Blog - Lazy Man and Money

Happy Earth Day!

April 21, 2023 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

I hope everyone is looking forward to a Happy Earth Weekend.

My wife recently decided that Earth Day is her favorite holiday. She runs a local freecycle. People come and drop off things that they don’t want and pick up other things for free. Last year, we donated a ton of stuff, clearing out much of our garage. We picked up a working 42″ television. It was perfect for our new basement.

It would be great if we could sell some of the things, but we list them, and they never seem to find a home. The freecycle works a lot better. Everyone loves free stuff. Hopefully, everything finds a second home.

It’s a lot of work to run the event. At the end of the day, a bunch of volunteers takes anything left over to a place (Goodwill or the Salvation Army) that accepts all sorts of donations. We generally don’t get stuck with stuff like e-waste that’s hard to get rid of.

Reviewing our Solar Power Purchase

Earth Day is also a perfect time to review our solar power journey. We got our panels back in 2015. At first, I was curious about all the sales calls suggesting we lease solar panels. I didn’t like the terms of those leases. They may not have been bad if you didn’t have any savings, but it seems significantly better if you owned the panels.

At the time, there were a number of government subsidies for solar power. We ended up paying about half of the $33,000 our system would cost. So it was $16,000 out of pocket. I don’t know how to report the size of our system or the specifications, but every year we generate around 9.0 MWh of electricity.

In the beginning, it almost always covered all of our energy needs. However, as the years have gone on, we’re using more electricity, and we fall a little short and have to pay a small electric bill. Perhaps I can blame the kids for growing up – LOL.

If you were to list states where solar power makes sense, I’m sure Rhode Island wouldn’t be at the tip of your tongue. It turns out that solar in Rhode Island makes a lot of sense. Our electricity prices are one of the highest in the country. We recently paid $0.33 per kWh, which breaks down to $0.23 for generation and $0.10 for delivery. It used to be cheaper for generation, but in New England, we use a lot of natural gas to make electricity. The price of natural gas has gone up with the Ukraine/Russia war.

At $0.33 kWh, the 9000 kWh (9.0 MWh) we generate this year would cost us nearly $3,000. With it being the 8th year of generating electricity, we’re a little past the breakeven point. When electricity was cheaper, we may have only saved $2,000 a year, but that’s grown over time. Alternatively, we could have invested the $16,000 in the market and perhaps doubled it to $33,000 by now. However, in that scenario, we would have had to cash out some of the investment each year to pay for our electricity use.

As you can tell, the math on whether it’s breakeven now is complicated, but it’s close to breakeven with whatever calculation you want to use. Our solar panels are guaranteed to be 90% as efficient as they are now until year 25. So we have at least another 16 years of free electricity to enjoy. I suspect that the cost of electricity will only go up from here, but let’s assume it averages the price it is now. At $3,000 a year, we’re looking at $48,000 in savings.

I haven’t looked at the costs of solar panels recently. I think some of the government incentives went away during the Trump administration. However, I think Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act may have helped make solar cheaper. I’m sure that the solar panels that you would buy today are more efficient than what I got eight years ago.

If you haven’t looked at solar power in a while, this is a good time to run the numbers.

The Million Dollar Dog?

April 17, 2023 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

Today’s article is a little unique. It’s three articles in one:

An obituary for my dog, Jake, who we euthanized in late March
It’s extraordinarily difficult to write a dog obituary in a way that strangers will connect with. I’ve read a few online. I’ve included a link to one of my favorites at the end of this article. This isn’t the space for dog obituaries. I’m not ready to write one, and I don’t think it would be good anyway.
A belated April Fools joke
I love April Fools! I usually have an idea of what I’m going to write about a month or so in advance. It snuck up on me this year. I wasn’t in the mood to write anything that was humorous at all. I’m still not there. However, this article can be seen as a little tongue-in-cheek. Don’t take the premise too seriously. At the same time, don’t dismiss it completely.
A personal finance article
I write personal finance articles. Hopefully, the title was a hint that I’d try to stay on topic.

Let’s get started.

The Million Dollar Dog?

The Start of the Dog Business

More than fourteen years ago, I wrote an article exploring how much a dog costs. I had the wrong mindset back then. Instead, I should have asked the question, “How much money can a dog make you?”

When we got our dog back in 2009, I couldn’t have imagined that it would lead to a dog boarding career. It started as a tiny side hustle in 2015, earning about $1000 a month on average. All the pieces fit together to be a Rover.com host. I work from home. We have a nice fenced-in yard. My dog would love to have a friend come for a play date, so why not get paid for it?

I think most people will take an extra grand a month, but it certainly isn’t something that qualifies as a career. All that changed with COVID. With travel being shut down, we earned almost zero dollars for a full year. We were paying for a private school, and I was out of around $15,000 in annual income. In the meantime, I was teaching my six and 7-year-olds how to read and do basic math. My wife helped a lot, but she was working on the policy for the pandemic, so her time was more limited than mine was.

Everything changed when vaccines came out. Many people got dogs during the pandemic, and they wanted to catch up on travel. Suddenly, I was making $3,000 a month… then $4,000. I was getting so busy that I raised prices to try to get less business. I make a little more than $5,000 a month on average – over $60,000 a year. Some months are busy with school vacations or summer travel. We travel ourselves sometimes, and I can’t board dogs then.

Of course, this business would not have been possible if I didn’t have experience with my own dog. It also wouldn’t have been possible if we didn’t fence in our yard for him to do his business. Jake loved being outside. Many days, he would only come back in to bark at me to tell me it was time for a walk. Whenever I got the leash, he’d hump my leg like crazy. Some people might have discouraged that behavior, but I thought it was great how freely he expressed his love. Most people don’t experience that level of happiness once a week. I loved seeing it from him a couple of times a day.

The Total Dog Boarding Numbers

Overall, I’ve made a little more than $175,000 boarding dogs. That seems low to me because I’ve been on that $60,000/yr pace now for a couple of years. That shows you that the first five years were slower, $12,000 years.

I don’t know if I’ll keep up this pace of dog boarding for the long term. I’m thinking maybe five or six more years, and maybe I’ll cut down. I can get help from the kids until then, but they’ll probably be off with friends, and maybe I’ll slow down as I get into my early 50s. If I continue another five and a half years at this rate, it will be around another $325,000. That would take me to a half million dollars in lifetime dog boarding earnings.

We’re halfway to Jake’s influence being a million dollars. There are a few ways to bridge this gap to get to the other half million:

Wife Joins in Dog Walking
My wife is going to retire one of these days. She seems to push it out one more year. However, she came up with the idea of dog walking when she retires. I don’t go around and walk dogs because we have them come to our house, where I get some blogging done. She likes the idea of getting some exercise. Fortunately, she wouldn’t have to build the business from the ground up. I would just add it to the list of services I do, and she’d get clients fairly quickly.
Kids Join in with Biscuit Business
My 10-year-old is really into cooking and loves the idea of starting a dog biscuit company. We should hopefully get this started this summer. My 9-year-old is interested in cooking too. They don’t work well together, but I’ve got an idea of how they could make competing brands.
We’ll fine-tune our recipes with all the dogs we are boarding.
Personal Finance Math
Whenever a money projection doesn’t seem to work, we can always use what I call “personal finance math.” (This is the tongue-in-check, April Fool’s inspired part of the article.)
Personal finance math is an easy way to make half a million dollars into a million dollars. Instead of using that money for housing repairs and such, I say, “Let’s invest that half million dollars.” If we use the rule of 72, we know it will double in about ten years if I earn 7% interest. By my early 60s, we’d hit that million-dollar mark.

Finally, I should mention that even if I slow down in five and a half years, it wouldn’t be a stretch to make $30,000 a year for the ten years after that. In the end, it may be a mix and match of all the above that makes the decision to get a dog back in 2009 worth a million dollars.

Jake’s Other Jobs

But wait, there’s more!

Every year around Mother’s Day, Salary.com puts out a “value” on the jobs that mothers do around the house. The list includes things like event planner, executive housekeeper, and staff nurse. They add up all these jobs and determine that a mother’s job value is $178,000 as of 2019.

You can do a similar thing with dogs. Jake didn’t just inspire a dog boarding business. Much like a mother, Jake performed a few other jobs around the house.

Personal Trainer
I took a look at my Fitbit lifetime stats the other day. I’ve been using one since 2012, and I’ve covered 35 million steps and a distance of 16,000 miles. I estimate that Jake got me up and walking for half of them. He was getting me walking before Fitbit was around, so his numbers are probably closer to 10,000 miles. I found an article online that says that dog owners walk an average of 24,000 miles during a dog’s average 13-year life. Maybe my estimate of 10,000 is too low.
In any event, it’s hard to dismiss the health benefits of moving around. More and more research is showing that a sedentary lifestyle of sitting at a desk typing all day is not good for you.
Fortunately, Jake reminded me of this a few times a day when he thought it was time for walks.
Therapist
As I mentioned above, a few times a day, Jake forced me to get some exercise and fresh air/vitamin D. In study after study, those two things have been shown to help with a number of mental health issues.
However, you’ve probably seen the bumper sticker of a paw that says, “Who rescued who?” The fact that there are so many sold shows that it resonates with a lot of people. Even the American Heart Association recognizes how pets can help with mental health.
Exterminator
Dogs are great at keeping mice and snakes away.
Jake had a strong instinct to get any other animals. He never caught the squirrels he chased, but one time while we were on a walk, he did get a woodchuck. I gave him a couple of tugs on the leash, and he let him go unharmed.

I’m probably missing a few jobs that dogs can do. Obviously, some are guide dogs or licensed therapy dogs. Jake wasn’t either one of those, so we can’t use those to bridge the gap to a million-dollar dog. Still, the cost of a live-in personal trainer and a therapist is very high. Over 14 years, that adds up to a lot of money.

Was Jake a Million Dollar Dog?

Value is the eye of the beholder. I say yes, but I’m sure that many of you could make a strong counterargument. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

P.S.

Looking for that dog obituary? It’s One final toss for The Dooze.

Passive Income Update: March 2023

April 11, 2023 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

Who is ready for Spring! We’ve got the first quarter in the books. Tax day is just a few days away. We’re filing for an extension as we do nearly every year. Our tax people need the numbers a month ahead of time. Our kids school is always then, and I’m not the type of person who is going to get it done six weeks ahead of time. With two corporations (blogging and real estate) it’s more complicated than most people’s taxes.

Much of March was spent on our southern California vacation. After focusing on accumulation phase of money for years, we’re flipping the switch to spending more. That means more elaborate trips as well as hiring contractors for finishing a basement, painting the house, and new carpet. This was a month where we stress tested our money.

Since I’ve written about that vacation, I won’t write much else here. I’ll include a few pictures, but not too many – looking at other people’s vacation pictures gets old fast. The other big news of the month was our dog of 14 years crossing the rainbow bridge. I’ve got an idea for a full blog post about that. I promise it will be different than almost any other ode to a dog that you’ll read. I’ll also keep it on theme.

Other than that, my oldest got his red belt in karate. He’s about a year away from a black belt. My younger son is about 6 months behind him. The kids also got to be in the Newport St. Patrick’s Day parade representing the Cub Scouts. It’s a very big deal as this area has a huge Irish population. Think of it as a combination of College Spring Break and Mardi Gras, but at 9 AM.

The kids were supposed to show off their uniform, but it was very cold. They took turns wearing my coat, which – of course, was comically and ridiculously too large.

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

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

The way I calculate these numbers requires that little explanation . I do things differently to show the journey. Following the progress keeps me motivated. 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

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

March is always a poor month for dog boarding. It’s impossible to board dogs at home while we travel for two weeks. Besides that, there are no big holidays and Rhode Island’s public schools don’t have vacations. (During school vacations people tend to travel leaving their dogs behind for me to board.)

One of the last pictures I took of Jake. He’s at the vet about to get acupuncture. Always smiling!

I also didn’t blog much in March. Not only that, but I set up a vacation responder on my email, so I missed all advertising deals. There’s a silver lining, though. Those potential deals have been rekindled in April and we’re off to a fast start this month.

In February, “dogs and blogs” combined for $5,521.50. In March, it was:

Total Blogging + Dog Sitting Income: $2,073.09

The blue line is the monthly income. The red line is the 3-month average. Look at that drop!

Ouch, that’s not a good number at all. However, given the circumstances, I’ll have to settle for it. Last March, when we had the same obstacles, this number was $4,295.77. I’d be worried if April wasn’t already higher. With current dog bookings and blogging income already earned I’m looking at around $7,000. There’s a possibility or cancellations and advertisers not paying, but it’s looking like it will be very good month.

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. Kids should start a Roth IRA as soon as possible.

2. Rental Property Income

Our properties last month hit a hiccup. It turns out that the heating unit wasn’t properly vented when it was installed a few years back (before we bought the property) and it’s a mess to repair. A lot of it is determining who is responsible because it’s a condo with other units and the association’s walls. The Allstate claims adjuster calls when I’m not prepared and then fails to respond to any of my last five emails.

The Lego Robotics group used $100,000 of grant money to buy this Boston Dynamics robot dog. Spot went viral a few years ago because you can buy an optional handle that allows him to open doors. Hook him up to artificial intelligence and we’re finished as a civilization.

Rental income continues to be boring. We’ve had the big bubble of increase property value last year. Then the bubble let out some air. Now, it’s starting to inflate again. When the properties don’t appreciate, we pay down the mortgages and slowly gain more ownership of the properties that way.

In the last month, we went from 76.05% to 76.53% ownership of the equity in our properties. The move of half a percent is very good for just one month. If we owned both of our rental properties with no mortgages (100% of the equity), we’d make about $2,200 a month after insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance.

If you multiply our rents of $2,200 by the amount of equity we have, 76.53%, you get $1,684/mo. in estimated passive income. Last month it was $1,673/mo. This month we added $11/mo in passive income. It doesn’t seem like much, but $100 in mostly passive income in a year isn’t too bad. It allows you to start eliminating some bills. If someone knocked $100 of your mortgage or car loan, you’d take it, right?

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.

Eventually, these properties 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: $1,684

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, iShares Core High Dividend ETF (HDV), is currently paying a 4.40% yield.

Disneyland and the 100th anniversary of Disney in general

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.

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

The markets barely moved, so this number didn’t move much either. Boring!

Total Dividend-ish Income: $3,950

Last month it was $3,960.

In January 2017, the dividend income was at $1,180/mo. Now, we’re almost at $50,000 a year – enough for us to live fairly well, especially if we paid off our mortgage.

For the 78th 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’ve got to finish our taxes first before I can look into this.

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: $2,073.09 – Adjusted to $1,036.55
Rentals: $1,684 – Adjusted to $1,347.20
Dividends: $3,950 – Remains at $3,950

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

Total Adjusted Passive Income: $6,333.75

Last month it was $8,059.15. That’s a big drop, but it’s a good number considering the travel. Even though I made the adjustment to count dog boarding as less passive, it is still location dependent.

This $6,300 number is about $75,000 of passive income annually. That wouldn’t cover all our expenses now, but it would after our mortgage is paid off and the kids are out of school. We’ll finish the mortgage in a couple of years and the kids’ school is still a luxury that we’ll choose to pay for.

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

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

It’s also important to remember that these numbers aren’t “real” because much of the money isn’t liquid. We can’t spend those retirement investments without penalties. We can’t access the equity we have in properties without selling them or opening a HELOC. We can do some things to get to this money, but it only makes sense when my wife retires and we are in a lower tax bracket.

You’d think we’d feel “rich” having “won” the money game. Most of the time we don’t feel rich at all. This month’s travel was one exception. 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 March 2021 was $5,784.73. In March 2022, it was $7,609.36. Now in March of 2023, it is $6,956.89. Because our vacations, dog boarding, and blogging are seasonal I like to compare the same months. We’re on a downward trend for the first time. Closing the dog boarding in January for renovations and the longer vacation affected the numbers. Next month, the three-month average won’t have January and we’ll probably be back in the growth area.

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

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

Super Nintendo World and Bowser’s Challenge is awe inspiring. The Yoshi in this picture is probably somewhere between 6-8 feet tall to give you an idea of just how big this is.

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

Net Worth Update

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

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

I thought the kids were getting old for Legoland, but they really enjoyed driving with no track or guidance.

This past month, our net worth was up 0.97%. For the year it’s up 2.80%. We’re at 99% of our all-time highs. Any kind of positive market move should put us over the top. We’re in the best money situation we’ve ever been in. As Hannibal Smith used to say, “I love it when a plan comes together!”

I had been giving updates on on our liquid cash, but somehow it’s slipped out of the last few reports. Liquid cash is important to us because it helps us feel comfortable while the rest of our money is hard at work. For the month our liquid cash was down $1,400. That’s great considering the vacation and vet bills. Some of those were paid with credit cards though and will spill into April. For the year our liquid cash is down about $3,000. That sounds bad, but we put nearly $20,000 into the January renovations.

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.

My wife and I had a date at a fancy bed and breakfast – where John Legend and Chrissy Teigan stay in Newport. This is their high tea.

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.

Stress Test Your Money

April 3, 2023 by Lazy Man 7 Comments

Every article I have written recently starts with one or more reasons why I haven’t been blogging much. We had a planned long vacation of two weeks. There are always a few days before the break for packing and putting our ducks in a row. Then there’s the catch-up time when we get back. It seems to be a good 24 days overall in total.

That’s if everything goes according to plan. Our tenants have had a lot of problems. It wasn’t an easy fix like a new appliance. It was pulling out internal piping and a fight with the condo board, another unit that was impacted, and a few other things. Then this whole thing needed to be repeated again with this same unit (piping affecting yet another unit). It got really complex with eight different parties involved.

During all this, we also had this happen:

After 100 dog years of walks, love, and play, Jake has graduated to a much bigger and better dog park than we can provide him on Earth. pic.twitter.com/6WOLs7ePtu
— Lazy Man And Money (?,?,?) (@LazyManAndMoney) March 24, 2023

He had some health problems when we left, but he still had a quality of life. He got a stroke while we were away, and it was time for him to cross the rainbow bridge.

The kids and I got back a few days before my birthday. My wife had some work on the west coast and came later. The government switched her flight back, and instead of coming in at 11 AM for my birthday, she returned at 7 PM. How do you honestly answer people when they ask, “How was your birthday?” and it wasn’t good?

I’ve started to feel better, though. The last few nights, I’ve watched the new HBO documentary George Carlin’s American Dream. It was hard to come away from that without thinking that he was the greatest comedian of all time. He had jokes in the 1980s and 1990s that are still relevant today. However, I have always loved George Carlin. I had been quoting him on this blog since 2007. When he died, I wrote a small tribute – one of the few times that I decided that I wasn’t going to write about money.

Some of you are thinking, “Cool life update, bro. *Click away*” That would be a mistake.

During all this, we never thought about money.

Vet hospital, how many thousands do you need? Plumbers and contractors, how many thousands for you? Disneyland, Universal Studios, Legoland, San Diego Zoo, how many thousands were you?

It all added up to a big number – more than five figures. We’ll have a couple of months of expenses like that because some went on credit cards and those bills come later.

I would have been crazy about such expenses seven or ten years ago. They would have been a disaster. However, my mental state was the exact opposite.

There are three big reasons why:

Our net worth is much higher
It’s about 3.5x higher. Our house is almost paid off. (We could pay it off if we wanted to, but with such a low mortgage rate, there is no reason to.)
We have much better cash flow
My dog boarding business is doing better than blogging was back then. The combination of the two and some other freelance work gives us an extra $50,000 to work with. My wife’s income has also increased substantially. The military does a good job at keeping up with inflation and going from “Year 16” pay to “Year 24” pay is a big move in the military charts.
We have much better liquidity
When my dog business started to take off, I contributed more to our joint account. My wife started stashing cash aside for pre-retirement. That nest egg also serves as a short-term emergency fund for when stuff like this comes up.
We also sold a rental property. We have invested most of the profits but kept $20,000 in cash. The plumber’s expenses come from this account, so we won’t notice it. For a couple of months, we’ll let the rents build this back up to $20,000.

Instead of being worried about this financial calamity, I looked at it as a successful stress test. We got punched in the face (financially), and we were able to laugh and say, “That’s all you got?” That gives me confidence that we’ll be able to handle much of whatever comes at us.

Of course, stress testing our money wasn’t plan A. In this case, we’ll take wins wherever we can get them.

SoCal Vacation (Spring 2023)

March 28, 2023 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

[I realize quite a few of my past posts have been mostly glances into our life. I want to get back to writing about personal finances that you can use specifically for your situation. For now, we’re on vacation, and that’s a big life event that’s worth writing about. There’s a huge part of this trip that I’m going to leave out. It deserves its own separate post. If you follow me on social media, you probably already know.
My computer is staging a revolt against me. My kids ask about the tortured cats in my laptop. It’s a mess, but I’m working through it.

Also, Grammarly says I have 65 errors in this. I would love fix them, but I have too much going on. I think the errors are mostly commas.
]

Los Angeles

The first leg of our trip was from Rhode Island to Los Angeles. We left late, and time zones mostly worked in our favor. We had a stopover in Chicago. That didn’t work out well. Our plane couldn’t pull into the gate because it was occupied. We waited for nearly an hour and missed our “A” group boarding for Southwest. We were the last people on the flight, so our 9 and 10-year-olds didn’t want to take middle seats with strangers. The flight attendants felt bad as the kids cried and explained that they wished they knew so that they could save a row. Well, we were on a Southwest flight, so a simple fix could have been to allow a chat on the flight to go directly to the next flight crew. Almost everyone on our plane felt so helpless watching the connecting flight board and getting ready for take-off while we were several hundred feet away, locked on our plane.

Some of you might say, “Don’t fly Southwest.” That’s sound advice. We were flying free using vouchers from the flight that they messed up almost a year ago when we went to Puerto Rico. I would say that we got more than what we paid for. It was just hard to explain the situation to young kids.

We slept on that second leg for a few hours and then went to our hotel. We checked in around midnight. The time zones helped us, as it was 3 AM in our old east coast time zone.

The hotel was the W near Hollywood and Vine. It was undergoing construction, which we didn’t know about it. However, it was priced at a very low category number in Marriott’s system, so we were able to use points for our entire stay without breaking the “point” bank.

Day 1

We slept until the morning and started the day off fresh – no jet lag! We went for breakfast and found a cool place called The Breakfast Club – not to be confused with the movie. It was perfect for kids. They had a wall of old cereal boxes, a tunnel of ceramic donuts, and a place where you could take a picture of yourself in a cereal box. This was also when we learned that nearly every meal on our trip would be $22 each and that the final bill would be $105. These numbers came up over and over again throughout our trip.

My wife had to finish some last-minute work stuff that needed to be done for the tail end of our trip.

I took the kids to a day at the Guinness Book of Records Museum. It had a ton of stuff for kids to do. My oldest played the world’s largest Pac-Man game for a while, my youngest set new boxing records by hitting a pad. We’ll have to look into that in the future.

We then went to Popeye’s for lunch because they are rare in New England. The kids loved it. It may seem weird to go to a national chain when you travel to a new place, but I feel like they’ll at least have that experience. They can identify with the commercials or other kids they may meet who mention it. Also, it wasn’t $105 for us to eat there.

Then we got some swimming in and went to Mastro’s Steakhouse for my birthday dinner. The bill was much more than $105. They tried to sell my 10-year-old on a petite filet mignon for $65, but I ordered a slightly larger steak, and he had a few pieces of that along with some mac and cheese we got for the table.

Day 2

We learned that the hotel had a great breakfast for free. It had some great healthy options, like six different kinds of fresh fruit and pressed juices.

Then we rushed to Universal Hollywood so that we could get to the newly opened Super Nintendo World. It’s only been open a month, so everyone was flocking to it. The Bowser’s Challenge ride was incredible, but we didn’t do anything else in that area of the park. It was too crowded – the lines were like 45 minutes to use special bands that you buy to punch bricks and stuff.

Universal Studios was a lot of fun. My kids have gotten into the Simpsons, so that was great for them. Unfortunately, they have been out of Flaming Moe’s for months. I think the best parts were the pleasant surprises. The studio tour where you see how the films were made was very well done. I thought the kids would think it was a waste of “ride time”, but they loved it. There was a Westworld show that seemed like it was just going to be filler until some line wait times went down, but it was amazing. The stunt people were jumping off things 40 feet in the air into the water, and there were a ton of pyrotechnics. It was like being inside an action movie.

The only downside is that the last two rides were virtual reality rides, and my wife got sick after them. I never would have thought the Harry Potter ride would be bad because she is such a fan, but it was.

She skipped dinner that night, so I took the kids to the hotel’s restaurant, Delphine. For staying at the hotel, we get a $29 credit each day. Of course, the bill came out to $105 dollars. I ordered the cheapest meal on the menu (pork chop). The kids each ordered grilled cheese ($13 each). I got a $10 beer, and the kids got a Sprite and Apple Juice. My oldest pointed out that the apple juice at $7 was smaller than my beer and probably more expensive, ounce-for-ounce. I brought that up to the waitress because the Sprite was only $4. They agreed that it seemed like a lot for a small kid’s drink and took it off completely.

That helped a little, but it was still a very expensive meal for what it was.

Day 3

This was the day we checked out of the W and drove to Carlsbad. We had a late checkout, though, so first, we went to the Chinese Mann theater. We had wanted to do a star tour or go to Venice Beach, but our late checkout wasn’t late enough. Instead, we went to Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. The kids loved Ripley’s – even more than the Guinness Book that was on the next block over.

By the time we got to Carlsbad and got settled at the Westin (also free using Marriott points), it was time for dinner. We found Draft Republic, which was a combination arcade, golf simulator, and brewpub. Since it was St. Patrick’s Day, we had green drinks. We mostly played the Aerosmith pinball machine. I showed the kids that I don’t just play Pinball Wizard music at home but can back up my game. My youngest was very, very good, too, almost earning a free game on his first try.

On the way home, my oldest spotted a Crumbl Cookies that he recognized from a YouTube video, so we stopped and gave that a shot. What does Shakira say in ZooTopia, “Try Everything!” The cookies were very good. I’d get them again, but only as a rare treat while traveling. I don’t think they are in Rhode Island, so that decision won’t come up too often.

Carlsbad

Day 4

My wife was still feeling a little off from Universal and wanted to take a day off. That’s what she said, but I think she just wanted to get back to running. She’s training for her first marathon in mid-April, and it’s probably not great to take a couple of weeks off completely before.

She stayed back to do her running and some other minimal work stuff. Me and the kids walked through the hotel’s special access to Legoland! Using my wife’s military discount, the price was around $75 a person instead or $95. (We saved money on Universal tickets as well.)

At first, I was a little disappointed in Legoland. It feels like it is great for kids 4-8, but it seemed like my kids may be getting too old. The roller coasters were less thrilling. However, the kids said that they loved it all and that it was blasphemy for me to suggest that they may not want to go in the future. One of the highlights was when the kids got to drive around in their own Lego cars without tracks. It was like bumper cars, but they weren’t supposed to bump.

Legoland has little “mini cities” where they recreate famous landmarks in other cities, so my kids were able to do the same pose at Lego Chinese Mann theater as the real Chinese Mann theater from the day before!

That night we met up with some old friends who had moved out there and went to dinner. We went to a Teppanyaki place that I have ignorantly been calling a Hibachi restaurant. Regardless of what you call it, it’s the Japanese-style restuarant where they cook your food at your table while spinning the knives around and stuff for show. Again, the kids loved it! They had never seen anything like it. We have them in Rhode Island, but we never managed to go.

After dinner we went back to our friend’s house and talked a bit. Me and my 9-year-old took on my 10-year-old and their 13-year-old in foosball. We were told that we were in for a world of pain and since she owns a table, I believed it. I knocked off a decade of rust on my old Silicon Valley tech bro skills, but it was my 9-year-old who was a scoring machine. It turns out his friend has a table. So on this trip, I learned he had an aptitude for boxing, pinball, and foosball.

We got out to a big lead and I realized that maybe I was trying too hard. Oops. They close the gap and it was very thrilling down to the end.

Day 5

On Day 5 we met up with some other friends – my 10-year-old’s best friend last year until the family moved to San Diego. That can be the problem with military families where we live in Newport. They are often there for just a year while they go to the War College. It’s gut-wrenching for them to lose friends.

We all went to the San Diego Zoo, because that seemed like an iconic thing to do. Unfortunately, it was a little disappointing. The platypi were a different “Safari” admission, requiring a different reservation. My oldest studied them in school and it was literally the only zoo in the US with them. It seems China took the pandas back in 2019. We did get to see some polar bears roll around.

Overall, it was just fun to see my kid have time with his best friend again.

When we were done with the zoo, we went a nearby Sizzler for a lunch/dinner. Sizzlers used to be in New England in the 1980s, but they are mostly extinct there now. My wife and I found them again when we lived in CA about 15 years ago. We figured they’d be perfect for the kids because their “salad bar” has a lot of options like a buffet. My kids do well at those places because they can pick from many different foods that they can see and aren’t locked into a main course. My oldest thought that my youngest invested the next million dollar idea with his salad.

Day 6

We woke up, packed, and moved to our next hotel – Cambria in Anaheim. This hotel was about a 3/4s of a mile from Disneyland! Using the military discount we got a three-day park hopper with Genie+. Genie+ is Disney’s new branding for their previous “Fast Pass” to get to the front of lines. It’s a very complicated service. To make things worse, it works differently than the Genie+ in Disney World – and almost all the Disney bloggers write to a Disney World audience.

Since we had to come from Carlsbad we got into the park at around noon. It was drizzling rain all day, which wasn’t great, but I think we were able to get on more rides as fewer people braved the weather. We thought we’d stay only a few hours on this first day and use the information we gathered to build a plan for the next two days. We ended up going on a ton of rides as we were able to time a lot of the wait times just right. We didn’t use Genie+ because the app kept telling us to buy it and we didn’t want to pay for it if we weren’t going to be there for the full day. Disneyland’s app should be smart enough to know that if you already have a Genie+ ticket attached to drop the advertisement to buy it and instead guide you to some instruction on how to use it.

At the end of the night, my wife clicked on the right button in the app and found Genie+. By that time, we just wanted to go home. The highlight rides of the day were Thunder Mountain and Space Mountain. My kids loved them and declared Space Mountain as the best. I last went on Space Mountain around 1984 in Disney World. I didn’t enjoy that. However, Disneyland’s Space Mountain is different and it was fun. Each of the coasters didn’t have big drops, which is what gets me. I like going fast in a corkscrew pattern.

Day 7

The rain picked up and it was fairly miserable getting to the park. Raincoats helped a bit, but our shoes were soaked through. On the agenda this day was to go to California Adventure, the sister park to Disneyland. Yesterday, the kids were disappointed that all the Marvel stuff they love wasn’t in Disneyland and that they were riding the Winnie the Pooh and Peter Pan rides instead. Finally they could get to the “good stuff.”
Again, due to the rain, the lines were short. From the day before, we had noticed that it usually take 80 minutes to get on the Spider-Man ride. However, we saw that it was only 20 minutes in the morning. We went for that even though we finally figured out how to Genie+ Lightning Lane the Guardians of the Galaxy ride. The kids declared the Spider-Man ride as better than the Bowser ride in Super Nintendo World – the best of the trip.
Five minutes after that ride was over we were at the Guardians of the Galaxy ride and near the front due to Genie+. This ride used to be the Tower or Terror, but it’s been rebranded. They essentially drop you up and down a lot. My wife wasn’t interested, so I took the kids. The drops were pretty bad, but I survived and kind of even found it fun. As my oldest said, “It was the best kind of fun scary.” Spider-Man’s reign as the best ride of the trip was a very quick one – Guardians had taken over.
Due to the rain quite a few rides were closed that day. Nothing really matched those two. The weather did get better, but they didn’t open the Incredicoaster. We ended up leaving fairly early because our thoughts were elsewhere. (That’s the separate post that I mentioned at the very beginning.)

Day 8

On our last day we went back to Disneyland to catch up on some of the rides we missed – this time with Genie+. We also had a day of clear skies, which was a nice bonus. We hadn’t ventured to the new Mickey’s Toontown that had been closed for a year while it was refurbished. It had just been opened a few days before so the wait times were very long. Fortunately, catching it early in the day worked again. Maybe everyone else was going on Space Mountain.
We were able to get into Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, which was my favorite ride of the trip from the perspective of, “How did they do that?” It’s a standard cart ride, but there were no tracks and it seemed like you spun around with the other carts a little haphazardly. Meanwhile you’d be in one room and it was an outdoor picnic and then face a way for 30 seconds and the whole room was designed to be under the ocean.
Roger Rabbit’s ride in the same area wasn’t as good. It was a lot like the Winnie the Pooh, and Peter Pan rides where you take a cart through the movie.
We were very lucky to find some wait times for rides that weren’t too bad. We did a lot in Adventure Land like the Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Caribbean, Indiana Jones (one of the kids’ favorites). We made sure to have the Dole Whip. You used to only be able to get it at Disney World, Disneyland, and the Dole Factory in Hawaii. It seems to be in other places now, but it’s NOT nearly the same.
My kids also got to try beignets. It was a scary word and they didn’t want to. However, a dough pocket of happiness changed their mind quickly.

Arizona

Day 9

We drove to Arizona for my wife’s conference. She was being inducted into the pharmacists’ “hall of fame.” Kids genuinely don’t find pharmacy conferences exciting. I’m with them. We went to the Phoenix Children’s Museum. The kids found it fun for about an hour and a half.
It was geared towards kids who are 4-7. It wasn’t great for kids 9 and 10. This was my first experience taking my kids to a kids’ place that didn’t work out.
We went back to the hotel and went swimming. The outdoor pool at the Springfield Marriot was cold, but the hot tub was better.

Happy Earth Day!

Reviewing our Solar Power Purchase

The Million Dollar Dog?