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Giving Thanks…

November 29, 2020 by Lazy Man 1 Comment

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

March 16, 2020 by Lazy Man 6 Comments

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:

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.
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.

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

December 20, 2019 by Lazy Man 19 Comments

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?

October 23, 2018 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

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

August 25, 2018 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

(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.