Lazy Man and Money

Passive Income Update: April 2022

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Is everyone having a great May? The weather is getting good in Rhode Island. We’ve even gotten some use of our inflatable hot tub. Perhaps I’ve been using it too much because April’s passive income update is later than usual.

Each month, I look back at the pictures on my phone and try to pick out the interesting moments to share. This past month there were a lot of dog pictures. As you’ll find in a bit, dog boarding was crazy.

In other news, I’ve been having some tenant troubles. We’re selling a condo. The tenant is upset that we decided not to renew the lease. She’s decided not to her rent for the rest of the lease. She doesn’t seem to be making any plans to vacate either, so this is becoming a big problem.

Aside from that, we had a successful annual Easter egg hunt. My 8-year-old had his first traveling soccer game. (It’s amazing how much better he’s gotten in just a couple of months). In April, the 9-year-old was just getting started in baseball – he might have had one practice. I’ll update how that’s going next month.

The kids earned another belt stripe in karate. They can use kamas now. They’ll be fine if they find themselves in a self-defense situation where they have a small sickle-blade-on-a-stick weapon handy. Last year that happened to me 7 times and I regret not having the kama skills to pair with the kamas that were nearby. We’re putting karate on hold for a couple of months because baseball and soccer were just too much.

I guess it’s boring times around here. That’s a good thing, I guess. It would be fun to share that we’re doing all this extra stuff.

That’s enough of the personal stuff… let’s start the Passive Income report. I used to call this the Alternative Income Report because some of this income has an active component to it. However, that idea isn’t catching on and 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.

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 real passive income from our rental properties right now. We still have mortgages to pay off. Instead, I calculate the percentage of equity we have to show where on that journey we are. Each month, you’ll see that the bank owns less and we own more. When we get to owning 100% there will be no mortgages and all that rental income can be used for living expenses. When it comes to calculating the percentage of rental income, I take the rent (minus estimated expenses) and multiply it by 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.

Lazy Man’s Passive Income

Passive Income Pyramid
My Passive Income Pyramid

I categorize our passive income into 3 main sources that are largely represented in my passive income pyramid. For this report, I ignore the bottom section, “career/job” – that’s not passive at all. (I do have some income in that area, but that’s not the focus of this report.) I combine dog-sitting and blogging into one section of my “somewhat active” income. They are a little passive because I can make money even when I’m not immediately tending to them. For example, I’m writing this while boarding 2 dogs right now. I leave real estate and investment income as their separate main sources of very passive income. This way if you want to only count those you can do that.

1. Blogging + Dog Sitting Income

April was our best month ever for dog boarding on Rover.com. Before the pandemic, we averaged about 1 dog overnight per day. After vaccines and everyone started traveling, we averaged 2 dog overnights a day. I raised prices to match other dog boarders. In April, we averaged 4 dog overnights a day. We also had many dogs for day boarding, but I don’t keep stats on these. (My spreadsheet subtracts the check-out day from the check-in day. When these are the same day, that number is zero, so it is like we didn’t care for the dog at all, except that the money still adds up.)

At 4 dog overnights and day boarding, it wasn’t passive at all! In fact, I was stressed out most of the month because people wanted to pick up their dogs after work. That’s reasonable enough, but that’s when I had to shuttle the kids to their after-school stuff.

Blogging dropped back down to average. I’m told by the advertising nerds that budgets get reset in April, so it takes some time for the spending to come in on adds

In March, “dogs and blogs” combined for a total of $4,295.77. In April, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $7,664.90

That’s an all-time record. We could have similar or bigger numbers over the summer as that’s our busiest season. I would like to see blogging income pick up because dog boarding doesn’t scale and we are maxed out there.

My kids help with the dog sitting. My 9-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 8-year-old was a little slower to develop dog skills, but he’s carved out a household niche of catering to the smaller dogs – he just loves them. He’s started to recently take an interest in feeding them.

Their help means that 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. Learn why you should get started with a kid Roth IRA as soon as possible.


You can tell I didn’t get a lot of good pictures of soccer. My son is #14 off to the side of the action.

Someday, I want to get them more involved in blogging, taking pictures, and things like that. During school, they have too much to keep them busy. After school, there’s homework, becoming mini-ninjas, scouting, music, and sports to fill up their days. Being a kid is hard work!

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

2. Rental Property Income

The rental properties had about $20,000 in appreciation this month according to Zillow. Last month it was $40,000 which was crazy, so I wasn’t prepared for another big gain. It seems like we’re back to the days of properties jumping up in value all the time. Last month, I said that we were finding that Zillow’s Zestimate for our condo may not be accurate. We were listing a condo and the real estate agent showed the comps and they were 10% less than Zillow. However, in the first few days, we got an offer that was 10% above our asking price – almost exactly Zillow’s Zestimate. So maybe Zillow does know best after all.

Each month, we pay down a couple of thousand dollars of mortgage debt. We build some equity each month aside from the appreciation.

We went from 75.10% to 75.85% ownership of the equity in our properties. That’s a month of good gains.

If we owned the rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), I calculate that, after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance we’d make about $4,000 a month. The expected rents have gone up a lot. However, we aren’t getting those kinds of rents yet. We’re keeping them low for now. So I’m going to average what we could make and what we are making, which is about $3650. It seems like low-lying fruit that we could get there and our tenants would still be happy that they are getting a bargain.

If you multiply our expected net rent by $3,650 by the amount of equity we have (i.e. where we are on our journey to 100% equity ownership), 75.85%, you get $2,768 /mo. in estimated passive income. That’s a gain of almost $27 from last month. That’s a very solid gain for one month.

This number will change a lot when we sell our condo. Our potential rental income will go down. However, we’ll have new money to invest that will earn dividends in the next section. It’s one less property to manage, so our income will be a little more passive.


Our teenager living his best life on one of our boarder’s beds.

When I started tracking this (January 2017), we only owned 36.4% of the properties and the properties had lower rents. The math worked out to $1,174 back then. So in 5+ years, we’ve seen that number grow tremendously to $2,768. The forced savings of 15-year mortgages have been a very powerful force.

When the mortgages are paid off, we would have had $45,000/yr. of income. I’ll have to recalculate that when the sale closes. Rent is inflation resistant as we can raise rents over time. So this income will grow as things get more expensive. This was looking like enough for us to live on once our own mortgage is paid off, but I’ll have to revisit that too. Of course, that’s just one part of the plan as you can see.

In the previous report, the rental property income was $2,693.

Total Rental Property Income: $2,741

3. Dividend Income

For this section, I assume we will earn a 2.5% dividend yield on our holdings. That could be from a high-dividend ETF. For example, HDV is currently paying about a 3.28% yield, but it has been less in the past. We could also get that yield from simply holding strong companies that have a long history of dividend growth. There are some income investing ideas here. We can also look at making passive income with Dividend Kings. If we wanted to simply retire on this dividend income, I would get Sure Dividend’s newsletter to try to get a 5% average dividend yield. (That link to the newsletter has a special discount rate and in full disclosure, I make a few dollars if you sign up for it.)

Of course, we may not convert everything over to dividend income at all, it’s just a conservative way to think of our investment portfolio. If I used a 3.5% or 4% withdrawal rate, these numbers would be much bigger.

The market rebound in March was short-lived. I took the numbers in this report on May 5th. The market has gotten a lot worse since then, but we’ll have to deal with that next month. It doesn’t look like the market is very good. For us, that’s fine as it has been great while we invested over the last decade. I had a larger than usual concentration of money in high-dividend index funds (the HDV mentioned above) and it is only down about 5% from its highs. I sold off a little and bought the Nasdaq index (QQQs) when it was down 30% from its highs recently.

I don’t know where the markets are going. The good news is that I don’t care too much. We’ll be invested for between 15 and 40 more years.


This bird found a nest that built outside our window in the early COVID days. It’s been sprucing up that abandoned nest

We continue to get a profit-sharing check since I bought (a lot of) a company. 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.

Total Dividend-ish Income: $3,535

Last month, it was $3,762. A drop of over $200 is a lot. I’m almost positive it will only be worse next month. When I started tracking this number in January of 2017 we were at $1,180/mo. Instead of focusing on the month’s drop, I choose to look at how much growth we’ve seen in those five years.

Our money has been working hard to multiply until this month. For a while, we stopped adding to our investments. Instead we had been focusing on saving money in cash for my wife to retire. Except that, now my wife got a new job and isn’t looking to retire. That’s a roller coaster of emotions. Some days she wants to retire and other days, it seems like she wants to work for many more years. Whatever she wants to do is fine with me. At least this new job is much better than the last one. She’s had time to bring the kids to school and do some things like that. Before they had a keyboard tracker on her.

Getting back to the monthly update, this monthly $3,535 would be over $42,000. As with the rental income number above, we should be able to live on this by itself. However, because most of our investments are in retirement accounts, we can’t use much of this potential income for now. (We can use the profit-sharing check as it goes straight to our checking account.) We started to see an estate planning lawyer last year, but they gave us a lot of paperwork to do before we can move forward. I haven’t had the time to convert our spreadsheet summaries to something they can use. I started the paperwork, but I don’t even know where it is now. Not great.

Very Close to Passive Income

Our “very close to passive income” is a combination of rental property income and dividend income. If there were some royalty income from books, movies, or music, I’d include that as well. I’m too tone-deaf to have a rockstar music career, but I may write a book someday. This is important to separate from the dogs and blogs’ income at the beginning. That takes some active work to keep up. Rental property requires a little work, but not nearly as much.


The Easter Bunny was a jerk this year – hiding eggs up in a tree.

We lost some of the gains here again this month. The stock market drop is too much for the real estate market to cover. I love having both types of income working together for us. With the stock market dropping recently, our real estate is saving our net worth from dropping further. For much of the last decade, it was the opposite – real estate didn’t do much while stocks quadrupled. I think everyone interested in FIRE should consider having stock market and real estate income streams. The diversification gives me great confidence that we’ll be better prepared than most FIRE folks in the case of an unfortunate economic event. We’ll still likely get rent checks if the stock market crashes. We’ll still get dividend checks if a tenant is late paying for a while. Of course a bad economy may impact both at the same time, but that’s what an emergency fund is for.

Very Close to Passive Income: $6,304

This would be over ~$75,000 a year of passive-ish income. We wouldn’t need to touch the investments themselves. We wouldn’t have to sell stocks or have a “withdrawal rate” – just live off dividends. We wouldn’t have to get a reverse mortgage on our home or the investment properties. Property maintenance and property taxes for rental properties are already factored in. We would still have all the underlying assets (property, stocks, etc.) and be able to pass these on to the kids for them to build on – unless we choose to draw them down for more fun, charity, or other spending.

This “very close to passive income” has grown from $2,354/mo. in January 2017. So in 5.5 years, we’ve added about $4,000 in monthly passive income. That’s nearly $50,000 – a lot more than the $34,000 I made as a software engineer out of college in 1998. This is one of the reasons why I went with the “Lazy” name, it shows that investing money can do more work (or somehow produce more value) than I did. It’s a crazy system. I’m just doing my best to work within it.

It’s worth noting that, once again, these are fudged numbers that aren’t “real” yet (except for the profit-sharing check), because the money isn’t liquid. We can’t spend those retirement investments or the equity we have in properties. We don’t feel “rich” by any stretch of the word, even though we are relative to many people’s circumstances. We still have some day-to-day struggles with money. These are relatively minor compared to what most people experience I imagine. That’s one reason we are selling a rental property. It will help us feel a little more financial freedom right now. We’ll still have plenty working for the future.

I used to wonder if we can get to $8,000/mo. in passive income by the start of 2025. A year ago, it was a stretch goal… now it feels like it could go either way. We’ll have to see where the numbers are when we sell off the rental property.

Final Passive-ish Income

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

Passive-ish Income: $13,967.90

Last month it was $10,798.77. This is an all-time high, but more than half of it came from dogs and blogs and the dogs were not passive this month. I’ll be happier if/when we can get to this number from investments. I enjoy working with all the dogs for now, but in the future, I’ll probably cut back.

That’s almost $170k a year. That (hypothetical) annual income for writing on a blog, taking care of dogs, investing, and landlording is very nice. If we manage $170,000 from all these sources we’d be doing quite well – given our necessary expenses for the next 45 years. Of course, those necessary expenses aren’t going to cover all our spending, but they are a large percentage of it.

None of the numbers here include my wife’s bread-winning day job as a pharmacist or the freelance work I’ve been doing over the last few years (which isn’t passive at all). When my wife retires we can count her vested military pension as more truly passive income. For now, those jobs (and the dog boarding) are the fuel that drives the passive income engine – it allows us to live well, pay off our mortgage, 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 gives me the flexibility to bring the kids to school and after-school activities.

I love two things about the graph below. First, there’s a solid trend of the numbers staying high for several months now. Second, it doesn’t dip down too far. It seems like it should be at least $8,000 going forward. I don’t want to see a big market collapse, it would hurt a lot of people, but I am curious how bulletproof all these sources of income are when they work together. If this month is any indication, it’s possible to hit all-time highs when the economy isn’t doing well.

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

Net Worth Update

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

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

We saw our net worth drop by 1.73% in April (including up to May 5th). That’s not great, but it’s what we signed up for when we invested in the stock market. For 2022, our net worth is up 1.58%. There are a lot of people who have a negative net worth for the year. Not that it is some kind of competition, but it is reassuring.

Recently for something new, I decided to share our liquid cash growth (or loss). I’ve been tracking it for some time, but never thought to share it. Many other bloggers break down their income and expenses in great detail. I’m too “Lazy” for all that, even if my credit card reports can do a lot of it. Looking at our liquid cash is a way to roughly gauge the bottom line, income minus expenses.

This month, we lost around lost $1,500 in liquid cash. It looks like the main drop has come from the cash in our real estate LLC. We paid the tax preparer a lot and one of my tenants is a couple of months behind on rent. Some of it was just general spending as our joint account is lower than usual.

It’s important to recognize that everyone is in a different place in their financial journey. I’ve been blogging about personal finance for almost 16 years. FIRE wasn’t a “thing” back in 2006. We naturally are further along in that journey than some younger readers who may be just starting. Some 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.

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. I decided that it does make sense to include it. She could have earned more in 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. However, like most of the money mentioned in this article, this isn’t money we can spend right now.

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

Portfolio Potential – One Trick To Keep Your Head in a Down Market

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Portfolio Potential

How are you doing with this stock market lately? Have you looked at it? Most experts recommend not paying attention if you hear bad news about the markets. I look at the markets a few times almost every day. It doesn’t matter if things are going well or very poorly. It’s a combination of a habit and a hobby.

If you are like me and look at your portfolio often maybe this trick I use will help you.

One of the numbers I keep track of is what I call Portfolio Potenial.

What is Portfolio Potential?

Portfolio Potential is not about what your portfolio value is today, but what it could potentially be… if the Vanguard Total Market Index matches its all-time high. I picked Vanguard’s VTI ETF as my market benchmark. I suppose you could choose something different if you like – I simply wanted a broad index that is well-accepted as a sound investment benchmark.

Let me give an example to illustrate.

Let’s pretend that I have a $10,000 portfolio of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, REITs – whatever is in your brokerage account. If that portfolio drops 15% it is only worth $8,500. However, instead of looking at that $8,500 number, I take that number and divide it by how much VTI is off of its all-time high. As I’m writing this on the morning of May 12, 2022, VTI is down 20% from its all-time high… or it has retained 80% of its value. The Portfolio Potential number I look at is $8,500 divided by 0.8… or $10,625.

Essentially, I’m celebrating that my portfolio has “beat” VTI by not losing as much. How did I do that? I had bought more bonds than I would normally have and removed some tech risk from my portfolio a couple of years back. I might have given up some potential gains then, but I slept well and I was still fully invested in the market. In fact, my high-dividend ETF (HDV) is only down 6% from its all-time highs. Since it has been paying me dividends during the last couple of years, it has held its ground in the latest sell-off.

Over the last few days, I’ve seen my Portfolio Potential go up about 5%. Diversification is paying off. Psychologically it’s very calming. It also helps that this money is in a retirement account that I don’t plan on touching for quite a while. If I needed to draw down from this account, I would be more concerned about the portfolio’s actual value than its potential.

I keep track of this in my Google Spreadsheet. It automates all the math, so I just have to know which cell to look at for the Portfolio Potential.

Bonus Trick

I know I promised one trick, but here’s a bonus one. This is a good time to focus on accumulating shares of stock.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve been selling off very small amounts of bond allocation and my high-dividend ETF (HDV). I’ve been able to buy shares of QQQ (Nasdaq Cubes) at an average of $300 a share. At the start of the year, a share of QQQ would have cost me $400. If I have $4000 to invest back then I would have been able to buy 10 shares. Now, I’m getting 13 shares with an extra $100 to spare.

I’m not trying to call a bottom of the market. I have no idea where that is. I will just dollar-cost average as it goes lower. I have a lot of confidence in companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. I know that they’ve gotten very expensive over the last decade. That’s one of the reasons why I removed some tech risk from my portfolio a couple of years ago. Now is a chance to buy tech at a discount.

Lazy Man 2022 Goals (May Update)

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New Year's Resolutions

It’s May and it has been a while since I checked in on my 2022 New Year’s goals/resolutions. My first update was in March 2022. I made some decent progress on many of them. Setting goals is useless if you don’t review them. Reviewing them now gives me time to refocus and adjust.

So let’s check-in where I am now. As I write this, it is May 8th. About 34.8% of the year is over. That’s close enough to 1/3rd, right? So I should be about 1/3rd of the way through my goals.

Here’s my updated spreadsheet:

Money Goals

Make $70K of income

My income goals are going quite well. I didn’t expect dog boarding to continue to do as well as it has. It seems the only thing that slows down the business is when we actually go on vacation. We took a couple of weeks off in March to go to Puerto Rico and we’ll do it again in June to do some local traveling.

The $26,116.78 comes from blogging, dog boarding and a freelance customer service job that I do. This includes the slow months of January and February. The summer months are usually my best earning months, so maybe $85,000 is possible.

Save Money for Wife’s Retirement

Since my income is doing well, we’ve been able to put $5,000 away for my wife’s retirement. I had hoped to put in more, but during the first quarter of the year we were paying off the bill for our finished basement. In February, be booked travel. In March, we had a bunch of summer camp bills hit. In April, we wrote some checks to save in our Roth IRAs instead of in this account.

This goal might end up being moot. My wife may not be retiring soon as she started a new position at the beginning of the year. Secondly, we’re selling a rental property condo, which would close out this goal quickly.

Business Goals

KidWealth.com

I’m only about 3.5% of the way to my goal to 50,000 page views this year. That’s not great, but I am seeing growth every week. The 50,000 number depends on getting a decent media mention that will bring a couple of thousand of people at once and hope that a few hundred stick around on a regular basis.

Recently, I put a real home page together (instead of just the latest blog posts) and I’m organizing the information to hopefully make it easier for readers to navigate to just the right information to help their kids become financially literate.

My goal was to have 75 articles published by the end of the year. That’s roughly 1.5 a week. I’ve gotten 27 articles published. That’s 36% of the way to my goal, which is just about exactly where I need to be. I could be hard to hit this goal as I’ve “cheated” a bit and used some articles that I already had written for Lazy Man and Money.

Content Audit/Article Refresh

I’ve made no progress in refreshing articles for Lazy Man and Money. Creating content for two blogs is a lot of work. I don’t see having the time to go back and rewrite old articles too.

Look into Dog Training

I looked very briefly into dog training. It seems there are a hodge-podge group of certifications. It’s hard to find out which ones are useful. I suppose I could do the very easiest ones that seem a little like window dressing and add them to my dog boarding profile. I’m not too excited by that idea and right now the dog boarding is going well enough without it. If I were to train some of the dogs that I’m boarding, I wouldn’t have any time left to blog.

Personal Goals

Lose Weight

I’ve lost about 13 pounds this year. I’ve never consistently tried to lose weight, but for some reason it’s sticking now. We’ve been going out to eat a lot less than in the past. When we do, I try to eat only half my meal. Even then it sets me back about a day’s worth of progress.

Since the last update, I’ve only lost 3 pounds. I plateaued for over a month. It’s only in the last week that my weight has dropped around a half pound each day.

I’ve got about 4 pounds left to get to my goal. It seems reasonable.

My body fat percentage started the year at around 27.5 and it is now around 23.8%. That’s great progress. I’ve gotten it as low as 23.5%.

I met with my doctor about a week ago and she said that I’m doing great. She said that I could try to go off the blood pressure medication as I’m fine. She also said that cholesterol levels were looking great. The odd thing is that I’m not doing too much differently – just a little more vegetables and a low-carb omelet a few days a week for breakfast.

Drink Less

I drank about 10 alcoholic drinks since the last update. When we got to Puerto Rico there was a “welcome wine” as we checked in. They also had a welcome reception for Marriott Elite members. Another time, my wife said, “Four drinks: beer, diet coke, and two apple juices” and they ended up giving us four beers and the other drinks. I chalk it up to the language barrier though my wife’s Spanish is very good. Nonetheless, the beers were a dollar, so we ended up just bringing them back to the hotel room.

We went to an April Fools’ Day party (everyone please steal this idea – it’s a lot of fun) where I had a few more drinks. At restaurants, I’ll usually get a Diet Coke, but I had a beer on a recent date night. And that’s about it for a couple of months.

Perhaps, just maybe, not drinking has helped with the health gains in the previous section?

Make a Bucket List

I made no progress on my bucket list. I didn’t even look at it.

Programming with Python

I made no progress in looking at Python. I had gotten a book from the library, but I barely cracked it. I will probably buy the book – programming Python for kids ages 10-14. I just need to knock off the programming rust, but this book would be perfect for my kids.

Family Goals

Get Organized

Once again my wife is the hero here. She lead a city-wide freecycle event as a community service event for the Boy Scouts. Dozens of people dropped off stuff they didn’t want and picked up other people’s trash and made it their own treasure.

We got rid of a bunch of stuff. However, we got a little bit of stuff back. One item was a flat-panel television from 2010 – the cheapest one that Samsung made. It’s 42 inches, but it works fine and is perfect in our basement. I hooked up a Roku and the kids can watch a lot of things. I need more of those 10-minute solutions in my life.

I also need to learn how to sell items on Facebook marketplace. If I can do that, I can declutter a lot of the garage. I’m sure we could move a lot of stuff cheap.

Travel Four Times

We completed our Puerto Rico trip. Everyone in the family loved it, while I thought it was just kind of okay. After we got back we learned that our kids’ school is switching languages from French to Spanish, so maybe we’ll go more often.

We’ve booked Block Island and New Hampshire in June. They are two separate trips, but around the same time for various schedule reasons. In late August we have been thinking of a Disney cruise with an England trip. It would be awesome, but I have FinCon in early September, so I’m worried about taking all that time off just while the kids are getting back to school. We have some friends interested in going to Hershey Park with us. We’ve been to Hershey Park a lot, so this is easier for us. We don’t have to plan as much and we can do a few things along the way. The kids have learned about the Statue of Liberty in school and that could be a stop on the way.

Finally, we may be doing Aruba in November. The school changed the vacation to make the entire week of Thanksgiving a vacation. Unfortunately that’s one of the few times we get to see our family. Also, flying around Thanksgiving is super expensive.

Parenting Goals

We had the kids in too many things. We started the year in skiing and snowboarding, but for the last few months we had karate, baseball, soccer, drums, and Boy Scouts. All the sports were a couple of days a week. We paused karate for baseball and soccer seasons because it was too much.

YouTube Channel

We’ve done nothing in this area. We haven’t even put up a bad video. I remind the kids and they get super excited about it, but then they are onto the next thing.

Drone Flying

The weather is just getting good for flying drones. I know this is kind of a silly parenting goal, but it’s a substitute to just getting out and doing something. We could fly kites or something like that and I’d count that. We had some snow earlier this year and we went sledding. Next year, I’ll try to change this up to make it more generic.

For now the kids will just have to stay addicted to video games – LOL.

Computer Programming

I got them started with Tynker.com a bit last year. They didn’t love it. I am trying to set it up with Minecraft which they like. Maybe with my Python plan above, I can get them involved in that.

They’ve each looked at a computer programming book, so I’ll take what I can get for now.

The best chance is a local Lego robotics group, but it doesn’t start back up until September. I’m trying to prioritize that over all the other stuff, but it’s going to be tough.

Specialty Camps

We finished up signing up for summer camps. Summer camps are expensive. We’ve got sailing, veterinarian camp, and cooking camps booked. (Sailing is such a Rhode Island thing.) My older kid is starting theater camp while my younger one has a series of art, Lego, and maker camps. They are very excited about having camps in things that they love to do.

Final Thoughts

I suppose it was a successful couple of months? There are a lot of things that went into the “no progress” category, but in all the major categories we’ve got some good progress. I need to work more on the personal goals, but I’m enjoying building Kid Wealth right now, so who needs a bucket list?

Five Ways to Save Money with Meal Prep

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With inflation on the minds of everyone, I realized it’s been a while since I wrote anything about saving money. When I started this blog a billion years ago, I would often write about little tricks to save money. Well, now there are so many websites with so many tips. You can literally for “how to save money on toilet paper” and get a bunch of articles.

However, that doesn’t mean that all those old ideas are invalid and don’t work anymore. As I was looking through my old articles, I thought it might be interesting to highlight a few of them in one post.

  • 5 Cheap and Easy Slow Cooker Recipes

    It’s a little odd to start a top-five list with another top-five list, but sometimes weird is good. The slow cooker is the ultimate in Lazy Man food prep. I can put together some spaghetti sauce, sausages, peppers, and onions and turn on the switch and have a great meal later that night.

  • Meal Prep for College Students
    I didn’t write this one, but I wish I had. Meal Prepify has 54 meal prep ideas for college students. At $2 a meal, it’s a good way to save money. Don’t be embarrassed to eat like a college student. I’m 46 years old and I still eat instant Ramen noodles. (I just use less salt/seasoning.)
  • Budget Hack: Shredded Chicken
    When I wrote that article in 2015, I wrote, “For years now I’ve seen [boneless, skinless chicken breast] at $1.99/lb. price. Who knew that chicken was immune to inflation?”

    The price of boneless, skinless chicken breast is still about $1.99/lb. near me. I can still find the occasional sales cheaper than that. In fact, it’s so cheap that I started to put shredded chicken in my dog’s food instead of cheese. (He’s picky and needs something.) It’s great healthy and versatile. While on the topic of healthy meal prep, Meal Prepify has some healthy, cheap recipes

  • Does Foodsaver Save You Money
    I’m including this article because I almost forgot about the Foodsaver. Back in 2007, we used it for everything. Now, I don’t think we’ve used it in the last 4-5 years. It’s also funny to see what constituted a somewhat quality blog post worth getting 20 comments back in 2007. It’s almost like comparing black and white TV to 4K.

    I’m inspired to get out the food marinator though. You put the meat in a plastic thing with the marinade and suck out all the air so the marinade gets into the meat much more quickly. The key to saving money comes from avoiding the plastic bags and using the wide-mouth jar sealing attachment.

  • Things I love – InstantPot
    I think InstantPots were not super popular back in 2016 when I wrote the article, but they are everywhere now. I still haven’t learned to work it. My wife is great with it though. She belongs to an InstantPot Facebook group and has a bunch of attachments. We had fajitas for Cinco de Mayo. It was much better than going out to the one Mexican restaurant in our area that had a 3-hour wait last year.

    The InstantPot saves us money by helping us avoid restaurants when we don’t have anything defrosted or prepared.

In retrospect, some of these ideas may not be great ways to save money. They may fill a role for some people though. As a bonus, here’s an easy homemade hummus recipe. When I was shopping for hummus for my wife in California back in 2009 it was expensive. Nowadays, we have an Aldi and hummus is cheap there, so we don’t make it from scratch anymore. I think there are a lot of places that don’t have an Aldi option – and inflation may make these prepared foods more expensive – so maybe it’s useful? Let me know in the comments.

We’re Selling a Condo!

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About a month ago, I wrote how our real estate empire was built. Now, I’m here to say that it’s going to be out of date very soon.

We’re selling the second property that I mentioned. It’s a 2 bed, 2 bath townhouse about a half-hour west of Boston. I had paid $278,000 for it in 2005 only to watch it climb for 18 months… and then fall dramatically to $178,000 (according to Zillow) in the 2009 crash. Now, 17 years later, I’ve accepted an offer of $385,000. There is a big difference between accepting an offer and having the process completed. For this article, let’s assume that everything goes according to plan.

That $100,000 gain turns out to be about 2% appreciation a year. I guess that’s the power of leverage. Refinancing the mortgage to 15-years helped us pay down the loan a lot. The end result is that we’ll have $300,000 after we pay the bank. From that $300,000 we’ll have to pay the realtor, lawyers, taxes, depreciation recapture, butcher, baker, and candlestick maker fees. I can’t do all the math to figure out what we’ll have left, but I think it will be more than $225,000.

Liquidity, Sweet Liquidity

Our net worth would lead most people to think we are rich. For years, I’ve written that we don’t feel like it. It’s the typical, millionaire next door story. For the last 15+ years, we’ve been doing our best to max out our retirement savings. We also have four mortgages at 15-year-fixed rates – three of them being rental properties. As a result, our net worth is 90% real estate and retirement savings – stuff that’s hard to get at. A large portion of the rest is in cars, 529 plans, and private equity – also hard to access. Overall, we have only about 4% of our net worth in cash that we can access. Even that cash is scattered in business accounts such as this blog or the real estate LLC.

In a lot of ways, we live paycheck to paycheck. However, we do so knowing that we can do several things to get some cash if necessary.

In January, I wrote that we were planning our first non-retirement asset allocation. We hadn’t decided on selling this property at the time, but we can use this to guide our investments. It’s almost like starting all over with saving and investing. It will be exciting to have all this cash available. I’m hoping that we can invest it conservatively and make 6% a year. Maybe we’ll be able to count on $15,000. We’ll try to reinvest as much as possible, but my wife is thinking of military retirement soon, so $15,000 in income plus her pension will help cover expenses until the rest of our mortgages are paid off.

The Power of Forced Savings

The most overlooked advantage of real estate investment is forced savings. You have to pay that mortgage every month. Most of the months it went smoothly because we had a tenant in place. Some months haven’t gone as smoothly. We rolled with the punches when there have been condo assessments or when the HOA fee has gone up.

There were certainly times when paying these expenses wasn’t easy. If we had a choice we would have skipped those months. Then we might have said, “Well the world didn’t fall apart, so maybe we can skip another month and use the money for a well-deserved treat.”

It really works great. I recommend that you give it a try if you can.

However, all that’s going away now. As my wife recently said, “We’re going to have to put this money somewhere. I’m afraid I’m going to spend this money on jet skis.” (“Jet skis” is our little code for a large, unnecessary expense that will probably sit around not being used.) I told her that I’m on it and I have a plan (well, at least part of the plan).

We thought about doing a 1031 exchange as we did with another property about 18 months ago. However, it seems to be the wrong time to buy into the market if you don’t have to. It feels like the housing bubble in the mid-2000s when we bought this property. I’d much rather invest in stocks and bonds and wait for another buying opportunity like in 2011. I feel that it will come in the next 3-5 years, but if it doesn’t, that’s fine too.

What are some ways that you’ve forced yourself to save money over the years? I can really use the tips. Leave me a message in the comments.