Lazy Man and Money

Adventures in Dallas (and how we saved money there)

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This past week, I took my first trip to Texas. I was kind of excited and kind of nervous as I didn’t know what to really expect. I have known only a couple of people from Texas. They wore shirts with slogans on them, like “There are two kinds of people… those who are from Texas and those who wish they were.” They had other shirts that stated that Texas should just move off and be its own country. I had never been a fan of country music (with the exception of Kenny Rogers’ Coward of the County) and have long theorized that the Country Music Television breaks millions of mute buttons on television remotes a year (the guys out there know what I’m talking about).

However, I have to say that I loved my trip to Texas. My fears of being outcast as an outsider were completely unfounded. Spending most of my life in New England, I had forgotten to account for one basic thing: southern hospitality. They say that everything is bigger in Texas. That saying has never been more true than when describing that hospitality. My wife and I just had to drop our jaws at the level of politeness.

For spending just a few days, we got a lot of “touristing” done. We were in the Dallas area for the most part, but drove up to Longview for a wedding. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Thanks to PT Money – I have to thank Phil Taylor for his article on frugal things to do in Dallas. It’s a very helpful list. I even sent him some e-mail about specific questions I had and he was happy to answer. The lesson here is that Phil rocks.
  • Fort Worth Stock Yards – This area is very much cut out of any Western that you’ve seen. What’s there to do there and how much does it cost? I’m glad you asked:
    • Cattle Drives – They have two cattle drives a day. We were fortunate to catch the first one at 11:30 as we did want to stay until the 4PM one. It was very cool and you can’t beat the price of free.
    • Riscky’s BBQ – A lot of people mentioned this as a great place for BBQ. It was decent, but didn’t knock my socks off. It certainly was not as good as Everett and Jones. However, $9 all-you-can-eat ribs is a great deal.
    • White Elephant Saloon – It’s a very authentic looking saloon, because that’s pretty much what it is. While it’s biggest claim to fame might be that Wyatt Earp drank there, younger folks might recognize it as the exterior of C.D.’s Bar and Grill from the television show Walker, Texas Ranger. The price of a pint of Bud Light there? A frugal $2.
    • Drink Dublin Dr. Pepper – Dr. Pepper is huge in Texas – because it was invented there. There’s an original formula using Imperial Pure Cane Sugar made in small qualities and still distributed locally. You can get an old school bottle of Dublin Dr. Pepper at a few shops around the Stock Yards for $1.50.
    • Much More – There are more things to do there, but we just didn’t fit it in. There’s a rodeo on Friday night, but we had to move on to Longview for a wedding on Thursday. There was a maze featured on the fifth season of The Amazing Race that you could go through, but I think it was $8 and we just didn’t feel up to it. There were some museums that were interesting to stroll through, but nothing that knocked my socks off like…
  • The Sixth Floor Museum – Peter King mentioned this a couple of weeks ago in his very popular football column. I didn’t think that I’d be that impressed, but I never wanted to leave. For those who don’t know, this is the site of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It’s turned into a museum not just of that horrific tragedy, but of Kennedy’s life. If you don’t openly cry, you have no humanity left in your soul. Interestingly one of most amazing things I saw was pretty well hidden on one of the walls. It was a quote by Kennedy the morning of his death:

    You know, if anyone wanted to kill the President, it wouldn’t be so difficult. All one would need was a high-powered rifle, a tall building, and wait for the opportune moment.

    Oddly, I could only find mention of this on this one Facebook page. How is it possible that only me and this one other person are the only people to mention it on the Internet?

    If you do nothing else in Dallas this would be my recommendation. It was well worth the $13.50 (or $11.50 with our military discount).

    In case you are wondering Las Vegas has the odds at about 85% that the Secret Service will be visiting my home in the next 30 minutes. Searching Google for all forms of “high-powered rifle” and “kill the President” will do that.

  • Restaurants to Eat at: – We stopped at quite a few places to eat along the way. I thought I’d write a little about each of the significant ones:
    • Wolfgang Puck’s Five Sixty – This is the signature restaurant in the Dallas Reunion Tower. (The Reunion Tower looks like a bigger version of New Year’s Ball in Times Square suspended on a smaller version of the Seattle Space Needle.) It rotates so you get a good view of the city while you eat. My wife says it must be 560ft high, because otherwise Mr. Puck failed his geometry class. We can’t figure out why else he would name it the 560 instead of the 360. The dinner there is quite expensive… the sushi appetizers were $18 for example. Most entrees were $40+. However, they have a happy hour at the bar from 5-7 where you can several drinks and appetizers for $5.60. We got out there with two drinks and three very small (but extremely good) Kobe beef sliders for around $20. The best part? You can time happy hour with the sunset and it’s fantastically romantic enough that you forget that you are being frugal.
    • Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse – A lot of people mentioned that I had to try this place out. I liked it better than Riscky’s, but it was still no Everett and Jones. It was about the same price as Riscky’s.
    • Whataburger – The aptly named fast-food restaurant is all around Texas. As a commenter mentioned we should try this place as well, we did. I was a little surprised by the pricey $7.14 combo meal for a double burger (the single burger looked small and I was really hungry. I was more surprised when this burger didn’t come with cheese. $7.14 for your signature burger and it doesn’t come with cheese? For a dollar or two more, I might as well go to Friday’s or Outback and sit down. Fortunately, the burger was extremely good. I liked my bite of my wife’s chicken sandwich as well. Still fast-food drive through for two people shouldn’t be over $15.
    • Gator’s Croc & Roc – When we got of the plane this was the first place we went to. Coming from California it was still 9PM for us and a good time for dinner. It was 11PM there and we were grateful to find an open place. I went for their “Ultimate Texas Grande Belt Buster Burger.” I love a challenge, I was hungry, and it was less than $10. It was a much better value than Whataburger. It was so big, I just focused on the meat an tossed the bread aside… no-need for filler.

      The most fun of the night though came when an off-duty (fairly attractive) waitress was hitting on a guy at the bar. They had obviously known each other from before the way she greeted him. I noticed her free up both hands by finishing up both of her drinks almost like Popeye would down two cans of spinach. I realized this could get interesting when I noticed the restaurant had grain alcohol on the menu. She went into a game of, “Let me show you my tattoos” with the gentleman. Somewhere along the line my wife heard her mention something about her boyfriend. Wouldn’t you know it, the boyfriend shows up not ten minutes later and it’s just the 7 of us at the bar (me, my wife, the bar tender, the cook, and the love triangle). Everyone took it outside, except my wife and I stayed there to eat. Somehow no punches were thrown. I figure the boyfriend realized that his girl was the instigator. Anyway, it was good drama at the start of our trip.

  • Hampton Inn Longview – Lastly, if you ever find yourself in Longview, TX (and I don’t know why you would), you can do a lot worse than stay at the new Hampton Inn on North Eastman Rd. As we checked in on Thursday, the people at the front desk were kind enough to inform us that celebrate guest appreciation with free beer, wine, and appetizers on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5:30 to 7:30 in the lobby. The wine was boxed Franzia and the beer was your choice of Bud Light, Miller Lite, and Coor’s Light in a can, but it was worth every penny. The appetizers were actually quite good and we ended up skipping dinner that night.
  • Three odd parts of our trip worth mentioning
    • Gator’s Croc and Roc – Just making sure you are paying attention…
    • Weird Toll Policy – When picked up our car rental, the place tried to see us a $32 package of pre-paid tolls. We declined saying that we don’t know what tolls we’ll use, but we’ll pay them as we come across them. The rental place pointed out that there are several highways that no longer take cash. You rack up fines if you don’t have a transponder with the appropriate money in it… and you rack them up fast as each checkpoint is a $25 fine.

      I can’t understand two things. 1) Why not have one cash lane or people from out of town, technophobes, or just people with malfunctioning equipment? 2) Why have a pre-payment for something that you might not use? It wasn’t clear if we were going to get refunded this money if we didn’t use it. I tried to ask that and the car rental place didn’t seem to understand that we didn’t want to give them money for a service that we didn’t intend to use, but we would pay for services that we actually use. Unfortunately that wasn’t presented as an option.

      As it turned out we found two restaurants that we wanted to go to, but couldn’t because of Dallas’ silly toll system. We tried to plan around back roads, but our GPS and Google Maps just gave us a response of “You can’t avoid that leg of your trip.”

      The car rental place that Dallas was going in this direction with all it’s toll roads. Note to Dallas: You’ll be sinking tourists who don’t have reasonable access to your transponder system.

    • Visiting NAS Fort Worth Joint Reserve Base – As part of the military, we went to check out the military base in Fort Worth. Sometimes you can some good deals on clothing. I did find a bright purple suit just like the Joker’s, but my wife refused to let me buy it. I thought it would be good value for $30, but she pointed out that it wouldn’t fit anyway. That wasn’t really the freaky part though. We found out about the Fort Hood shootings the next day just two hours from the base we were on.

Save Money by Turning Off Your Television?

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I love television. If I’m at home, there’s probably an 85% chance you’ll see the television on. While I like to think I watch educational programs and news, I do catch a fair amount of Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, and Family Guy. On the way to work yesterday, I heard something distressing… watching television can cost you money. I think I already knew this, but I didn’t want to face then and I’m not sure I want to face it now.

How much does watching television cost? If you believe Boston College sociologist Juliet Schor, an hour each week of television costs you $200 a year. The theory according to Juliet Schor? “Television viewing results in an upscaling of desire. And that in turn leads people to buy.” As CNN Money would have you believe, “a handful of sitcoms and a reality series or two can cost you more than a grand a year.”

It sounds like a good chunk of change, but let’s break that down a bit. The $200 a year number breaks down to $4 an hour of watching television (since it’s report was based on weeks). If I watch three hours of television each day, that’s still $12 more that I could have in my pocket. That’s $4,380 a year. Wow that’s a lot of money! It sounds a bit like too much money. I would buy an argument that watching television stops me making money, but I’m not sure it saves me $4,380. In fact, I would think that without television, I would incur new costs… my wife and I would go out to dinner. We’d go to the movies more. We might even spend time… gasp… at the mall. Sure a lot of the nights, we might stay home and read, play with the puppy, and do other activities like that. But a $40 dinner out once a week eliminates half the savings of not having a television. Going to 25 movies puts another dent into those savings.

When I think about it, I’m usually watching television much as one would use a radio… just listening. Much of the time, I’m doing other things that actually make money, such as writing articles for this website, researching future articles, or creating new website. I’m also chatting with friends and/or reading about sports online.

The CNN Money article finishes up with an interesting thought, “…stop watching shows centered on the lifestyles of the fictionally the rich. Try COPS or The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. No one ever looked at the PBS anchor and said, ‘I’ve got to get a blazer like that!'” I couldn’t find Juliet Schor original study, but I’d love to read the methodology behind it. What you watch may be very important. I watch a fair amount of sports. I do buy some sports merchandise, like the shirt if my team wins a championship, but that’s a purchase I’d make as a sports fan, not because I’m watching television. I don’t buy Ford F-150s nor do go out and get beer when the ads comes on.

I’d like to know how commercials factor into the equation. Does the fact that I watch much of my television on DVR while fast forwarding through the commercials make me less exposed? As an active personal finance blogger, am I less immune to this because I focus on frugality?

In the end, this may just be an average. It doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone applies to it equally. There will be people all over the spectrum. Just like how you might read that the average person in America has $800 dollars in credit card debt… it doesn’t mean that you do. The fact that you are reading this website probably means you are anything but average financially.

If you enjoyed this article, I have many more on how to save money.

Got Last-Minute, Frugal, Mother’s Day Tips? Win $25!

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I totally spaced on Mother’s Day this year. I had been running around my job, new dog, and this blog. That doesn’t give me a lot of time to research some frugal Mother’s Day Gifts. So I figured I’d run an experiment… a little contest. One person who leaves me a frugal, last-minute Mother’s Day gift or tip as a comment on this post will win $25 in the form of an Ebay or Amazon e-mail gift certificate (winner’s choice).

A few rules:

  1. The first idea is what counts – If you give me an idea that is a repeat of someone else’s, I can’t count it.
  2. Two tip ideas per person, please – I will give you credit for a maximum of two entries if you include two tips. If you have 3 or 5, feel free to pass them on… I just want everyone to have a chance to win.
  3. Please use a valid email – I can’t send you the prize if you don’t leave a valid e-mail.

Contest Ends on Thursday night at 11:59PM PT. I’ll announce a winner this weekend.

Financial Freedom in Five Years (and the Difference Between Rich and Wealthy)

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Below is a guest post from Early Retirement Extreme. As you might imagine from the title of his blog, he writes about extreme ways to retire early. This article serves as a good introduction to that philosophy. I encourage you to sign up for the Early Retirement Extreme RSS Feed.

Being wealthy means having lots of opportunities. It means that you can do whatever you want. You have connections to people, you know how to get things done, and you have all the resources to do so.

On the other hand, being rich merely means having a lot of money to spend. You can only be rich at a high level of income, and the only way for a rich person to accomplish anything is to pay for it. Obviously, paying for it makes the person less rich and therefore rich people have to work hard or eventually run out of money.

To make the distinction clear: You can make someone rich by giving them a lot of money, but there is nothing you can give to anyone to make them wealthy. Wealth only comes through your own effort.

Yet in our consumerist society, most people dream of being rich, or alternatively famous or powerful, although I suspect those are merely seen as short cuts to getting rich. Far fewer dream of being wealthy and even fewer dream of being wise. There exists now, in our society, a prevailing attitude that you can get something for nothing. Just witness the free lunch people expect in the stock market where anything below 10% APY is considered bad performance. Contrast this with the attitude of just two-three generations ago, where TANSTAAFL prevailed and successful money management was mainly about preserving principal rather than using money to magically make more money with no apparent effort.

No, you must give something to get something. In my experience as a blogger, the main points of resistance towards change, that is, where people argue the most that it is impossible for them to change, are their house, their driving habit, their food, and lately their cell phones. These are also the areas that make the biggest impacts on their life and prevent them from becoming wealthy.

Here’s a sure-fire way to achieve financial independence in a handful of years.


  1. Go to craigslist.org and click on housing and enter $200 minimum and $400 maximum in the search form. Pick something that lies so close to your work that you can walk or ride a bike there. Also make sure that this also holds for the nearest supermarket.
  2. This place will likely be smaller than what you are currently living in, so get rid of everything which does not fit and that you are not using anyway on freecycle.org — you might want to start this process early, since it is a lot harder to get rid of stuff than it is to buy it.
  3. Sell your car. You don’t need it anymore.
  4. Stop buying stuff. Make the stuff you already own last. Trust me, by the time you wear it out, you will be financially independent.
  5. Decrease your other running expenses. First, learn to cook. If you think of meat and cheese as treats you can easily stay under $100/month. For instance, I eat meat about once a week (There’s a reason they are at the top of the food pyramid along with candy). Drop superfluous insurance. Drop your expensive cell phone plan. Drop your cable TV.

Calculate your new monthly expense level (E) and compare it to your monthly after-tax income (I). Now, compute 25*E/(I-E). This is the number of years it takes you to reach financial independence).

Now this may seem harsh — especially the thing about selling your car, right? ;-) — and it is difficult when someone is completely inexperienced and used to spending money on everything and most people either say “that’s fine for you, but I could never do it” (think of the children!) while others try for a little while but then give up because it feels too challenging. It is in many ways like taking the bottle away from an alcoholic. He does not know either how he could possibly be happy without being inebriated. The non-alcoholics are just fine without getting drunk on a daily basis, but for the alcoholic getting through the emotional hangover of preconceptions and prejudices about life as a sober person is hard.

However, after about a year (Hey, I said it was not going to be quick and easy), an amazing personal transformation takes places. What always happens is that you will think of your new home as home rather than a sacrifice, much like when you move into a place with a nice premium dollar view yet after two weeks, you hardly look out of the windows anymore. Too, at that point you will be used to walking and biking everywhere that such simple “exercise” does not seem like a strenuous and boring labor (the average American only walks 400 yards a day). A year of not running down to the mall to buy a gadget every time there is a problem and the accumulated experience successfully finding ways to bodge and improvise solutions, and you will see new problems as challenges to be overcome with the resulting feeling of accomplishment. Conversely, having to buy anything will be seen for what it is, a failure to competently solve your own problem; buying new things will feel positively bad.

Many, who has initially seen such extreme frugality as deprivation, will come to see that consumerism is merely another form of deprivation aimed at reducing personal creativity. For instance, buying a chemically treated 4 hour log at the store and lighting it with a Bic lighter prevents you from exercising your skill in stacking up a fire with kiln, twigs, and real logs, which you may also have use a maul to split yourself, and starting it with a cotton ball dipped in vaseline; or learning that trick in the first place.

Hence, first, you become wealthy in terms of experience. Do not confuse experience with experiences. Experiences is typically something you buy for money like flying to Africa to observe a tiger or two, going to a concert, or eating something at a fancy restaurant, but all those are merely events. The experience I am talking about is akin to when one speaks of an experienced engineer or an experienced carpenter, when a lot of experience means that the person have seen and successfully solved a lot of problems and that he or she can be expected to produce quality work.

Once you have that kind of low-impact frugal experience, you can expect to live a quality life with far fewer expenses than a regular consumer. If you are still working and saving 75% of your paycheck, savings go up rapidly. This means that financial independence is achieved in short order. For instance, after 5 years I was able to cover all my expenses with interest and dividend income from my savings and investments. This significantly increased my freedom and opportunities. As I was no longer tied to my income, I decided to focus more time on things that were more meaningful and interesting to me rather than spending most of my time building my resume and concentrating on my career. Thanks to this I replaced my stressful salaried job with an hourly but equally well-paid high-skill job that I work at for about 15 hours a month; I blog for fun rather than income which also gives a lot of freedom in terms of posting schedules and advertising; I spend a lot of time on sports (about 5 times a week); and I now have the pleasure of working with (no longer for) people from a wide array of interesting fields.

Although being frugal is the best way to attain your financial freedom decision making also plays a big role. Be sure to educate yourself regarding all investments you choose to make. Annuity Straight Talk’s pros and cons of annuities is a great example of a site that helps its members make the right decision prior to any investment. This way of thinking will essential get you ahead on your path to financial freedom.

That is what I call wealth and there is no secret to it. Anyone can be wealthy, but not everyone can be rich.

Be sure to read more about How Jacob became Financially Independent in 5 Years.