Lazy Man and Money

Building a Million Dollar Blog: Getting Started (Part 1 of ?)

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I realize this series isn’t for everyone. I had the idea to create another blog, because of TINA – there is no alternative of COVID. It didn’t seem like there good investing opportunities with a high stock market and a fast rising real estate market. It seemed natural to me to invest in creating a business. Nowadays, the markets look a little different, but investing a business (in this case a blog) is a personal finance topic worth covering, right?

A few months ago, I started off this series with a blog post, Building a Million Dollar Blog: Introduction. I explained that I started Lazy Man and Money in 2006 and have made over $600,000. It will take some time, but I might get to a million dollars. However, rather than review the 16-year history of Lazy Man and Money, I decided to profile the start of my new blog, KidWealth.com.

I acknowledged that it would be an uphill climb for Kid Wealth to be a million-dollar blog. With that said, I have a few things in my favor to help make it successful. It’s a great brand (in my opinion), domain, and it has all the social media accounts. I know a lot of the bloggers in the personal finance space giving me a head start. I’m not working on a timeline – a million dollars could be over the next 20 years. I’m also willing to spend money. The big marketers often only preach about their revenue, not their costs.

Finally, I made the point that Kid Wealth isn’t about making money. It’s a lot of fun and hopefully, many families will benefit. I have a passion for personal finance and covering it from a kid’s perspective is fresh and exciting. Last week, I overheard my 9-year-old explaining to my 8-year-old what a loan was. A few days later, he offered to do a bunch of extra chores to earn money for a Pokemon card set that he saw at Wal-Mart.

Getting a Blog Started

The first thing I had to do was find my brand name. I had a few ideas such as KidMoney.com, but so many .com domains are gone. I found KidWealth.com was for sale on GoDaddy for $250. I decided to get a Gmail account with the name and then buy the domain. I purposely wanted to get the email first because then renewing the domain would always be with that business email rather than my personal email address.

Before buying, I also did a quick search on NameCheckr.com which tells you all the social media usernames that are available. Fortunately, almost everything was available. It took me about an hour to complete the purchase and sign up for all the accounts.

I already had some blogging infrastructure set up. For example, I use Cloudflare for Lazy Man and Money nameservers. I also had hosting with SiteGround. My software engineering days are far behind, but it gives me a headstart, especially combined with my experience at Lazy Man and Money.

SiteGround, like any decent host, makes it easy to install WordPress. I had a basic blog up and running.

That’s when I realized how much work I had left to do. I had some ideas of what articles I would write. After all, I had been writing a few articles on Lazy Man and Money. However, I didn’t have a design. I didn’t have a logo. I didn’t have any organization of how to categorize the articles I would write. I knew the people in the personal finance area, but kid financial literacy is almost an entirely different group of people. I had an idea of which WordPress plugins I would need, but the best plugins have changed since I last updated the Lazy Man and Money website. There were a lot of other sub-accounts that I needed to sign up for such as Google Analytics.

I started to organize by making a Kid Wealth directory on my hard drive. Inside that were some folders like Content, BizDev, and Design. I also included two more files at the root level – a text file called “ToDo” and a spreadsheet called “MasterPlan.” The MasterPlan spreadsheet is enormous and covers anything my ADHD brain could think of. I would create a spreadsheet for the Theme, Passwords, Marketing Ideas, Helpful Friends, Publishing Checklist, etc. I also had a page of content titles, keywords, and notes.

Unfortunately, the MasterPlan spreadsheet is disorganized. Part of my goal with this series is to refine some of the process and make it easier for others to duplicate. In future articles, I’ll drill down into specific areas, how I’ve implemented them, and what the costs have been.

I Sold a Fungible Token for Millions!

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You may have seen the news about non-fungible tokens or NFTs. These seem to be everywhere today. There was a Saturday Night Live skit on them this weekend.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t understand why you’d want to deal in non-fungible tokens when you can get fungible tokens. As my friend says, “What’s not to like about 100% more funge!”

The great part about fungible tokens is that it is a completely untapped market. I think I can own it all to myself.

It took me some time to figure out what was the best thing to sell. Some famous people like Jack Dorsey sold his first Tweet. It seems like firsts go for a lot. So maybe I should sell my first post on Lazy Man and Money? It’s nearly 15 years old now and starts off with a sentence that might make me the first FIRE blogger:

“This blog is about a man, a lazy man, and his quest to not only retire early, but to retire rich enough to live a comfortable lifestyle.”

That’s too easy though. I think I may sell that second. No, my best post for selling fungible tokens would definitely be my bitcoin article from 2011. It’s almost 10 years old now. I could have bought a bitcoin for $13, but of course, I never did. I missed my chance for millions and millions of dollars…

… at least until recently. I’m a big fan of recycling, and fungible tokens (along with non-fungible tokens) gave me that chance. I was able to sell the bitcoin article for $2,021,040.10. I can’t believe that I was able to get so much from just a little work back then. I guess some people really like the idea of using the blockchain to buy an old article about the blockchain.

The good news is that this extra $2M puts us firmly into the early retired territory. It has always been close, especially if we continue to send the kids to private school. This changes the math considerably. It gives us some money for now, and should completely fund their college.

They’ve still got a decade before the college expenses come rolling in. This should give me more time to reinvest the funds into more fungible tokens from others and make 10x more money!

A Brief History of 14 Years of Lazy Man and Money

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Today is the 14th anniversary of Lazy Man and Money. I’m 44 years old, so next year I will have spent 1/3rd of my life as “Lazy Man.” (Those who have known me through the other 2/3rds of my life may claim that it’s closer to 100%). For now, I’ll have to settle for my “inverse pi-anniversary” because 44/14 is a close approximation of pi. (That got way too nerdy. I’ll dial it down.)

There are only a few single-author money bloggers that have consistently been around longer. The only one I could think of was Jonathan of My Money Blog. There were several others that have taken a hiatus or sold their blog and came back under a different brand.

Consistent blogging is difficult for me these days. My priority is to homeschool the two kids (ages 6 and 7), while my military pharmacist wife is virtually-deployed* to help with the coronavirus. I don’t have much energy after putting the kids to bed. Trust me, I still have many, many money stories to tell. Hopefully, if I continue to stay healthy, you can look forward to being bored by them for decades.

The Beginning of Lazy Man and Money and FIRE

It might be hard for many people to understand what the blogging landscape was 14 years ago. Twitter had launched just a couple of months before so no one had heard of it. Facebook was only 2 years old. Lazy Man’s hockey stick growth curve has to be coming any day now, right?

With that historical perspective in mind, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at my first blog post, “Welcome”.

Here’s what it looked like in November 2006 from the Archive.org’s Wayback Machine:

In hindsight my first sentence of more than 2,558 blog posts (and 2 million words) may have been my best:

“This blog is about a man, a lazy man, and his quest to not only retire early, but to retire rich enough to live a comfortable lifestyle.”

I’m not going to say that I invented FIRE (I didn’t). But I specifically set the FIRE goal about a decade before most personal finance bloggers started categorizing themselves that way. The last half of that sentence translates roughly to what those FIRE bloggers call fatFire.

These concepts are the same by any name. They were here before the Great Recession of 2009 and they’ll be here after coronavirus.

I mention this because I ran a Twitter poll awhile back and most people didn’t consider me a FIRE blogger. I wasn’t sure whether I should be insulted or flattered. The truth is that I’m an overall money blogger. I’ve always tried to be a generalist. I’m not the best frugal, investing, real estate, military, consumer advocate, family blogger, but I cover all those topics.

You can think of me as the blogging equivalent of a Susan Lucci and a Jamie Moyer child, but not as talented.

A History of FIRE

Many people have asked me how I became interested in FIRE and why I created Lazy Man and Money. It was a confluence of four factors, in order from most to least importance:

  1. My military wife’s pension

    We were still dating when I created Lazy Man and Money, but she had mentioned that she could retire with 20 years of service – at age 43. Since she was obviously marriage material, I had to find a way to bridge the gap of 22 years from the typical age 65 retirement.

  2. The Dot-Com Bubble of 2000

    I graduated with my computer science degree in 1998. After a year at a century-old insurance company, I went to a big dot-com. I was a rising star, quickly becoming a manager of their search engine technology. The start of my career there until the end was only a couple of years. The Dot-Com Bubble lead to the entire technology team getting laid off. It was supposed to happen on September 11, 2001, but the company wisely rescheduled the layoffs.

    Like many software engineers at the time, I didn’t find steady employment until 2004, almost exactly at the time that I met my wife.

    I had come very close to financial rock bottom, that I knew I never wanted to be there again.

  3. Outsourcing of the mid-2000s

    In the wake of the Dot-Com Bubble, many companies realized that they could reduce their risk by developing software overseas. The cost of living is much lower, so oversea software engineers would work for less money than American ones. The movement picked up steam from 2003-2012. I have lost track after that since Big Tech has consolidated to several big companies.

    I got very worried that the economics of developing software in the United States simply wouldn’t make sense going forward. At this time, the iPhone wasn’t invented yet. And while its software is still developed in the US, the hardware is largely outsourced to China.

  4. Actual Laziness

    Staying competitive in the software engineering world is difficult. In many places, you have to work a 12 hour day and then go home and learn all the breakthroughs that other coders have made.

    Facebook flew me to their headquarters in 2006 and we mutually agreed it was a terrible fit. Like NFL running backs, I was on the wrong side of 30 (by months) and aged out of the Silicon Valley programmer club. I wanted to go home to my wife instead of living on campus.

    5. Unexpected Bonus 5th Factor:

  5. Starting a Family

    There are very few organizations that zero flexibility. You have to do what is required no matter what. One of them is the United States’ military. Another is being a parent. As a military spouse** with children (especially young ones), I have the flexibility of an icicle.

    Because I had a long-term view of our money management, we have some flexibility.

A 14-Year Financial Journey

With the image from Archive.org above you can see my goals (on the right side). I wanted to make around $1700/mo. in alternative income. I had made $23.

It was a start, right?

In my last passive income report I made around $7,500*** for the month. Those “***” are important as it isn’t liquid money we can spend right away. However, we can get to a large portion if necessary.

In that image from Archive.org, you can see that my net worth was less than 200K. My goal was to have a net worth of $3-4 million. What is missing from that is a timeline. I could lack through all my old posts to know for sure, but I think it meant for now when I hoped we’d retire early.

That projection included my wife’s net worth because $3.5M with the rule of 4% (the standard at the time) would allow $140,000 of spending a year. I wouldn’t need that much if I was just trying to support myself.

If you fast forward to today, my wife’s military pension is worth around 2.3M. Our net worth outside of that is less, but not much less. Most of it is tied up in retirement accounts and real estate investments. We’re expecting that all of this will bring in $200,000 a year in income in retirement.

Is it fair to say that we have achieved our goal? I don’t know. It’s not like we have millions in index funds actively throwing off dividends that we can spend. As we’ve learned over the last couple of months, we never know what challenge lies just around the corner. On the other hand, it’s not like our hard work is invested in Beanie Babies – it’s real money.

Nowadays, I try not to look at money as a destination. This article’s goal is to highlight that money is a journey. And in the words of my sons’ favorite TV show, “The journey continues…”

Final Thoughts

You may read financial magazines that project how saving and investing works in the long run. We’ve not only experienced it first-hand, but it’s documented here for all to see. Fourteen years can feel like a long time when you trying to reach financial freedom. However, looking back on it, the time flashes by in the blink of an eye.


* “Virtual deployment” means my wife is still working from home, but it’s 12-hours a day, 7 days a week for the next month.

** Happy Military Spouse Day! I’m double-dipping with two special days at the same time.

*** This number has a lot of qualifications attached to it. There’s a whole FAQ about it. The bottom line is that it’s the number that makes the most sense.

Two Months to Take Charge of Your Money

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This article contains affiliate links.

Three weeks ago my son discovered Pokemon. It derailed my grand Summer of Math plan. At first I tried to ignore Pokemon, but I soon learned that wasn’t going to work.

Magikarp - Gyarados
Magikarp is a joke of a Pokemon with no powers, except the ability to evolve into Gyarados one of the most powerful Pokemon

Instead, I did the exact opposite, I embraced the phase. I evolved from Magikarp to Gyarados. I went to the library and got a this Pokemon guide/directory. My 4 and 5 year old are now teaching themselves dictionary skills as they look up various Pokemon and their abilities.

The lesson here is simple: Ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. Embracing it can be an opportunity to learn and grow.

Right now you are reading the money blog that I started in April, 2006. I didn’t know where the blog would go, but I knew I didn’t want to get down to my last few dollars like I did with the dot-com bust. I knew I wanted a strong Plan B (and C an D) in case software engineering jobs continued to get outsourced to foreign countries.

Today, I can look back and say there were a lot of pieces of the puzzle. I started tracking my net worth (first with a spreadsheet, then with Personal Capital. That forced me keep my spending in check as I wanted to see that number grow every month. There were other factors, the greatest being marrying well. There was a lot of good luck as well, even if some of that was just avoiding disastrous bad luck.

However, everything started with one initial spark. I saw a few blogs where people wrote about money. I decided why not give that a try? I quickly realized something that I that I had forgotten:

The best way to learn is by doing.

By pressuring myself to write about money every day, I had to some up with something to write about. Some people lose weight by making food journals. Starting a money blog is your food journal. (If you are looking for a cheap, easy place to get started, Bluehost can help you out.)

Maybe I’m living up to my Lazy moniker, but I often find that I get excited about something and then forget about it as life “happens.” After all, even though most people don’t think I work, I’m always busy with a number of things.

This is where the “two months” comes into play. In about 2 months, the biggest personal finance blogger conference is happening: Fincon 2018. That’s enough time to establish a yourself as a blogger. It’s also around the time when the initial excitement of starting a blog seems to wear off. It’s really the only place where you can meet face-to-face with more than a thousand of people who are (more or less) like you.

Prices go up at the end of the July (Tuesday midnight), so you may want to sign up for this first.

Finally, if you book the conference now, you’ll lock yourself into blogging consistently until then. It’s a little like committing to running a race. Whether, it’s a 5K, half marathon, or marathon you’ll have created a goal in the future.

I will be the first to admit that going to Fincon is not cheap. Between tickets, flight, and hotel, it can add-up quite a bit. It certainly isn’t for everyone. Personally, I’ve been to every one except for the one where I stayed home to see my son being born. This year, the whole family is going, and we’ll celebrate his 6th birthday in Orlando. Do you think we’ll find any fun things for kids down there ;-)?

As I wrote in the beginning, this article has affiliate links. Roughly 10,000 of them, give or take several thousand. That means that if you click on pretty much anything other than the Summer of Math article (or how I keep myself busy) and decide it is a good service that you’d like to try, I’ll get a little money. That includes even the free Personal Capital service. However, I honestly believe that if you track your finances, start a money blog, and network with other money bloggers, it will put you on the right path to improving your finances.

I can’t think of a single personal finance blogger who has seen their financial lives get worse since they’ve started blogging. In a dozen years, I’ve probably talked with several hundred personal finances bloggers.

I feel that’s a very strong percentage and great odds at success.

The Best Articles of 2016

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We’re more than a few days into 2017, but since I’m still signing checks* with “2016”, I’m going to go with it.

Lazy Man Best Of 2016

Many bloggers will highlight their most popular articles. That may work for them, but my articles aren’t popular at all. (I’m joking… self-deprecating humor is en vogue, right?)

Instead, I’m highlighting the articles on Lazy Man and Money that I thought were interesting or might not have received as much love at the time of posting.**

  • Investing Tip: Focus on Accumulating Shares – I was honestly thinking of this in the shower the other day. (Too much information?) The idea is to think of investing as simply buying as many shares (of quality funds such as Vanugard Star) as possible. If the price goes down, don’t think of it as losing money, but think, “Hey, the cheaper price means I can buy even more shares!”

  • Why MLM is NOT a Business

    Yes, I’ve written MLMs a lot here… far more than I wanted to. This general summary of this article shows that MLM isn’t a business and isn’t a true entrepreneurial endeavor. Unfortunately, it’s marketed as if it is, because recruiting people to believe that is believed by some experts to be all that MLM is (sorry no time for citations see on the topic.

  • How I Work – Not a flashy title, but I think there are ton of useful tips. I wish every blogger (and non-blogger) would write an article like this… I would read them all day. I can’t take credit for the idea, Lifehacker inspired me to copy them and write my own.

  • The Craziest Week of My Life? – It’s not often that the Department of Health and Human Service considers suing the Department of Defense on your behalf, but that’s what we were looking at. This may have been a precursor to understanding later in the year just how weird and nonsensical our government system is. Oh and that was just about 40% of the craziness for the week.

  • My Mammoth DisneyWorld and Universal Studios Review – If you are heading to either for the first time (especially with young toddlers), this article is for you.

  • Many Americans Can’t Afford $400 in an Emergency – It feels like everyone wrote about this as it seemed to be a big national story. I feel like it can’t be covered enough because so many people are on the verge of bankruptcy.

  • Would You Pay $629 for a Bandage? – Before we had the EpiPen fight there was this article about a $629 bandage. It’s amazing to me how messed up health care is… and how easy it seems to me it would be fix it. I’m hoping to write about it. I might not be able to fit it in this month, but maybe next.

  • How To Be a Millionaire in 20 Years – Twenty years might seem like a long time, but it will sneak up on you faster than you think. Should I do a follow-up on how the second million may take you less than 10 years?

  • Betting On Zero with My New BFF, Billionaire Bill Ackman – It’s not everyday you can meet a billionaire, but I was able to do that this summer. It wasn’t just any billionaire, but the billionaire who shined a floodlight on Herbalife’s scheme.

  • College Planning is Impossible (But Do It Anyway!) – Our greatest future expense may be paying for college. Or it might not be. (Maybe health care is a similar concern.) You might need to save a couple hundred thousand to pay for it or zero. There are loans and other financial aid to make it easier. Overall, this is one area where the crystal ball is cloudier than any other in personal finance

  • Gambling on the Election – Nostradamus better look out because Kosmo has a bead on him, “If you bought $500 worth of Trump shares (2941 shares) and he wins in November, you could cash out for $2941. It seems like there might be an opportunity to make a few dollars betting on Trump.”

  • NEST Thermostats Do NOT Save You Money – Two of two my Nest have failed in the the 2.5 or so years that I had them. One failed early enough to be covered by warranty. Another failed afterwards.

    The lesson I learned is that sometimes spending money on expensive technology to save money doesn’t always add up. If it’s something that is expected to last more than a decade (like a thermostat), check the warranty and make sure it really lasts that long.

  • The FTC, Truth In Advertising, and John Oliver Eviscerate MLM Scams – Three heroes of the consumers protection wage a war on MLM scams. I had never been more optimistic in my nearly 10 years of covering these scams.

    And then the American public voted in an administration with some strong ties to MLM scams. We’ll see what happens, but at least Americans have the information to see that they are scams.

  • Make Bacon Great Again! – Either no one got the humor or decided it wasn’t funny.

    That attempt aside, it really is good advice on how to make bacon. You might be surprised how much having some bacon around helps when the question comes up, “What’s for dinner? Should we go out to eat again?”

  • How Cox Prevents Me from Saving Money with Their Competition – I wrote about Cox Communications twice this year as neither experience was satisfactory.

    It seems that everyone hates their cable company. My favorite new show of the year, Adam Ruins Everything, explained how the cable companies eradicated competition, which explains why I simply have to take my lumps with Cox. (That link has the source list for his arguments, and it is a very compelling read even if you didn’t see the show.)

  • The Season of Giving – This is a great story about how a strong personal finance focus allows one family to give back to another who is less fortunate.

    I can’t think of a better way to end the the year and this list.

That’s it for now. I’m going to turn my attention to making the articles for 2017 even better.

* I use “signing checks” metaphorically. I think I write one check a month.

** I apologize clip-show. My wife’s long-awaited highly-discounted Hamilton tickets from AmEx were this weekend, so I had solo kid coverage. Mother Nature decided to whoop us with a foot of snow. I’m the last person in a snow region who doesn’t own a snowblower, so it was a lot of shoveling. On the plus side, that time with the kids has made me about as fluent in Vegimalese as anyone on earth.