be a big dog sitting month due to the local summer tourist season, but we weren’t around much.

Blogging income for August was just off. Some months advertisers aren’t around. This is why I like to be diversified across all these income streams.

In July, these combined for a total of $5,713.84. In August, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $2,705.48

So while that looks like a big loss, it’s just a little below the average. September is shaping up to be worse, due to the craziness.

Here’s a historic chart with the red line being a 3-month average:

2. Rental Property Income

Zillow said our rental properties were worth a lot more than last month. As with every month, we also paid off a couple thousand of mortgage debt. That helped us gain more than $10,000 in equity. Too bad it isn’t liquid, because that would pay for a lot more vacations.

We now have 58.06% of the equity in our properties with a combined rent of $3,325 after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated maintenance. I like to use that number, because it represents our net gain.

If you multiply $3,325 by 58.06% you get $1,930 in estimated monthly alternative income. When I started tracking this (beginning of 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 31 months, we’ve seen the number grow $756/mo. That’s like giving ourselves an annual $9,072 raise until the end of time from where we were nearly 3 years ago.

As the years march on, the ratio will grow to 100% of the $3,325 monthly inflation-resistant rent. That’s what gets us to that annual $40,000 income I mentioned in the FAQ mentioned at the beginning of the article.

In the previous report, the rental property income was $1,892. This number always moves slowly as it only changes if one of two things happen: 1) The properties go up in value. 2) We charge more for rent. We’re raising the rents a bit next month, but it mostly negates rising HOA fees, so I’m not going to count as increased rent.

Total Rental Property Income: $1,930

3. Dividend Income

The Tariff Man went away! Or maybe the markets just didn’t care about him. In any event, our stocks are doing well.

I had to estimate some of the numbers for my wife’s retirement plans. Things have just been to busy for me to ask her to log into her accounts. Fortunately, because they are index funds, I can usually estimate fairly well.

For this section, I generally assume we’ll be able to make 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. For that we’ll look at making passive income with dividend kings. I’ll get Sure Dividend’s newsletter (this link has a special coupon code if you are interested) to try to get closer to a 4% average dividend yield.

I’ll have a new surprise in this section when I get to October’s results. I’m really excited about it, but I can’t spill the beans just yet. It should be a big jump though.

Total Dividend Income: $1,733

Last month, it was $1,692, so that’s a good jump. This is another all-time record (go markets!). This would be nearly $20,800 in dividends a year. If our mortgage was paid off, this could almost cover of our necessary expenses alone. We would still have to draw some money out or make more than 2.5% in dividends to be safe. Of course we wouldn’t really need to do that because of the other income streams.

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, we’d include that here (but my rockstar career hasn’t taken off yet).

The stock market goes up and down fast which makes the dividends calculation fluctuate a bit. The rental property income keeps going up because the mortgages are always getting paid down every month. Unless there’s a housing market crash, this should continue to happen.

Having both types of income working together for us is going great. The diversification gives me great confidence that we’ll be better prepared than most people in the case of an unfortunate 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.

Very Close to Passive Income: $3,664

Last month it was $3,584, so it’s up $80. It’s another record! It’s now consistently over the average of my dog sitting and blogging.

It has grown from a combined $2,354 in January 2017. Since then, this has gone from an estimated annual income of $28,252 from these two sources to $43,965. It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet. However, I’m looking forward to 8 years from now when the mortgages on the investment properties (and our primary residence) are paid off. Add in stock market growth (of a conservative 4%) and this number could reach $85K/year by then.

Final Alternative Income

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

August’s Alternative Income: $6,368.48

That off of last month’s all-time record. The passive income of dividends and rentals didn’t quite make up for the low blog and dog income. That’s going to happen.

Annualized, the $6,368.48 in monthly income would be $76,421.80. I have been trying to get this number consistently over $100,000. After doing it twice in a row, it has come back down. However, for the year it looks like we’re closer to landing the $85-90K range for the year. Maybe we’ll have a big end of the year, but if not, that’s fine too.

That largely hypothetical annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, and investments feels like a dream. In the long term, $90K+ would be a lot more income than we’d need. Here’s what our expenses for the next 45 years looks like.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning pharmacist income, her vested military pension (more passive income), or the freelance work I’ve been doing over the last year (which isn’t passive at all).

As always, I’m still hoping to write a book someday – just to add some more passive-ish income. I may tip my toe into self-publishing sometime in the next year. I would love to talk to a real a publisher, but I don’t want to take on the “job” of writing. If you know someone who I could talk to contact me.

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, I think.

I use Personal Capital to track my net worth and it makes everything easy. It’s free and you should give it a try. For full disclosure, I might make a few dollars if you do. For more full disclosure, I haven’t made a dollar from that suggestion this year so I’m not just suggesting it because I’m getting rich off it.

With the stock market and real estate markets getting back on track, our net worth overall jumped 2.48%. Over the entire year it’s up 26.09%, which is amazing considering it is a sizeable number. About half of that growth was from a large percentage of that was based on a website sale that I had at the beginning of the year. The rest has been simply investment gains and savings.

Some of our net worth will be held back in the next report because we are tapping our HELOC for some siding repairs. Every year we seem to have one really large expense and this going to be it this year. Hard work, good planning, and very good luck has put us in a position where a $15K total job isn’t devistating. Hopefully, it’s the only big expense this year. So far we have nothing planned for the abnormal big expenses next year.

It’s important to remember that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for 13 years, naturally, we may be further along in that journey. Don’t be discouraged by some of the numbers above if you are just starting out. Use it as motivation for what may be possible (depending on your circumstances).

There’s a big wild card in calculating our net worth. Now that my wife’s pension is vested, it’s reasonable to ask Should I Include a Pension in Our Net Worth?. I decided that it does make sense to do it. It’s not easy, but I came up with some ways to figure out what a pension is worth. In the end, it seems my wife’s may be worth $2.3 million. However, like most of the money mentioned in this article, it isn’t immediately spendable cash.

That pension would ridiculously dominate our net worth, so I’ll note two separate numbers in our spreadsheet. Since I don’t share the numbers anyway, except for these hints, it shouldn’t matter much to you.

How was your August? Do you even remember it? Let me know in the comments.

I Got a Year of AT&T Service for $20/mo (and you can too!)

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I love a good bargain, but sometimes you really do get what you pay for. When it comes to cell phone service, I’m always looking for something cheaper than my $35/mo Cricket Wireless plan (which includes a $5 discount for autopay). It’s a pretty competitive price for a no-compromise service in my opinion.

I’ve tried a few other carriers to reduce my bill… and it didn’t work out. I actually felt scammed by Red Pocket Mobile. My attempt with Mint was an incomplete and that’s on me. I plugged in the sim chip and got dozens of spam SMS and calls almost right away. I think it got better, but I put it in a super cheap phone (instead of my real number) and then didn’t want to carry two phones around. I also didn’t want to deal with a slow phone when I had a fast one.

Today I come with a cell phone deal from a company you have probably heard of… AT&T. For fair disclosure, I personally bought this deal and I will make no commission if you decide to do the same.

Simply put, you pay $300 upfront for a year of service. Get your yuks in with my bad math while you can. It gets effectively cheaper, just keep reading.

I always give credit where it’s due, so I found the deal through this CNET Cheapskate article. A reader found the promotion and he thought it was good too. Don’t blindly follow that link and sign up yet though. There’s more money to be saved.

I love saving money, but the thing that made me go for it was something many people may consider minor. It’s what we’d call an “edge case” when I was a software engineer. It’s not likely to impact a lot of people, but it impacts me greatly. (I feel my life is a giant edge case, but that’s a different article all together.) This deal included mobile hotspot at no additional charge. On my current Cricket Wireless service (same AT&T network) it is another $10. I don’t need a mobile hotspot. However, my kids love Pokemon and Pokemon Go and we can use some old phones lying around to play… if they have a mobile connection while we walk around. For the 2-4 hours a month we’d use it, it’s hard to spend an extra $10 on a mobile hotspot. Also, I’m certainly not buying a 5 and 6 year old cell phone service.

So instead of paying $45 a month for Cricket with a hotspot, $20 is much, much better.

Ugh, there’s my bad math again. It’s time to fix that.

I Tweeted out this deal and the Awesome Jackie Beck saw it and bought it. She said that if you download the Honey extension for your browser, you’ll get 20% back. I did it and they promised me 20% back, so I expect that it will be legit. I’ve heard of Honey before and it’s reputable, just like Ebates (or Rakuten as it now has been rebranded by the new owners). That 20% back ($60) would make it effectively $20/mo.

If for some reason Honey doesn’t come through, I’ll happily pay $25/mo. It’s still a great price. At a minimum it saves me $10/mo. and solves a problem in my life (the Pokemon Go thing). At a maximum it saves me $15/mo. and still solves that problem.

Other than the saving big money part, perhaps the best part is that you have a full AT&T account. You can go to a store and get good customer service. You won’t find a store for Red Pocket Mobile or Mint.

What happens in a year from now when it expires? I always have Cricket Wireless to go back to. There are almost always deals in the wireless space, and maybe a new one will surface.

I should note that this may be for new AT&T customers only. They won’t just let you switch from your existing plan it seems. However, if you do what I do, have your main phone number ported to Google Voice, you should have no problem. Let me know how it works for you.

How do you actually get the deal? I tried to find a direct link, but couldn’t find a good one. I just used the CNET Cheapskate link, but with Honey installed.

What do you think? Is $20-25 a “buy it now”? Let me know in the comments.

Do It Now: Check Your Emergency Fund

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Recently, I’ve been thinking about how I written a lot about personal finance over the years. I just came back from a financial conference with thousands of people who produce tons of personal finance content (including video and podcasts) every day.

That’s a lot of talk… and as Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler says:

Talk is cheap, shut up and dance

So today, I’m going to channel my inner Suze Orman. I’m going to assign you homework. And you better do it!

Check your emergency fund. That’s it. If you don’t have one, today’s assignment is easy: START ONE

Don’t be worried if you don’t have one. Don’t even be worried if it isn’t much. I’ll let you on a tiny secret:

I am embarrassed by how small our emergency fund

I’ll get to those details on that in a bit… we have an unusual, complex situation.

First, I want to help you figure out your situation. Then, if you are still interested, you can get your voyeurism on and read about mine. But only if you finish your homework. If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding. Sound good? Let’s go!

How to Calculate Your Emergency Fund

To put it simply, an emergency fund is how much money you have in cash divided by your monthly expenses. If you have $9,000 in cash and spend $3,000 a month, you have an emergency fund of 3 months (9000/3000 = 3).

It’s usually easy to figure out how much cash you have. You look at your bank account(s). It’s tougher to figure out how much you spend. Did you eat at too many restaurants too much this month? Did you have a minor car repair? Did you find a big sale on chicken?

Those links above were a test to see if you are getting distracted from the task. I hope you didn’t click on any of them. You can always read them when you’ve finished.

To make calculating expenses easy, I’m inventing my own rule of thumb. What did you expect from Lazy Man, right? On average housing and transportation are half of people’s expenses. You may not be average, but you’d probably know if you aren’t. Thus you can roughly add up your monthly house payment and car payment and double it. So if your rent/mortgage is $1500 a month and your car is $300 a month it would $1800 a month or doubled to $3600. (Doubling accounts for things like food, gas, utilities, coffee, food for your monkey butler… whatever it is.

While rules of thumb may not be accurate, this whole exercise is about creating an estimation. I’ve found that this is the best way to get it done quickly and easily. For me, it works better than getting bogged down in the details until…

Hopefully this rule of thumb can get you to an estimation in 5 minutes or less.

How Much Emergency Fund is Enough?

This is a question that is debated constantly. Most people say 3-6 months of your typical expenses. Some like more security and that’s okay too. Let’s aim for the 3-6 months, because many people don’t have that.

Also, you can always worry about “more security” after you have “security.”

Did your calculation give you more than 3 months? I hope so. If not, you may want to consider it as your next money goal.

Our Emergency Fund Situation

I can’t assign you homework that I wouldn’t do myself. So here’s a little analysis of our emergency fund. I’m not giving you all the numbers, but you might be able to estimate them from the context.

Our emergency is about 6-7 months, so it isn’t as small as I thought above. It is above average, but it feels small. That’s probably because it comes with a lot of “but”s. (I warned you it was complicated.)

Our expenses are very large between three rental properties (all at 15-year fixed mortgages), our own primary residence (same 15-year fixed mortgage), kids’ private school, and other stuff like food, transportation, utilities, etc. We are fortunate that those last three are limited. Our cars are paid off. I’m good at putting together cheap dinners (now is a good time to click on that chicken link above). Our paid-off solar panels eliminate our electric bills.

However, if we lost a tenant (or two), our emergency fund would drop quickly. In the above, I assume our renters all pay their rent. That’s a bad assumption for an emergency.

Also, our cash is split in a lot of different accounts. It feels less because I have to keep some money in certain accounts to keep them from getting overdrawn. There’s not just our personal accounts, but our joint account, the business account for this website, the business account from the rental properties. More than a month needs to sit there to avoid fees. I put that money in and try not to even think about it. In a true emergency, we can get at it, but it doesn’t feel the same as if we a big account with $40,000 in it.

Additionally, and fortunately, we have quite a few different income streams. The diversity of income is, in a way, its own emergency fund. If I’m fired from one job, I have 3 others. That’s why our emergency is complicated.

Extra Credit

If you’ve finished all that, I have some extra credit for you. Simply leave a comment below with at least 50 words about your emergency fund and/or thoughts on emergency funds in general.

I’ll put what I consider to be the best 5 comments in a virtual hat and pick a winner at random. What do the winner get? A $20 Amazon gift card.

Time to Buckle Down and Get Back to Work

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I started writing this a couple of days ago, but between being sick and the annual Fincon conference I didn’t get it together to post. Hopefully, I’ll be better by next week and can live up the title.

I recently wrote about my wife practicing early retirement. We went straight from that to a family vacation/road trip to NYC and Hershey, PA. It’s our attempt to squeeze all the fun we can.

The sad part is that no matter how much we do, I can’t help focusing on the things we didn’t do. We didn’t get to Thomas Land this year. We didn’t get to the local “Fools’ Rules” regatta. The event requires entrants to build a vessel out of non-marine items in two hours, and sail it to complete the course. It sounds so awesome, but the timing has never worked out for us. I bought baseball gloves for the kids and haven’t gotten in a single game of catch.

I know I shouldn’t focus on the things that we didn’t do. I’m probably breaking a cardinal rule of blogging by not depicting everything in the most optimistic way. My optimistic and pessimistic sides are often at war with each other. In this case, I can keep my pessimistic side in check by going back to my pictures of the summer and all the things we did do. That’s when I start to realize that we did 80-90% of what we wanted and the other 10-20% were outliers.

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been spending, spending, and spending some more. We don’t budget, but instead focus our spending mindfully. It has always worked well for us in the past. However, it seems that when you aren’t mindful it doesn’t work. Who knew ;-)?

It’s not like I bought a jet ski, or a Patriots’ jet ski, or a Patriots’ jet ski autographed by Tom Brady. My wife hasn’t done the Broadway equivalent of that (which I suppose would involve Lin-Manuel Miranda), either. It’s been a lot of small things, mostly restaurants lunches and dinners.

However, it’s time to heed the immortal words of Daniel Tiger, “That was fun but now it’s done.”

It feels like a rubber band snapping back after you stretched it too far. The kids are back to school tomorrow. The personal finance blogger conference (FinCon) is tomorrow. I literally hug the kids and send them off, and then drive straight to the airport for D.C. I haven’t even packed yet.

I know some friends who travel often and it’s easy for them. I rarely travel. I am extremely anxious about everything. Did I forget [X] or [Y]? I always make sure that I have phone chargers. That calms me.

In any event, it’s time to focus on being productive outside of “family fun” activities. I have a list of more than 50 blog posts that I want to write. Sometimes, I feel like I’ve written everything that can be written about personal finance in 13+ years. However, there’s always more to write. In my case, I can rewrite my old articles 4 or 5 times until they become coherent – LOL.

I’ve got a lot of other non-blogging work to do. My fantastic tenants of 5 years bought their dream home. Another tenant has bounced yet another check (she’s been good at recovering, but it is concerning.) I’m 99% of the way into a new business partnership. I will write more about that in the future, but since they read the blog, I’ll have to run all the language by them first. It is very, very boring stuff, so even though I’ll be vague, you wouldn’t want the details anyway… trust me.

I’ll be back from FinCon around the 9th. I’ll have much deeper posts about personal finance. The first will likely be a monthly alternative income report for August. These have been a little formulaic in the past, but it will be interesting to see how extreme spending and vacation (less blogging and no dog sitting), work together. It sounds like a disaster, but I think our focus on personal finance will pay off.

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