How was your Fourth of July? We’re officially at the halfway point of the year. This is a great time to look back at those New Year’s Resolutions. You remember those, right?

Back in January, I made some New Year’s Resolutions and Goals for 2023. My plan was to give updates eight times a year – twice a quarter. This is my second update, so it looks like we’re going quarterly instead. We’re already off to a bumpy start – let’s see if it gets better.

Here’s my updated goal spreadsheet. It may be useful to refer back to this as you read the explanations below.

Lazy Man’s 2023 Goals and Resolutions

Money

Income: $46,209.42 (Goal: $90,000)

I made $98,000 in 2022 – much of it due to exploding demand for my dog boarding business. Everything went perfectly. I set the goal at $90,000 to give myself some wiggle room.

In addition to boarding dogs, I have this blog that makes some money. I also run customer relationship management for a small Silicon Valley tech startup.

It can be a lot, but most of the work is flexible and not too challenging. It gives me a lot of other time to do dishes, laundry, grocery shopping, and cook. I also shuttle the kids to/from school and after-school activities. Of course, my wife does a lot of this stuff too, but her work isn’t as flexible.

The math is easy at the halfway point. I’m on pace for a little more than $92,000. That’s perfect. Blogging isn’t doing too well, but the dog boarding business is going great.

Wife Retirement Savings: $20,000 (Goal $30,000)

My wife started the year looking to save another $30,000 to reach $100,000 to feel comfortable retiring. She could have retired for a few years now, but she wanted that extra security blanket.

Well, she got the big military promotion and is now looking to work at least three more years – maybe six. She says the work gets a lot easier with the promotion, so why not? It’s more money, and she likes the work, so I’m not going to argue. We were taking it year-to-year before, so it’s an upgrade to have the likelihood of a long-term plan.

We had a bunch of unexpected and extra expenses this year. I wasn’t sure if we could save this money. However, the dog boarding business has done so well lately that we’ve been able to mostly live off of it. My wife’s been able to deposit a few big checks into savings.

Estate Planning

I’ve been trying to create an estate plan for a long time. The big stumbling block is that the lawyers want our money situation in their format (every account, every share, etc.), and putting that on paper is very tedious.

I may need to give up and just give them a spreadsheet or some account totals. I could always print out my holdings via Empower or NewRetirement.

Before I get started on this, we need to finish our taxes for 2022. In my last report, I wrote, “Optimistically, I think [the taxes] could be done in June. That may be the best-case scenario, though.”

We spent a couple of days on taxes, and we’re just about ready to submit them to our tax people. Our taxes are complicated with two corporations, military stuff, and rental properties. We simplify them a little bit each year.

Insurance Review

We became very good friends with a great insurance agent about a year and a half ago. We should have done an insurance review with her before now.

We have most of our insurance with USAA, and my wife has access to that. I think I can only see one car insurance when I log in. We have a lot of different types of insurance, and we effectively have a significant financial “presence” in four states. Not all companies service each state.

I need my wife’s help with this one. She traveled for much of May and the start of June. We’re looking to catch up on this soon.

Business

Kid Wealth: 6,055 Page Views, 9 articles (Goal 50,000 PV, 75 articles)

Last year, I had 4,200 page views, and I’m on pace to TRIPLE that this year. However, that’s still quite a ways below fifty thousand page views. I would need something to go a little viral to get that many.

I haven’t been very motivated to work on Kid Wealth. I tried to hire someone on Upwork to help with Pinterest. I got fifty applications, and I spent hour after hour reviewing applications. By the time I picked the person and had started to onboard her, we had to go away on vacation. She had enough information to get started but didn’t do anything. She probably thinks I dropped the ball on it. I may have, but I hired her to take control of it. It doesn’t matter who is at fault – it’s not getting done.

I have quite a few ideas for articles. I really hope to get back to it soon. I’m a little more focused on dog boarding at the moment.

Content Audit: 1 Article (Goal: 15 Articles)

A content audit is a review and refresh of older articles on a website. Lazy Man and Money has over 2700 articles over 17 years of publishing. That’s a LOT of outdated articles.

For a couple of years, I wanted to go through some of my old articles and update them to make them more relevant for today. It takes some time to do the additional research and rewrite them.

I was able to create one article that was in the spirit of a content audit. I wrote about how to save money at McDonald’s, which incorporated some ideas that were “blasts from the past.” In other words, I included tips from older articles that don’t work nowadays from a historical perspective. I’m not sure if that part is useful, but I put all the current, relevant stuff at the beginning, so readers can get that information first.

Dog Boarding Website

I get most of my dog boarding business through Rover.com.

Rover takes a 15% commission, and it’s well-deserved when they bring me business. However, I’ve started getting more business through local connections. I have also learned that they charge dog owners an 11% fee. (When I was a dog owner, we were grandfathered in and didn’t have to pay this.)

In the end, Rover is getting 26% for their management fee. I need to have a website so people who come from local connections can book outside of the Rover system. That way, I can keep Rover’s 15% fee. (Customers will still save by avoiding Rover’s 11% fee.) That could mean as much as $10,000 a year for me.

Health

Lose Weight: 191 lbs, 25.4% body fat (Goal: 175lbs 24%)

This is trending in the wrong direction. I’m usually doing a lot better than these numbers. I think I’ve been catching up from the last vacation (see below).

With three jobs and everything else going on, I don’t have a lot of time to do extra exercise. I used to walk our dog a lot, but since he passed earlier this year, I just don’t get out as much. I could walk the dogs we board, but I never know how they are going to be on a leash. People are often surprised that I don’t walk dogs much. The dogs we board get a ton of exercise in the backyard playing with each other.

Health Wins: 120 (Goal: 360)

I wrote an Extreme Lazy Man’s Diet a couple of years ago. It’s really difficult to keep up with it consistently. However, picking one or two items a day isn’t bad.

My big “health win” is to start the day with a salad bowl of raw baby carrots and broccoli. I make it and put it on the counter. Then I pick at it over the next few hours as I’m doing stuff around the house. Aside from that, I’ve been trying to follow these healthy eating tips.

I haven’t been keeping track of my health wins which is a problem. If I track it, I’m sure I’ll grow the number. My 120 number is an estimate.

Dentist

I completed this one already this year. I needed to find a new dentist. Sounds easy, but it wasn’t. I’ve had a string of bad dentist situations.

Fortunately, I’ve found a great dentist, and I’ve been a few times already. I’ve got a couple more visits this month.

ADHD diagnosis: No Progress

I think I have ADHD. There’s a family history, and I feel like I have all the signs. Getting tested is difficult between dealing with insurance and doctor referrals.

I’ve made no progress on this. I told my primary care doctor about this, and she said that the health care system is terrible – especially in dealing with insurance.

Then she said I should get a colonoscopy. I said that I was fine with that. The colonoscopy department called twice when I wasn’t available to schedule a call. I was a jerk to the second person calling because I said that I’ve been trying to get ADHD testing for years. I shouldn’t have been a jerk, but I’m frustrated with the healthcare system.

I really don’t mind the colonoscopy. However, I can’t understand why they are putting so much more energy into a newly determined age guideline (colonoscopy) rather than something that is highly likely (ADHD).

Hobbies

My goal was to come up with hobbies. Lately, it seems all my hobbies have largely been related to work or parenting. Kid Wealth is a perfect example of a hobby (it might make $5 a month). I need to come up with some other stuff.

Below are my ideas. Unless noted, I’ve made zero progress on them.

Read Three “Fun” Books

I simply can’t seem to carve out time to read a book. If I had more time, I would write articles for Kid Wealth. This goal isn’t looking good.

Drone Flying

I took the kids to fly a drone! Actual progress! We went for about an hour. It was my first time taking the DJI Mavic Mini in the air.

The kids switched off on a $15 off-brand drone for a bit.

When I felt comfortable with it, I eased each of the kids into trying it for a bit. The DJI Mavic Mini is supposed to be 16+, but parent supervision goes a long way.

Guitar

When I published my goal for this earlier this year, I only wrote, “I want to,” before I must have gotten distracted by a shiny object. I published it just like that. I’d like to learn how to play a song.

I have made no progress in this at all. I haven’t even picked up a guitar.

Program in Python

Last year, I had this goal and didn’t make much progress. I want to create a “toy” app. It doesn’t have to be useful, but just something that gets me back to being the software engineer that I used to be.

I’ve made no progress in Python programming. After my last update, I brought the book with me on a trip and never opened it.

Family

Clean and Organize House

The painters and flooring people finished their work on our house in late January. We made good progress decluttering until our Earth Day Freecycle Event.

My wife traveled a lot in May, and I surprised her by doing a massive cleaning of the garage. It’s a big project, and I’d say it’s now about 50% done.

This has been a great year in cleaning and organizing the house. There’s always more to do, but it’s a big difference from the start of the year.

Travel

In March, we went on a big Southern California trip. We did Hollywood, Legoland, Disneyland, and Phoenix.

We always try to do an annual staycation at Block Island. This year we booked late and only got a couple of days. It was a good getaway, but it could have been longer. At least we’re only 6-7 weeks away from…

In late August, we’ll take some time off and go to New York City, American Dream, Hershey Park, and the Cartoon Network Hotel.

We booked our Aruba timeshare over Thanksgiving – when the kids have a break from school. The flights looked very expensive, but they are getting better. We’ll dig into this in a week or so.

The personal finance convention, FinCon, is in New Orleans in October. My wife and I love New Orleans. I’m happy to pull the kids out of school for a few days to go. There’s a lot of culture there. It will be a great field trip.

My wife is also planning a weekend in D.C. in October. Sounds like fun. We’ll add it and see where it goes.

Usually, we have 3-4 trips. It is looking like we’ll do five – maybe more.

Kids

With summer being here, the kids are living their best lives. They get to wake up at 8 AM instead of 6:30. That means they can stay up late. It’s great for them, but not so great for me. I have to shift my productivity time from the evening to the morning. It works well enough because the birds wake me up a 4:30. Don’t they know that we live on an island – not a farm?!?!

YouTube Channel (20 videos)

The kids made six videos, and they each have about ten views.

The goal isn’t to become YouTube stars. I view it as an extension of their school drama class. I want the kids to be comfortable in front of a camera, learn how to edit videos, and be able to present their ideas. If all that fails, they are being creative, which is always a great learning experience.

Sports

My nine-year-old (youngest) liked his baseball season and is signing on for the fall season. He was objectively terrible at the start because he had no idea how anything worked. However, he worked hard and improved a lot. He got good at drawing walks, which helped the team a lot. Now that the weather is nice, he’s taking surfing lessons and have a couple of them in already.

My ten-year-old has decided he’s not athletic, though he’s about a year away from being a black belt in karate. I want to work with him more this summer, practicing various sports. Some of his camps end early, so we should be able to get some time outside.

They finished another season of skiing/snowboarding lessons in the winter. They’re good enough now to go without lessons. I’m the one that needs lessons now.

Digital Art

My nine-year-old loves art. I spotted a deal on a Samsung S7 Tablet last year. It came with a great digital pen. I think learning how to use art software will be great for him.

I was watching a video on the S7 in our inflatable hot tub, and it ended up falling in. Many phones are rated to be waterproof, but I learned the hard way that tablets are not. RIP to my old S7. I bought a Samsung S6 Lite that was on sale and found the Android Sketchbook app. My son has had a lot of fun with that.

Computer Programming

Lego Robotics was light on computer programming. My ten-year-old wasn’t too excited to go each week, but he sure liked it when his team won at the end. My nine-year-old didn’t have much programming at his lower-level version.

Fortunately, the kids’ school added an after-school programming class. It’s just for grades 1-3, so only my nine-year-old qualified. It was Scratch instead of Python, as I was hoping.

I asked if I could watch the class, and the school agreed. They hired a company to do distance learning, and it was a disaster. I had to jump around through all six kids’ computers and keep them moving in the right direction. The school ended up asking me to come back for every class. I guess they hadn’t planned on having an active adult helping the kids in the room.

We had two really good students, and luckily my son was one of them. At times, I had him and the other student help the rest of their friends catch up.
I’m going to consider this done for now. I can’t seem to find another path to get them computer programming skills right now.

Specialty Camps

Both kids are in theater camp. My 10-year-old is acting, and my 9-year-old is doing stage crew. They love it! It’s well worth the high cost of summer camp.

Up next are cooking, art, animal care, and sailing. We’ve done these all in the past, and they’ve all been successful.

We added a week of “rackets camp,” where they learn tennis, pickleball, and squash.

Final Thoughts

It seems like a mixed bag at this point. I feel like we’re making good progress on the kids, some of the stuff money, and organizational stuff.

Much of the time I seem to be dealing with a different drama each day. One day it’s the air conditioner that’s broken. The next day it’s something else. When that’s not an issue, we usually find something interesting to do around town. We went on a whale watch recently. It was on one kids’ bucket list, so we just booked it and went.

It’s time to close out the 2022 goals. I have to get started on creating new goals while I have New Year energy and enthusiasm.

Overall, I enjoyed 2022. It was certainly better than 2020 and 2021. It’s a nice streak of things getting better for us for three straight years. I’m looking forward to keeping it going for 2023.

Each year is more than a spreadsheet of goals, but it’s always helpful to quantify goals and resolutions.

Here’s my updated spreadsheet:

Money Goals

(Click for Larger Image)

Make $70K of income

I finished the year with $98,633.82 in income. Dog boarding nearly doubled from 2021, which itself had doubled from the pre-pandemic years. So that’s 4x as much money as I made a few years ago. It’s come a long way since I decided it would be nice to earn a few extra hundred dollars a month.

Blogging and my part-time customer service gig were almost exactly what I had expected. Maybe in 2023, I’ll try to raise my blogging income, but I’m happy with how the customer service gig is working out.

Final Grade: A+

Save Money for Wife’s Retirement

I’m estimating this at $20,000. My wife and I sync up every month for a brief financial talk, but it hasn’t happened yet. We’ve had a good last few months, and I know she’s been socking away some cash. She’s super excited about the interest rates at banks. She’s got this crazy idea that we can live off the interest. In related news, I’m wondering who I married and spent the last 20 years with.

I probably won’t renew this goal for 2023. We sold a condo and invested most of it in conservative high-dividend ETFs and bonds. We keep leaving some in cash, which fulfills the purpose of this goal.

As for my wife’s retirement in general, she seems to waver each month on whether she wants to retire. Her regular work is going well, and she enjoys it. However, the chase for a promotion is like The Hunger Games. It’s not fun and stressful. I encourage her to slow down and just do the work she loves, but she’s super close to the promotion. I can’t explain it all here, but the military promotion may also be worth a million dollars when you factor in the increased pension.

The important thing is that she can retire when she wants. I think if the promotion comes through in June, she can coast doing work she enjoys. If not, I hope she finds something to retire to. It doesn’t have to earn a dime as long as she’s happy doing it.

Final Grade: B-

By traditional measures, this is a failure, only saving 20K of the 30k goal. However, she might be at 30k with her I-bonds. This goal became somewhat irrelevant in the middle of the year due to the condo sale.

Business Goals

Kid Wealth

I only got 9.5% of my goal to get 50,000 page views on my website on Kid Wealth. I had hoped for some media attention to find it and give it a boost. It didn’t happen. It’s not enough to just write good (well, decent) content and hope that the media promotes you. Nowadays, you need to go out and promote yourself to get that media attention. I’m too busy for that.

The good news is that more and more people are finding it. As long as it helps one person, it’s working. Traffic is growing about 12% a month, which is close to 4x traffic per year. That 5,000 page views could reasonably be 20,000 next year.

I had hoped to get 75 articles published, but I only got 64. At least I accomplished 85% of this goal.

Final Grade: B-

I’m being generous with my grades. I did a lot of other stuff with Kid Wealth that doesn’t show up on the spreadsheet. I redesigned the site, got the logo done, and hired a social media person. I need to hire a Pinterest person in 2023, but hopefully, I won’t have to do as much.

I think I would have had over 75 articles if the dog business wasn’t so busy.

Content Audit/Article Refresh

I’ve made no progress in refreshing articles for Lazy Man and Money. Writing articles for two blogs is a lot of work. It is hard to carve out the time to go back and refresh old articles. I thought I could do this as part of my regular writing, but it isn’t working.

This is a failure. I’m going to keep it around for next year. I think there are a lot of benefits if I can do this. I also have found a few articles that need refreshing, which will get me started. Sometimes momentum is everything.

Final Grade: F

Look into Dog Training

Earlier in the year, I looked very briefly into dog training. There are a hodge-podge group of certifications. It’s hard to find out which ones are useful.

I don’t think dog training makes sense. I think I would need one-on-one time with a dog, and I usually have a few dogs at the house. Maybe when my wife retires, she can be with the other dogs while I work to train one.

In the meantime, I found that there’s a dog and cat CPR class online through the Red Cross. That’s low-lying fruit. I think I could do it in a couple of hours. I should have gotten that done.

Final Grade: Incomplete

I’m giving myself an incomplete because I technically looked into dog training, but nothing has come from it.

Personal Goals

Lose Weight

I lost weight and got to 177 pounds and 23.8% body fat in May. However, I gained it back. No bueno.

I can get to 175 pounds again, but it’s WORK. When I was younger, I could just think about being a weight and get there. Getting older is tough. It’s not going to get easier. I need to be tougher.

Next year, I’ll add a goal where I spend a week doing 15 things from my extreme Lazy Man diet article each week.

Final Grade: D+

I came very close to touching the goal but didn’t keep it. I’m not giving myself a failing grade because I did get there for half a year.

Drink Less

I had several months where I barely drank. It went well. I like relaxing with some light beer, though. I’ve almost completely cut out mixed drinks. I only have wine on rare occasions like holidays or events when there isn’t another option.

Final Grade: C+

Make a Bucket List

I didn’t make any progress on this.

Final Grade: F

Programming with Python

Even though I bought Python Programming for Beginners: A Kid’s Guide to Coding Fundamentals (affiliate link) several months ago, I haven’t opened it. I purposely bought a book aimed at kids to share with them.

I wanted to program something easy with the kids, such as something that calculates random dice rolls. I’ll have to renew this one.

I got the kids using our Artie 3000 over the winter break. It’s a modern version of Seymour Papert’s Logo turtle – a robot from the 1960s that could draw based on simple commands. They worked with it a bit but lost interest in a couple of hours. The interface for coding with Artie is a little difficult.

Final Grade: D-

I at least did something, I guess.

Family Goals

Get Organized

For us, getting organized isn’t just getting the house in some kind of order but getting everything in good shape. At the beginning of the year, our ceiling had a leak, and we had to tear much of it up. It seems like something is always falling apart.

We made a lot of progress over the last year, but we still have a long way to go. We’re spending around $20,000 for new paint (the whole interior of the house) and carpet for the upstairs. The carpet we have is from the previous owners, so it’s at least ten years old. It isn’t designed well for dog boarding. Our new carpet is better. The painter is going to make a lot of the nicks from all the dogs, and the two kids look a lot better.

My wife also wants to hire a professional organizer. She found one, but this organizer charges $95 an hour. It’s $170 to even have her come out and look at the house. That’s paying someone a salary of nearly $200,000 a year, which seems like a lot for someone to organize stuff. I think I could organize a lot, but I don’t have the time and/or energy.

Nonetheless, I asked my wife if she could stay within a $2000 budget. This seems very reasonable from what I found online. I was worried that we’d spend the $170 only to find that the recommendation is another 100 hours of work or nearly $10,000. With the painting and carpeting, I want to limit how much more we spend on the house this year.

Final Grade: C+

Travel Four Times

We went to Puerto Rico in March. My wife and I had only been for one day on a layover before we had kids. With COVID, we weren’t sure about travel rules internationally, so this was a great way to get some international culture while staying in the United States.

We did our annual staycation in Block Island in June. It’s about a half-hour drive and another half-hour ferry.

Also, in June, we spent several days in New Hampshire. I wanted to go to a Jack Johnson concert. It’s a place my wife’s family often went on vacation, and we’ve been a couple of times. We finally got to take the kids to Santa’s Village, which is New England draw. We also spent some time at FunSpot.

In August, we went on a Disney cruise – our most extensive travel ever. We spent 17 days in Denmark, Scotland, Iceland, Norway, and England. I wrote two articles about it. Here’s the first. And here’s the second. I hadn’t traveled internationally much (outside of our Aruba timeshare) in my life, so this was huge for me. It was a great experience for the kids too.

Final Grade: A+

This is a good mix of travel for us. Disney was very expensive, though. At least we got a great price because we booked when they appeared to have cut prices due to COVID. The same trip now seems like it would be 40% more! Next time, we may go with Royal Caribbean to save some money.

Parenting Goals

Every year has its challenges, and 2022 was no different. It’s a tale as old as time, What’s the matter with kids these days?

I joke, but in general, they are good kids. Now at ages 9 and 10, they are just starting their spring semester. We’ll get their report cards in about a month and see how they did last year. They usually get top grades.

Kids’ YouTube Channel

We used the tripod I bought during Amazon Prime Day (affiliate link)! My 10-year-old created a Pokemon Scarlet and Violet walk-through. He did it all himself, and it is terrible. It’s only terrible because it was a first attempt, and he was winging it. We talked about a couple of things we could do next time, such as turning the phone sideways and zooming into the television instead of getting our whole living room in.

I then suggested that he look for a YouTube video on how to make good gaming YouTube videos. He loved the idea and learned a few more tricks. Future videos are going to be much better. The phase of learning something new when you get tremendous improvement is always fun.

Final Grade: C-

My plan with the YouTube Channel isn’t to make them YouTube stars. I think it’s useful for them to learn skills like acting and video editing. They always play around and make fantastic stories. They spent a morning writing a script. It’s like an unstructured drama class.

Drone Flying

We never got to fly any drones. Much like the YouTube Channel, flying drones isn’t all about flying drones themselves. It’s getting outside. We got outside a lot, though, so that’s a win even if we didn’t fly drones.

Final Grade: F

Computer Programming

My 10-year-old has soured on Lego Robotics. The other kids are REALLY into Legos; my son doesn’t match their enthusiasm. He mostly sits around and watches them.

We signed up for Lego robotics for my 9-year-old, and his age group doesn’t start until later in the month. He is really into Legos, so I think he’ll love it.

They each played with the Artie 3000 a little bit.

Final Grade: B-

I’m going to count this as both kids having done 20 hours of coding. It’s not great. I bet my kids would look at me funny if I asked them about an assignment operator, data types, or even how to do binary math. Some of that stuff can get complicated, so I’m joking, but only a bit.

Specialty Camps

We had great success with the camps this year. The 10-year-old loved theater camp, and we’ll do that again. He also loves cooking camp and the pet camp at the local animal shelter.

The 9-year-old loved sailing camp and discovered a love for surfing. He even got a surfboard for Christmas. He also enjoyed the pet camp.

I don’t know if we’ll try too many new things for 2023. While I would prefer that they do new stuff, I’m happy if they stick with some things they love.

Final Grade: A+

Final Thoughts

It seems like goals are either hit or miss. That’s okay. I intentionally planned a lot this past year.

One thing that I’ve learned over the years is that each year new things come up. You can make some plans in January, but even if you intend to follow them month after month, things change. Everyone had that happen with COVID. Individually, we each have various things that come up. I take whatever wins I can and adjust for next year.

We’re at the home stretch for the end of the year. At this point, there’s not much time to complete the remaining tasks. December always goes quickly with the holiday season in the second half of the month.

Since the last update in October, I’ve been busy with a lot of dog boarding. It’s my top job now. Often, when I have a meet and greet with a new dog owner, they say that I have their dream job. It’s got a lot of advantages, but it does have negatives too. There’s a lot of wear and tear on the house, and I’m effectively “on call” 24 hours a day.

Setting goals is useless if you don’t review them and check your progress.

So let’s check in on where I am now. As I write this, it is November 23rd. (I’m publishing it later than I’d like, but the data is from November 23rd.) About 90% of the year is over. So, I should be at about 90% of all the goals below.

Here’s my updated spreadsheet:

Money Goals

Make $70K of income

I’ve made $86,414 this year with about a month to go. The gains are all on the dog boarding side. Blogging and my part-time customer service gig have been almost exactly what I had expected.

Save Money for Wife’s Retirement

We took a step back in the Wife’s Retirement account. We’ve hired a painter to paint the house’s interior and fix all the nicks from the dogs. We are also getting new carpeting upstairs. So we dipped into reserves to write checks for deposits for that.

We did take a few steps forward with this, though:

1. We bought I-Bonds

   My wife bought $5,000, and I bought $10,000. We got the 9.62% interest rate for a bit. My wife probably could have purchased another $5,000, but her busy pharmacy life doesn’t always allow optimizing every financial move. TreasuryDirect.gov’s website is terrible and doesn’t make it very easy.

   This is a $15,000 that I didn’t count because it isn’t cash. However, it effectively serves much of the same purpose.

2. Moved money to high interest Savings

   My wife had a lot of cash from previous years’ savings earning only 0.1% interest in a local bank – over $50,000. We like to have money at a local bank. However, we don’t need that much hanging around. We opened a couple of accounts at Ally, now paying 3% interest. There was a bank bonus too. Essentially, we’ll make $1500 more in interest than we would at our local bank.

3. Condo Sale and Cash Cushion

   We sold a condo and have invested that money. A lot of it is in conservative high-dividend ETFs and bonds. We left some in cash and put that in an Ally account too. When I made this goal, we didn’t know we would sell the condo, but now we’ve got more cash and investments that pay us cash.

As this goal is written up, it looks like a failure. However, in spirit, I think we are doing much, much better in preparing for my wife’s retirement.

Business Goals

KidWealth.com

I’m at only 8% of my goal to get to 50,000 page views on KidWealth.com. That’s not good enough. It’s hard to predict when something may go viral, which usually brings an initial rush and then a trickle of repeat visitors. So far, nothing has gone the slightest bit viral, so it’s slow going.

However, traffic has been growing an average of 11.6% a month. If I continue that growth for the next year, I’d be “on pace” to have only 20,000 page views – less than half of this goal. I’m just pleased to see growth.

My other goal was to have 75 articles published by the end of the year. That’s roughly 1.5 a week. I’ve published 61 articles, or 81% of the goal. I won’t reach this goal, but I may get 90% there. I had to make many adjustments because the dog business was going so well.

Content Audit/Article Refresh

I’ve made no progress in refreshing articles for Lazy Man and Money. Writing articles for two blogs is a lot of work. It hard to carve out the time to go back and refresh old articles. I thought I could do this as part of my regular writing, but it isn’t working so far. If the dog boarding business slows down, I can revisit this.

This is a failure. I may keep it around for next year. I think there are a lot of benefits if I can do this.

Look into Dog Training

Earlier in the year, I looked very briefly into dog training. There are a hodge-podge group of certifications. It’s hard to find out which ones are useful. On further review, there’s not a lot of dog training I could do with the other stuff I have going on.

I found that there’s a dog and cat CPR class online through the Red Cross. That’s low-lying fruit. I think I could do it in a couple of hours. I just don’t have the time for it now.

Personal Goals

Lose Weight

I went in the wrong direction and have gained a few pounds. At least my body fat % is much better than it was in the last report. I’m running out of time to put it all together. Thanksgiving wasn’t helpful, and Christmas won’t be helpful, either. We’re currently cleaning out the pantry, and I’m finding that I’m trying to eat down a lot of food.

Next year, I’ll add a goal where I spend a week doing 15 things from my extreme Lazy Man diet article each week.

Drink Less

I’m over the number of drinks I was aiming for, but I’ve almost completely cut our wine and mixed drinks, except for rare occasions where there is nothing else. Light beer is a lot better.

Make a Bucket List

I didn’t make any progress on this.

Programming with Python

Even though I bought Python Programming for Beginners: A Kid’s Guide to Coding Fundamentals (affiliate link) several months ago, I haven’t opened it. I purposely bought a book aimed at kids to share with them.

I hoped my son’s Lego robotics would use Python, but they chose Scratch instead.

Family Goals

Get Organized

My wife is making great progress on this. We had a mouse in the basement that ate through some stuff and pooped on other stuff. It’s much easier to throw out the stuff you thought you liked when they are chewed and pooped on.

I’m not helping nearly enough. I need to sell some stuff, but I never seem to have the time to do it. I did try to sell a few large items on Nextdoor, such as some wooden pallets. So far, no luck. I may have to give them away. It’s a shame because many people would pay $100+ for them from the vendor (and I’m selling much less than that.)

Next year, I’ll make it a more concrete goal by trying to list 30-50 items and selling half.

Travel Four Times

In March, we completed our Puerto Rico trip. My kids and wife loved it, but I thought it was only okay. After we returned, we learned that our kids’ school was switching languages from French to Spanish. Maybe we’ll go back again.

We made our annual staycation-ish trip to Block Island for a few days in June. Soon after, we spent several days in New Hampshire. I wanted to go to a Jack Johnson concert. It’s a place we often vacation, so we did other stuff there, like Santa’s Village and Funspot. (If you are from MA or NH, you know.)

In August, we went on a Disney cruise – our most extensive travel ever. We were gone for 17 days to Denmark, Scotland, Iceland, Norway, and England. I had wanted to go to our Aruba timeshare in November, but it made sense to stick around a bit. We sold the week off and will use the money to pay the maintenance and have a little money left over.

We are looking to plan for 2023, but our dog is almost 14 now. It’s hard to know what his health might be like in four or eight months away.

Parenting Goals

The kids are close to finishing the fall semester. They got excellent reports at the parents’/teachers’ conference in November. We had one kid who had a lot of fall activities and one kid who had only a few. It’s going to switch a bit in the winter. It would be nice if it were consistent, but we don’t control the scheduling of the activities.

Kids’ YouTube Channel

The tripod I bought on Amazon’s second Prime Day is great, but it’s not getting used. We’re getting the room painted in January and can set up a better background for videos.

Drone Flying

I brought my DJI Mavic Mini to Block Island but never got it in the air. So far, I’ve only got it to hover in my living room for a few seconds. That took about an hour of learning how to set it up and about regulations and things like that.

I haven’t done anything with it since then. I thought about bringing it to Europe, but I’m glad I didn’t. I wouldn’t have gotten to use it much.

Now the weather is getting too cold, so I guess I’ll have to look into it in the spring.

Computer Programming

My recently 10-year-old is in the local Lego robotics group, and he flip-flops on whether he likes it. The other kids travel 30 miles or more to be a part of it, so he’s not going to make any lasting friendships. They are also REALLY into Legos; my son doesn’t match their enthusiasm. They qualified for the state finals, and the competition was fun. We’ll see where it goes.

The 8-year-old loved his week of robotics camp. We signed up for Lego robotics for him too, but his age group isn’t starting until January. He loves Legos and building, so I don’t have many concerns about whether he’ll like it.

I will count this as both kids having done 20 hours of coding. When I was ten, I would have done that in a weekend. Nonetheless, this completes the year’s goal.

Specialty Camps

We had great success with the camps this year. The 10-year-old loved theater camp, and we’ll do that again. The 8-year-old loved sailing camp and discovered surfing. Surfing camps are challenging because they spring up months after you need to commit to the other camps.

We failed at getting the younger kid into cooking camp. We had to cancel it for the Disney cruise. Those are two sentences I never thought I’d type back to back. We’re in a good place with camp ideas for 2023.

Final Thoughts

I certainly dropped the ball on many items, but I knew it was an aggressive list. To do so well on income, keep Kid Wealth close to the goal, and travel so much, it has to be a win.

I see myself doing one more update with the final numbers after the end of the year. I’m not sure I’ll check off any new boxes, though. December will go by fast with holiday festivities.