Lazy Man and Money

Appreciate What You Have Today

by 4 Comments

Last week our toilet stopped flushing well. It needed new innards – the stuff inside the tank that help it flush. I’ve done this in a rental property, and it was no big deal. My wife has done it several times as well. Well, this was not as simple. Maybe I bought an incompatible unit, but this took us both hours of mixing various parts of the old unit and the new one.

It was… not fun.

Yesterday, we spent an hour trying to get the motion-sensor lights on a Chamberlain garage door opener to work. Changing the light bulb didn’t work. Changing out the sockets with new ones we bought on Amazon didn’t work.

For the 8th year in a row, our air conditioning didn’t work when we turned it on this summer. We have two units, and neither worked. We didn’t spend hours fixing it, but we spent weeks waiting for the A/C repair people – and over a thousand dollars. I spent a couple of hours on calls to get it done.

We always have a few of these projects. Whenever we fix one thing, there’s another thing that breaks.

I often think, “When does this end? When does everything just work, and I can focus on starting a new project?”

However, I recently changed my mindset. I’ve started to look at the things that we’ve fixed in the past.

There was a time when a tree fell and went through our fence. That was a mess then, but now we have a nice fixed fence.

We replaced our upstairs carpeting earlier this year. It was exciting for a couple of weeks, and then it became “normal.” This was a time to reflect on how nice it is compared to what we had before.

I walked down to our finished basement and thought of all the things that I hadn’t done. The television isn’t hung on the wall. The couch is one my dog ate up 14 years ago. (We turned around the cushions, so it’s not obvious.) Last night I found out that the dimmer switch on the lighting was broken. There are probably at least another dozen things that I wanted to do.

But you know what? It’s a lot better than it was three years ago. Then it was a pile of old baby stuff and other things we never had a chance to put away properly. The kids can go down there and play video games or watch a movie. I can go down and use it as a quiet office space.

There are so many things in our house that are working well. Growing up, I had to fill ice trays with water. Now, I have magical ice without doing anything at all.

The other day I was upset that our Apple TV subscription doesn’t work on our Android or Amazon tablets or phones. Today, I am happy that I can watch thousands and thousands of other shows/movies anywhere in the house with an extremely lightweight, portable TV screen.

Appreciating what you have goes far beyond a stroll through your home. You can apply it to your health, relationships, and just about anything you can think of.

Take a few minutes and appreciate all the things that are working well in your home and life.

Free Form Friday!

by Leave a Comment

I’m doing something a little different this Friday. Instead of one main article, I’ve got a few different thoughts on my mind. Typically, I’d do this on Twitter, but things disappear on the timeline fast that it doesn’t seem worth it.

Giveaway on Kid Wealth

I’m giving away a course on entrepreneurship for kids ages 10-18 on Kid Wealth. It was created by a financial expert with the certifications and credentials to match. It includes twice a week live video conferences for accountability. It’s timed perfectly to fight your kid’s summer learning loss. By the way, I know a guy and he says your odds of winning are extremely good. Go here to enter.

Plutus Awards

The other news is that the annual Plutus Awards are taking nominations. The Plutus Awards are like the Oscars, Emmys, or some other award show with a red carpet that my wife watches. Except it’s for personal finance… and there’s no red carpet and it’s not televised and it’s not reported by the news. Nonetheless, it’s important to me to continue a streak of never winning one. I could take the easy way out and simply ignore it, but that’s no fun. It’s much more fun to play the game.

However, to get in the game, I need your help. I need to be nominated. That means that someone has to go to the Plutus Awards Nominations Page and enter in my website in a relevant category.

Below are a few suggestions. My best chances may be the first two. Regular readers know that Lazy Man and Money covers personal finance very broadly. I can write about military pensions one day, investments the next, and college planning after that. That means it doesn’t fit in a nice category. I’ve been a finalist for a Lifetime Achievement, so that seems like the best path.

Secondly, Kid Wealth is perfect for the best financial literacy content for children. It’s a perfect fit unless some of the other categories and Lazy Man and Money

  • Lifetime Achievement – LazyManAndMoney.com
  • Best Financial Literacy Content for Children – https://KidWealth.com
  • Best Family or Couples Personal Finance Content – LazyManAndMoney.com
  • Best Financial Independence or Retire Early Content – LazyManAndMoney.com

Make Extra Money

Does inflation have you worried? It seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. The people from Savings Advice have a blog post on how to make more money on the side. I got started dog sitting several years ago with the idea of making a couple of hundred extra dollars a month. Now, I make thousands and thousands. This blog was designed to explore side hustles and then it became one itself!

Savings Advice is probably one of the oldest personal finance websites on the internet. Some people have created blogs on the site and have run them for more than 10 years. They also have some money forums which is a good place to get some quick money answers.

Cleaning Out the Desk Drawer of Ideas

by Leave a Comment

I have (what I think) is a good article to share for Thursday. Today, I’ve got a good article and a few housekeeping things to share and clean up. I used to write articles that were a combination of a bunch of small topics. With Twitter, it’s become less necessary. However, this seems like a good time to bring it back. Cue the bullet points:

  • This week Retire by 40 published an interview with me. We have a lot in common so if you like my blog, you’ll probably love his. In this interview, I answer a lot of questions about being financially independent, but still self-employed and not really retired.
  • On that self-employment front, last month’s dog sitting was about twice what we’ve ever done. This month we are doing 25% better. I’ve had to turn away customers and raise prices to try to slow down requests. It’s close to a full-time job scheduling everything.
  • Between the dog sitting and short kids’ camps, I don’t have much time to sit and do much “deep writing.” My son’s cooking camp this week is only 3 hours.
  • I’d appreciate it if you’d nominate me for Lifetime Achievement Plutus Award. I’ve been nominated twice before, but didn’t win.
  • I need to do an update on my goal’s progress for 2021. I was trying to get them done about every 6 weeks, but I think it’s been about 3 months now. I have a hunch this is going to be a mixed bag. I think I’ll be ahead of the financial goals (due to dog sitting coming back) and behind in some of the personal goals.
  • Similarly, I want to update you on my crypto-currency investing progress. You can see that the crypto markets haven’t been doing well. That’s going to be the high-level update, but I’m hoping to get an article out on that soon.
  • If you are an RSS subscriber to the blog, you may not be getting updates anymore or they may be leaving soon. Google has discontinued its Feedreader service that was popular back in 2006. I found a replacement, but ran into some technical issues. I think they might be resolved, but I haven’t had a chance to test it yet. (I realize that if you aren’t getting updates then you aren’t likely to see this either, but it’s the best I can do.)

When 92% Isn’t Enough

by 4 Comments

Every few days, I get a test back from my kids’ school. Either I’m really spoiled or the tests are too easy. It may be a combination of both. They do well at school, so they probably get 96% on average. I figure that because they are in the first and second grade the school is building confidence in them.

Over the long term, they won’t always get A’s. They probably won’t even get A minuses. Competition gets greater and the pressure to be the best all the time is probably not the healthiest lifestyle.

I’ve found in most cases in life, 92% is great. Of course, there are a few exceptions – I expect more out of pilots and surgeons.

Last week, something happened that made me wonder if 92% isn’t good enough.

The 92% Wealthiest People

Our net worth is probably somewhere between the top 90% and top 95% in the United States for our age. Every now and again, I find a tool online and it fits somewhere in that range. For lack of a better figure, let’s call it in the 92% range.

In many ways, I feel that being in the top 8 percentile of wealth makes it difficult to relate to some of the challenges of my younger readers. We’re on different parts of our money journeys and the changing world makes today’s challenges different than the ones I had. We had the benefit of having invested early and a long, long bull market. We also are high income – my wife much more than me as I focus more on kids and household stuff.

In any case, being in the top 92 percentile of net worth is a good place to be in. We don’t have many day-to-day money troubles. At the same time, we do have a small-ish house (by today’s standards), a mortgage, and I drive a 2012 Subaru Forester. I don’t have a pair of jeans that isn’t ripped. To outsiders, we probably look like “The Millionaire Next Door”, except without the millionaire part.

Our greatest splurge is that our kids go to a very good private school. Even with a generous military discount, it is a lot of money. We love the education that the kids are getting, but the families are extremely wealthy.

Last week, I found out that Millionaires Next Door and the One-Percenters don’t mix well. I’m sure this isn’t surprising, but it also isn’t the kind of thing that most people have the privilege of even thinking about.

My son and I were invited to one of his friends’ birthday parties. It was just a few families and the kids were all from the same school. There’s not a lot of COVID in our area and through one means or another (age, health care worker, connections maybe?) the vaccinated percentage was high.

I Zillowed the house beforehand and saw that it was a 3M mansion. The family was new to the school, escaping COVID of NYC for their summer house where the kids could be in school full-time. Their Maplethorpe-like original art was very much my kind of humor, but not something I’d consider appropriate for kids. The host casually mentioned that it was probably worth more than the house… and I’m not sure that’s a stretch. (People can pay a lot of money for art.

They had complaints about their refrigerator, but I couldn’t get past that it was bigger than my closet. It was a historic house and parts of it always seemed to need fixing… at crazy prices to keep up with the neighborhood code. Our house, at a fraction of the cost, is cheaper to maintain – a great feature of being constructed around 1990. Our yard is just as big or bigger, but the location is a little farther from the center of town.

(Funny side story about the fridge, my son got thirsty so he went to the kitchen sink and poured himself some water. When he saw another kid get water from the refrigerator door, it completely blew his mind. I know the feature isn’t limited to the one-percenters, but our fridge was brand new when we bought the house, and it didn’t have the feature – my kids had never seen it.)

They were really great people. However, we are just from different worlds. Every so often something came out like, “Johnny doesn’t own a shirt without a collar”, I would blurt out that my kids barely own any shirts WITH a collar. (It’s not true that my kids don’t own shirts with collars, the school has a dress code, but they would never choose to wear them.) My son wore his Minecraft T-shirt on the outside of a Pokemon long-sleeve T-shirt because those were the characters that the birthday boy liked. Like every day, his socks didn’t match. (I dressed up for the occasion in my best Newport pastels with the tiny whale logo, so I at least looked like I fit in.)

I kept trying to find a way to bridge my 92% life experience and their 99% life experience. Our kids seem to be great friends. (It has been hard to tell because COVID has prevented us from meeting all school year.) Maybe we’ll be spending a lot of time together as things start to open up. I just couldn’t find that common ground.

Overall the kids had tremendous fun. Truth be told, I did too. It was much more fun than I expected, but maybe it’s because this was my first socialization in over a year.

When I got home that night, I couldn’t help but think what they thought about us. I wonder if they were thinking that we were great comic relief as such commoners. I know that being in the 92% is enough for us and that’s all that matters. However, it’s strange to live in two different financial worlds and not fit into either.

Just before I drifted off to sleep, I had a strange thought that made me laughed to myself. I imagined the host family writing in their bedside journal – or maybe they have a blog too. Their entry was “When 99% Isn’t Enough.” After all there are a couple of families who are semi-famous with net worths of over $100 million.

Oprah’s Viral Stanford Graduation Speech

by 15 Comments

(I’m taking some time off this week, but prepared this (mostly) a little ahead of time.)

Oprah has been in the news recently. I seem to be the only person who missed the big event. I’m just not into royalty stuff. I had a friend who used to say that he has no time for rich, inbred people. I wouldn’t have put it so bluntly, but he had a point.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong about royalty. After all, there was a time that I wasn’t a fan of Oprah… until this event in 2008.

My wife and I were invited to watch our friend get her Ph.D. from Stanford. While I should have been more focused on her accomplishment, Oprah stole the show. I suppose that’s what commencement speakers do – they are the show.

In 2008, these observations about her speech went viral. I’m not sure that viral was “a thing” back then… and given the situation with COVID, I’m not it should be now. Either way, you get the point. This article is so old that YouTube deprecated the format to include the video. I can’t blame it too much, YouTube was still a toddler of 2 or 3 at the time.

It doesn’t make sense to reminisce with myself. You can join me on the journey by either watching the video or reading the full text. (I expect that you’ll do neither, so just continue to scroll, it’ll still make sense.)

Here’s the full text full text.

I thought it would be interesting to review how I thought of it back then and add 2021 thoughts.

16 Things I Think from Oprah’s Graduation Speech

  1. 2008: I think I laughed a little each time Oprah said Stanford, because she used a baritone voice to convey the exclusivity of the school.

    2021: School exclusivity is still a big deal in 2021. It is always going to be timeless humor when it involves the very best (and most exclusive) schools in the nation.

  2. 2008: I think that I would be like Kirby Bumpus, a Stanford student, and not mention that Oprah is literally my fairy godmother.

    2021: Kirby Bumpus was married at Oprah’s home around a month ago. It seems that she still makes the news.

  3. 2008: I think that no one needed a Wusthof knife to cut the tension when Oprah closed the ceremony with, “You know, I’ve always believed that everything is better when you share it, so before I go, I wanted to share a graduation gift with you. Underneath your seats, you’ll find…”

    2021: We didn’t find anything underneath our seats. As far I know there’s nothing under your seat right now.

  4. 2008: I think that Oprah’s story of not being one credit shy from graduating college for 12 years was great. She tied it into a great message when she went back to get the degree despite having more than enough success without it, quoting B.B. King, “The beautiful thing about learning is that nobody can take that away from you.”

    2021: I will always advocate for more education. However, I think we can talk about the celebrity narrative of “being a credit short” to graduate and going back to school to get it. In almost every situation you hear or read about, that credit didn’t matter – they were already celebrities. If there are a lot of common, “uncelebrity” folk out there who lack a credit after a few years, there should be a process to have it made up with experience in the industry or other accommodation. It doesn’t help anyone to have people 1/100th away from a degree that is useful to them.

  5. 2008: I think that while I often write about money, this is a beautiful excerpt, “I believe that there’s a lesson in almost everything that you do and every experience, and getting the lesson is how you move forward… I know that inner wisdom is more precious than wealth. The more you spend it, the more you gain.”

    2021: This is still beautiful today, but it strikes me as some kind of mamsy-pamsy non-actionable advice? Too harsh?

  6. 2008: I think I learned that you should do what feels right. Oprah went into a story about her first job where everyone tried to make her into something that she wasn’t. Even her father encouraged her to play along, “Just do your job”, he’d say. This spoke to me recently with a contract job that I took.

    2021: Now when I read, “Do Your Job”, I can’t think of it without the fame that the New England Patriots put behind it. I even have the t-shirt and it motivates me to this day.

  7. 2008: I think that story led into the one thing that’s been driven home time and time again from this website, “When you’re doing the work you’re meant to do, it feels right and every day is a bonus, regardless of what you’re getting paid… If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it.”

    2021: I’m much more of a pragmatic, “do the job to pay the bills” kind of person nowadays. Some years of tough blogging incomes and now having dependent kids has changed my view.

  8. 2008: I think this would be a horrible article if I didn’t mention this nugget from the speech… “Let me tell you, money’s pretty nice. I’m not going to stand up here and tell you that it’s not about money, ’cause money is very nice. I like money. It’s good for buying things.”

    2021: Yes, money is important, don’t just always do what feels right.

  9. 2008: I think it would be an even worse article if I didn’t provide the full context, “What you want is money and meaning. You want your work to be meaningful. Because meaning is what brings the real richness to your life. What you really want is to be surrounded by people you trust and treasure and by people who cherish you. That’s when you’re really rich.”

    2021: This is a good mix. It’s really has has pushed so many people into the FIRE movement. If you don’t need as much money, you can focus more on the meaning.

  10. 2008: I think having the trust of many readers and being surrounded by other great bloggers has brought meaning and real richness to my life.

    2021: Still true today. (However, I wish I didn’t have to beg for a comment every couple of weeks ;). I know many of you are reading this, I can see the stats._

  11. 2008: I think this is a great piece of advice, “There are many times when you don’t know what to do. When you don’t know what to do, get still, get very still, until you do know what to do.”

    2021: When I don’t know what to do, I don’t think, “Let’s open up Oprah’s 2008 graduation speech.” I have never actually tried this, but I’d like to some time.

  12. 2008: I think Oprah gave this piece of common advice, “Ask every failure” ‘this is what I do with every failure, every crisis, every difficult time’ “I say, what is this here to teach me?”

    2021: During a crisis or difficult time, I think the best idea is to focus on “How do I get out of this place, situation?” Do a post-mortem later to get your life lesson.

  13. 2008: I think she tied that piece into her own experiences well, using the story of the sexual abuse at her school in Africa. She realized that her failure was in focusing on all the physical details of the school, and missing the overall picture that the people are what matter.

    2021: I had forgotten about this over the years.

  14. 2008: I think that Oprah reiterated what Bobby Petrino said about dealing with adversity. In case you missed it, here’s a recap. Greive properly, attend to the situation at hand, and get back to what was important before the crisis.

    2021: I should update that old article about Michael Vick and the dog fighting ring. The lessons are universal and there are more recent examples.

  15. 2008: I think Oprah’s third lesson is one that many of my personal finance blogging colleagues will nod and agree with… “Don’t live for yourself alone. This is what I know for sure: In order to be truly happy, you must live along with and you have to stand for something larger than yourself. Because life is a reciprocal exchange. To move forward you have to give back. And to me, that is the greatest lesson of life. To be happy, you have to give something back.”

    2021: This hits me much harder today than it did back then. I think as you get older, what you have given to others becomes “The Most Important Thing.”

  16. 2008: I think I now appreciate the amazing woman that Oprah is. If you think about it she’s had every “strike” against her… discriminated against race, gender, even weight. On top of it all she had a funny name… It’s even more amazing when I realize that she became a public figure with all those “strikes” against her. It’s not like she got rich by inventing dental floss.

    2021: This still rings true in 2021. I remember several years back thinking that she could run for President of the United States and get it because few people have a better reputation that would connect with all the voters. In hindsight, I was a little too optimistic about America.

    I’m not sure what the dental floss line was about, but I think it was more that she had to continuously work to build her reputation and brand and that made her famous. It wasn’t a strike-it-rich moment.

I’m going to leave it there for today. It’s a lot to read and longer if you watcher or read the whole speech.

Originally published on: June 16, 2008