Kids Archives - Lazy Man and Money

These Millionaires Made Their 7-Year-Old Buy His Own School Lunch

March 6, 2020 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

This is the first edition of Kid’s Corner. I hope to do use one or two Fridays a month to write about issues of money and kids.

That’s probably the worst headline I’ve ever written. It’s terrible. What ARE these @#$*!$% thinking!

We’re the villains in our own story. Yep, we’re pure, pure evil.

Let me tell the tale of how we arrived at such a dastardly act.

Every day we pack a lunch for our kids school. You could say it’s the typical brown bag lunch, but we of course use reusable bags nowadays. Our kids are picky eaters (aren’t they all?), so it’s taken awhile to find some foods that they’ll eat. Figuring out what they are going to eat each day takes more hours than I care to admit.

We often sacrafice nutrition for our sanity. One such compromise we make is buying Lunchables. We’re not proud, but we are able to supplement them with some healthy foods. At the local military commissary they are around $1.25. That’s a great price compared to what they cost at the grocery store. With the other healthy snacks that they eat at lunch, our total lunch cost is probably around $2 a day. We spend probably another $1 or $1.50 on snacks for before and after lunch at school.

The other day our 7-year-old says that he wants the pizza hot lunch at school. He doesn’t want the spaghetti and meatballs lunch though, because that has tomato sauce on it. I’m sure that every parent is familiar with this kind of logic.

Kid Context: I interviewed my 7-year-old about the differences of tomato sauces of pizza and pasta. It seems that pizza cheese covers up the sauce taste, making it clearly edible where pasta with sauce is not.

The Pizza Connundrum

If it was as simple as pizza always being safe this story wouldn’t be less interesting. Pizza is a safe food only about 75% of the time. Those are actually very good odds in comparison to other foods.

The hot lunch at school has to be bought by the semester and paid in advance. There are no refunds and no exchanges. That’s the deal the school had to make with the outside vendor to reduce complexity. Essentially we have to make the decision to pay $60 for 10 pizza days to finish out the school year… or skip the pizza all together.

The math is easy – it’s $6 a day for hot pizza lunch. That seems like a lot to me, but I guess that’s what happens when you have to outsource catering because the school doesn’t have a functional cafeteria. Obviously, I’d rather continue to pay the $2 a day, but spending $4 more once a week isn’t going to make a dent in our budget.

However, what if this pizza falls in the 25% of bad pizza? Then we threw all $60 down the drain. My 7-year-old doesn’t care if we lose $60. It’s not his money…

… but what if it was?

That’s what I asked myself. What if he had to put some of his own money on the line? Would he be so quick to throw it in the trash? Would it taste better because he earned it?

Now, of course we wouldn’t make him pay for all $60. We wouldn’t even make him pay the difference. However, one dollar a day could work. He’s good at math for his age, so we could lay out what we currently spend and what the hot lunch costs.

The final aspect to this is that we haven’t set up an allowance policy yet. I’ve got a lot of unorganized ideas. I don’t want it to be, here’s money for free every week. I want to set up a base of chores for the money. I want to set up some extra chores he can do to earn more money. I want to have charts to track the chores so that at the end of the week he can cash in.

I also want someone who is awesome at graphics to create the chart for me. I’m joking, of course. There are a lot of chore charts on Pinterest, but so many of them are not quite right and customizing them to remove a chore or add a chore is not easy (for me at least).

There are a lot of money lessons to be learned here and this seems like a good time to start laying down that foundation.

Could You Save ~$100,000 by Age 18? She did!

November 11, 2019 by Lazy Man 3 Comments

I often read a lot of financial articles and think, “I should write about this.” About 10% of the time, I actually do. The rest of the time… well that’s how I earn my nickname.

One of those stories that I always meant to write about was the story of this 18-year old young woman who had saved $85,000.

It’s the perfect personal finance headline and story. Everyone wants an easy recipe to wealth and it’s tempting to think, “~~I’ll have what she’s having.~~ I’ll do what she’s doing. If she can save so much by age 18 with a full school schedule and part-time jobs, maybe I can do it too.”

I don’t know what is possible for you or not. I can only walk in my own shoes… others’ don’t fit me well.

As I went through the story, I realized that (reading between the lines) her financial life got complex quickly. I think it would make for a better case study in a book rather than a one-page web story with a few quotes. I’m sure I won’t be able to do it justice here, especially because I have to make some, possibly erroneous, assumptions.

Before I get started, I want to stress that the drive that she has and personal responsibility* are unmatched. If I get a little critical, it’s because personal finance has entered a time where we must to point out privilege – especially in any kind of success story.

What we know is that she grew up in Marin County, CA. You may not know Marin very well, but having lived in NorCal for 6 years, Marin County is a very wealthy area. It’s possibly one of the most wealthy areas in the country.

Why does that matter? This young woman started as a dog and cat sitter, moved to baby sitting, and finally as a waitress. As a dog sitter, I can tell you that areas that have higher costs of living pay more. Rich people love their pets. The same translates to babies. I’d imagine that tips are better in wealthy places too.

Here’s another thing about dog sitting, you need to have a house. Many apartments don’t take animals, and most of those that do probably require the pet to live there full-time. Because we have a home with a nice fence and I work from home, my kids can get started on a Roth IRA at an absurdly young age. That’s going to part of their privilege story. However, they’ll have to do the work too.

There are a couple confusing parts about the original SF Gate article.

It mentions that, at 18, she lives with a friend and independent pays for food, phone, car, clothing. Presumably this is a new arrangement for an 18 year old, so it probably isn’t too significant… and thus not worth the mention in the article.

Next, the article says that the parents made a number of money mistakes which the young woman learned from. Yet, she claims to have gotten “really intrigued by money” when the parents bought a new house, the year she started her pet-sitting gig. We don’t get details on what mistakes the parents made, but it seems obvious to see that the house made the income opportunity a possibility.

The obvious elephants in the room is that many kids in Marin County-type areas don’t have expenses. They aren’t expected to help with family bills. Thus almost every dollar earned is a dollar that can be invested. While on the topic of investing, the market had been up the previous 8 years (as of publication in 2017), so it’s possible she was able to double her earnings in the market. It was mentioned that she has multiple investing accounts and had bought Apple stock. Kudos to her!

Another important thing to consider is that she only sleeps 5 to 6 hours a night. She’s obviously very successful with that amount of sleep. That’s obviously a rare trait to have. The importance of getting more sleep is one of the few things that nearly all health experts can agree on. Getting by on less sleep could be great for your financial bottom line, but it might not lead to a high quality of life.

Final Thoughts

This is essentially the blue print that I would want for my own kids. I just hope that in the rush to make money she hasn’t missed out on being a kid. That’s my concern for my own kids as I fight my natural instinct to push them to do more and more.

Focusing on the privilege aspects in this article has been difficult for me. I’d much rather say, “Let’s celebrate this awesomeness!” And it is nothing less than awesome.

You may have noticed that I didn’t use the young woman’s name. I was curious to see if there was a follow-up to the articles that came out a couple of years ago. I found that her social media accounts were private. This is my way of granting some of that privacy, while still talking about her financial accomplishments.

* Personal responsibility seems to be a big political buzzword nowadays. I don’t mean it in a political sense. I simply mean that she seems responsible, which, of course comes with the dog sitting and baby sitting gigs.

McEconomics!

May 28, 2019 by Kosmo 3 Comments

This article is from occasional contributor, Kosmo. At the end, I’ll tack on some of my own McDonalds economics thoughts.

Several weeks ago, I was at McDonalds with my 9 year old. It blew his mind that I was able to put together a package that included more food at a lower price than the standard option. I’ve turned this into a personal finance lesson for him and his 11 year old sister.

They like McNuggets. A lot. Typically, they’ve had the six piece Happy Meal, but they’ve reached the point where they (usually) don’t care about the toy anymore, and they want more food.

What do they want? Between the two of them, they want 18-20 nuggets, some fries, and two bottles of chocolate milk.

The standard six piece happy meal contains:

6 nuggets
Small fries
Apple slices or Go-gurt
Drink (chocolate milk)

The cost is $4.18 each, for a total cost of $8.36 for two. They end up with fewer nuggets than they want, but two Go-gurts (which they’re somewhat ambivalent about). Realistically, they’d need three Happy Meals to get the right number of nuggets.

So I went comparison shopping to see how else I might accomplish the goal.

A ten piece nugget value meal is $7.49. To get twenty nuggets, I’d have to spend $14.98! I’d end up with

Twenty nuggets
Two medium fries
Two medium fountain drinks

I’d have to swap out the fountain drinks for the chocolate milk. I’m not sure if there’s an upcharge for that, because this option was immediately discarded – because I found a better deal.

I went the a la carte option and took advantage of some special deals and coupons.

The ten piece nugget is part of a 2 for $5 deal.
I have a coupon for a large order of fries for $1. This is a coupon I can use once per week via the McDonalds app.

Here’s what I ended up ordering:

Two ten piece nuggets @ 2/$5 = $5
One large order of of fries = $1
Two chocolate milk @ $1 = $2

Total cost: $8. This is 8 more nuggets than the two Happy Meals, and more fries, since a large is more than twice as big as the small. The cost is 36 cents less than the two Happy Meals! You may have noticed the missing Go-gurt. The good news is that you can buy a Go-Gurt or apple slices for 50 cents. For the sake of argument, let’s say that I get two Go-Gurts. That brings the total to $9. I’ve gotten all the food the Happy Meals would have, plus eight extra nuggets, for 64 cents more than the cost of the Happy Meals.

For myself, I got two bacon, egg, and cheese biscuits. Sticker price $3.39 or 2 for $4. I would have slightly preferred one bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit and one egg McMuffin, but I’m not going to pass up the 2 for $4 deal.

Later, I pulled out a piece of paper and walked them through the options and prices. They were impressed at the price differences.

Is this post simply a way for me to brag about my ability to save money at McDonalds. Well, sort of. But mostly it’s to illustrate how simple it is to teach some basic personal finance lessons.

Unit pricing is another area where I try to teach the kids an occasional lesson. Toilet paper is a good place to start, because there are so many options within a brand and style. Which Charmin Ultra Soft Mega Roll is the best option – the 4 pack, the 8 pack, the 12 pack, or the 18 pack? You’d expect the per unit price to drop as the quantity increases, but that’s not always the case in the real world.

My nine year old is starting to grasp the concept. He can already determine which box of garbage bags we should buy.

I’m not necessarily a tightwad. There are things I’ll spend money one (MLB.TV, for example). But if I need 36 rolls of toilet paper, I don’t want to pay more per roll simply because I chose the wrong size package. 36 rolls is 36 rolls, regardless of how they are packaged.

I’ve also given the kids a thirty thousand foot exposure to concepts like bank accounts, credit accounts, pensions (and the difference between defined contribution and defined benefit), 401(k)s, 529s, and income taxes. As they get older, I’ll go deeper into these topics, so that by the time the graduate from high school, they’ll have a solid understanding of personal finances.

Editor’s McDonalds Economics Thoughts

For a long time, we were able to escape the McDonalds Happy Meal trap. Our kids simply didn’t know they existed until Grandma spoiled the plan. They would have figured it out eventually, but I can still fondly look back on those days.

With my kids at age 5 and 6, the Happy Meal is still important to them. However, we use it a treat. Typically, we’d take advantage of the five dollar 20-piece nuggets in our area. That’s the equivalent deal as Kosmo’s (except for the bulk requirement). Since my kids are smaller, we don’t need too much more to feed 3 or 4 of us. A $1 Value Menu sandwich will usually do it.

Recently, we’ve revisited the value of the Big Breakfast with Hot Cakes which is an economical ~1350 calories. Everyone has their favorites and it just seems to work out for us. Once again, an extra $1 value menu sandwich or two can round out a hearty breakfast for the family. It’s been particularly handy at the Orlando airport terminal that we seem to visit a few times a year.

As for teaching unit pricing, my kids are a little young for that. I’m very good with unit pricing, but toilet paper is very, very difficult. The best I can do is look at square footage to avoid the differences in mega-rolls and regular rolls. Doing a dollar per square foot isn’t always easy though.

Instead, I’m going to turn to teaching unit pricing through something that I know my kids will pay attention to: Pokemon. Specifically Pokemon Go has items for sale at the shop. A single super egg incubator will run 200 PokeCoins. However, you can get 10 super egg incubators and a bunch of other useful stuff (lucky eggs, and star pieces) for 1480 PokeCoins in an Ultra Box.

We’ll go down this road in more detail over the next year or so. For now, I explain that I can get a lot more things if I save my PokeCoins and take advantage of the package deal. I have a suspicion that unit pricing will come up in more video games in the future.

Starting Your Kids on a Financial Independence Path

May 16, 2019 by Lazy Man 9 Comments

Everyone is a product of where they focus their time and energy, right? As you can tell from this blog, much of my focus is on personal finance, especially financial independence. In my personal life, much of my focus is parenting two boys, ages 5 and 6.

Getting them started on a path of financial independence is inevitable. Given their age, we are working with simple things like chore charts and saving money for special toys.

One of my biggest concerns is the changes in the world. When I growing up in the 80s, I knew programing a computer was the future. Nowadays, retail stores and newspapers are closing. The automotive industry may nearly disappear as robot, on-demand cars may mean car ownership and driver jobs are a thing of the past. Artificial intelligence promises to disrupt more markets.

I know that most people think new jobs will be created. That’s probably true, but who knows if enough good jobs will be created. It seems that the current trend is replacing journalist jobs with influencer jobs. That should concern us all.

We can’t change where the world is going, but we can help prepare my kids. Here are a few things that we’re doing:

Teach Core Life Skills

This is a no-brainer. Some skills never grow old and can directly influence your bottom line. Here are the first two skills that came to mind. If you can think of more, I’d appreciate it if you could please drop me a line in the comments.

1. Cooking

Food is often one of people’s largest expenses. It doesn’t have to be. Eating out at restaurants is expensive. If you know the basics of cooking, going out to eat is less appealing.

We’ve got the kids enrolled in an after-school cooking class. They might not be learning much. (I’m still waiting to be served breakfast in bed.) However, they are learning and enjoying it. Those are the important things at this age.

In conjunction with learning cooking, I hope to teach the boys how to shop to save money. This will include updated versions of the following articles:

Being able to manage and limit one of their largest expenses can only help their financial bottom line in the future.

2. Handyman

I’m not handy at all. I can’t fix anything. I can barely work a screwdriver. If something breaks, I have to write a check.

That’s not good, especially for landlords like us. If you are good at fixing things and home improvement in general, you can create a lot of real estate opportunities with just sweat equity. You can fix up the house and move repeating the process over and over. You may even be able to keep the money tax-free when you sell. It may be a long time before artificial intelligence replaces carpenters and plumbers.

Perhaps someday, one of their jobs could be a managing our real estate “empire” and we could pass money and equity to them over time. I haven’t figured out exactly how this arrangement would work, but in theory there’s an opportunity there.

For now, I just want my kids to be better than I am with any handyman stuff. Home Depot has “kid workshops” once a month, but we haven’t had a chance to get to one yet. They also have workshops for adults, so maybe it’s not too late for me to learn a thing or two to pass on.

Personal Finance

I don’t think I’ll have to focus on teaching them too much about personal finance. I half suspect that they’ll learn it from osmosis perhaps like I did from my mother. However, I can give them a couple of boosts.

If they don’t master personal finance from osmosis, they can fill in the gaps with my Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom. I’m hopeful that when they are older they’ll give their old man 10-15 minutes to read the Cliff’s Notes to financial success.

As a practical matter, I recently wrote about their kid Roth IRAs which will give them a head start in saving for retirement.

Education

Education is one of the foundations for a high-earning career. We’re investing a lot in private school now in hopes that it will set them on a great path for the future.

I’m still not sure that’s an optimal investment. For example, an episode of Teen Titans Go! (one of my favorite kid shows) brings up the idea that investing in a rental property is better than college. I don’t agree, but it’s an interesting topic. Of course, the Teen Titans teach a lot of personal finance.

Finally, it’s helpful that the the best financial independence book is actually a kids book.

Final Thoughts

One of things that I’m hoping to balance is giving an opportunity versus handing them too much. That’s why they are earning their kid Roth IRAs by picking up dog poop. That’s also why I think they would have to be property managers before they reap the benefits of the rental properties.

Keeping the Opportunity Wedge Wide Open

March 6, 2019 by Lazy Man 4 Comments

Note: The month of March might be slow around here. I hoped to get ahead of some planned travel, but with four of the last six days derailed by kids’ snow days and their flu, it hasn’t happened. The good news is that I have plans and outlines for at least a dozen articles.

It’s not often, but sometimes an article just sticks with me long after I’ve finished reading it. In extremely rare circumstances I’ll come back across it months later and think, “Wow, I’m glad I read that.”

Today, I want to share one such article with you.

It’s called The Opportunity Wedge and it’s on the website Live Your Wage.

I’m going to describe it, but feel free to click the link above (it will open the article in another tab), because you’ll probably want to read his take on it too.

Essentially the concept is that you are born with a huge number of possibilities (or opportunities) in life. As time goes on, the possibilities disappear until you get to a single point at the end of your life. Yes, it’s kind of morbid.

Think about it. I don’t remember what I wanted to be when I was 5, but I’m fairly sure astronaut, basketball star, doctor, and firefighter were all in there. At age 42, firefighter is about the only one I’d have a chance at… and I’m not sure I’d make the cut there either. Some of the possibilities were actually eliminated by my DNA… the basketball star is one example.

The opportunities can go away for any number of reasons. Personally, I became very interested in programming computers. I liked breaking big problems into smaller ones and solving them. When I learned more of what doctors’ jobs entailed, I found that I wasn’t interested in that. When you choose to spend your time in one way, you are also choosing not to spend your time in another way.

I keep coming back to the opportunity wedge because I’m now a father of 5 and 6 year old boys. The oldest wants to make Pokemon real, so maybe he’ll spend a lot of time learning about DNA, RNA, and CRISPR. Maybe he’ll be interested in something else later in life. Whatever it is, I see my job as trying to keep their opportunity wedges as wide open as possible.

Or as a gazelle would put it, try everything (even if we fail):

This philosophy has some financial ramifications. Swim lessons, piano lessons, karate all cost money after school. There are some more frugal options, but keeping the opportunity wedge open means not just choosing something because it is the cheapest option.

It also means that I will spend money almost anything that seems like a reasonable educational expense. This unfortunately doesn’t always work out well:

I hope no one paid $10 for @hookedonphonics like I did.
The app keeps on freezing on the latest Amazon Fire HD 10.
After the fourth freeze and reboot, I had to tell my sad child that we have to do something else.
— LazyManAndMoney (@LazyManAndMoney) March 6, 2019

And sometimes it works out wonderfully, like the awesome Osmo Genius Kit.

Keeping the opportunity wedge as open as possible also means spending a lot of money on private school. That’s been a very paralyzing decision, as I don’t see ANY other personal finance bloggers doing the same. (I may have missed some.) There’s not a day that doesn’t go by where I think, “The compound interest on this money would be tremendous down the line.” I have to remind myself that we can’t predict the future. Investing the money on education or investing it in the stock market are just different ways to keep that opportunity wedge wide.

It’s easier to focus on their opportunity wedge than my own. I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up. However, recently I got excited about the idea of writing a book. It has been something that I’ve been toying with for years. Just the other day I had a completely new idea that has renewed my interest in that tremendously.

But that’s a story for another day.