Lazy Man and Money

Stay-at-Home-Dad, Wifeless-Style

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On Tuesday of last week, I celebrated my birthday, very happy with a fully vaccinated wife, a single shot of my own, and two healthy kids. The kids have been in school since September. I don’t want to pretend it is all a picture-perfect family. I don’t think anyone’s is, but, in general, we had the river current of luck/awesomeness flowing in the right direction.

There are a lot of families whose lives have gone in the opposite direction since the pandemic started. My wife and I were mostly stay-at-home workers before, and we continued to be over the last year. It didn’t change much, except that I had to teach a 6-year-old how to read and 7-year-old multiplication, but I was fortunate that I could keep a little part of my career going on the side. That was only a couple of months nearly a year ago though.

My birthday celebration went south fast.

I’m usually not a fan of promoting the obvious things that everyone knows. (What’s the fun in that?) I’ll make an exception this time. Though it’s been quoted hundreds of times, this is the best quote for how I feel right now (well at least part of it):



“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Sometimes you don’t have time to look around. My wife got some vague notice that she could be deployed in a few days. In less than 24 hours, we were waking up the kids at 5 AM and bringing them to the airport in their pajamas. “Mom’s” cattle-plane wasn’t going to wait. (There were no Ubers or taxis running in our area of the suburbs, it simply doesn’t make sense at that time in the morning. In fact, all our local taxis are closed due to COVID. We could have stuck the gov’t with the parking for more than a month (it’s fair to expense it), but maybe $1000? That is crazy! With the last-minute information coming down, there was little time to think.)

I wrote a hasty note to the kids’ school that they may be grumpy. The kids seemed to rise up to the situation though, because they were extraordinarily well-behaved according to the school.

That school day wasn’t just a flash in the pan, they have become almost completely different people. They (mostly) have gotten along. I’m at 12% confidence that the government has some kind of behavior ray that they use on families when a parent deploys. Maybe they use it more when there are young kids going without their mothers? I’m also at 100% confidence that I’ve jinxed myself with this. They will likely harm each other greatly later today.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t say why my wife is away. I respect the secrecy of our government operations. However, in this case, I think we all know the deal. If it was a secret it would be the worst-kept government secret of all time. Our President has made it clear that his top goal is getting vaccines in people’s arms. My military pharmacy wife obviously can play a role in that.

My wife has been “virtually deployed” a few times before this year. There was a need for policy and planning a lot of COVID-19 stuff. This time is different. EVERY ACTIVE DUTY personnel needs to move to get the shots in arms. I put that last part in bold/caps to emphasize again that we all to work together to get this done. Also, it’s not just a few military people… everyone is getting called in on this. In 20+ years of military service, my wife has never seen anything like this. That’s fair because we have never seen anything like COVID-19.

My kids won’t see their mother for the next 5 weeks. Five years ago, my wife was deployed for two weeks. That was tough. At 2 and 3 they weren’t able to “wiping their own butts” (our terminology for being able to take care of oneself). They are older now (7 and 8-year-olds for the math-lazy). We have some systems in place. They can feed themselves a bit (cereal) and make their own drinks. They can dress themselves. For those of you with younger kids, life gets a lot easier when they can dress themselves.

Kids (maybe just boys?) at this age have their own set of challenges. There is a constant need to escalate wrestling moves until one kid cries of unbearable pain. I try to mitigate this, but I’m fighting thousands of years of evolution. Fill in your favorite cliche here. Two suggestions: “Boys will be boys” or “It is what it is.” In the end, they are each other’s best friend. However, they are their own worst enemies.

As you can tell by now, my brain isn’t working on its typical levels. I’m better than Buffy’s “fire bad, tree pretty”, but definitely 100%. Sometimes it seems to super-charge itself into some kind of survival mode of “Do everything now!” That’s great for getting stuff done around the house, but it’s not conducive to writing a blog post.

I’ve rambled so very much, but it is time to put a bow on this. Here are my main thoughts to pass on:

  • Money – Money is the least of my worries right now. Part of having good money systems in place above means that I don’t have to think about it much. Err… except for the fact that I need to write about money most days. At least I don’t have to think our money for awhile.
  • Hawaii – When I wrote about our Hawaii trip during COVID, I was expecting so much hate. I didn’t get it, so maybe readers simmered a bit inside? If any of this sounds like you (or not), my wife opened up and said that she felt this was coming. She said this was a big part of the reason why she made the judgment call of traveling to the safer state for time away to enjoy family. (She’s at least 10x smarter than I am.)
  • Career Opportunities – I need to put pause on two exceptional career opportunities – the best two I’ve seen in 10+ years. The job descriptions seemed to be tailor-written to me. I haven’t seen anything more perfect since my old engineering days of running a search engine and applying to be the boss of myself. (I got the job!)

    It’s very weird that both of these jobs came in at the same time. Unfortunately, that was over the last couple of weeks. I had to tell one of the jobs that I simply wasn’t going to be reliable for the next month and a half. I got a sense that their ship was already moving a certain direction, but I had a strong chance of changing it. Sometimes you just have to own up to the bad timing.

    As for the second job, I don’t know them as well. They don’t know me either. We were doing the get-to-know-you dance like some mating rituals. Things were really going great, but then Hawaii happened fast, and now this. I don’t know much about life, but I do this… when you use the moniker of “Lazy” for your brand, you lose any benefit of the doubt.

    I won’t hide it, I extremely miss being part of a team doing great things. Also, my social skills have devolved to saying stuff about Pokemon, Gumball, and Teen Titans Go!. Maybe I’m evolving from talking about how Henry getting bricked up is so wrong in Thomas the Tank Engine.

  • Military Service – I appreciate all the “thank-you-for-your-wife’s-service” comments that I’ve gotten in person. I really do. I’m very fortunate she’s a military pharmacist who doesn’t have to go typically go into war zones.

    That said, there are places in the United States where military service members are not particularly welcome. My wife is going to one of these places. Some friends and family have asked me whether I’m concerned about her safety. I trust the system and I hope that Americans will respect other Americans trying to provide them with life-saving medication. On a national level, Americans helping Americans is an easy win. On an international level, people helping people is also an easy win.

    This is the first time in my lifetime (and probably anyone’s alive today) where everyone SHOULD BE UNITED to fight a common foe. (The alien invasion is 7 years away so we have time to prepare after this.) We can get this done.

    If you can, please support support the USO. In a world of partisan politics, I think that’s one thing that I hope we can universally agree to.

On that last note, a lot of people have asked how I feel about my wife going away. One of them said something like, “Why would they take a mother from their kids? Why 5 weeks?” I’m not particularly excited about the situation or how the deployment was managed. However, I can’t be too upset. We receive a lot of military benefits. Our health care is very good and very cheap… and we can keep it after my wife retires. There’s a very good pension. I can shop for cheap groceries on the military base. We receive a generous discount on the kids’ private school. We can use my wife’s GI Bill to pay a substantial part of their college. The kids have been to Disney so many times. I’m probably missing a lot, but you get the idea. There are so many positives that would be a real jerk to hold it against the military when there is a time of need. (I can be a jerk about a lot of things, but this is a hard one.)

As the saying goes, you take the good. You take the bad. You take them both and there you have the facts of life.

Giving Thanks…

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The annual Thanksgiving article has always been a difficult article one for me. I mulled this one until it’s almost too late to post. While I feel it’s important to reflect on all the things I am grateful for, each of them is very personal. I don’t think you gain much by reading my ramblings about how privileged I’ve been over the last year. When I give thanks for something, I realize that someone else reading it may not have that. That’s not much fun for anyone to read.

Because of that, I usually skip writing a Thanksgiving article. But here we are in 2020.

(And because it’s 2020, I can break all my English teachers’ rules about which words not to begin sentences with. Or even how not to end them.)

We are globally united by a common foe. Everyone’s experience with COVID is unique, but no one’s is good. There are a lot of people who have very good reasons to not be very grateful this Thanksgiving. I can give thanks that I’m not one of those people. There are about a billion ways that any of this could have personally worse for us. Fortunately, none of them happened. I only have minor nuisances to complain about (in comparison).

One of those complaints was teaching two curriculums, kindergarten and first grade, at the same time, on different floors of the house. We got through it, and the kids almost (almost!) seem to have grown because of the experience. In a normal world, learning to read and writing emails come in a different timeline. We learned some important life skills like cooking. A couple of times the 6 and 8-year-old surprised us with breakfast (usually cereal, but that’s because we like to supervise watching the stove being used).

The kids’ school has opened up this fall and so far everything has gone smoothly. The school had a planned, whole week off for Thanksgiving. The idea was to give teachers and kids a chance to recharge their batteries. With rising COVID cases, the timing couldn’t be any more perfect. With my wife still working, it was a long, long week. When the kids don’t have school, they feel like they should do nothing but sit and watch TV all day. Oh, they’ll fit in some video games too. I get frustrated by that, but they haven’t had much TV/video game time since school started in September. We always seem to have an activity like Boy Scouts or Karate. Both of those are paused for the rest of 2020 though.

Money Thankgiving

Because this is a money blog, I should write about money, right?

This is a tough year financially for so many people. It’s impossible for me to single each occupation out. I wouldn’t know where to begin.

My dog-sitting business has been terrible. I’m thankful that we don’t rely on that income. As much as I appreciate it, the money feels like a drop in the bucket. Our investments, like the stock market, are skyrocketing. It’s hard for me to write about money articles that aren’t around investing nowadays.

In February, I moved some of my retirement savings from stocks to bonds. It simply felt that after a 10-year bull market, I should try to preserve my investment gains. It was perfect timing. Sometimes it’s better to lucky than good.

As the markets dropped, I sold some of those bonds and bought more stocks. So now my retirement accounts are up 23% for the year. I was nervous about the stock market jumping back then. I’m at a complete loss on what to do now. Part of me wants to just sell everything. However, I know I have years until I can access the money, so it’s best to just let it sit and grow.

Final Thanksgiving Thoughts

With COVID cases rising and more things shutting down, I’m hoping the kids can get through a couple more weeks of school. After that, the winter break will kick in anyway. It’ll give the kids the carrot stick they need to put in those two good weeks. After the break, it will be 2021 and we can try to put some of 2020 behind us. By that time, vaccines may be able to start helping some of the spread. We get a good spring and summer maybe start to put COVID-19 behind us.

[The hope this week is to get back with a fresh personal finance article by Tuesday or Wednesday.]

Our Family’s Coronavirus Update

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Every business under the sun is giving a coronavirus update. I don’t want to this to be one of those. Staying home and reading personal finance blogs may be one of the safest things you can do now.

At the same time, everyone is sacraficing for the greater good now. Things are changing so rapidly almost every hour. I said to my wife, “It seems like each city and state is trying to one-up each other with more strict measures… and this is a healthy development!”

There are a few different perspectives in how this immediately impacts our family. Part of the reason I’m writing this here is that it impacts the Lazy Man blog. Another part is that it often just helps to talk to someone (even if it is writing online). If you need that space, feel free to use the comments below.

The Kids

The kids were already on school vacation for the next two weeks. I doubt the school will open then as planned. One grandmother was going to take them for a couple days. I was going to bring them to a children’s museum for a day. I was also going to bring them to my mother’s house who doesn’t get to see them much. That’s all canceled. With the local library closed, the only thing I think we’ll do outside is a hiking area with the dog while the kids play Pokemon Go. They’ll probably ride their bikes a bit too.

Being 6 and 7 years old, they often get in each other’s faces if they don’t have some separated time. That won’t be much of an option. That will be difficult to deal with.

Their private school costs $2200 a month – even if it’s closed. They’ll do some distance learning activities set up by the teachers, but I’ll be doing 90% of the teaching and 100% of the child care with 100% of the fight prevention. I feel like that we’d be losing 90% of the value that we pay for. I’d like to opt-out of the distance learning and grab my own homeschooling curriculum to save the money.

At the same time, I understand that teachers have mortgages and need to make an income too. It’s a difficult situation and I’m not sure there is an easy answer.

My Wife

As a phramacist with the United States Public Health Service (USPHS), she’s on the front lines of this. It was only a couple of weeks ago that she was dinner with the Surgeon General (along with a dozen other USPHS representatives). Things have moved fast, but they haven’t deployed her yet. She may be deployed to help with airport screenings on Tuesday. For now, she can work from home (the office is shut down), which is very helpful.

She’s very excited about the Presidential conference with all her USPHS co-workers at the podium. In 22 years of her being with the service, the work they do has been behind the scenes. It never gets mentioned in the big hurricanes, earthquakes, or ebola outbreaks. Now she’s pumped and ready to kick some coronavirus butt! I want to remind her that this is the administration that has spent three years trying to shut down USPHS. They systematically added new regulations that forced many to take second jobs and maintain fitness levels in off-time (military do it as part of their work day). My wife recently spent three years getting a master’s degree in addition to her Pharm. D. due to new regulations.

They put more effort in the Space Force. That doesn’t look too good now.

She had to cancel her trip to the annual pharmacy conference. That means that she might have to earn continuing education credits some other way. No one is really thinking about that now, but I bet some will be surprised surprised to lose their license later on this year. She’s been trying to get through airlines and hotels for 4-5 days now to cancel and it’s just a busy signal.

Me

I’m very good with the kids. As you can tell from the above, the USPHS has really piled the work on my wife over the last 3-4 years, so I do almost everything with the kids. However, it gets to be too much for me if it’s too long of a time without a break. They never nap and for a long time constantly needed help with stuff.

I often find impossible to get much blogging done with them around. I have no quiet place to focus on writing. The interuptions break up my flow whenever I feel like I’m putting two decent sentences together. However, I’m using this time to teach them how to be more independent. They can get snacks and drinks themselves. They are pros at working the TV and tablets now. Things are a lot better now than they’ve been in the past – as long as I can limit the fighting.

Besides the loss in blogging time (and likely revenue), there’s likely going to be a loss in dog sitting business. Dog sitting income is best when people travel – school vacations, long weekends, and summer. If people don’t travel, they won’t need to book their dogs to stay here.

I also do customer support for a company based out Silicon Valley. They are largely virtual with many international customers. This should continue to be a strong income for the near future.

Losing the majority of two incomes, and having to still pay the school $2200 a month is a big financial blow.

Local Economy

Most businesses are going to suffer for a long time. That’s a given. Everyone’s local economony is going to feel it.

However, our area, Newport, Rhode Island is a tourist town. They do 75-80% of the year’s business in the summer restaurant and hotel industry. If there’s a rainy Memorial Day weekend, restuarants close forever. That’s not an exaggeration.

Maybe it could be worse. Maybe our city could be where they build cruise ships. It’s very close to the worst situation many could imagine for businesses.

Final Thoughts

This is a not an easy time for anyone. There are certainly people who have it a lot worse than us. People who have tested positive. People have family members who tested positive. Families who rely on day care to bring in a single income and are looking at losing both. It’s impossible to enumerate them all, so it’s hardly worth trying.

We’ll lose some significant income sitting dogs. We’ll do more supporting of great teachers and the local economony than we may get back in return. We’ll lose a significant amount of money in the stock market. However, the key to all that is that it’s all just money. Because I’ve been writing about money and managing it for so long, these aren’t completely and forever life-changing. In the the grand scheme of things, as long as we can healthy we’ll be fine.

As for the blog, I’ll continue to do my best to keep it updated with the most relevant information. Today’s update about our family was necessary, because this blog is about our money journey and this is certainly part of that. However, I’m committed to helping you with your money journey.

I know a lot of parents are being put in difficult situations. Losing day care and staying home to educate kids isn’t easy. I need mental health breaks. You need mental breaks. The kids need to relax and have a little fun too.

Fortunately, I have a couple of articles that can help do all that for you, while keeping the kids learning:

  1. There’s the best educational streaming shows for preschoolers. This isn’t meant to replace an educational curriculum, but these shows can give everyone a break.
  2. If you have Hulu, you can stream multiple Teen Titans Go! episodes about money: 401ks, compound interest, landlording, currencies, and pyramid schemes. I suggest some parental guidance with this show as it’s for older children. However, it’s rare for a kids’ show to introduce the topic of a 401k or compound interest and give you something to build a discussion on… all while making it hilarious.

    3. If you know someone who is staying at home with their kids’ school closed, maybe send them one of those articles. It could be the lifeline they need to get a little sanity back.

Tough One to Hit Publish On

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So it’s that time of year when everyone is happy about the holidays. Or at least they are able to put on the appearances of being happy. I wonder if the reality is more like this SNL skit:

The kids’ school does a lot of extra events this time of year, so the schedule is helter skelter, “Pick up kids early, drop them off in pajamas, have a special snack prepared, bring ingredients for ginderbread house making.” That’s just a few of the things. Yesterday there was a school play which required the kids get in “special dress” and the result was similar to this SNL skit from this weekend:

Since school is dismissing early my wife came up with a good idea to invite some of the kids’ school friends over for lunch and a play date. We’ve been missing the social connection (her especially, I think), so I figure that this would be a good idea. Unfortunately, our lives are pretty hectic (isn’t everyone’s?) so the house has a billion half-finished projects and we’re overwhelmed with clutter and toys. (In fairness, my STEM toy addiction probably hasn’t made matters better.) We’ve got so many toys that the kids don’t even play with their brand new Nintendo Switch that they saved up for. It’s only going to get worse as I kept finding deals throughout the holiday season.

The biggest thing that is going on with me is that I think I’m just depressed. It’s hard to write that and we’ll see if I hit the publish button. The combination of the short days of the year and it being 15 degrees is simply not a good mix for me. It’s probably some kind of S.A.D. (seasonal affective disorder). I don’t want to leave the house or walk the dog or any of the things that would probably be healthy.

Behind the scenes, we have a condo turnover that is just terrible. It’s hard when people move out in November or December in cold states. No one wants to move. We’ve lowered the price, but the real estate agent keeps on asking us to do more and more work. It’s getting to be too much deal with contractor after contractor. With it being a couple of months now (and probably more without a Christmas miracle), it’s hard to pour more money into it.

I’ve had a difficult time online as well – and almost everything I do is online. I had this great idea to review every year of the decade. That kind of article takes 8-10 hours minimum, which is hard to put together. I’m not sure if people get value from it, because few people leave comments on blogs any more. I think it’s just the nature of their being so much content out there that no one has the time to read it all and comment. Everyone else has their own endless todo list, right?

The online income isn’t getting better (which makes sense, because I have less time to blog), but when it does come, it comes with maddening invoicing instructions. It used to be that everyone put an email address and an amount in Paypal and it was done in 30 seconds. I spent nearly half a day with one client after they were making so many changes and special requests, I was wondering they ever intended to pay me at all.

I’m certainly not being helped by the news cycle. I don’t go into politics here very often, but I’ve been transparent about which side I’m on now that the chasm has grown so far apart. I find it difficult to root for someone whose platform of bullying and helping foreign interests is put ahead of America and real problems like student loans, healthcare costs, and climate change. I grew only more sad watching the democratic debate last night and thinking, “It’s a shame that we can’t have any of these intelligent, articulate leaders representing our country.

Usually, I have a few safe havens, like being able to celebrate the Patriots’ success. However, they haven’t had their success (despite the great record) or late. They are banged up and don’t seem to have the offensive talent any more. And to make things worse the local news is buzzing about taping issue with the general conscious seeming to be that because they were deemed guilty before, they’ll be deemed even more guilty now. I’m sure no one would have any sympathy for a Patriots’ fan (nor should they), but it was a constant source of good online news for me for a long time now.

This is also one of the busiest times for my wife. She’s got to file for military promotion. She compares to doing college applications, but in this case, there’s one school – Harvard. So you better have cured cancer in the last year, or the promotion isn’t happening. Even if you did, you better cross every “t” and dot every “i” and make sure all 74 of your bosses signed off on it and wrote a glowing 10 page review. Then you’ll have checked off one of the 5 or 6 areas that they judge.

Personally, I don’t if she should ever even try, but if you fall at the bottom of list, you could get discharged. It sounds like a more and more competitive rat race, and I think she’s at the point where it’s just not worth running it any more.

I don’t know what the end take-away is from all this. I think most of it is temporary and may just be in my head. One of the things that helped was just writing up. I know that a lot of other people are feeling it too. In the grand scheme of things these may be small potatoes in comparison. I think there will be some natural time off with the Christmas holiday and then things on this blog will hopefully pick up before the New Year.

Are you a Middleton?

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I never blog about people starting a new website, because that happens all… the… time…

Today I’m going to break that (self-imposed) rule. There’s a new website that I think you might want to follow: Meet the Middletons

That’s not the only rule I’m breaking. There’s a couple more, but I’ll get to in a bit. For now, let’s move forward.

What is Money Middletons?

The short answer is that it’s a money website for the middle class. Of course I still believe that Middle Class Income Numbers are a Myth. Fortunately, I don’t think the Middleton police is going to come knocking looking for income verification to make sure you are qualified to the club :-).

Money Middletons is crowd-sourced, which means you can make it what you want it to be. It’s curated by volunteers, so you know that people are invested in it. It’s also covering the best articles in personal finance, so you know that I will never be featured ;-).

There might be a longer answer to what Money Middletons is about, but it’s so much easier to click and see it for yourself.

About Those “Rules”

I think Stephonee (who is launching the website) was looking to make a big media push on Monday. I was distracted by some other stuff, but I hope it worked out well.

You probably don’t know Stephonee. She’s not exactly a household name. However, she’s one of the very, very few bloggers who have been writing about personal finance for the last 12 years like me. I’ve been a fan of Poorer Than You for more than a decade.

As part of the launch there were images and writing guidelines/ideas. You don’t care about logos right? I’ve never been one for writing guidelines either. I feel that blogging is supposed to be about raw writing.

So that’s it, just go to Money Middletons and enjoy.