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Lazy Man 2022 Goals (Final Results)

January 6, 2023 by Lazy Man 1 Comment

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.

Lazy Man 2022 Goals (November Update)

December 6, 2022 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

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:

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.
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.
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

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.

Lazy Man 2022 Goals (July Update)

July 19, 2022 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

July marks the middle of the year and we’re more than halfway though that. That means that I better have made some serious progress on my 2022 New Year’s goals/resolutions. My first update was in March and my last one was in May.

Setting goals feels useless if you don’t review them. Reviewing them now gives me time to refocus and adjust.

So let’s check in where I am now. As I write this, it is July 18th. About 54% of the year is over. I should be a little more than halfway done with all my goals.

Here’s my updated spreadsheet:

Money Goals

(Click for Larger Image)

Make $70K of income

The dog boarding business is going great as usually does in the summer. With my other income streams blogging, and a part-time customer service gig, I’m 68% toward my goal. It’s looking like I could get to $90,000 this year, but we have a big vacation coming up. We’ll see how it goes. So far the vacations haven’t derailed my income goals yet.

Save Money for Wife’s Retirement

We are stuck at only having put $5,000 away in my wife’s retirement. She’s back to maxing out her government TSP account (similar to a 401k), so she’s still saving money for retirement. However, this goal was about saving cash for use before then.

We’re spending a lot of money this year. We finished a basement and our vacation spending is high. This summer we’ve gone out to eat a lot, but some of that is due to local staycations.

We’ll likely miss this goal, but maybe we can at least make it close near the end of the year.

Business Goals

KidWealth.com

I’m at only 5% of my goal to get to 50,000 page views. That’s not good enough. It only takes one article to go viral though, so you never know. I was starting to see some good growth, but it started to trail off. In the summer, I’m very focused on the busy dog boarding season and the good weather outside. We also go on more vacations (two weeks in June!) and the kids are in camp for only 5 hours of the day.

My goal was to have 75 articles published by the end of the year. That’s roughly 1.5 a week. I’ve published 45 articles. That’s 60% of the way to my goal, which is a little ahead of where I need to be. I’m surprised because it feels like I’ve been writing less.

Recently, I posted an article that highlights much of the content that I’ve written for the first six months. Here’s what I know about teaching kids about money so far.

Content Audit/Article Refresh

I’ve made no progress in refreshing articles for Lazy Man and Money. Creating content for two blogs is a lot of work. I don’t see having the time to go back and rewrite old articles too.

Look into Dog Training

Earlier in the year, I looked very briefly into dog training. It seems there are a hodge-podge group of certifications. It’s hard to find out which ones are useful. I suppose I could do the very easiest ones that seem a little like window dressing and add them to my dog boarding profile. I’m not too excited by that idea and right now the dog boarding is going well enough without it. If I were to train some of the dogs that I’m boarding, I wouldn’t have any time left to blog.

I think I’ll have to pass on this for now.

Personal Goals

Lose Weight

My last update was great and losing 13 pounds left me with only 4 left. However, the vacation set me back and I gained 6 pounds back. It’s hard on vacation because I don’t want to control my eating much. I also don’t have the good habits that I formed at home.

I will need to refocus, but even if I lose weight now, I’ll likely put it on by September. I’ll explain why in the vacation update below.

Drink Less

Over the last couple of months, I added around 50 alcoholic drinks. Almost all of them are light beers with little alcohol and calories. While on vacation, it’s easier to have a drink. I also like to have a beer in the inflatable hot tub at night. It’s a great way to relax from a busy day.

My goal was to limit drinking to 5 a month and I’m way over that. Overall though, I’m far under what I have been and I generally feel healthier and happier.

Make a Bucket List

I made no progress on my bucket list. I didn’t even look at it.

However, I put a lot of effort into helping the kids with theirs. After a few rounds of revisions, it’s looking good. You can read more about how I went : Making a “Things I Like” list for kids.

One takeaway: Next year we should leave a week free in the summer with no camps and no travel. I feel like we are overscheduled, so there’s no flexibility to add a fun day in-between.

Programming with Python

I was going to order this Python Programming for Beginners: A Kid’s Guide to Coding Fundamentals on Prime Day, but it wasn’t any cheaper. It seems that Python for Kids: A Playful Introduction To Programming is a highly-rated book along the same lines. I would pick a book aimed at kids because I could then pass it on to them when I’m done.

Family Goals

Get Organized

I’m not making much progress in this one. My wife organized a yard sale. I didn’t end up helping too much because I was focused on the dog boarding. We didn’t get a lot of traffic, but we sold a few items. We’ll need to run a few more.

I posted my first item on Nextdoor a few days ago, but I have no takers yet. It’s a big set of wooden pallets that we inherited when we bought our house. So far there are no bites. They take up a lot of space, so if I can move them to a new home, the garage will look a lot cleaner.

I haven’t been pulling my weight here, so I’m going to give myself a bad grade, but thanks to my wife, we’re doing okay in this area.

Travel Four Times

In March we completed our Puerto Rico trip. Everyone in the family loved it, while I thought it was just kind of okay. After we got back we learned that our kids’ school is switching languages from French to Spanish. Looks like we’ll be going back more often.

In June, we went to Block Island and New Hampshire as I mentioned in my last passive income update.

We booked a European Disney Cruise in August. It’s a bucket list life event. I have only been to Europe once and it was around 20 years ago. I’m not a big travel person, but this has something for everyone. The kids will be in the ultimate heaven with nothing, but an overload of fun. My wife is excited to visit all the different countries. I’m a little excited by both, but mostly just happy that everyone else is happy.

The downside is that Disney Cruises are very expensive. That’s one reason why aren’t saving as much cash lately. In addition to that, there’s going to be so much free food around all the time, so I will likely be very behind on my weight loss goals by the next update.

That would be our fourth travel, but we might also travel in November around Thanksgiving. Maybe we won’t because the Disney Cruise counts as at least two normal vacations.

Parenting Goals

The kids got their final report cards and they were awesome. They’ve always done well, but this seemed better than usual.

YouTube Channel

We’ve done nothing in this area. We haven’t even uploaded a bad video. Our 9-year-old finished theater camp and loved it, so maybe that will be a springboard to getting them to work on this.

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.

Computer Programming

My 8-year-old is doing the Lego camp that the 9-year-old loved last year. He’s loving it. I signed them up for the local Lego robotics group that starts in September. I’m going to volunteer to be a coach, but as you can tell from many items on this list, I’m perpetually busy.

This may not be full-on computer programming, but it’s a start and the kids are interested in it.

Specialty Camps

We’re about 40% through the summer camps and so far they’ve been a great success. The only blemish so far is that the first day of sailing camp hasn’t gone well with the older kid. That’s the camp that I picked. He has a few friends in the camp, so I thought that would be helpful. Our area, Newport, RI, is a big sailing city, so it makes sense to have some basic sailing knowledge. Sometimes new experiences don’t work out, but you have to give them a fair shot.

Final Thoughts

Once again, there were a lot of things that came back with “no progress”. However, I made big progress on the items that are “work hard, play hard”. The business and family goals are good, so minor things like not flying a drone very often seem petty.

Lazy Man 2022 Goals (May Update)

May 9, 2022 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

It’s May and it has been a while since I checked in on my 2022 New Year’s goals/resolutions. My first update was in March 2022. I made some decent progress on many of them. Setting goals is useless if you don’t review them. Reviewing them now gives me time to refocus and adjust.

So let’s check-in where I am now. As I write this, it is May 8th. About 34.8% of the year is over. That’s close enough to 1/3rd, right? So I should be about 1/3rd of the way through my goals.

Here’s my updated spreadsheet:

Money Goals

Make $70K of income

My income goals are going quite well. I didn’t expect dog boarding to continue to do as well as it has. It seems the only thing that slows down the business is when we actually go on vacation. We took a couple of weeks off in March to go to Puerto Rico and we’ll do it again in June to do some local traveling.

The $26,116.78 comes from blogging, dog boarding and a freelance customer service job that I do. This includes the slow months of January and February. The summer months are usually my best earning months, so maybe $85,000 is possible.

Save Money for Wife’s Retirement

Since my income is doing well, we’ve been able to put $5,000 away for my wife’s retirement. I had hoped to put in more, but during the first quarter of the year we were paying off the bill for our finished basement. In February, be booked travel. In March, we had a bunch of summer camp bills hit. In April, we wrote some checks to save in our Roth IRAs instead of in this account.

This goal might end up being moot. My wife may not be retiring soon as she started a new position at the beginning of the year. Secondly, we’re selling a rental property condo, which would close out this goal quickly.

Business Goals

KidWealth.com

I’m only about 3.5% of the way to my goal to 50,000 page views this year. That’s not great, but I am seeing growth every week. The 50,000 number depends on getting a decent media mention that will bring a couple of thousand of people at once and hope that a few hundred stick around on a regular basis.

Recently, I put a real home page together (instead of just the latest blog posts) and I’m organizing the information to hopefully make it easier for readers to navigate to just the right information to help their kids become financially literate.

My goal was to have 75 articles published by the end of the year. That’s roughly 1.5 a week. I’ve gotten 27 articles published. That’s 36% of the way to my goal, which is just about exactly where I need to be. I could be hard to hit this goal as I’ve “cheated” a bit and used some articles that I already had written for Lazy Man and Money.

Content Audit/Article Refresh

I’ve made no progress in refreshing articles for Lazy Man and Money. Creating content for two blogs is a lot of work. I don’t see having the time to go back and rewrite old articles too.

Look into Dog Training

I looked very briefly into dog training. It seems there are a hodge-podge group of certifications. It’s hard to find out which ones are useful. I suppose I could do the very easiest ones that seem a little like window dressing and add them to my dog boarding profile. I’m not too excited by that idea and right now the dog boarding is going well enough without it. If I were to train some of the dogs that I’m boarding, I wouldn’t have any time left to blog.

Personal Goals

Lose Weight

I’ve lost about 13 pounds this year. I’ve never consistently tried to lose weight, but for some reason it’s sticking now. We’ve been going out to eat a lot less than in the past. When we do, I try to eat only half my meal. Even then it sets me back about a day’s worth of progress.

Since the last update, I’ve only lost 3 pounds. I plateaued for over a month. It’s only in the last week that my weight has dropped around a half pound each day.

I’ve got about 4 pounds left to get to my goal. It seems reasonable.

My body fat percentage started the year at around 27.5 and it is now around 23.8%. That’s great progress. I’ve gotten it as low as 23.5%.

I met with my doctor about a week ago and she said that I’m doing great. She said that I could try to go off the blood pressure medication as I’m fine. She also said that cholesterol levels were looking great. The odd thing is that I’m not doing too much differently – just a little more vegetables and a low-carb omelet a few days a week for breakfast.

Drink Less

I drank about 10 alcoholic drinks since the last update. When we got to Puerto Rico there was a “welcome wine” as we checked in. They also had a welcome reception for Marriott Elite members. Another time, my wife said, “Four drinks: beer, diet coke, and two apple juices” and they ended up giving us four beers and the other drinks. I chalk it up to the language barrier though my wife’s Spanish is very good. Nonetheless, the beers were a dollar, so we ended up just bringing them back to the hotel room.

We went to an April Fools’ Day party (everyone please steal this idea – it’s a lot of fun) where I had a few more drinks. At restaurants, I’ll usually get a Diet Coke, but I had a beer on a recent date night. And that’s about it for a couple of months.

Perhaps, just maybe, not drinking has helped with the health gains in the previous section?

Make a Bucket List

I made no progress on my bucket list. I didn’t even look at it.

Programming with Python

I made no progress in looking at Python. I had gotten a book from the library, but I barely cracked it. I will probably buy the book – programming Python for kids ages 10-14. I just need to knock off the programming rust, but this book would be perfect for my kids.

Family Goals

Get Organized

Once again my wife is the hero here. She lead a city-wide freecycle event as a community service event for the Boy Scouts. Dozens of people dropped off stuff they didn’t want and picked up other people’s trash and made it their own treasure.

We got rid of a bunch of stuff. However, we got a little bit of stuff back. One item was a flat-panel television from 2010 – the cheapest one that Samsung made. It’s 42 inches, but it works fine and is perfect in our basement. I hooked up a Roku and the kids can watch a lot of things. I need more of those 10-minute solutions in my life.

I also need to learn how to sell items on Facebook marketplace. If I can do that, I can declutter a lot of the garage. I’m sure we could move a lot of stuff cheap.

Travel Four Times

We completed our Puerto Rico trip. Everyone in the family loved it, while I thought it was just kind of okay. After we got back we learned that our kids’ school is switching languages from French to Spanish, so maybe we’ll go more often.

We’ve booked Block Island and New Hampshire in June. They are two separate trips, but around the same time for various schedule reasons. In late August we have been thinking of a Disney cruise with an England trip. It would be awesome, but I have FinCon in early September, so I’m worried about taking all that time off just while the kids are getting back to school. We have some friends interested in going to Hershey Park with us. We’ve been to Hershey Park a lot, so this is easier for us. We don’t have to plan as much and we can do a few things along the way. The kids have learned about the Statue of Liberty in school and that could be a stop on the way.

Finally, we may be doing Aruba in November. The school changed the vacation to make the entire week of Thanksgiving a vacation. Unfortunately that’s one of the few times we get to see our family. Also, flying around Thanksgiving is super expensive.

Parenting Goals

We had the kids in too many things. We started the year in skiing and snowboarding, but for the last few months we had karate, baseball, soccer, drums, and Boy Scouts. All the sports were a couple of days a week. We paused karate for baseball and soccer seasons because it was too much.

YouTube Channel

We’ve done nothing in this area. We haven’t even put up a bad video. I remind the kids and they get super excited about it, but then they are onto the next thing.

Drone Flying

The weather is just getting good for flying drones. I know this is kind of a silly parenting goal, but it’s a substitute to just getting out and doing something. We could fly kites or something like that and I’d count that. We had some snow earlier this year and we went sledding. Next year, I’ll try to change this up to make it more generic.

For now the kids will just have to stay addicted to video games – LOL.

Computer Programming

I got them started with Tynker.com a bit last year. They didn’t love it. I am trying to set it up with Minecraft which they like. Maybe with my Python plan above, I can get them involved in that.

They’ve each looked at a computer programming book, so I’ll take what I can get for now.

The best chance is a local Lego robotics group, but it doesn’t start back up until September. I’m trying to prioritize that over all the other stuff, but it’s going to be tough.

Specialty Camps

We finished up signing up for summer camps. Summer camps are expensive. We’ve got sailing, veterinarian camp, and cooking camps booked. (Sailing is such a Rhode Island thing.) My older kid is starting theater camp while my younger one has a series of art, Lego, and maker camps. They are very excited about having camps in things that they love to do.

Final Thoughts

I suppose it was a successful couple of months? There are a lot of things that went into the “no progress” category, but in all the major categories we’ve got some good progress. I need to work more on the personal goals, but I’m enjoying building Kid Wealth right now, so who needs a bucket list?

2022 Goals and Resolutions

February 7, 2022 by Lazy Man 6 Comments

Back when all my little goals seemed so important
Every pot of gold fill and full of distortion
Heaven was a place still in space not in motion
But soon
I Got You
I got everything
I Got You
I don’t need nothing more than you
I got everything
I Got You
– “I Got You” by Jack Johnson

I know it’s late to create goals for 2022. We’re already about 1/10th through it. Like the Jack Johnson quote above, I used to focus on my “all so important” goals. Now, I’m pulling back a little bit. Goals can be still important, but the top goal is to be happy with the ones you love.

We’re still dealing with a pandemic and there’s a lot of stress for many people out there. It’s okay to focus on living. As Buffy the Vampire Slayer once said, “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.”

With those two big acknowledgments out in the open, I still think it’s worth it to make some goals. I’m going to try to make them smart goals, but think I’ll miss with a few. I did well completing many of my goals last year, so I’m going to try to build on that success.

If you already have goals, this is a good time to renew those New Year Resolutions. Early February is prime time for people to start to fall off the wagon.

Before we get started here’s my goal’s spreadsheet for this year. It’s a lot easier to have a spreadsheet than it is to go back and read this article. It’ll also help you follow along:

Money Goals

Make $70K of income

Last year, I wanted to make $50,000 with a stretch goal of $60,000. That was good because I didn’t know if travel would ever open up and I could make money boarding dogs. Well, with vaccines it opened up and I ended up making about 3x more than I usually do – in only about 8 months. I ended up making $75,000.

This year, I may not do as well. It’s started better, but I lost one of my freelance clients late last year. I don’t know if I want to do all that dog boarding this year. My part-time customer service position pays a set amount and I don’t see that changing any time soon (unless I lose the job).

Save Money for Wife’s Retirement

My wife was very certain she was going to retire last year. Then she got a new job with an easy road to a promotion that she likes. It’s a lot less stressful too. So she’s going to give this a year or two and see how it goes.

Last year we were trying to save $100K for my wife to feel comfortable with retiring. We’d still have my income above, but it’s irregular. We’d also have her pension, which would be around $65,000 minus some insurance we’ll buy so that I’ll get the pension if she dies. It’s a good situation, but we aren’t mortgage-free yet and we have 3 investment properties that aren’t mortgage-free either. Our kids go to a great private school, so we’ve got a lot of expenses.

We were able to save $30K last year and that’s our goal for this year. It would get us to $85,000 in savings. Maybe we’ll be able to save some more and safely invest some. Could that get us an extra $15,000? Probably not, but maybe it would get us very close. I have some other money squirreled away (she knows about it) that could also bridge the gap.

Business Goals

KidWealth.com

I want to get 50,000 page views to Kid Wealth this year. I have about 660 now, so I’ve got a long way to go. It’s okay, I’ve just started. I don’t know if 50,000 is a good number or not. Sometimes it’s tough to get a single view. Sometimes a big media outlet links to you and there’s a big flood of thousands of page views.

I also want to get 75 articles published. I think that’s a lot I’ve only published 7 articles right now and I’m hoping to get to 80.

These are going to be difficult goals. I’m still going to be posting here along with the dog boarding. If you have kids, I hope you’ll check it out. There’s no advertising and I worked hard to make sure that the pages load very fast and look a lot better than what you see here at Lazy Man and Money. Sometimes a fresh clean slate produces great results.

Content Audit/Article Refresh

I want to go through 15 old articles and refresh them for 2022. It’s a lot of work to refresh some of my old articles. They are that bad. I often write about current events or my life and it’s hard to take that view from 2007 and put it in a 2022 context. However, when I can do it, the articles are very good and helpful for readers.

Look into Dog Training

I’m not sure if I want to go into dog training. I usually like to board dogs that are well-trained already. However, this would be a good way to make some more money. Of course, this would take more time – time that I couldn’t spend blogging. However, maybe I could charge higher rates and host fewer dogs if my clients know that they are getting someone who has a professional dog training certification.

As you can tell, I’m not very committed to this. That’s not a great sign of a goal.

Personal Goals

Lose Weight

I had gained a “Pandemic 15” and my goal last year was to lose it. I was at 192 pounds and that’s not great. I had gotten it down to 186, but a stressful Christmas came and I ended up back around 192. The good news is that the first month of January brought it back to around 185. So now I only have 7 pounds of that “Pandemic 15” left.

My goal will be to lose another 10 pounds. That would get me to a round number of 175. That BMI would still be 25.8 – not great. However, my body fat percentage is bordering on the acceptable range. It was as high as 28%, but now it’s around 25%.

I’m going to try to lose those 10 pounds by eating more healthy wraps. I’ve been eating these Tumaro’s Wraps with some lettuce, tomato, salami, deli chicken, cheese, some roasted red peppers, and banana peppers. It’s good and it seems to be working, so I’ll stick to it. Unfortunately, it’s probably too salty for what I should be eating.

I’ll also try to do at least a couple of things from my extreme Lazy Man Diet. The diet is too extreme to stick to long-term, but I should be able to incorporate some of the things.

To get to my goal, I’ll need to add more exercise than walking my dog… especially weight training and cardio.

Drink Less

This should really be “drink zero”, but I don’t know if I can do that. We’ll see how it goes. I’m only a few days into coming up with this idea, but I feel strongly about it.

Make a Bucket List

I worked on a bucket list last year, but I don’t think it was very good. I’ve been reading about making a bucket list for the next five years. That sounds more manageable. I think it would include a lot of travel, but that’s still a little uncertain now. I’ve also never been fond of traveling. Of course, this also directly works against my dog boarding goals – unless I build a credible dog boarding robot.

As part of this, I’ll explore making a dream board. That will get me to the dangerously close place of scrapbooking. Now I’m starting to understand why I always put this off.

Programming with Python

I want to get back into programming, even if it’s just to make stupid little programs for myself. For example, once upon a time, I could have coded Wordle. I bet I could still do it, but it would take me a long time to get a development environment set up and organize all the logic.

While my main motivation to get back into programming is for my selfishness, it would be helpful to do it, so I could get the kids set up with something. That’s why I’m going to choose Python to get started in this. Python wasn’t a big programming language until I started to stop coding, so it would be new to me. It’s also good for helping kids learn real coding, not just moving visual logic blocks on a screen.

This has been a tough goal because I’m always pulled in a lot of different directions. Right now, I’m trying to finish this post in time to get it published before it gets too late on Monday. I also have to start the slow cooker for dinner tonight. There are some trouble tickets I have to do for my customer support job. KidWealth also needs a new article. So while I’m very motivated to dig into Python programming, I’ve got to stop before I give myself a panic attack.

Family Goals

Get Organized

This isn’t going to be a SMART Goal because I don’t know how to quantify success with this. My wife has gotten an organizer to come to the house once for an hour and we made a lot of progress. Then the kids and I got COVID and we had to put it on pause. After finishing the basement last year, we’ve got a lot of clean-up to do. It’s going to be tough to fit this one in.

Travel Four Times

Last year my wife wanted to go on a European cruise. That wasn’t going to happen in 2021 and it isn’t matching up with our 2022 plans. I’ll see if she finds anything she likes for the kids’ March vacation in 2023.

This year, we are going to Puerto Rico in March. I’m very excited. I’ve only been there for one day on a cruise layover and it wasn’t enough. It has fewer COVID travel issues for us because it is part of the United States. However, it has its own culture. As much I’m going to enjoy it myself, I love getting the kids some exposure to a new culture. They’ve never been anywhere where Spanish was a major language.

For one of the other trips we’ll go to Block Island – a staycation we do every year. That’s great for getting away from electronics and hiking in nature.

For another trip, we’ll go to Hershey Park and the Cartoon Network hotel. We try to get to Hershey every year and the kids enjoyed the Cartoon Network hotel last year. My wife enjoyed Amish country. I enjoyed everyone being happy.

Our last trip is up in the air. I’m hoping to go to Aruba, but we weren’t able to book a school-friendly week with our timeshare this year. We can sell our week and buy another week on an exchange without too much loss, but my wife would like to go somewhere else. I’m okay with somewhere else as long as it’s warm and relaxing. I need a break from the New England cold around November/December to get me through to next spring. We didn’t have that this year and I can feel the difference.

Parenting Goals

It’s hard to come up with plans for the kids. Their interests are always changing. The things we can do during COVID keep changing as well. We’ll have to play it by ear. That said, I think we can try a few things:

YouTube Channel

It was just before Christmas, but I completed the goal of setting up the kids with a YouTube channel. I even got them a domain name, social media accounts, and an email account. They know how to do any of that stuff and I won’t teach it for a while. My oldest, 9 years old, knows how to film and post to the channel. He’s only allowed to do it if a parent is around though.

They have one video up and it isn’t great. I think it’s gotten 5-7 outside views (other than ourselves), which is good for how terrible it is. There was script or plan, just silliness around the house. The longest journey starts with a single step.

Unfortunately, they haven’t taken a second step since then. They’ve been very busy, so it’s understandable. I have no expectations that they’ll become YouTube stars, but there are some useful skills they can learn. The kids (and their dad) can learn filmmaking. I can help them learn how to organize and outline their thoughts. They can create a set. The big idea is to get them to create something, which will stimulate their imagination.

The goal this year is to make 20 videos. They don’t have to be good videos, just better than the first. We’ll let practice take its course and improve all of us. Maybe next year, we make a goal of a number of subscribers or a video that gets 200 page views. We’re all flying blind in this YouTube world, so we’ll have to figure it out as we go along.

Drone Flying

The kids and I find flying drones very fun. It’s hard to find the time to take them. We’re all moving in different directions.

Computer Programming

I got them started with Tynker.com a bit last year. They didn’t love it. I was hoping that being a game, they’d enjoy it, but I guess it was still too much of a focus on teaching and learning. Maybe a different Tynker game would be better.

Maybe with my Python plan above, I can get them involved in that. It might be a better plan for 2023.

Specialty Camps

We’re still trying to figure out camps for this year. I don’t think most have started up yet. At least we registered for a spot at the sailing camp in time. I think we’ll do cooking camp again even though it is super expensive. I find it is a valuable skill. The 9-year-old loved it and my 8-year-old is just old enough to do it. Maybe we’ll do a karate camp this year because they are getting good at that. We may also try theater camp.

There are so many different things for kids to do nowadays. It’s a good thing that kids’ minds are flexible because I wouldn’t know which end up with all the things they are into.

Final Thoughts

Last year a lot of these goals conflicted with others. Fortunately, there are fewer conflicts this year. The biggest conflict I see is a fight against Father Time. There’s just so much to do. I’ll have to remind myself to breathe and focus on the opening paragraph of this article. That’s what’s important.