Goals Archives - Lazy Man and Money

Creating My 2018 Goals and Plans

February 6, 2018 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

I was going to wait until April to post this, but I’m a little ahead of schedule. Seriously though, we’re in February which speaks volumes about my productivity. That’s why this might be the most important article that I write this year.

One thing I learned from 2017 is that I need structure.

I can point to a whole host of ~~excuses~~ reasons for why I didn’t get as much done as I wanted in 2017. I was forced to waste a lot of time on a frivolous lawsuit. I was the general care-giver to a 3 and 4 year old (more on that later). I spent a lot of time reading about politics, which seems to have taken over the general news cycle. Yada, yada, yada.

I’m not sure how much of those will change in 2018, but maybe with a list of steady goals, I can work more efficiently. Or at least I can focus on the things that are really important.

As my 7th grade math teacher had posted in one of those old dot-matrix printer banners, “Failure to plan is planning to fail.” So here’s an attempt at a plan. It might be ambitious, but why not “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” (Don’t worry, I think I got all the cliche quotes out of my system.)

Four Burners Theory

I once read something brilliant called the Four Burners Theory. Essentially you imagine your life is a stove with different burners. They represent family, friends, health, and work. The theory is that to “be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. To be really successful you have to cut off two.”

I don’t really believe it’s healthy to cut off any of those burners (especially the “health” one, because that would be the definition of unhealthy). I believe in trying to find a balance among them all. I know that I won’t be Julian Michaels (health) or Jeff Bezos (money), but I don’t need to be. I like to think you define successful yourself.

To make this analogy more difficult, none of these burners include any time for yourself. It is very important to read a book, watch a favorite show/movie, meditate, journal, or enjoy your favorite hobby. I had a conversation with my wife a few days ago about this very thing.

So, I’ve got to manage five burners, which is now two more than I should have to be successful.

Or in the words of Jack Johnson’s Subplots:

Well, how many subplots you got runnin’ around your mind?
The Gordian Knot must be cut through
Give me a red pen, I will simplify your story
Which part of yourself can you afford to lose?
And if you show me your list, then I will show you mine
Let’s kill off a character or two

Here’s my list. Anyone got a red pen? (Err, maybe just leave me comment at the end of this article.)

Productivity

Everyone says that they want to be more productive. It’s great to say it, but it’s hard to do it. It’s also difficult to measure.

This means that I’m going to have to revisit my old BeBetterNow Productivity Guide for some specific action items. While I would like to be more efficient with email, that’s far too broad for an action item. Instead here are a couple of specific items that I can focus on. Indirectly they’ll help with the email goal, but they aren’t about email at all.

I will be more organized and reduce clutter. I’ve let too much pile up over the last year or two. It’s time to reduce and simplify.
I will plan my most productive day. Again, having a plan is a good thing. Executing on it is better. That’s going to be the hard part.
I will stop fighting poor technology. In an effort to save money, I fought my old computer that had too little memory. It often meant waiting up to 30 seconds for a new Firefox tab to load. (I have a Firefox tab hoarding problem.) I have already solved this by buying a new computer. Now things are fast. I’ve found that I’m am more productive, but the real time spent is often in that browser tab, not just
I’m going to try to use the Pomodoro Technique. I think that structure will help me get more done.

Motivation

I need to revisit motivation. I don’t have a lot of competitive fire. After the Patriots’ impossible win in the AFC Championship game, Tom Brady said, “You need sparks. You need something to ignite you. When you’re losing, it’s which play are you going to make that’s going to kind incite everything?”

(The Patriots defense didn’t have those sparks in the Super Bowl, but let’s move on.)

I don’t have 66,000 screaming fans. I need to explore where I’m going to get those sparks from. Perhaps I’m too comfortable. I don’t have a burn the ships situation. I don’t know the exact historic root of that saying, but I guess some conquerors would burn the ships so they had nothing else to go back to. The result was that they had no choice but to win the fight.

That’s motivation, right? While I admire the dedication, as a father of a couple of boys, I won’t burn the ships. In fact, I’ll spend extra time extensively baby-proofing them.

Money

This is a blog about money, so I should probably have some firm money goals, right? Wrong.

I’ve learned that the Mr. Market does his thing. That is true for the stock and real estate markets. I’m a leaf on the wind. When I started writing this article (see the AFC reference above) the market was soaring high. In the last couple of days, it’s taken a nosedive.

It’s not wise to create a goal around something that I have zero control over. Instead, I’ll focus on the long-term, high-level goals. I may not have full control of these either, but at least I can steer my leaf in the wind in the right direction, right?

I’m putting my focus in 2018 into one thing:

Chart a Path for Energy Girl’s Retirement

I started this blog in 2006 in part because the love of my life could retire at 42 with her government pension. Would you want to work 23 more years than your spouse? Of course not!

Life takes its twists and turns and I’m fortunate to have started a family with her. Many of those 2006 thoughts are obsolete today.

She’s eligible to retire in 2019. I have about 15 months to put together a 13 year master plan. No pressure, right?

Does Facebook still allow you to have a status of “It’s complicated”? If so, that’s where this money goal is. It’s a long article on its own, but a lot of it boils down to balancing golden handcuffs and the value of your children’s education.

Aside from that, we have a bunch of short-term money things to think about. I need to flesh this out a bit, but fortunately, I can (and do) write about it publicly here.

Blog, Health, and Personal Growth Goals

I looked at these three things in the spreadsheet I’m making and I got overwhelmed with all the things I wanted to write on each of them. Here are some quick thoughts:

Blog – I’d like to grow blog traffic by 20% from the average of last year.

Health – I’d like to lose 10 pounds (ha ha, such a typical goal), but also get under 20% body fat. I don’t know if anyone really cares about my body type and goals related to it.

Personal Growth – I’d like to finally join Toastmasters and learn how to speak publicly. This is very difficult because the meetings don’t match up well with my wife’s work and taking care of the kids.

You may notice that everything starts with “I’d like.” This is an obvious problem with goal planning. I have a fear of committing to anything.

Travel/Fun

It looks like we’ll be going to Orlando twice this year. We had planned a Disney trip in March more than 6 months ago. Then FinCon threw us a curve by also being in Orlando on my son’s birthday. The only way to go is to bring the whole family with me. So that’s the plan.

We are also planning to go to Block Island as we do every year. It’s the town with the fewest people (~1000) in the smallest state. Christopher Walken and James Taylor have been known to hide out there.

If you ever want to get away from the hustle and bustle and connect with nature, Block Island is the place to be.

Finally, we’re also looking to do our annual Aruba trip at the timeshare my wife bought long, long ago.

Final Thoughts

It’s clear to me that I need to “zoom in” and make these definitive goals and break them into smaller pieces. I need to start somewhere and just typing this article helps me focus in on where and how.

I understand how ridiculous it is to write about goals for 2018 this late in the year. However, we’ve actually been working on an important one with cleaning and decluttering the office. By “we”, I mean mostly my wife. I’d like to say that we got a lot more accomplished in January, but we put a lot aside due to everyone in our house passing the flu around.

Do you have goals in 2018? Let me know in the comments!

Setting Goals for 2015

October 13, 2015 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

There’s some irony in sitting down to write this article on the morning of January 29th. I had hoped to have it done a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully that’s not an indication on how my goals are going to go this year.

I’ve thought long about how I set goals every year just to find give myself a D+ the following year. The fundamental problem I’ve been having is to look at things from a year-long perspective. There’s always next month to hit revenue goals. I can lose 5 pounds next month. I’m trying to do something a little new and set goals by the month. For example, there’s Setting Goals for January 2015.

I’m not going to take this space to set monthly goals though. It doesn’t make sense at the financial stage we are at. The closest thing I can think of is building up emergency fund, which we are making great strides in.

There are a couple of things that I want to shot at though:

The Big Net Worth Milestone

One of the biggest goals I have is hitting that big net worth milestone. I’m not saying what that is, but if you read the comments, you should be able to put it together. Much of our net worth is not liquid, tied up in real estate investment properties and retirement brokerage accounts. Unfortunately, I don’t control either the stock or real estate markets, so my influence is limited to what I can save. I have to leave the rest up to “the powers that be”.

I’m wondering if those “powers that be” are related to low oil prices. Though we probably will see a raise in interest rates this year, the low oil prices should help company’s profits. (Perhaps the strong dollar eats into those though.) If consumers save at the pump, they might have more money for rents and houses, driving the theoretical value of our investment properties up. We’ll see what happens. At any rate, it will be fun to look back on this paragraph a year from now and see how crazy it was.

This is a terrible goal to set due to the factors outside my control, but I also see it as a can’t lose situation. If I don’t achieve it, I won’t be disappointed because I’ve managed my expectations to start. If I do achieve, then it’s “unicorns, show ponies, ‘where’s the beef?’!!!”.

Business Goals I

I continue to try to keep Lazy Man and Money as a daily money journey diary sharing my favorite tips of what works for me, while looking out for consumers to keep them safe from scams. Currently too much of my income relies on this website. I would like to diversify. It’s not just for the purposes of where my income comes from, but to match my interests. There’s more to life than money, and I want to write about it.

I realize that not everyone is a fan of reading about MLM scams. They are interesting to me from an intellectual standpoint and the number of comments I get tell me the articles are extremely useful. Overall, I’d say that 95% of the population doesn’t care. Of the remaining 5%, I’d say that 99% of those people are wrapped up in the pyramid schemes and not open to me exposing the fraud.

With that I’d like to announce the launch of a new website: Be Better Now. It’s a self-improvement site with a few unique twists to set it apart from anything else I think you’ve seen. I’ll go into it in more detail later in a separate post. For now I suggest you go explore, but here’s why you’ll love Be Better Now.

(Side note: To all those MLMers, who send me death threats or simply try to sue me, your best move is to help me be extremely successful with Be Better Now. Time that I spend there is time that I am not spending exposing your pyramid schemes. Also, you do your “industry” no favors when you attack people who are trying to help others.)

With the two websites combined, I hope to have 800,000 visitors throughout the year. I’ll put a huge stretch goal at an even million. Like the net worth goal above, I control some things such as how good the content is. I don’t control other things, such as getting people to spread it or search engines to say: “This is really useful!” If I build it, will they come? I guess we’ll find out.

Business Goals II

(With the upcoming Super Bowl, I’m in a Roman Numeral mood.)

Aside from the obvious website businesses, I’m still the a full-time family CFO. This means that I’m focused on ways to save money such as shopping for bargains or refinancing mortgages. It even includes our foray into solar power.

There are a lot of these little thing that I do which stretch the money we make further.

The closest thing I have to a goal for this year is to finally sign up as a host at DogVacay and bring in some extra money outside of website stuff. I estimate that I could make about $30 a day or roughly around $2000 a year doing it around once a week. It isn’t huge money, but when you already know how to stretch a dollar, $2000 is more than you might think.

Everything Else

I have bunch of tiny goals, but nothing sweeping like the yearly ones. One example might be to drink at least 50% almond milk instead of my current milk. I’d like to investigate all those tiny health choices I can make and really cement them as habits that stick. Most of this is going to be covered at Be Better Now on a monthly basis.

When it comes time to look this over at the end of the year, I’ll go and grade those monthly goals and come up with a meta-analysis of how things went.

… And if all this doesn’t work, I’ll look to improve the process for next year. I view it as an evolutionary process.

Make a New Year’s Resolution for SMARTER Goals This Year

January 5, 2015 by Lazy Man 14 Comments

[Note: Every year, I republish this article around this time as I remind myself what’s really important in setting goals for the next year. It’s the last of the New Year re-run articles, I swear.]

It’s a few days into the new year… how are your New Year’s Resolutions coming along? Maybe I’m just Lazy (wait, I am), but I typically start having trouble with mine in the next few days… just as work starts getting really busy again. Right now, I’m enjoying my freshly born son (surprise!), trying to write articles in advance, get a new website off the ground, and hundred other things. That’s the problem with New Year’s resolutions, you get busy, put it off, and then it gets forgotten. The best way to stop that from happening this year is by being SMART with your goals.

SMART Goals

Many of you have heard about SMART goals in the past. It’s common in the realm of project management. SMART is simply an mnemonic device to help you remember the steps necessary to achieve your goals. Though some of the specific terms are debated (more on that later), one interpretation is that stands for:

Specific – What is the goal that I want to accomplish? Do I want to get my TPS reports submitted with cover sheets? Do I want to get that ~~T.G.I. Friday’s~~ Chotchkie’s waitress to go out with me? Or do you want to just want to get your red stapler back? (Note: Those goals won’t make sense unless you’ve seen Office Space)
Measurable – How do I measure the goal? Am I successful if I submit my TPS reports with cover sheets 80% of the time? Sounds like a good start. Having I gotten to know what the Chotchkie’s waitress likes? Am I successful if I find that she likes kung-fu? Yep.
Attainable – Is my goal reasonable? If my goal is learn to fly by flapping my arms, I need to go back to the drawing board. In this case it is possible to achieve the TPS report/coversheet goal… and contrary to what any logic in my head says, I guess it’s finding Jennifer Anistons working at Chotchkie’s and get them to go out with you is “attainable” (maybe this is where my Office Space analogy breaks down).
Relevant – Does the goal matter to you and your life? Do you really care about achieving the 80% TPS report/coversheet goal? No you don’t. Does going out with Chotchkie’s waitress matter? I’m going to go on a limb and say that in example it’s something worth caring about.
Time-bound – When do expect to reach this goal? Maybe you want to start out with getting your TPS Reports up to par for just a month… then raise it to a fiscal quarter… then go for the full year… Maybe you want to find out three things that the Chotchkie’s waitress likes in the next week.

I mentioned earlier that there are some variations to SMART goals. Some use Appropriate and Realistic instead of Attainable and Relevant. If you think about it, Appropriate is similar enough to Relevant, and Realistic is similar enough to Attainable that it doesn’t really matter. As long as you cover the main five concepts you are ready to tackle any goal… or are you?

SMARTER Goals

I’ve noticed some people are getting a little clever with SMART Goals and trying to make them even SMARTER Goals. They do this by adding a couple more steps such as

Exciting – Your goals should exciting you. I think this is captured in Relevant step mentioned above. This could be debated, but in the example above, I think it’s safe to say that Peter should be excited about the idea of taking Jennifer Aniston’s character on a date.
Recorded – You should record your progress at set intervals. I like this one. It’s a little like Measurable, but reminds you to go back and look at how you are doing

Another variation is:

Evaluate – Same concept as the recorded above – evaluate your goal progress on an on-going basis
Re-do – After evaluating your goal’s progress, go back and adjust your goal accordingly. Now that you know some things that the waitress likes, ask her to come over and watch the Kung-Fu marathon on channel 39.

SMARTEST Goals

I’m not going to revise the acronym again. Instead I’d like to add a couple of important tips for achieving your goals that I believe get lost in the steps above:

Assess Where You Start – Before you create a goal, you should assess where you stand currently. It will help you with various steps in the process.
Break them Down – You may need to break big goals into smaller ones. Some goals may seem break the “Attainable” guideline, but in smaller chunks it becomes easier. Paying off $100,000 of debt in a year may not be attainable to some people, but paying off $25,000 may be possible.
Get Some Motivating Help – How do I keep up with my goals? Here are some things that I’ve found helpful:
- StickK to Your Goals – This website can help make you accountable for not achieving your goals.
- Buddy System – If your goal is to go to the gym, get a buddy to hold yourself accountable. On days when you don’t feel like going, you will be less likely to give up because you don’t want to let your buddy down.
- Reminders – It can be easy to forget your goals. I would recommend setting up regular reminders on a regular basis on Google Calendar. If you are low-tech type, you could put a picture that reminds you of your goal on your bathroom mirror.

If you take just one thing away from this article, I hope it’s this: “Lazy Man has seen Office Space far too many times.”

Reviewing Goals for 2014

October 13, 2015 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

It seems like whenever I have a title with the words “review goals” things get ugly real quick. Unfortunately, I don’t think this will be an exception.

On Martin Luther King Day last year, I wrote an article about Setting Goals for 2014. Though it wasn’t related to any of my goals, I always like to bring the special day into focus. While it may not have been the most outrageous call of the year, in review of 2014 two sentences really caught my attention:

“I like to think if he was alive today, he’d be pleased at the progress. However, I wonder if he’d be focused on about how much work we still have to do.”

Personally 2014, was a year of transition just like 2013. When 2013 started, our first child was 3 month old and we moved from San Francisco to Boston. When 2014 started we had another boy (yes, they are close). So while we didn’t relocate, it was a transition to have another boy. I imagine that for the next 18 years (or more) there will be transitions related to their growth and development. The first few months of the year though were dedicated to help the new Mini Man with his transition to the world.

Though it might not seem like it due to my somewhat sporadic writing over the last couple of months, I wrote more in 2014 than I had in some time. I had this crazy theory that if wrote almost every day, the audience would grow and I’d get more income opportunities. It didn’t work out that way. Writing more simply lead to… writing more.

That’s not to say it didn’t have it highlights and lowlights. I wrote about quite a few more MLM companies and put a spotlight on their misinformation and disinformation. I have covered a couple dozen now in fairly extensive detail. I’ve also received tens of thousands of comments on them, without a single comment making any kind of legitimate case that they are a real business. It should be clear to any objective person that they are financial fraud, plan and simple.

One of lowlights of the year was when I wrote about Beachbody’s Shakeology scam after Side Hustle Nation’s interviewed a top distributor who claimed it wasn’t a pyramid scheme. This was despite admitting that she made much more via recruiting and that selling wasn’t viable… and that happens to be the very definition of a pyramid scheme according to the FTC’s guidelines. Part of the problem is that there’s little unbiased education on these pyramid schemes and people presume that the authorities would shut them down if they were illegal. Unfortunately, law enforcement and the legal process for doing so is too extensive and costly for the regulators’ limited time and budgets. It’s an ongoing problem. However, it is getting better with the attention that Herbalife has received and the ease of information on the Internet.

The other lowlight was when I received a death threat because of my article exposing a pyramid scheme. It seems clear that it was from one of their distributors as it originated from an IP address that was just outside the location of their Global Convention. You’d think that an American company would be against this kind of terrorism and put some investigation into it, but it didn’t happen. Perhaps that mentality is why their stock is in the tank, down 18% this year and 35% over two years.

Getting back my online income, it is very disappointing not to have increased it more. I had set a goal to make 50% more than 2013, noting that 50% of a small number isn’t as crazy as it seems. While there are still a few days left in the year, it is looking like I might make only about 5-10% more. I can sugar-coat it by saying that I’ve learned a lot and doing all the extra writing has helped me improve my skills. It’s all true, but the bottom line is that I need to do better.

We’ll try something new in 2015, but we’ll save that for an article about setting goals for 2015.

Another of my goals was to keep expenses down. In 2013 we put a lot of money into a new fence, a new deck, and central air conditioning in the house. In total that was around $30-40K. We took advantage of 0% interest financing for the central air, the last payment we made a few weeks ago. I’d like to say that we used the year to build up savings, but there were some major renovations to rental properties that made it feel like swimming upstream.

I learned that I need to do a better job of anticipating and amortizing the necessary rental property maintenance. The result of that is an Excel spreadsheet with all major expenses and an anticipated schedule of when they’ll likely come due. In addition to this we need to set up two bank accounts (even if virtual): one for rental property maintenance, and one for an emergency fund in the event that we can’t find tenants in a timely manner.

Getting back to keeping expenses down, perhaps out biggest move of this year is going solar. It’s a move that doesn’t pay off for 6-7 years, but after that we’ll reduce our necessary expenses by $125 a month on average. It’s almost like giving ourselves a $2000 raise every year and keeping $1500 after taxes.

My final goal was to lose two pounds to get under the 25 BMI mark. I had achieved it for most of the year, but there was some Aruba weight that thwarted the goal in late November. While I had a little time to recover, a stomach virus and the holidays made sure that wasn’t going to happen. The end result is that I’m now 6 pounds more than I was. Now I need to lose 8 pounds to get to the high end of where I want to be.

If I am being honest with myself, there’s a lot of room for improvement, particularly in the exercise area. While walking the dog is better than nothing, it’s not nearly enough.

Final Thoughts

On the surface, it feels like 2014 was a complete failure with regard to these goals. However, when I look deeper, I see many more bright spots. There were a lot of quality of life aspects that can’t be quantified here. I think we went to a dozen (free) concerts this summer. My wife and I got some kayak time in. There was the aforementioned long vacation in Aruba.

It is impossible to quantify spending this time with family. However, it is time when I’m not actively working to increase income. So what looks like a failure because it is quantifiable may not be so in reality.

Setting Goals for 2014

December 29, 2014 by Lazy Man 1 Comment

Last week, I took a look back to 2013 and this week, I’m taking a look forward to plan for 2014. Typically people set their goals for the year before now, but I needed a little extra time due to the new baby. I’m relieved to be done writing these posts, so I can live in the present.

I wanted to start off by presenting two quotes:

“I have a dream.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

“A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline.” – Harvey MacKay

Dr. King was great at many things, but his speaking stood out. While he may be most famous for his speech about dreams, there’s no doubt that he had a goal. Part of that goal was to get people to think race differently. I like to think if he was alive today, he’d be pleased at the progress. However, I wonder if he’d be focused on about how much work we still have to do.

When I looked back at 2013, it was mostly about transitioning back to the east coast and getting a hang of this father thing. All my financial goals went to the back-burner. When I could do something extremely time-sensitive that would make a great impact like refinance our home, I bumped it up the priority list. It was largely a successful year in terms of everything, except increasing income. In fact, I made less money than I did the previous year and it is far below what I used to make as a software engineer.

So with that in mind, I’m looking forward to my 2014 goals. Since I believe in making SMARTER Goals, I can’t add things that aren’t measurable like be the most awesome father ever. It’s not that I don’t have that as one of my goals, I just don’t currently know how to measure it.

Website Goal – It’s going to require me to boost traffic something like 30-50%, but I’m hoping to get to 4 million lifetime visitors on Lazy Man and Money. I’m almost up to 3.5 million as you can see in the right column. One of the things I saw emphasized at the annual Fincon meeting this past year is that traffic is essentially everything. I don’t personally subscribe to that. I’d rather have 15 people who actively comment on articles than 150 people who come by to read and then move on their day. The more engagement the more can learn from each others’ experiences.

Earnings Goal – I think you’d get punched in the face if you went around telling everyone that you’d like a 50% raise this year. Well that’s what I’m shooting for. Before you get those virtual fists flying though, in 2013, I made less than half than I did in 2011. A 50% raise now only brings me half way to where I once was. Something else to keep in mind… 50% of a small number is a lot easier than 50% of a large number.

Keep Expenses Down – This is one of those goals every year. Last year we did some home renovations and we have already planned for this year. Enough is enough though. I’d much rather redirect this money towards replenishing our cash stores and new investments. Sadly there will be no spa coming to the Lazy Man home this year. I’m not entirely sure how I’m going to measure this one. I think it’s going to be a combination of using Mint reporting and tracking my necessary spending as I used to in the past.

Lose At Least Two Pounds – That may seem like a funny goal, right? Well, I’m just one pound over the magical 25 Body Mass Index that makes me “overweight.” I’d like to lose more to give myself some cushion in the healthy range, but at least two pounds will put me where I was hoping to be.

I’ve got a couple more goals that I’m going to keep private for now. I hope this list wasn’t too boring. If so, bear with me, it will hopefully be more meaningful when I look back on it in early 2015.

Creating My 2018 Goals and Plans

Four Burners Theory