Lazy Man and Money

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.

3 High-Yield Stocks With Staying Power To Buy Now

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The following is guest post by Samuel Smith for Sure Dividend. I’m a big fan of Sure Dividend and buying great dividend stocks are one of the very few areas where I think there is true value in going with individual companies rather than your typical S&P 500 or Total Market fund.

Investing in high yielding stocks can accelerate your passive income snowball. Instead of having to wait a long time for your lower-yielding dividend growth stocks to reach an impressive yield on cost, you can simply buy a higher yielding stock and get that yield immediately. The math on this is pretty simple: if you buy a 3.25% yielding stock with an 8% dividend growth rate, it will take you a whopping 10 years to reach a 7% yield on cost. If you instead purchase a 7%-yielding stock today, you can literally retire 10 years earlier with the same passive income stream.

That said, while high yield is better than low yield all else being equal, it can be tricky investing in high yielding stocks. That is because oftentimes stocks offer high dividend yields for a good reason, such as a risky balance sheet, business model, or a dividend payout. As a result, recklessly buying stocks for their yields without looking under the hood first can lead to painful dividend cuts down the road that will ruin your retirement dreams. In this article, we discuss three high-yielding stocks that pay out an average current dividend yield of 7.25% that we believe is sustainable over the long-term.

#1. Antero Midstream (AM)

AM is a midstream business that is paying out a very attractive dividend that currently yields a whopping 8.5%. Even better is the fact that we expect this dividend to be very sustainable for the long-haul for the following reasons.

First, the dividend is expected to be covered 1.69x by distributable cash flow in 2023. Second, distributable cash flow per share is expected to increase moving forward due to a combination of interest expense reduction and organic growth. Third, AM has a multi-decade production profile underpinning its assets which themselves generate stable cash flows from fixed-fee commodity price resistant contracts, giving the company a stable cash flow profile for many years to come. Fourth, AM has no debt maturing before 2026 and management is currently focused on aggressively deleveraging the balance sheet with its substantial free cash flow net of dividends, which will further de-risk the company and make it even less likely that they would ever have to cut the dividend.

Likely sometime in 2024 management expects to achieve its long-term leverage target of 3.0x. Once this happens, they expect to look at beginning to increase their dividend and/or share repurchases. Regardless if/when they decide to grow their dividend, AM’s current dividend yield is more than sufficient to make up for a lack of dividend growth and its dividend appears to have a very low risk of being cut anytime soon.

#2. TC Energy (TRP)
TRP is a very reliable dividend growth stock with 22 years of consecutive dividend per share growth. On top of that, it currently offers a very attractive 6.6% dividend yield that we expect to continue growing each year for the long haul for several reasons.

First of all, it generates very stable cash flows from its utility-like midstream and energy generation assets which are considered world-class and have lengthy, fixed-fee contracts attached to them. Second, its payout ratio is remarkably low at just 53% anticipated for 2023. Third, its substantial multi-billion dollar growth pipeline should drive solid growth for the foreseeable future (in the mid-single digits according to management guidance). Fourth, its balance sheet is in sound shape as evidenced by its BBB+ credit rating and 20 year average term to maturity on its debt.

With such strength in its underlying cash flows, the solid balance sheet positioning, the strong growth momentum for the dividend and business, and the very attractive and well-covered current dividend payout, TRP looks like one of the most appealing risk-adjusted high yield investment opportunities in the market today.

#3. New York Community Bancorp (NYCB)

NYCB is a banking company that recently completed a merger of New York Community Bank and Flagstar Bank. This combination is expected to give them significant synergies and new competitive advantages, including a greater branch and ATM network, expanded product offerings, and an improved funding profile to mitigate some of its interest rate risk. With a 6.75% current dividend yield, NYCB is not only an attractive high yield stock but it should also prove to be a very reliable dividend payer for years to come.

The first reason for this is that NYCB’s business model is quite low risk with very strong underwriting performance. As of the end of fiscal 2022, non-performing loans stood at a mere 0.2% of total loans. This is largely because they have conservative loans to value levels (~60%) on their loans and their loans are generally backed by very stable – including recession-resistant rent-controlled – multifamily properties in New York City.

Second, NYCB’s efficiency ratio of 38.75% compares very favorably to its peer group’s efficiency ratio of 48.39%, indicating that it is a well-run bank and generates high profit margins. This should enable them to better support their dividend through leaner periods.

Third, its payout ratio is quite conservative. The company earned $1.23 in adjusted earnings per share in 2022 while paying out a dividend of $0.68. This means that their payout ratio is just 55%. Moving forward, this payout ratio should move even lower given that the merger with Flagstar is expected to be accretive to earnings per share. On a recent earnings call, management made it very clear that they remain firmly committed to the dividend, stating:

“we’ve had a long history here of a very strong dividend…We are very comfortable with asset quality. We’re very comfortable with how we look at our capital deployment. And going forward, we feel very strongly that we’ll continue to pay a very strong dividend. And obviously, this has been a history and culture of the company going back for decades. So ,we’re very confident.“

Conclusion

Finding high yielding stocks whose payouts are safe for the long haul can be challenging. However, given the ability of high yielding stocks to accelerate and enrich one’s retirement, finding them can definitely be a highly rewarding undertaking. With stocks like AM, TRP, and NYCB, retirees should be able to sleep well at night with lucrative income streams that should be dependable for years to come.

The Problem with Second Generation FIRE

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The following is a guest post from my sister site, Kid Wealth.

We’ve been doing a lot of cleaning for the new year. One of the areas I’ve come across is my book collection. I feel like I’ve finished about ten books in my life, but somehow I’ve managed to own at least a couple hundred books. Of the ten books I’ve finished, at least two are by Malcolm Gladwell. You can read my Outliers review here and my What The Dog Saw review here. For some reason, I’ve never reviewed The Tipping Point or Blink on this website, which is weird because I would have thought those were the two Gladwell books I’ve read.

Wow, that’s quite a Grandpa Simpson story of a paragraph. In the cleaning, I came across Gladwell’s David and Goliath and realized that I’ve never opened it. Each chapter is a story of “underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants.” Gladwell makes the point that sometimes who we feel is the underdog should not be an underdog at all.

The second chapter caught my attention. The main point that Gladwell wants to make is that we think about school class size all wrong. We have always assumed that smaller classes help kids learn better and achieve more. He argues that’s simply not true.

To prove his point, he uses an analogy involving parenting and wealth. It can be hard to parent if you are very poor – “Poverty is exhausting and stressful.” A point that I’ve made many times on this website is that money may not buy happiness, but it can cure a lot of unhappiness. It is common sense enough that I don’t need to spend more words on this point.

As you go up the wealth ladder, it gets easier to parent. I enjoy having landscapers, which saves me time and energy that I can use to help kids with homework or another enrichment activity like Cub Scouts. However, there comes a point where more money doesn’t buy too much more time – the advantage of having enough money levels off.

Then something strange happens. Gladwell tells the story of a Hollywood producer who has hundreds of millions of dollars. Parenting becomes more complicated when you have too much money. The kids grow up spoiled. They see their parents with a Ferrari, and they expect that they can have almost any material object they want. Kids know you have more than enough for the PlayStation 5 and 40 new games. It’s much easier to explain that you can’t afford something than you won’t give it to them.

I think of my kids. They’ve seen me “go to work” once in their lives. (I had one meeting in Boston a few years back.) I write for the blog a lot, but they don’t see that as work. They don’t see my customer service gig as that’s through email. Fortunately, they actively participate in my dog boarding business. I can show them a lot about how money is earned. The dog boarding business was just supposed to be a little side hustle. I hadn’t planned on it becoming a full-time income. I got lucky.

In an alternate universe, my wife could have retired, and we’d use her military pension for income. Perhaps I have no dog business or a customer service gig. (These are new income sources over the last few years.) Our kids could grow up watching neither of us works aside from my blog hobby or answering a rare tenant’s phone call. For them, it would be normal that adults simply don’t work.

That could have been a big problem. What do kids think when they see that their parents don’t work? I tell my kids that doing their best in school is their job. I would have a problem telling my kids that they need to do their job while I spent the day surfing or golfing.

The biggest issue is when kids grow up with too much money; they don’t have to work hard to make money themselves. My wife was motivated to become a pharmacist because her family always had money problems. Pharmacy was a way out of a bad situation.

First generation FIRE has eliminated money adversity. The next generation has a very comfortable life. There’s nothing to light the FIRE fire.

Second-generation FIRE isn’t all bad, though. I haven’t met anyone who has said, “I wish I learned about compound interest and financial independence later in life.” They always wish they had learned it earlier. Second generation FIRE grows up with that. They know that a Kid Roth IRA can be worth a million dollars and can help them get started with that early.

Gladwell moves on from the analogy of kids, parenting, and wealth to get back to class size. His point is that there’s a Goldilocks Principle* where there is a “just right” class size. If you have a class too small, the group dynamic suffers, and you lose the diversity of class discussion.

* Gladwell never mentions the Goldilocks Principle. I stumbled upon it completely by accident. I thought that Goldilocks made sense to describe it, and I guess enough other people did as well.

The Google Pixel Watch is an Unmitigated Disaster, but…

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The most significant part of this article is going to be a rant about my horrible experience with the Google Pixel Watch and Google’s customer support. However, you can skip down to learn how I returned it and got a brand new Fitbit Charge 5 at 60% off. Also, to balance out the negative product review for something I got at Christmas, I want to tell you about two awesome things I DID get for Christmas. If you aren’t interested in a Google Pixel Watch (maybe you have an iPhone), just scroll down to the next big heading.

The Disastrous Google Pixel Watch

To start, I’ve always been a bit of a Google fan. I don’t like to pay the “Apple tax” and think that competition works better when hardware and software can be separate companies. I’ve read that Samsung makes a good watch, but Samsung likes to put its own apps that compete with Google’s apps on my Samsung S10 phone. Samsung makes the best Android hardware, so I accepted that annoying aspect. For a watch, I have been looking forward to the Pixel Watch for over a year.

I would have been happy if the Google Pixel Watch only functioned as a watch. Unfortunately, it did not.

The battery on the Pixel Watch would die after five hours. That would happen even in power-saving mode. It would happen in bedtime mode (it’s supposed to measure sleep).

So I did my best to charge the watch three times a day. It would usually die for an hour before I could get to the charger, and then charging time would take most of an hour. I reached out to customer support after about three days of this. My wife had bought it over Black Friday and given it to me for Christmas, so I was concerned I might not have a long return window left.

The Google representative in the online chat pointed to all the Google resources online that I had already gone through. My phone has a way to see which apps are using the most battery, so I asked for a similar diagnostic tool. Either one doesn’t exist for the public, or they wouldn’t give it to me. Google customer support just changed the subject.

The person in the customer support chat set me up with an email ticket. I gave them all my account information so that they could look into it. The representative said that they escalated it to a higher tier of engineering. Three days went by with no email. Then the first week passed, and no response. I emailed and asked when I could expect an answer. Another three days pass, and the original customer support person responds that he did indeed escalate it. The second week passed, and I emailed again to tell them that they really needed to respond. Two weeks simply isn’t reasonable.

After another few days without a response, I’m getting angry at them. That’s a long time to have to charge your watch three times a day. That’s around 50 charges which would have been enough to get through a year with my old Fitbit.

Then I got a strange text. My wireless provider said that I used up all 16GB of my data plan. I typically use only 4GB a month because I’m almost home (since I work from home). It was also only the 25th day of my billing cycle. I went to look at my phone’s data usage, and the Google Pixel Watch had churned through GB after GB. Not only that, but the Google Chrome app also used several GBs of data – more than five times as much as I typically use in a whole month.

I suppose this was the diagnostic app that I was looking for. Something on the Pixel Watch was connecting to my phone constantly and making huge data requests. I don’t know what kind of data it was asking for. I tried to reach out to Google customer support one more time, but I admit that I was even angrier than I was previously. With my data plan used up, I was reduced to only extremely slow data speeds. I couldn’t navigate to a web page on my phone without waiting at least a minute. The alternative was to buy more data from my mobile provider, but I knew that Google’s lack of customer support was going to make reimbursement for that a non-starter.

I told customer support that I’d have to return the watch. My wife looked, and we had two days, so we rushed it off. Customer support got back to me a few days later with a one-liner, “Just to confirm, we do not have to initiate the replacement on our end anymore, is that right?” There was no apology. There was no offer like, “I understand how bad this has been for you. Let us give you a 20% discount on a Fitbit, so you can get back to what worked for you.”

The escalated customer support representative never entered the email thread in the entire three weeks. I had pleaded with them multiple times that I just wanted to donate my time to help debug their device. I was happy to be a QA (quality assurance) engineer for them for free and they simply couldn’t respond back to the email.

I can only imagine the situation will only get worse as Google, like many big tech companies, is laying off thousands and thousands of people. I am used to poor customer support from Google for their free products, but for the hardware that I purchase, I have a much higher standard.

Get 60% off a Brand New Fitbit Charge 5

With the Google Pixel Watch returned, it was time to get back to a regular old Fitbit. I have loved Fitbit as far back as 2012. Back then, you’d clip it to your pants or put it in your pocket. I ended up putting quite a few through the wash. I’ve been through a couple of wrist trackers. The Bluetooth died on the first one, so it would no longer sync my data with the web. The screen died on the second one making it useless for telling time or seeing my step count. At least I got 2-3 years out of each.

The good news is that by switching to the $150 Fitbit Charge 5, I’d save $200 over the $350 Pixel Watch. The Charge 5 has been around for a little while, so I thought that maybe I could hunt for a deal on a refurbished one. In hindsight, I don’t know why I thought going refurbished was a good idea for a product that seems to be designed to break. In any event, it led me to eBay, where I found that I could buy just the Charge 5 core (they call it the pebble) for $50. A bunch of sellers had them – all brand new. Maybe they fell off the back of a truck because they don’t come up with boxes, watch bands, chargers, etc.

I bought the Fitbit Charge 5 “Pebble” ($50), this watch band for $6.75, and these two chargers for $9. I didn’t need two chargers, but I couldn’t find a way to save money buying just one. Add it all together, and I have a brand new Charge 5 (with an extra charger) for about $67. That’s a lot better than a new one for $150 or a refurbished one for $100. (If you buy anything from the Amazon links, I may earn a commission.)

That’s almost $300 less than the Pixel Watch.

The Two Best Things I Got For Christmas

My wife has been on me for owning a long black wool winter coat. It’s not a good fit if you have a dog boarding business. I don’t need to bring the dog hair everywhere I go. Last year she invested in an expensive winter coat and was so happy with it that she thought it would be a good idea for me. She got a Vineyard Vines coat that looked very nice, but I wasn’t sure if it was going to be warm enough. We did a little more research and found that it wasn’t going to be warm enough.

I did a little research and found a “best of” Travel+Leisure article that mentioned LL Bean’s Maine Warden’s 3-in-1 Parka. The article mentioned that the coat might be too warm, according to their reviewer. I’ve been out in 30-degree weather without zippering it (though I usually do). It’s been a warm winter, so I haven’t had the opportunity to test that aspect too much. It has about 200 pockets in all the right places. The standard ones (where you would normally put your hands) are perfectly angled in such a way that nothing falls out.

The best feature is that you can take out the liner and wear it separately as its own coat. As we move into spring, I’ll separate the liner from the GORE-TEX shell. The shell can be a raincoat, and the liner as a spring jacket. At $400, it isn’t cheap, but I’m getting to the stage in my life where I’ll pay extra for quality.

My other favorite Christmas gift was the The Green Bamboo Brush by Bass. It’s weird to be excited by a hairbrush. Nonetheless, here I am, excited to brush my hair. Kids love it, too, and they normally hate to brush their hair. My hairbrush from a few years ago was plastic, and it had a good run for about a decade. It was cheap, though, and it was time to move on. My next brush had metal brushes with soft rubber tips. It was fine until the soft rubber tips fell, and I was scraping my head with knife-like spikes. The curved bamboo wood is much softer, and the handle is a much better grip.

Final Thoughts

Did you read through my rant or just skip through to the good stuff? I was really torn on what to do with this blog post. On one hand, I wanted to warn everyone to avoid the Pixel Watch at all costs. On the other hand, who wants to read an article that’s all negative?

Kosmo’s Greatest Hits Volume 2

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The following article is the second part of Kosmo’s Greatest Hits. It’s his subtle grift of getting me to pay him twice for the content he’s already written – like a sitcom clip show. I appreciate the lazy factor, so I’m embracing it. You can read Kosmo Greatest Hits Volume 1 here.

Welcome to another installment in my walk down memory lane.  Let’s take a look back at a few more of my favorite articles from the past.

The Great Baseball card regifting

The article details how I took a 1976 Topps baseball set that I was given, broke it into team sets, and sent them to fans of various teams.

Looking back at the article, it mentions that I set aside the Cardinals set for my son.  That’s news to me.  At some point, I’ll have to dig around in the storage closet to see if I can find it.  I’m sure I put it somewhere safe.  (Translation: I have no idea where it might be.)

The Expos set went to Jonah Keri.  At the time, he was a prominent sports writer and author.  He was one of the foremost fans of the Montreal Expos.  Unfortunately, the only time he has been in print lately is as the subject of news articles detailing his abuse of his ex-wife.  Sometimes people who seem like nice guys really aren’t.

When I wrote this article, Lazy Man sent me a 1983 Fleer card of my childhood idol, Ryne Sandberg.  That card is in a prominent location at the top of my desk.

Pizzagate and financial fraud

Remember Pizzagate?  The basic idea was that a pizza restaurant in DC was a front for a child trafficking ring.  Proponents of the idea “discovered” coded language in emails.  When an email said that Hillary Clinton needed ten large pepperoni pizzas delivered to an event, this was actually coded language for something far more nefarious.

As bizarre as this idea was, it actually got some traction in various groups.

Ultimately, a guy drove from North Carolina to DC to break up the “pedophilia ring” and fired several shots inside the pizzeria.  He was sentenced to four years in prison in June 2017 and was released on May 28, 2020.  In addition to traumatizing the employees at the pizzeria, the gunman threw away his future just because he got sucked into a conspiracy theory.

Sadly, this was just a single point in a journey toward an increasing frequency of conspiracy theories.

McEconomics

This article focused on paying attention to what you are buying to ensure you pay the lowest price for a bundle of items.  The example in the article was piecing together items from a McDonald’s value menu to create the same food bundle was the McDonald’s value meals but for a lower price.  While prices have escalated in McWorld lately, the basic premise remains valid.  In the McDonald’s universe, the twenty-piece a la carte nuggets and the $1 any-size drinks are the foundations of an economical, albeit unhealthy, meal.

I’m ashamed to admit that I recently failed a McEconomics test.  My wife wanted two McRibs.  I ordered two McRibs for her and a drink ($1) for me.  The cashier asked if I wanted the McRib meal plus a bonus McRib for $1.  Since I didn’t want the fries, I said no.  A few minutes later, I realized it would have been cheaper to do it this way and just tell them to keep the fries.

[Editor’s Note: Don’t forget to check the McDonalds app for free fast food.]

How to bribe your coworkers

What’s the best way to bribe your co-workers?  With donuts and chocolate, of course.

At my current job, I have pivoted a bit.  I still occasionally bring donuts, but I’m mostly known as the guy who keeps the ice cream stocked so that there are always some tasty treats in the freezer.  It’s not particularly expensive and helps me maintain my image of being a nice guy.

What’s my angle?  When I need a favor from a co-worker, they know that I have already done them a favor in the past by bringing in ice cream.  It’s a reasonably cheap way to build some team chemistry.

A killer made me do it

This article is the first of two on the topic of stamp collecting.  (The second was “what’s worth collecting“.)

I’m not spending quite as much time on my collection as I was in the early days.  One reason is that we’re no longer in COVID lockdown, so there are other activities to consume my time.  Another reason is that I don’t have too many gaps in my primary collection (New Zealand, 1855-1970).  I have all the stamps from 1940-1970.  Most of the stamps I’m missing are from pre-1920.  These stamps are either expensive, ugly, or both (high-value fiscal stamps).

True to my frugal ways, I primarily collect canceled stamps, which are almost always cheaper than mint stamps.  In addition to the fact that they are cheaper, I like the idea of owning stamps that actually served their intended purpose of getting a letter to its intended destination.

Job Search Journey

Job Search Journey was the most cathartic content I have written for Lazy Man and Money.  It started with me losing the job I’d had for more than twenty years.  The company simply decided to cut loose hundreds of remote workers, and they chose to focus on co-location of team members.  Remember the old days, pre-COVID, when “remote worker” was a bad word?

This series of articles was written as I navigated a foreign process in an attempt to find another job.  Although I had occasionally interviewed for other jobs, I hadn’t had a real job search since leaving college.  It was a very frustrating process but ultimately became great for me professionally.  I have upskilled considerably in the past five years.

If you’re currently a job seeker, this series may interest you.

The Whole Job Search Series:

1. You’re Fired

2. Assessing the Situation

3. Networking

4. Learn

5. The Interview

6. Frustration

7. Success

8. Sink or Swim

9. Search for Stability

10. Job Search Journey: The Interview that Lasted for Seven Months

11. Advice

Another job hunt

Three years after the job hunt chronicled in Job Search Journey, I decided to spread my wings and look for a different challenge.  Another job hunt details the reasons for the job hunt, as well as the initial steps in the process.  This was a different job hunt than my previous one because I wasn’t losing my current job – thus, it didn’t require the same level of urgency.

Although urgency wasn’t required, things unfolded very quickly.  I launched my job hunt on December 12, interviewed on January 6, accepted an offer on January 8, and started the new job on January 25.

It ended up being a great move.  Not only do I enjoy my current work, but a subsequent layoff at the previous job would have almost certainly affected me.