Lazy Man and Money

How To Be Successful in the New Year

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Welcome to 2018!

It still feels like 2017 to me. The kids are still on their winter break from school. Tomorrow, I get focus on writing again. It feels like forever, and I’m so excited to get started. In the meantime, I’m going to continue a 9-year tradition… bumping up one of my most popular articles.

How To Be Successful In The New Year
How To Be Successful In The New Year

Start at the Beginning

I’m very biased here, but my more recent blog Be Better Now focuses more on success and self-improvement. It covers important topic from How to Make and Keep Your New Year’s Resolution to this Quick Guide to Success.

If you only read and followed through on those two general articles, I can almost guarantee you’d have the best year of your life (short of an unrelated tragedy).

However, let’s continue on:

Preparation and Planning

  • Make a List of Short, Medium, and Long Term Goals – Each night before I go to sleep, I try to write down 3-5 things that I want to accomplish the next day. I make sure that at least a couple are things that I can complete that day and purge from my to-do list. I also make sure to add a couple of small parts of medium or long-term projects.

    Here’s an example: Imagine that you want to write an eBook. The first day you create a rough outline of the book – just the chapters. The next day you might want to pick 3 or 4 things in a few chapters to cover in each chapter. Repeat this for 3 or 4 days and you’ll have a great plan for a whole 9-12 chapter book in less than a week. Then you simply need to spend a day expanding each chapter. In about 20 days you’ll have completed the first draft. Use the next 10 days (or more) to review, revise, and edit.

  • Catalog Your Progress – I started this blog to keep me accountable. I can’t go out and buy a Ferrari on credit. If I did, I’d have to write about it here. I have a strong streak of not buying a Ferrari on credit. See? Simple, right?

Fix Your Finances

This is important enough that I created a whole article focusing on it. Unfortunately, the article is quite out of date. Still the ideas are sound. Still there should be a half dozen easy ways for many people to save thousands of dollars.

Learn These Skills

  • Sales / Marketing – Even if you don’t think you have a product to sell, you do… yourself. I’ve learned that sales and marketing are not easy skills to learn. You can’t shout “look at me!” or people will think you are obnoxious. You have to find people who might be genuinely interested in what you have to offer. I always find it best to be open and honest with what I have to sell. If the product is of value, you price it accordingly, and have the right buyer, it should sell itself. I’ve found that if you have to “sell” too hard, it’s probably going to be a sale you regret making.
  • Public Speaking – I am most shy person on Earth. Talking to someone one-on-one often ties my stomach in knots. I’ve almost completely given up using the phone. Imagine how I feel about public speaking right now. There’s at least a 90% chance I’d faint.

    However, public speaking was a required class in high school. I started off horrible, but by the end, I had earned an A. The head cheerleader said that I was funny… which is the kind of thing that sticks with you 25 years later (Thanks Amy!) I have to remember that public speaking really is a skill where practice means everything. An organization such as Toastmasters, seems to be the best way to get that practice. Unfortunately, Toastmasters usually takes a back seat to the pile of other things that I’m currently focusing on.

  • Writing – Even if you are crafting a short e-mail, try to use proper grammar. You’d be surprised how many e-mails I receive where people make 6 mistakes in 6 sentences. Poor writing skills on the first impression impacts my view of the person’s intelligence and/or professionalism. Perhaps it shouldn’t be that way, but it is. A person who can write great commands my respect and my trust.

    I realize that my articles have more than their fair share of writing mistakes. This article probably has 3-5 in it. I feel that it is a balance. I’d rather spend my time writing another article than proofreading the previous one for a couple of typos.

  • Networking – Get out there and meet new people in your areas of interest. When you know a lot of people, opportunities multiply. [Editor’s Note, I’m going to date myself on this, but I wrote this about Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income who wasn’t widely known in January of 2009 when I wrote this article:

    “To go back to the eBook example above, I met one person who has had some success with an eBook. He’s in the process of getting it translated into an audio book now. He could definitely be a great resource for me to learn from. He’s newer to blogging and doesn’t have the number of readers that I have. I can probably give him a few tips and help him out. Now if I knew 100 people like this guy, I’d have a solution to almost every question I’d ever have at my fingertips.”

  • Read More and Faster – I have always been a very slow reader. I simply don’t scan text very well. Perhaps I’m afraid I’ll miss a critical word or something silly like that. This is one area that I’m going to work on in the new year. Much of my time is spent reading, you’d think I’d at least be good at it.

Take Action

  • Help Someone with Something Everyday – This may sound like some kind of “Pay It Forward” hype. In some ways it is. I estimate that I’ve given guidance to around 50 or 100 bloggers who are just getting going that were looking for advice. Some of them became successful bloggers and some stopped blogging. The successful ones have returned the favor 100 times over or more. They link to my articles, they comment on my site, and fill me in with opportunities that I would have otherwise missed. This isn’t limited to blogging. If you mentor someone, you’ll be seen as a natural leader. I’ve always seen a strong correlation between leadership and success.
  • Make Mistakes – When I just got out of college, I took a job with a top ten Internet company. It was a very high profile job as I managed the search engine myself. It was about 20% of this 2 billion dollar company’s traffic… and some of their most valuable real estate (look what Google did with search). The thought that I’d make a mistake scared me to death. I spent each day walking on eggshells until the day that I made a mistake. It was a terrible mistake that crashed the whole database. A strange thing happened. No one got upset with me, and we were able to recover pretty quickly. From that experience, I learned to always have a back-up plan. This allowed me to take some risks, experiment more, and eventually produce ideas that made the company tens of millions of dollars. Perhaps as importantly, I learned to tolerate other people’s mistakes.
  • Surround Yourself with Like-Minded Individuals – There are studies that show an individual’s income will be somewhere around the average of your closest five friends. That formula works for me and my closest friends – or it did until I decided to build my career from websites. There are also studies that show your weight will reflect those who you hang around with. It makes sense if you think about it. If your circle of friends likes to bounce business ideas off each other while playing a game of pickup basketball, you’ll probably put yourself closer to the path of prosperity than if you tell fart jokes while eating Bon-Bons.
  • Exercise – Whenever I work out, I am all pumped up with endorphins for hours. It feels like nothing can stop me – as if I could tackle a bear. Instead of tackling a bear, I focus that energy on my list of goals and churn through it like never before.
  • Start a Website or Blog – It’s easy to talk the talk, but what matters is if you can walk the walk. A website or blog not only makes you accountable for the goals that you set, but can also help you network and gather useful information. For more inspiration read how personal finance blogging helped me.

Be More Productive

  • Don’t Get Wrapped Up in Television – I love television. However, I try to watch shows that you don’t have to follow too closely. This way I can work while it’s on. You won’t see me watching a lot of Law and Order because it requires too much of my focus. However, having the Red Sox on the background doesn’t distract me from accomplishing what I’m trying to.
  • Commute with Books on Tape (or Podcasts) – Most of the people I know have a 30-60 minute commute to work each day. You can listen to some morning talk show or a shock-jock DJ or you can learn some of the skills that I mention above. I’m not saying that you should throw away all entertainment, but if you are looking to increase your productivity, utilizing this downtime is a great start.
  • Declutter and Organize Your Home and Work Area – I used to waste a lot of time looking for stuff. The problem? I had stuff everywhere. I couldn’t find the stuff that I needed from the old stuff that was piled around it. It’s amazed me the number of things that I had around the home that I didn’t use. Finally I simply said “Stuff It!” and got rid of most of the stuff that I didn’t use and put other special stuff in a closet that I’ll probably ignore for another years. Just like in What About Bob, “baby steps…” I tell myself.

Think Your Way To Success

  • Think Positively – I’m not going to get Stuart Smalley, Motivational Speaker on you, but making the conscious decision to focus on being financially successful is extremely helpful. Bringing finances to front of my mind, instead of the back has made a huge difference in my finances.
  • Don’t Hate Money – Lose the thinking that money is the root of all evil. Start thinking about it as a key to freedom to do whatever interests you. Think of it as a way to help friends, family, and charities important to you. Think about how you could use money to make the world a better place.
  • Appreciate What You Have – Schedule a day to just appreciate yourself. Appreciate the things that you do have. The fact that you are reading this likely means that you are much better off than others in the world.
  • Be In A Good Mood – One of my favorite lines from Say Anything is when Lloyd Dobler (played by John Cusack) says to his sister, “Why can’t you be in a good mood? How hard is it to decide to be in a good mood and be in a good mood once in a while?”

The Most Important Key to Success…

  • Do What You Love – You aren’t going to be successful at something you spend all day dreading. When I was excited about software engineering, I was good – perhaps even above average ;-). When I got stuck on a project that didn’t interest me, I was honestly a poor software engineer.

    However, be careful about blinding heeding the “follow your passion” advice. You must also recognize supply and demand and work within those constraints. There’s a large supply of people who want to become professional baseball or basketball players, and the demand is for only a few hundred. This means you have to be so much better than everyone else. There are few people looking to be morticians because it creeps a lot of people out, but there is a big demand, leading to a high-paying lucrative career.

    Mark Cuban has a great article on a related to this: Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort.

Happy 2017: Here’s Your Guide to Success

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The calendar does what it always, moves forward. While the change of a year is arbitrary, it does serve as a wake-up call for millions to take stock and try to improve their lives. I’m one of those millions. In fact, I’ve felt the push to improve for a full week now. (More on that later this week.)

Mountaintop Success

New Year’s resolutions don’t change much year to year. Last year I wrote researched 7 simple ways to Make and Keep Your New Year’s Resolution.

Seriously, that’s all you need, so just click that link.

You’re still here? Why?

The fact that you are still here is a good sign. It tells me that you have persistence or grit. This is important to succeed in any New Year resolution.

Want to know how much grit you have? Bestselling author Angela Duckworth has a Grit Scale test. On the 0 to 5 scale, I scored a -37. Yikes. On the bright side, you can be confident that you are ahead of me.

The general ideas are great for building a foundation on how to succeed with your resolution, but I thought I’d cover a few more. Here are some common resolutions and my very best tips:

Personally, I’d pick one area (more than one is setting yourself up to overwhelmed) and read the specifics and jot down a few notes. Then I’d use the Make and Keep Your New Year’s Resolution article to set up a plan to keep motivated… which is the most difficult part.

How I Work (by “Big-D”)

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Last week, I wrote about How I Work by following the Lifehacker outline. A regular reader, Big-D, loved it, and suggested readers could do the same. Within a couple of hours he had submitted the following for how he works. At the end, I’ll give some editor’s thoughts about what I’m going to take away and try to incorporate into my life/routine.

Location: Indiana

Current Gig: IT Security Professional, College Professor, Small Business Owner (Rentals, IT Consulting, Author, etc.)

One word that best describes how you work: “Sitting” Down

Current mobile device: LG Volt

Current computer: Errr … I have several I use daily: HP laptop at my day job, Dell laptop for home/teaching, Frankenstein 8core desktop with 32GB RAM running multiple virtual machines, an HP MicroServer running my domain website, mail server, file share, etc.

What apps, software, or tools can’t you live without? Why?

I use Firefox for my browser. I install uBlock, Ghostery, BarTab, NoScript, and FlashBlock as my add-ons. Being in IT security, I hate cross site privacy data contamination, thus the Ghostery. uBlock blocks advertisements, and FlashBlock and NoScript stop scripts and flash stuff from firing unless I approve them. BarTab takes tabs that I will get back to later, and unloads them from memory, helping performance on my systems.

I read my news from a Tiny Tiny RSS (ttRSS) feed program that I have installed on my personal web server. I have about 90 sites that are scoured through RSS feeds and read when I have time.

Jinzora is my home media application that I used on the road to listen to music. I have a ton of music and I serve it up from my home PC network through this application.

As for applications, I use MS office and basic apps like that for typical office productivity tasks.

I use Kali Linux for anything that I need to do when it comes to security application. I just use a live CD in my laptop and I can go to town to diagnose anything.

I use pfSense as my firewall at home. I have a small Intel Atom box running this as my firewall.

From a personal finance perspective I use gnuCash for my accounting software for my company. I have excel spreadsheets as I have hated the direction that Quicken has gone and it is just too hard to manage data as I like it to be seen in there. I guess you can call me an advanced user so I have migrated back to spreadsheets. I don’t use any online sites (outside of billpay at my credit union) due to privacy concerns.

I don’t use any apps for productivity except maybe notepad if I need to write a reminder to myself. I have a pretty good memory so I don’t forget things like what I need at the grocery store, etc.

What’s your workspace setup like?

My workstation at my 9-5 job is a laptop with dual 24” monitors and an old keyboard and trackball I got when I worked for Microsoft back in the day. At home, I have a dual 22” monitors and an IBM model 70 keyboard and a MS intellimouse (their first laser mouse) hooked up to a KVM for my 3 PCs in my rack. When I am watching TV or on the road, I use my laptop to multitask.

What’s your best time-saving shortcut or life hack?

I automate everything. Here are examples of this:

  • All of my utilities pay monthly for free on my credit cards.
  • All of my credit cards pay monthly out of my checking account without me doing anything.
  • I use timers for things to save time and money. My coffee maker is on a time, my hot water heater (to save money when I’m not home), my furnace/AC has a timer.
  • I sit down on Sunday and select which shows I am going to record on my Windows media player, and I have them to watch when I get home and have time to watch TV.
  • I have my food portioned out (meat, veggies, etc.) from buying in bulk, so I plan my meal before I leave in the AM, I pick out the food, put it in the sink to defrost, and defrosted when I get home from work. Usually eat 20 minutes after I get home from work.

What’s your favorite to-do list manager?

Notepad. When I write stuff down, I need it for a short period of time, and then it can go away. I have a pretty good memory. If I need it longer, I make a MS Word file out of it.

Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can’t you live without and why?

My Xboxes. I have a couple xbox 360 and an xbox one. I game on my one mostly, and my 2 360 boxes are hooked up to my 2 TVs. They are basically my DVR, home Media servers, etc. I have remotes for them and can watch tv, movies, anything I want. I have 3 jobs and when I am home, I just want to relax.

What everyday thing are you better at than everyone else? What’s your secret?

Planning efficient use of time. I am really good at knowing what I have to do, and how long it is going to take to do it. When someone asks me to do something, I can give them the precise amount of time it is going to take to do what they ask, and what other priorities I have at the moment will slip, etc. This comes from experience and planning your time efficiently.

What do you listen to while you work?

Anything that I find. I have 2500 CDs which are all ripped on my Jinzora server. I play what I want. Today is Paul Van Dyk, yesterday was Spiderbait, day before was Slayer. Whatever I am in the mood for.

What are you currently reading?

I read articles on the internet, the 90 RSS feeds mentioned above. I don’t do well with books because I just cannot get the time to read them all. If I ever get engrossed in a book I don’t sleep so that really becomes an issue. Last book I read was “Currency Wars” and all 7 of the Harry Potter books when I was on vacation in July/August.

How do you recharge?

Sleep at night if I can. I take walks around the office, drink water so I have to take pee breaks, etc. I have a hot tub which I get in several times a week after dark. Plus a glass of whiskey helps, but not too often (thus it is a treat ;). I drink decaf coffee and permit myself only one diet soda (diet mt. dew is my vice) a day at lunch so I don’t worry about ups and downs of too much stimulants or depressants.

What’s your sleep routine like?

I try for 8 but between 6 and 7 usually since I am too much of a night owl. I usually go to bed about 1:00am and get up at 8:00 on work days. I am at work by 8:45. I usually get home from work around 6-10pm depending on if it is a school night. Then I do my stuff for my own company.

On weekends, I usually go to bed at 4 am and wake up at noon. That is more to my natural body rhythm.

Fill in the blank: I’d love to see _________ answer these same questions.

I could say someone like my father but I know most of the answers. I don’t really believe in celebrity as they are just normal people who have had fame thrust upon them. Maybe someone like Vinton Cerf (Father of the internet) as he would be someone interesting.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Others have done the Golden Rule, and things like that. I am going to go with something a little different which has helped me a LOT in my career. From a psychological perspective, there is only one reason a person ever gets angry. That is when you trample on something that they think is a “right” of theirs. You can skin that cat, and peel the layers back but it always comes back to someone doing something which that individual feels they are owed.

So how does this apply? When you are negotiating and the other person gets angry? When a child is throwing a fit? When a significant other is angry? There are many reasons. Anger takes many forms, and 90% of the time it is not the reason they are yelling about. Getting to the key issue as fast as possible diffuses the situation, and allows for you to make a constructive progress in easing the anger.

Editor’s takeaways

  1. I don’t know how Big-D manages to find the time to read my site, but I’m glad he does.
  2. That 8-core 32GB RAM, monster sounds really impressive. I wonder if I should invest in powerful desktop just to alleviate the load from my laptop. I’d probably still gravitate to my laptop for convenience.
  3. I feel like I don’t get enough done after reading this. Three jobs? Wow!
  4. Great final advice about understanding why people get angry. I need to think more about this…

    I’m reminded of the great quote by River Tam in Serenity: “People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.”

How I Work

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Lifehacker has a great series called, How I Work. Often they have CEOs of companies and other extremely smart people, but they’ve recently done something that I find far more interesting.

They are having the editors of Lifehacker write about how they work. These are the experts on productivity writing about how they are most productive! I’m going to steal borrow their outline today and tell you a little bit about how I work.

I’m going to use their format:

Location: Rhode Island
Current Gig: Personal Finance Writer, dog sitter, defendant (it feels like a gig)
One word that best describes how you work: Dogs. If Kristin Wong can say cats, I can say dogs.
Current mobile device: Nexus 5
Current computer: Dell XPS 13 (9300-something edition) with 4GB of Ram (sad)

What apps, software, or tools can’t you live without? Why?

I’m a Firefox guy (see 10 Hacks to Speed Up Your Browser and Firefox Profiles for Increased Productivity). Google and Microsoft control enough of the tools I use, so if it’s close I’m going to go with the independent.

I read my news with Feedly on my phone. I use Pushbullet to send interesting articles to my laptop. I save and tag articles with Pocket.

I write my articles either directly into WordPress and sometimes into Scrivener. I want to use Scrivener more, so I can rearrange blog posts in to an ebook.

Excel is currently my to-do list, my accounting system (which will likely change to Quickbooks soon), and my General Organizer of All Things.

I use Personal Capital to keep my net worth constantly updated.

What’s your workspace setup like?

Sadly, it is my lap on a couch. Sometimes, it is the barstool in the kitchen. I’m trying to use my desk more often. It should be my treadmill desk, but I get a lot of walking in due to the dogs.

What’s your best time-saving shortcut or life hack?

I’m going to give a few hacks:

  • Going to the library. When I work from home, I can get distracted by chores and other things (subtle code for the Patriots Sub-Reddit). When I’m at the library, it’s 100% grind as Mark Cuban would say. I can sometimes get more done in two hours than I get done in two days.
  • I like to plan my most productive day. I never do everything exactly right, but it gives me something to strive for and keeps me on track. That article is just a smart part of my article exploring How to be Productive.
  • Aside from those two, really look into Pushbullet (mentioned above.) It’s such a great way to get photos and websites from your computer to phone and vice versa.

    • What’s your favorite to-do list manager?

    I use Excel for my own work, but when I need to manage family tasks with my wife, Wunderlist is the way to go.

    Besides your phone and computer, what gadget can’t you live without and why?

    Amazon Echo (Review and Revisited Review)

    It is just so easy to say, “Alexa, play the Beatles” or “Alexa, play Pandora” and have music. Too often technology makes things more complicated. Amazon Echo is the exception.

    There’s a lot of other things it can do that I simply haven’t dug into yet. My wife has used it to play Jeopardy. I use it to read my Google calendar. It integrates with my Ooma free home phone service. I’m tempted to get a Spotify subscription to expand the music available to me, but I’m frugal so Pandora works.

    Because I have only 4GB of memory on my computer, I am happy to off-load whatever I can to other devices like the Echo.

    What everyday thing are you better at than everyone else? What’s your secret?

    Googling information. I’m sure that some of my friends (and readers) think I’m the offspring of Lucy van Pelt and Brainy Smurf. (Good luck trying to get that image out of your head.)

    What do you listen to while you work?

    Since I already gave The Beatles, I’ll go with Jack Johnson and “Classical for Reading from Amazon Prime.” (I stumbled on this playlist randomly, but it’s great with the Echo.

    What are you currently reading?

    A bunch of articles on the internet. I can’t seem to make any headway reading books.

    How do you recharge?

    Naps and dog walks. These 200mg caffeine tablets and this pill splitter are also helpful.

    What’s your sleep routine like?

    Usually somewhere around 6 hours from 11:30PM to 5:30AM. The 30-40 minute siesta is usually around 2:00PM

    Fill in the blank: I’d love to see _________ answer these same questions.

    Tom Brady. Some 99.999% of the time, I think athletes should not be role models. He’s one of the very rare exceptions. I almost always learn some new life lesson from his Monday interviews during the season. For instance, he said that The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom helped him deal with the Deflategate haters.

    What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

    The best advice comes from my mother: “Do onto others as you’d have them do onto you.” I distinctly remember this, because she said I could stop going to school when I learned that Golden Rule. I didn’t get out of going to school, but the rule stuck with me.

    I’d want someone to help me with personal finance or to get me out of an MLM cult. So that’s why I want to help others with that.

Typesy: Typing Software is Back?

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A couple of months ago the folks at Typesy reached out to tell me about their product – typing software. I had a flashback to 1986 when MasterType for my IBM PCjr was the greatest thing ever. That software, combined with using a computer since I was 7 prepared me to ace my high school typing class.

(Yes, there used to be a classroom of actual typewriters with an instructor calling out letters.)

I chortled to myself as I thought, “With computers everywhere, isn’t everyone a very good typer now?” I’m at the point where I can type about one thing and have a conversation with my wife. (I don’t do it very often, because it really freaks her out. Also, writing about one topic and talking about another will make my brain explode if I do it for too long.)

Here’s the thing: I type a lot. Most of the people I know type a lot. It may be less than a few years ago thanks to smartphones and tablets, but there’s always going to be a need to create words to express thoughts.

If you can type faster, you can express more thoughts in less time. That’s productivity that saves you minutes every day… maybe hours each week.

When I think about that productivity and combine it with everyone not having a computer at age 7 like I did, it’s very easy to make a case that typing software is very valuable. Almost as if on cue, my 3-year old son provided another good reason for typing software… teaching kids to type. (Hey just came up to me and asked if he can type on my computer. He proceeded to type his name. Yes, I’m a proud papa. At the same time, should I be concerned that his typing skills are better than his writing skills?)

I decided it was worth a look, so convinced Typesy to let me try their software. It knocked my socks off. To be fair, my socks were prepared for a remake of a mid-80’s Mastertype.

There’s a lot to the software, so it’s for me to touch on everything, but I went straight to the training section to see if where I started. (I’m not the type to read instructions… I want to dig in.) It gave me a passage to type and I could see the letters change color as I went. I expected it to be short, but it felt like 3-4 minutes which I felt to be a long time as I was trying to typing as fast and as perfect as I could. I usually make very liberal use of the backspace key, and that wasn’t an option here. It definitely pulled me out of my comfort zone, which is what I wanted.

I finished with a score of 50 WPM and 1 error. I was pretty happy with that. I’ve never been one to do things very fast (call it Laziness if you want), so 50 is probably close to my physical figure speed maximum. The software integrates with an online account that saves all my tests, so I can graph my progress over time.

I looked through the website and see a lot of things that I didn’t try. For example, I didn’t look at the tutorials. Call it hubris, but I didn’t want to spend my time there. There were always ways to connect with your social network. That may be helpful for newer typers, but that’s not something I’d make use of either.

Typesy comes with access for 5 people, so I’ll give each of the boys their own account when they are a bit older (2 and 3 seem a little early at this point). When that happens, I’ll have a better idea of what their teaching program is like.

So far everything here has been glowingly positive about right? I did have some difficulties in installing the software. That didn’t help my early bias that typing software was outdated. However, when I closed the installation and tried it a second time, it worked.

The software itself runs on Adobe AIR. That’s good for Typesy because they can write it once and have it work on both Windows and Macs. Unfortunately, it requires installing extra software (the Adobe AIR environment). That was quick and it worked well. The style of the software itself doesn’t have a “modern” feel to it. I’m not quite sure if it is the Adobe AIR environment that makes it look outdated, but no one walking by is going to stop and say, “Hey that looks really slick! What are you doing?” If that was one your priorities in your typing software, it may be best look elsewhere. While you are looking, might I suggest that you double-checking those priorities?

Still wondering whether you should give Typesy a shot? They have the best guarantee I’ve seen anywhere: “Our Fearless 12-Month ‘Refund and $50’ Guarantee.” Not too many companies are willing to give you 12-month guarantee. Of those few, I’m not sure any of them (other than Typesy) will give you an extra $50.