Lazy Man and Money

What’s in Lazy Man’s Wallet?

by 12 Comments

Jeremy of GenXFinance suggested that a few of The Money Writers get together and share what’s in their wallet. I thought it was a terrific idea. It’s been three years since Mint interviewed me, and then they deleted the Flickr account with the picture of what was in my wallet.

So here’s my wallet spread out on my floor (taken with my trusty Palm Pre):

Lazy Man's Wallet
Lazy Man's Wallet

(Click the image to make it larger in a new window for easy reference.)

While a picture is worth 1,000 words, I thought I’d explain why I have everything in here:

  1. USAA Cards – I love USAA and their banking is top notch. It’s one of the great benefits of having a wife in the military. Included in here is a joint savings account with my wife, a business savings account, a personal savings account, and a fourth account that I honestly don’t know what it goes to.
  2. Marriott Rewards – Since we own a timeshare with Marriott it makes sense to maximize our reward points when we are staying at the Marriott. This is a joint card that both me and my wife have.
  3. Chase Rewards – This is my main credit card. Almost all my expenses go on this. It’s a grandfathered reward program that gives me 5% back on gas, groceries, and drug stores… and 1% everywhere else. Yes I know how lucky I am.
  4. AA Rewards – Similar to the Marriott Rewards… a joint reward card for a company that we tend to use a bit.
  5. Chase Business Rewards – This is my second most used credit card. It gives me 3% at restaurants, office stores (like Staples), and home improvement stores (Home Depot, Lowe’s). (Yes, I really know how lucky I am).
  6. Bank of America bank card – Simple ATM card for the bank account that I’ve had since I turned 16.
  7. Mensa Membership (Expired) – I joined Mensa back probably about 10 years ago. I was looking for something to prove that I was smart, since I didn’t have a lot of job experience. I got a lot of comments on it and I think it opened a couple of doors for me.
  8. Heath and Dental Insurance Cards – Both provided via my wife’s military career.
  9. Membership and Club Cards – Costco, BevMo (a local spirits store that has everything), and Safeway (local grocery chain) are here. Wish they had key chain versions, but they don’t seem to.
  10. Military and Driver’s License – Since the plan has always been to move back to Massachusetts at some point, I just kept my Massachusetts identification. That’s one of those military perks.
  11. Cash – One of the rare times that I have almost perfect change for any amount up to $100. Typically I carry between $35 and $100.
  12. Thin Wallet – It is hard to tell in the picture, but this is an All-Ett. I particularly like it since it spreads the cards over more space rather than having them stacked. The Rip-Stop Nylon that they use is very durable and very thin. I can’t recommend these wallets enough. I’ve more about it in the past at: Thin Wallet: Avoid Back Pain.

As for the other Money Writers? Check out their stories:

How to Become a Millionaire

by 7 Comments

Who hasn’t played the “if I had a million dollars” game? If you are a fan of Office Space, it probably comes as no surprise that I’d take the Peter Gibbons attitude (see the name of the site). Actually doing nothing would get boring after awhile I imagine.

While a million dollars isn’t what it used to be, it is a great start towards financial freedom. Most people don’t know how to become a millionaire. I believe it is an attainable goal if you follow these 5 easy steps:

How To Become a Millionaire
How To Become a Millionaire
5. Find the elusive money-growing tree and hoard it all to yourself (But first call me and let me in on the royalties since I gave you the idea.)

4. Find yourself a sugar daddy/mama and marry them ASAP.

3. Spend all your time and energy on making your life as ridiculous as possible. Then get an equally ridiculous television station to pick up your life as their newest reality show. (It worked for Jon and Kate… not so much for the balloon boy)

2. Con your friends into playing Monopoly with real money, build hotels on Boardwark and Park Place, and rig the game so that you continually land on the “Free Parking” space and collect the loot from the middle. (That is assuming you play with the rules that Free Parking actually earns you money.)

You don’t like those options? Good, you shouldn’t. The chances of you securing your future and becoming a millionaire through those first four steps are about as good as Michael Jordan becoming a star in NFL now (remembers his baseball career?). Give me one more chance at proving you a path to financial freedom.

1. Read the rest of this article.

The beauty of the prestigious millionaire club is that there is room for all of us at the table. Everyone has power over their financial status if they focus on a few small things. Here are several simple steps that could change your life forever and help you in becoming a millionaire.

  • Don’t spend more than you make – That sound easy enough, but for most it’s easier said than done. For many, today’s cashless society makes it easy to swipe the credit card and plan on paying it off later. Others, like my wife, just tend to spend whatever cash they have on hand, because it’s a quick transaction (not having to sign anything). We tend to buy now and think later, rather than the other way around.
  • Get out of the “Now” mindset – Many young couples get married, buy their first home, and expect to immediately have all of the ‘luxury’ items that it took their parents thirty years of working to obtain. I wish I could get them to change their thinking… realize that building your dream home, owning the perfect car, and being able to take extravagant vacations will not happen overnight, nor in 5 years. It takes time to achieve it, just as their parents did. In the same way, realize that it is almost impossible to become a millionaire overnight. What you can do is implement the basic financial principles today that will increase your chances of becoming a millionaire in the next 20 years…
  • Save Money – In the immortal words of Al Bundy, “Save hard, save now, save silent, save deep…. the key word here is: SAVE!” (Actually, Al used the word “run” instead of “save”, but it is one of my favorite lines and it fits.)

    The easiest way to effectively change your saving habits and make a monumental difference is to save at the beginning of your month, rather than at the end. Too many people trick themselves into thinking they are saving by just transferring what is left each month to their savings account. Sure they are saving, but they are not saving intentionally. If you don’t tell your money where to go, you’ll get to the end of the month and question where it went. Decide what you will save each month (after making a monthly budget) and take that straight to your savings account the day you get paid. Don’t allow yourself to touch it, not even for an emergency. Have a separate emergency fund of $1,000 so your savings can be safe. If you are married, try to live off of one income and save the second. This is difficult, but very doable by cutting certain expenses.

  • Attack debt now – Step #2 doesn’t apply here – when it comes to debt get in the “Now” mindset. Though I’m not really a fan of Dave Ramsey he I do agree with his approach of attacking debt with “gazelle intensity.” (Don’t confuse this with Tony Little’s Gazelle which will get nowhere.) Go after your debt rather than letting it control you. Work on your highest interest loan first, and once you have paid it off, take the amount of that monthly payment and add it on to your next loan’s monthly amount. Many people make the mistake of paying off one debt and then taking that money they would’ve been spending and simply increasing their standard of living. Instead, wait to get out of debt completely and then celebrate with something small.
  • Invest your savings – Be careful with this step. Don’t go after the get-rich-quick schemes. Look into the mutual funds and other financial vehicles that have historically been shown to appreciate in value. Your savings is not something to gamble with. Don’t make the first four steps obsolete by a reckless decision in the final step.

    • Whatever you do, make sure that your path to becoming a millionaire is focused on doing something that you absolutely love. Find your passion and follow it. When you do, those long hours and the stressful days becomes a lot more fun.

Can America Learn To Save From My Dog?

by 9 Comments

When you think of great minds in personal finance you may think of Suze Orman, Dave Ramsey, or Jean Chatzky. You probably don’t think of a dog, but perhaps you should.

A few months ago my dog started doing something I had only read about in children’s books… burying dog biscuits in our yard. I remember the first time I saw him do it. I grabbed my wife and exclaimed, “Look at Jake! He’s being a dog!” (Sometimes, I’m not a wordsmith.) For a while, I thought he was just being a stupid dog. This past weekend when he retrieved one of his buried bones, something in my mind clicked.

Are you Smarter than a Dog?
Are you Smarter than a Dog?


Biscuits are like money for my dog. He was saving the biscuit for a rainy day when biscuits aren’t readily available. He’s learned to do what so many Americans have difficulty doing… passing up instant gratification for future benefits. I think this is noteworthy for two reasons:

  1. As my wife reminds me from time to time, “he’s a freaking dog.” (I give him more human-like privileges than most dog owners.) We didn’t train him to bury bones and he’s never seen another dog do it. Saving appears to be hard-wired into his brain… why do we have such difficulty with it?
  2. The second reason I find it noteworthy is that there’s significant risk and no reward to burying a bone for later. The bone may get washed away by rain or stolen by zealous squirrel. The bone itself will even likely have less “value” to a dog as it will be covered in dirt. When people save their money in banks, it comes with some security (FDIC) and they are rewarded with interest. People should be the ones doing the saving, not dogs.

    3. This isn’t the only way he saves. Jake loves food – he’ll eat anything and everything and ask me for more. However, we found that if we give him food and leave the house, he won’t eat until we get back. I think his rationale is that there’s no guarantee we are coming back, so he better conserve his food until the providers of his food are back.

    Perhaps Fox should create a television show that asks, “are smarter than a dog.”

Can You Fix California’s Budget?

by 12 Comments

It may sound like a Saturday Night Live skit, but an organization is asking for your help with assistance budgeting. Next10 has a fairly easy to understand budget calculator simulator that lets you do just that. You have a choice about 4 or 5 questions in much of the areas that impact the government’s budget. You have choices like adjusting the spending on Education, Health Care, Jobs, Environment, Criminal Justice, etc. You then have to make some tough choices on revenues like income tax, sales tax, corporate taxes, etc. Even if you aren’t from California, it’s very educational (although somewhat depressing) to play a big game of Would You Rather…? It only takes 5-10 minutes.

I gave the simulator a shot and I almost reduced the state deficit in half, while increasing K-12 education to the national levels. In order to do that I turned the state into a toxic waste dump and drove out every corporation with raised taxes. I think I also had to raise the sales tax from 9.25% (in my county at least) to around 78%. Oh and I had to let all the criminals go free. Maybe the companies that make bars for windows will stick around… not that anyone can afford them with the sales tax.

I’m making a big joke of the situation in California, but it’s no laughing matter. The state has some serious issues and people are going to be negatively affected (they already are). I need to commend Next10. I’ve always been a fan of crowdsourcing a solution and while that would be nice, the education that Next10 is giving Californians is a step in the right direction.

Did you try the simulator? Tell me the choices you made in the comments below…

Reader Question: Which Loan Should I Pay First?

by 15 Comments

I got a question from a reader recently and when I tried to e-mail her back the email bounced back to me. Seems pretty odd because it was persons full name at a very well-known company. It was a well thought-out question and I hate to leave it unanswered, so I figured I’d make a post of it. I hope she’s ready. I’ll give her my typical code name of Buffy Summers and change around the loan numbers a bit to protect her identity.

I have a loan situation that I need some advice on. I have been struggling with the best way to pay off 4 loans with the same interest rate. I want to pay these off in whatever order will have the least interest paid overall. I can’t seem to find any information through researching on the web as to the best solution for this (and I’m not much of a finance person either!) The monthly payment for these 4 loans is lumped together at $373 per month. I’d like to pay an additional $300 per month, but don’t know if I should apply this extra money "strategically" across the four loans or only to one. Does it make sense to pay the highest loan first so that I can tackle the interest portion of each payment earlier rather then later? I have been using this loan comparison calculator and after playing around with different numbers, it seems like it makes most sense to pay across all four:

Here are the loan amounts:

Current Interest rate on ALL four: 6.75%
Number of payments left: 197

Loan A: $6,000
Loan B: $8,000
Loan C: $11,000
Loan D: $19,000

Here are the different payment scenarios when applying an extra $300 (as I am understanding it):

Scenario #1: Apply extra $300 to lowest loan first
If I did this, I could pay off Loan A in 1 year, 7 months, with total interest paid of $327. I can apply the extra minimum payment towards the other loans, plus roll over the extra $300.

Scenario #2: Apply extra $300 to highest loan first
If I did this, I could pay off Loan D in 4 years, paying a total of $2,323.79 in interest (just for that loan, this doesn’t include the interest on the other 3). Again, this would leave me the extra minimum payment I had been paying towards Loan D, plus I can roll-over the extra $300 at that point to the remaining 3 loans. How can I figure out the total interest paid over the life of all 4 loans this way though? I need a calculator like the one I am using that ALSO lists the amortization schedule?

Scenario #3: Apply extra $300 equally across all 4 loans
4 extra payments of $75 are applied to each loan. This would be $11,947 in interest paid over the life of the loans. However, the smaller loans would obviously be paid off sooner, meaning I could just roll over that money to the other loans (and I am assuming this would lower the amount of interest even further). Is there an easy way to calculate this?

Scenario #4 (what I have been doing for the past 2 months)
Apply extra $300 across all four loans based on percent of each individual loan amount I make the following extra payments towards each loan:

Loan A: $40
Loan B: $55
Loan C: $75
Loan D: $130

When doing it this way, I pay $11,474 extra in interest over the life of these loans.

Am I doing these calculations correctly? How should I best apply this extra $300 each month so that I pay the LEAST amount in interest over the life of all these loans? I read alot about how its better to pay the lowest loan first because it’s "psychologically" better. However, I don’t care about the psychological aspect of paying these loans off, I care about paying the least amount of interest over time.

Here are my thoughts:

It mathematically shouldn’t matter if all loans are the same interest rate. Buffy should end up paying the same interest. I put the emphasis on shouldn’t because my math isn’t what it used to be. Also, I was too lazy to find a loan amortization calculator to hand her, but there should be some good ones at Dinky Town.

However, I can see some factors that Buffy should consider:

She mentioned the “current” interest rate on all loans is 6.75%. Are they locked into that rate for the length of the loans? If not, perhaps she can anticipate which might increase in the future and pay those off first?

I’m with her on the psychological aspect of paying off loans. In the end, she knows she’s got $X in debt to pay, so getting rid of it the fastest is best. Sorry Dave Ramsey!

Readers, can you let me know what else I missed? Also, please feel free to contact me with questions any time using the contact button at the top of the page.