Lazy Man and Money

Deal: My Favorite Educational Toy is 55% Off (Lowest Price Ever)

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I wrote this article earlier this year, but Amazon made it one of its “Deals of the Day.” So instead of paying the retail price of $99, or the previous sale price of $70, you can get it for $56. Being a daily deal, that’s today (12/1/2019) only. This article contains affiliate links. I personally have the products and stand by them.

I usually don’t write about deals. By the time I type up an article, the price may have changed. Also, I don’t think you are here because you want more ways to spend money. Finally, there’s almost always literally a deal of some kind going on.

So when I write about a deal like today, it has to be for some other reason. The quick reason is that I have been meaning to write about Osmo since it became the biggest hit of all the STEM toys I bought at Christmas. That’s saying something because I went and bought everything. Some people eat ice cream to feel better. I buy STEM toys.

I know I’m weird.

On the topic of weird, that brings me to the second reason why I’m writing about a deal today. I’m licking my wounds after my satirical article on the WATER movement for April Fools’ Day didn’t make the splash I thought it would. I used up all my creative juice on that article, so all I have left for today is a bland informational article.

Last night I noticed that all Osmo toys are 30% off. I don’t know how long it will last, but I’ve never seen them cheaper and rarely go on sale at all. Naturally, you may be thinking…

What’s Osmo?

Osmo is an educational toy for young children (4 to 10 or so). It pairs with a tablet to create an augmented reality area for children to play in. Translation: You put a tablet in a stand and add a camera reflector to the top of the tablet. The apps use the camera to see what the children are doing in front of the stand, such as building words, adding numbers, solving puzzles, and giving instant feedback with fun entertaining games.

It’s a little easier to explain with this two minute video. Our experience was almost exactly like this (except with no kids randomly coming in. Also, the shape game at the beginning is our family favorite.)



I used to see commercials for Osmo just before Curious George. For years I rejected Osmo because we aren’t in the Apple ecosystem and it only worked there. I’m certainly not going to pluck down $400 for an iPad when much cheaper Androids do the job for us.

Everything changed for us when Osmo came to the Amazon Fire. Since we already had an Amazon Fire HD 10 Tablet (review), it was just an incremental cost for the Osmo system and 5 included games.

Suddenly, it wasn’t spending $500 total (iPad + $99 Osmo), but due to a similar deal to the one today it was only about $70. (You get a better deal now!) That’s actually reasonable when it comes to STEM or other educational toys. As I mentioned before, it’s rare that it goes on sale. I only saw it on sale for a brief time during the competitive holiday season until now.

So I took a flyer on Osmo Genius Kit for Fire Tablet. That’s the version that comes with the 5 games. If you have iPad that’s $70.

There’s a method behind all the games that Osmo makes. The Genius Kit is the one that comes with 5 games, which is the one I prefer. The words and math games are your common reading and writing lessons. The puzzle game is good for visualization and abstract thinking. There are a couple of drawing games. One is good for hand-eye coordination and the other is more based on physics.

Like any company selling a system, there are also add-on games. Amazon has them all 30% off as well. Here’s a sample and what they teach. I have bought a couple of these, but I squirreled them away for birthdays or special occasions, so let the Amazon reviews be your guide (hint: the review for all of them are awesome).

  • Pizza Company – This not only has the best reviews, but it’s most fitting for the personal finance parents. I’d describe it as a more complex version of the famous lemonade stand video game. This is one that I bought when I saw the deal. I can’t wait to teach my kids about business and money.
  • Detective Agency – This looks like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego for a new generation. (Though Netflix has that TV show covered with a recent reboot.) It teaches geography/culture and critical thinking to solve the mystery.
  • Coding Awbie – It seems that every system has to teach coding and this is that game for Osmo. I’d compare it to Scratch Jr. where you can make instructions and repeat them to solve a puzzle.
  • Coding Jam – This combines coding with music. I bought this one as well to try in the future. I couldn’t resist the interesting mash-up of a music and coding toy combined.

As you may have noticed, I compared almost all of Osmo’s games to an equivalent video game that’s a little more famous. What I like about Osmo is that it isn’t a video game. I don’t think of it as screen time, even though the screen is clearly necessary in giving feedback. For parents who are worried about their children getting too much screen time, this could be a good compromise.

I could go on longer, but I’m going to cut it short. I don’t want the deal to go away while I’m writing.

Is Private School a Good Value?

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On Monday, I made a vague mention of being scared to “come clean” about something. You can probably guess from the title.

We send our children to private school. (Actually only the oldest as the 2-year old is too young.)

This may come as a surprise because I’ve been writing for years about how to save money. One way to NOT save money… pay for private school.

Why We Pay for Private School

The public schools in our town aren’t bad. They rank in the top 8, which is good… even for a small state like Rhode Island. Hmmm… that’s not a convincing reason to pay for private school.

I think my mother may think we’re crazy for paying for private school. Nope, that’s not a good reason either.

Third time’s a charm, right? Let’s go with this…

A lot of the value of having money is to be able to spend it on things that are important to you. (Some may even argue that’s the entire value of having money.) For us, our children’s education is one of the most important things. While some are adding $60,000 in Lexus debt this Christmas, we’ll invest in our children’s future.

However, that’s not the entire reason why we pay for private school. The other part requires a little more explanation.

We looked at all the private schools in the area and I think that 9 of 10 were highly religious. That seems to work for a lot of people, but I’m not a big fan of bundling education and faith. In the case of the religious schools, if you pick one with the best education, you get stuck with whatever religious views it has. If you pick a school based on the religious views, you get stuck with whatever the education-level is (which might not be the best).

The single secular school offered a significant military discount… much more than the other 9 schools. They had an open house and my wife and I decided to check it out.

To say we lost our poop was an understatement. When a PS-8 school has electives that I want to take (Robotics, 3D printing, Ted Talks), it’s something special. It feels like the teacher to student ratio is 3-to-1… yes more teachers than students. (It isn’t really that way, but it feels like it.) I could only quibble with them teaching French in the 3rd grade instead of Spanish, but I’ll let it go.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The school far surpassed our wildest dreams not to mention our expectations.

But What Does It Cost?

Different grades have different prices, but after the discount, it comes to around $11,000 a year. They have, PS, Pre-K, K, and grades 1-8, so 11 years total. Thanks to my old Trapper Keeper, I quickly estimate this will cost us $121,000 for each child. Some of it, like the preschool and pre-Kindergarten we’d be paying anyway, so it’s probably an even $100,000 more than public school.

To keep the numbers easy, we’ll say that it is roughly $1000 a month for each child. Technically it’s more because they don’t operate in the summer, but our baseline comparison, public schools also don’t. We’re going to be paying for summer camp either way.

Anyway you slice it, it isn’t cheap. However, with the discount, it fits our definition of having a very good value.

Financial Independence, Private School, and the 25x Rule

The real reason I wanted to write about this though, is to apply it financial independence. When your goal is financial independence, it makes sense to evaluate the impact of spending $22,000 a year vs. saving and investing it.

Personal finance experts tend to use a “Rule of 25” to determine financial independence. The idea is that if you spend $40,000 a year, you’ll need a nest egg of 25 times that, or a million dollars to be financially independent. It comes from some scientific paper that estimated that you can spend 4% of your nest egg and not draw it down for 30 years. (I cover some of this here.)

Paying for private school, or college, presents a bit of a pickle for that equation. We can’t calculate our current expenses and multiply them by 25. Private school expenses are temporary. They will cost around $250,000, but then it ends (or not… there is high school and college to consider). We don’t have to take $22,000 and do the 25x calculation and presume we have a nest egg of $550,000.

I see this kind of mistake most often when people calculate their annual spending and include their mortgage. If you are striving for financial independence, you are probably not going to have a housing payment (other than taxes and insurance) for the rest of your life. The exception would be if you want to rent forever it make sense to include it. Otherwise, just subtract the rest of the mortgage from your nest egg and use the other expenses as the basis for the 25x comparison.

So when I do our financial independence calculation, our expenses later in life will drop as our biggest expenses (housing and education) disappear. Our estimated expenses now are probably around $60,000 a year, but they’ll drop to around $30,000. Which number should we multiply by 25 to decide if we are financially independent? Do we need to have $1,500,000 or $750,000 to be able to say we are financially independent? I don’t think there’s a right answer.

“What if we just invested the money for the kids?”

As I was writing this, that tempting question kept on getting in my head. Imagine if we took the $11,000 and invested it. Let’s presume that it earns 4% so that we don’t have to deal with taxes and inflation. Let’s also presume that they take the money out in 65 years. That $11,000 would grow to $140,000. It would be a real $140,000 since we already accounted for inflation.

[Message to my kids when they read this when they are older: Sorry. Yeah, we could have made you millionaires eventually. Unfortunately, you’ll have to earn it. By they way, do you know how much dog poop I picked up in my dog sitting business so you could get that education? No pressure on using it or anything…]

There some proverb about giving a man a fish vs. teaching him to fish. I think that’s fitting here.

Once again, I’m not sure if there’s a right answer here. I could see people thinking that investing the cold, hard cash is the best answer.

We’ll never know what the road not taken may have presented. However, this feels like the right for us for now.

Exploring Child Care Costs

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If it feels a little quiet around these parts, it is because I’m still adjusting to becoming a dad. I predict that it will continue for the next 20 years… probably longer. I’m learning quite a bit and I think a lot of this will be reflected in the my writing in the future.

One of the first questions that comes up with parenting, is who is going to take care of the baby? It’s Baby 101. The options can be split into two categories: someone in the family and hired help (okay, sometimes a combination of the two is possible). Taking care of a baby requires time and that is still a finite resource (until my flux capacitor shipment gets off backorder)… very often that’s going to cross over to personal finance.

Given that I work from home, on this online business that I like to attempt to grow (even if it is Syphilian at times), the natural choice would be for me to take care of the Little Man. My wife’s closeness to the military pension and a transferable free college education (transferable GI bill is great), her income, and health care, made it quite clear that she wasn’t an option to stay at home with Little Man. With no other family in Silicon Valley that eliminated the options that some other people choose.

Then there’s the option of hired help. A few months back, I looked into a local Kindercare and priced out their 5 day a week program at around $22,000 a year. That’s all after tax money, so it would be a little like taking away a $26,000 income away. Ouch! There were part-time programs, but the pricing structure is perhaps even more prohibitive. The pricing for just two days a week was around $14,000 if memory serves. It got to the point where the cost for 4 days a week was exactly the same as 5 days a week.

My wife and I next went on Craigslist to see about a nanny share. The theory is that a few hours a day off would allow me some time to focus on my work. It’s a good theory, but even nanny shares aren’t cheap. I typically found prices in the range of $18 to $25 an hour which, even at part time would add up to the $22,000 a year or more.

Lastly, we looked into an au pair. We found that this would be around $8,000 a year, but require giving up our office, which would require some significant downsizing. It wouldn’t be impossible and of all the choices seems to be the most practical solution. I would need to do more research to see if there are any other “gotcha’s” with this… well aside from having a stranger live with you all the time.

As I was thinking about the au pair solution another idea occurred to me. If I look at this differently, doing the child care myself would be like giving myself a raise of $25,000 in that it saves that $22,000 after tax cost… as long as my businesses don’t go completely in the tanker (and I have reason to think they won’t). There’s also the added advantage that me and Little Man could learn Spanish and Chinese together. That could be a tall order, Little Man is already two weeks old and he hasn’t even gotten to a remedial level of baby sign language. If this any indication of his learning aptitude, perhaps I should push his Taekwondo lessons back a month.

How $100 Could Save Your Child’s Life

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Regular readers know that I have an affinity for professional football. Sometimes I take it much too seriously. I’m not proud of it, but that’s why they call us fanatics, right? Every Monday, one of my favorite writers, Peter King, comes out with an article about all the happenings around the NFL. On a day, known for being the bane of many people’s existence, Monday morning is a surprising bright spot in my week. What makes Peter King a great writer, in my opinion, is that he draws you into his life. He’s not afraid to talk about his daughters, his experience at the latest Starbucks, or a particularly annoying plane ride. I love that even though I don’t have kids, drink coffee, or fly often, I still feel like I can identify with him – and that’s why my writing tends to have some of the same influence (so some people tell me, though I think they are being much too kind.)

It’s pretty rare that I can share any of his writing with my readers, because football and personal finance – not exactly something that fits together. Last week, was one of those rare occassions. This year he’s added a new wrinkle to his column, each week he picks out a NFL player or personal who gives back unselfishly. One week he pointed out that Jason McKie contributions to the military (giving tickets and even meeting the family before the game). Another time, he wrote about how the Kurt Warner family – at a restaurant – will pick out an family and picks up the tab for them anonymously. He does this to show his children the joy of giving – knowing that he is blessed.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I think I’ve found my second favorite Kelly in Peter King’s column last week (you’ll need to scroll to the Good Guy of the Week section). Jim Kelly, the guy who may be best known for losing 4 Super Bowls, may just be one of the people who saves your child’s life someday.

He lost his son, Hunter, from a rare brain disease called Krabbe Leukodystrophy in 2005. It turns out that this can be diagnosed at birth. According to the article there are 53 other fatal diseases that can be diagnosed today – and Minnesota is the only state that tests for them all. Kelly lobby’s the states to try to get them to test for all of them. While we can buy a kit that will do it for $100 (some of the best money I think I could ever spend), he wants everyone to get them for free. He makes a good business case as well since treatment of many of these diseases, though rare, is can be hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars… per year. He’s already saved the life of one child and correctly points out that it’s worth more than Super Bowls.

The only problem I had with the article is that the editors didn’t link to Jim Kelly’s organization, Hunter’s Hope. (I’m giving King a free pass on this one.) When you have a popular website, you should understand the tremendous value a link has vs. just stating the website’s URL in the text. Readers don’t want to read a URL and have to cut and paste it into the URL bar – so are doing them a disservice. It’s why linking was invented in the first place – and one of the reasons why the web is such a powerful medium. I can see if you might not want to link to a competitor, but a charity that helps children? Poorly done, CNN. I hope you see this and go back and edit your story to give them the link that they deserve.