Lazy Man and Money

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.

Catch Me If You Can

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(Warning: This is more of a journal entry than a personal finance article. I will try to slip in some personal finance tips along the way. That’s also why I’m posting on a Saturday.)

For the first time in a week, I have the combination of a laptop, an internet connection, and potentially an hour of quiet time. I’m writing this at 4AM (Friday) which helps for the last part.

The last week for me was a lesson of how simple plans can go crazy.

We had booked 5 days to be at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire which is where my mother-in-law vacations around this time every year. She loves having this time with the kids. She was going to be there for a week, but we staggered our trip so that we’d have 3 days with the kids ourselves to go to Storyland (kids theme park) and then two days to ourselves in NH before returning to Rhode Island where our kids would be brought back to us at the end of my mother-in-laws trip.

That’s 5 days (Mon-Fri) of not supervising children, which would give me all the time in the world to do online work. I’m not smart to remind myself that things never go according to plan.

Monday turned out to be a family day because we didn’t sync up with my mother-in-law until around dinner. Extra family time is good and typically missing one day isn’t a big deal. Tuesday, my wife suggested we go to the outlet malls and do some back-to-school shopping. I agreed, because shopping for clothes with a 4 and 5 year is difficult, but also it would give me a chance to upgrade from the 20 year old shorts I’ve been wearing. (Microfiber was in style, went out of style, and fortunately came back in style during this time.) The outlet shopping ended up taking up much of the day. Afterwards it was time to check in on the kids and go to dinner.

Personal Finance tip: I thought outlet malls stopped being good deals about 15 years ago. It seemed like you got a lower quality product. I’ve changed my mind on this recently. I think now there are indeed some bargains to be had. As you can tell above (20 year old shorts), I don’t shop for clothes very often, but they seem a little big like TJ Maxx and occasionally better. We were able to get the kids a lot of the brand names that their classmates wear for special occasions.

Before I get to Wednesday, I have to take a step back. As we were running out of the door for our trip, we received some bad news. My wife’s paternal grandmother had passed away. I am the worst person in the world in dealing with death. I’m just one step below being Anya bad. However, in this case, I think death was truly her gift (to keep with the Buffy theme). She was 93 years old and had been everywhere and seen everything. Her husband of 71 years died last year. I had only met her 3 times with two of those times being my wedding and her husband’s funeral.

At the last minute my wife packed some clothes suitable for a funeral. She even grabbed a suit for me, but I couldn’t see the point. Since we had our dog on our trip, I wouldn’t be able to leave him alone and would probably have to miss the wake and funeral. I also had to be Rhode Island for Wednesday night as I am class parent at the kids school and I needed to be available to greet the new parents and the welcoming event.

The wake was planned for Wednesday evening. The plan was originally to drive from northern NH in the morning to southern Rhode Island to drop off me and the dog, with my wife going back to Boston for the wake. That’s about 6 hours round trip for her to get to the wake and another 1.5 hours to get back home that night. That would be followed by another 3-hour round-tripper to Boston the following day. That’s a lot of driving.

The welcoming event got pushed to Thursday due to bad weather. As we were driving down from NH on Wednesday morning, I had the idea, what if we just got a pet-friendly hotel around Boston for the night? It would save hours of driving back and forth to Rhode Island. Then I took it a step further and called my mother to see if we could stay there. Ordinarily this would be an easy thing to ask. However, she’s had some mobility problems and I didn’t know if introducing a dog was going to work. Once she found out that we didn’t have the kids, she agreed that having two adults may actually be helpful with a couple of things around the house.

We saved a lot of driving time and spent some quality time catching up with my mother and went to the wake Wednesday evening. Afterwards, we went out for a quick dinner before heading home and falling asleep. Thursday, we went out for breakfast, as my mother was, of course, not planning for our visit. If you live in the New England area, Friendly’s is offering 50% off of all breakfast M-F. Our bill for two huge breakfasts, drinks, etc. came to $13. After breakfast, we had just enough time to walk the dog and get dressed (thanks to my wife bringing the suit) and get to the funeral.

The lunch after the funeral ran late and we rushed down to Newport to meet with the new parents at the school. I didn’t have time to change and we were still 30 minutes late. It was still a successful event though I think it was a bit of a downer explaining that we were coming from a funeral.

While we were exhausted at that point, my wife and I really wanted to see the only showing of a documentary that near to dear to our hearts – Life in the Doghouse. It focuses on a pair of animal rescuers who have rescued over 11,000 dogs and have around 70 dogs living in their (very large) house all the time. It’s run as a non-profit and they take no salary. The money from their day job, show horse training, goes straight to the dogs. It’s really an amazing story and if you ever get the chance you should see the movie. Bonus points if you rescue a dog from Danny and Ron’s Rescue or anyone else.

Next week, I should be able to focus more on personal finance articles. I have a couple of ideas ruminating.

Another Government Shut Down Starts to Hit Home

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Every few years, it seems like it’s another time to talk about how the government shut down affects our life. It started in 2011 and I wrote about it next when it happened in 2013.

A government shut down is a weird situation for most families of government workers.

We have a weird situation put on top of a weird situation.

My wife is active duty, but she has a position that is generally held by government worker. Because she’s active duty she has to work even when the government shuts down. At the same time, there’s often no guarantee if she’s going to get paid. Finally, she’s often becomes the division leader as the highest ranking official.

Everything’s generally confusing when there’s a government shut down. You’d think there would be a solid plan in place because it seems to happen often enough. Nope. It’s not easier that this happens over the weekend when most people aren’t work anyway. The most confusing of all is that my wife’s special case slips through the cracks.

There are so many questions. Are troops getting paid? (It seems like they might not be.) Does my wife count as being part of those troops? (Sometimes yes, sometimes no.) Is the office building going to be open or is she going to drive 2 hours to a locked door? Will the shutdown be over in a couple of hours or we plan for the long haul? (Who knows.) Can Tom Brady fix this? (Probably. Who would doubt his ability?)

So far it looks like my wife is still going to be paid. That’s a big one for us, because she’s the breadwinner. We found out that she won’t be the division leader this time, which is fine by me. (I don’t want to get into why she isn’t, but I feel it is a little controversial.)

It’s a very confusing time (Did I use the word “confusing” before? It’s confusing. Confusing.) However, it does seem like we are starting to get some answers. I know that a lot of people have had enough with politics, so I’m trying to put those thoughts aside. I will say that I spent much more time than I would like to reading all the updates and bickering. I should be focusing my attention to other tasks, but I can’t seem to help it.

I realize that this article is a little light on the “money” and high on the “politics”, but government shutdowns can be a real personal finance situation for us and we can’t be alone there. Tomorrow, maybe I’ll get to a real investing article. Let’s hope it doesn’t blow up on me like my recent GE article.

Ask the Readers: What Makes for a Successful GoFundMe Campaign?

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Over the last few days I’ve been dealing with a number of major life changes. I’m really not ready to write about them today, but you’ll be the first to know when I am.

Some part of the life changes are financially related. It’s not something small like my expenses going up $200 a month. One of the changes would have a nearly $1500/mo. impact. The other one is even larger. It’s kind of like the equivalent of Surprise Honey, I Just Added $60,000 to Our Debt. It’s being thrust upon us (in my opinion unjust and unfairly) and not the result of our action or inaction.

So I’m looking at a website like Go Fund Me, which I’ve read a lot about. I usually just read the results, never what goes into making a successful campaign. I’m going to give some quick thoughts on that and then turn it over to the comment section.

My first thought is that the cause has to be one that people deem worthy. A young adult harassed by United Airlines seems to be worthy. Someone in “need” of Hamilton tickets posting a sad fish doesn’t appear worthy. (Sad fish everywhere have my sympathy.)

I think the cause I have is worthy and compelling… at least if judging by the commenters on this website on some of my articles.

Other than that, I’m guessing that catch titles and good images are probably very important. I’m not sure if a sad fish is a good image. I think it’s kind of creative personally. Thoughts?

What else would be in the recipe of a successful GoFundMe campaign? I’m sure that marketing the message is important. Unfortunately, I’m a terrible marketer of anything related to myself. (In what seem like something out of a Greek tragedy/mythology, I’m great at marketing other people.)

Lazy Man and Money Takes a New Direction

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I mentioned it briefly a couple of weeks ago, but Lazy Man and Money is taking a new direction… I’ve hired a couple of writers. I think you are really going to like them.

There’s always a risk in introducing new writers to a blog. People are probably expecting an article written by “Lazy Man” and be disoriented by a female writer. My articles also tend to be personal. I write about what’s going on in my life. Another author is going to be living a different life (I hope!) and have different experiences.

When J.D. Roth stopped writing for Get Rich Slowly, I stopped reading it. I read the blog because of him. If I wasn’t getting him, why waste my time?

So why am I hiring writers? It’s a bunch of different things. Some of them include:

  1. I’m not seeing as many comments on my articles as I’d like. Perhaps the quality of my articles on a daily basis isn’t where it needs to be. By reducing quantity, maybe I can increase quality.
  2. As I touched on earlier, the new writers can write about different topics such as debt that I usually don’t cover due to lack of experience. Maybe readers are looking for this.
  3. I want to put more time into different things. I really want to write a book (even if it short and terrible). I want to be more active on social media. I want to grow Be Better Now into the best website that it can be.

Finally, (and I’m purposely separating this from the list), I like to try new things and see what works. That’s what lead me to start this blog in the first place and look how far it has come? It looks like Lazy Man and Money will do more than 2.2 million page view this year.

In the ideal scenario, Tuesday and Thursday will feature other writers. Tomorrow we have an article from Christina Garofalo who is co-author of the blog Adventures in Frugal, where she writes about travel, food, finance, and more. Her writing has also appeared in Paste, First We Feast, Robb Report, and Art & Hustle. In her free time, you’ll find her writing poetry and eating her way through Brooklyn, New York.

This Thursday we have an article from Michelle from Fit is the New Poor. While we are still working on her biography, feel free to check out her website.

If it really doesn’t work and you hate their writing, let me know that you want more of my writing by leaving comments. Don’t be scared of the comment box.

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