Lazy Man and Money

I Can (Still) Ride My Bike With No Handlebars

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Today, I’m refreshing a weekend post that turned 12-years old this week.

We need it.

I thought it was relevant in 2008, but it is even more so in 2020.

If you can relate to this, I’d appreciate it if you could also turn back the clock to 2008 and leave a comment. (Blogger love comments – it makes their day.) Also, consider spreading the video (and this article if you choose) on social media.

no handlebars
I Can Ride My Bike With No Handlebars

Like almost all of my weekend posts, I try to highlight something that’s not necessarily related to personal finance. Maybe it’s a small detail of something that’s going on in my life. Earlier this week, I was driving to the store to do some shopping and I heard an unusual song. It caught my attention because I would categorize it as rap, but I don’t listen to channels that typically play rap. Perhaps it’s a lot like one of my favorite bands, Cake, that mixes in spoken word within the song.

I went home and found the video on YouTube. I showed it to my wife and she agreed that it was even better than the song itself. What do you think:



The video is not loading on my phone, so here’s a link to YouTube

That’s a great story about the paths that you can choose… how power can corrupt… how you can choose to create, build and help people… there’s lots of great symbolism.

This is the reason why I miss MTV showing music videos.

A Look Around the World of Personal Finance

Continuing along with this historical look, I decided to preserve what used to be called “link round-ups”, which were highlights from partner blogs.

Only one of these blogs is still active – Million Dollar Journey. Interestingly, their article from June 25, 2008 is titled, “RBS Predicts a Global Market Crash.” It begins: “I read a report from RBS predicting that there will be a global market crash could come at the end of summer/beginning of fall 2008.”

I’ve removed the links that no longer link to the exact article, but a surprising number of blogs are still serving (even if they are dormant).

And now some links from The Money Writers:

Links from other great blogs:

  • The Zebra gives some great ideas on how to save during a crisis.
  • Flexo points out that the IRS now allows you to deduct miles at 58.5 cents each. This is helpful for my wife, who occasionally drives pretty far for her work. We expect they’ll update their reimbursement to match. Perhaps this should have a regional aspect to it as well.
  • No Credit Needed reports on StreetRead – an interesting new site for stock quotes and financial information .
  • Mighty Bargain Hunter has found a great site to share with all of us who love to eat out. You get $35 in Restaurant.com gift certificates for only $4. Perhaps the prices at the gas pump won’t hurt so much with this sweet deal.
  • More gas-saving tips are offered this week by Free Money Finance on top of Money Smart Life’s post. These pertain more to trip taking than every day.

This article was originally published on Jun 28, 2008 at 09:50

Three Dreams, Two Household Tips, and One Merry Christmas

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Money Gift

Last week, I wrote an article that was tough to publish because I was feeling very depressed. Tasks everywhere just caving in on me and I was getting buried… and I don’t even have a traditional career. Turns out that much of the cure for those feelings may have been just writing about them. Or maybe is was all the heartfelt comments I received. I’m sure the passing of time played a role as well.

Whatever it was has had a very interesting side effect. After years of only remember one or two dreams per year (at most), I now have a 3 day streak of very vivid dreams. It’s been years of since I had one vivid dream.

I wanted to share them, because they give a little peeks into myself, this blog, and have a little money mention in them. (I wouldn’t blame you if you just skipped down to the two household tips.)

  1. My MLM scam exposure stories haunt me (and Tom Brady)

    In this dream, one of the old MLMs that sued me into silence was upset about some kind of new story that was being done by a journalism student, Mary Higgs, on the Boston College campus. I guess she uncovered all my previous findings and wrote it into a story. No one would give me a clear story, but the lawyers were fighting and demanded I come in.

    Tom Brady happened to be taken a master’s course there for some reason. In fact, the Patriots had a whole satellite office there. All of it was connected, but no one would tell me how. When it finally came time watch the video of Higgs’ exposé, Tom Brady came in and asked if could talk to me for a few minutes. It was a clear distraction tactic. I don’t have many rules, but one is, “If Tom Brady wants to give you a few minutes of his time, you don’t say no.”

    Of course, I woke up before talking to Tom Brady or uncovering the mystery of the reporting and the connection to the Patriots. I could only assume it was like when the Red Sox players were caught in the MonaVie pyramid scheme.

  2. I sailed around New York City

    I’ve been sailing exactly once in about 10 years. However, I live in a sailing community, Newport RI, so that will change. On this day it changed really quickly as I hopped a quick flight to NYC (not sure how that’s quicker than driving) and rented a sailboat. I took it around the sea a few times and got a picture of the Statue of Liberty through some kind of arch.

    Since I was wet, I got a hotel room and showered. Then it was too dark to sail back to the rental place. A fine Japanese young man who happened to have a sail planned in my direction offered to guide me. I got the sailboat back safely. Then I rented a car and drove back home only with the fear of having to explain to my wife that I spent a few thousand dollars.

    In the morning, I checked my phone for that picture of Ms. Liberty, just to make sure that it didn’t happen.

  3. Barstool Sports makes my son famous

    I posted something on Lazy Man about my son’s scooter not being charged for school. Very mundane stuff. Barstool picks up the story and uses their traditional sarcasm to explain that he must have a howitzer to get girls with such a terrible ride. (Howitzer, is a reference to an old Barstool scandal.) I don’t know if they knew he was 5 years old, but the media jumped on them for that.

    All of this time, traffic to my Lazy Man story was going through the roof. The only thing is that I don’t check traffic very much and I had a full day of real world errands to run. I missed the whole media circus until everyone had moved onto the next interesting thing.

    Come to think of it, that very much sums up everything you need to know about blogging. (Also, I haven’t read Barstool in years.)

Hopefully those weren’t too long or boring. I promise not to give up personal finance writing for dream writing.

Two Household Tips

I realize that you don’t come here for the above stuff, but I didn’t think Christmas Eve was the right time for a deep analysis of the SECURE Act and stretch IRAs. As a compromise, I’ll leave you with two random household money saving tips that I’ve been saving up for years because they don’t fit anywhere else on the blog:

  • Fogless Shaving Mirrors Forever – I NEED a fogless shaving mirror in the shower. It’s the best thing ever invented. The only problem is that they lose their foglessness as you clean them. Sometime they give a 1/10 of an ounce cleaner and ask you to buy more. A better plan is to get RainX anti fog repellent for car windshields. I put a couple of drops on a piece of toilet paper and any old shower mirror is anti fog for a few days. A bottle will last you for years and years. It’s usually about $5, so Amazon’s pricing is very weird today.

    They seem to realize that people have discovered this trick and added that it works great on bathroom mirrors on the bottle. I’ve been on my same shaving mirror for 15 years now and before I had to churn through them every year or two.

  • Bullion Cubes – This is further proof that moms are the smartest people. My mom used bullion cubes fairly often, but I’m mostly self-taught cooker. I bought chicken broth in boxes. Then I’d throw half the box away because it was too much. Then I bought cans because I was less wasteful of broth – but probably more wasteful in creating trash.

    At Aldi’s I discovered bullion cubes on just a random glance on the aisle. It was about $2.00 for the equivalent of 25 cans of broth… in 1/25th of the space! It’s a perfect replacement. I don’t know if tastes the same, but fortunately my cooking is bad enough that no one will the notice the difference.

I hope you got something out of your time reading this today. If you have a favorite household tip, please share it below. Maybe we can compile a greatest hits and turn this into a valuable resource (minus my weird dream stuff).

Finally, I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. The plan is to do a financial year in review before the New Year.

Selling Wine – Almost Like Blogging

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This past holiday weekend my wife, my dog, and I headed down to the wine country of Paso Robles, California. Each year a group of 17 vineyards called the Far Out Wineries get together to host a wine tasting event. For a price of $35 you can spend 4 days visiting any of the wineries and taste their wine for free. To make it even a better deal the money goes to charity (tax deduction!) and you can win some prizes as long as you go to at least 8 of them. It’s a brilliant marketing plan to get people down there and buying their wine.

This was our third trip down to Paso in the last two and half years. One thing we noticed this time is that there are a number of new wineries popping up. I don’t know if it’s the economy picking up, but it seems like the wineries have doubled in number. When we got to Carmody McKnight I had to ask, “With all these wineries popping up, can I expect this annual wine tasting event to expand from 17 to 30 and go on for a week?” I feel like I should have known the answer…

The sommelier explained that the 17 wineries that participate are good friends and that they’ve been doing the event for nearly 30 years. It’s an exclusive club. Though the newer wineries are quite good, it’s not practical to let everyone in the club. As you start adding more people the value of being in the club actually goes down. It would be difficult to coordinate events like the annual one around Presidents Day and probably lead to the whole group collapsing under its own weight. The sommelier also pointed out that there is a delicate balance to strike. For instance the new wineries could get together to form their own network and compete with their own program.

It struck me that this is very much like blogging networks. I’m part of The Money Writers which is a group of ten bloggers. We have the same issue of newer bloggers asking to be part of our network. We feel we are a good size and adding new people would increase the complexity. And often other bloggers will go out and join other networks. The only difference is that I encourage bloggers to join networks and don’t view it as competition in the same way that the wineries do.

Can you think of some other area where this concept of a limited network enters your life? (Outside of blogging, I couldn’t think of any.) Let me know in the comments below…

Random Thoughts (Some Even Financially Related)

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Financially, I feel I couldn’t me less organized right now. I haven’t done my net worth in a few months. Haven’t asked the wife to do hers in much longer. I also need to look over the cash flow of my web-based business (this website being a sizable component of that), which I haven’t done in the last 2-3 months. I’m hoping that after the long weekend, I can start to finish that up.

Also on the to-do list is to set up an SEP-IRA for last year (I’m looking at you Fidelity). It will be interesting to look at more traditional investments for the first time in a while as I’ve been doing more investing in my businesses. I know I’m going to go with index mutual funds or exchange traded funds to broadly diversify with minimal expenses, but for fun, I will at least look at some blue chips. I don’t know why, but I love to tempt myself.

With that quick financial update out-of-the-way, here are some of the non-financial thoughts I’ve had lately.

  • I’ve been spending more time on my MonaVie Scam website. With the help of a few other dedicated people, more and more reasons why it’s a scam keep popping up.
  • I didn’t mind the Super Bowl halftime show as much as most people. Yes, The Who is old, and yes they’ve lost a lot on their fastball. However, when I hear the song, my brain kind of fills in the gap between what they are now and what they were. Also, I heard some radio station saying that most people can’t even name a song The Who sing. If you can’t name at least 5 songs The Who sing, I can never talk music with you. And if one of those songs is “Teenage Wasteland…” *sigh*
  • I realize that the Super Bowl is being really, really careful not to invite people who might have wardrobe malfunctions, but they are probably going to be running out of artists soon. You’d probably think that the wardrobe malfunction is the most amazing thing to happen on live television during a halftime of the Patriots game, but Joe Namath’s drunken “I wanna kiss you” interview with Suzy Kolber is up there. Those are the only two times I can recall literally fell out of my seat in my life.
  • While on the topic of football, I’ve already anointed Janell Wheeler as the winner of American Idol this season. I think they should just cut everyone else on the next show and just name her the winner. Perhaps they can give everyone else a parting gift and invite them back next year. How is Ms. Wheeler related to football? Google her and you’ll find she’s linked to Florida star Tim Tebow.
  • In the last two weeks, I’ve become much more portable. I bought an extended battery the Aspire One that I got pre-Black Friday sale. The new battery set me back $40, but it also seems to give me 9-10 hours of juice (though I haven’t put it to the full-test yet). I also bought an extended battery for my Palm Pre. It cost around $20, but lasts twice as long as the battery that came with the phone. I can get very close two days on a full charge now. Thank you Ebay.
  • While on the topic the Palm Pre, I can’t figure out why more people don’t buy one. Sprint has really cheap plans. Looks like the only competition should be the Nexus One on T-mobile. I realize it was limited to Sprint which might not work for everyone due to coverage. For those people, Verizon may have better coverage.

A Small Tribute to George Carlin…

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For those of you who have missed the news, famous comedian George Carlin died last night. I’m still in shock. I suppose I shouldn’t be, but he seemed to be the type the guy who live to be 120, giving every disease an obscene gesture that’s not appropriate for mention on this site.

I’ve spent much of day trying to decide if I should post something about it. It almost feels like if I didn’t, he could still come back tomorrow and we’d find that it was a big mistake. It seems like it was just yesterday that I was praising him for realizing how stupid it is to get a McMansion back in the 1980s.

I learned a lot from watching him. Besides a lot of new four letter words, I learned how language can be one of the best tools that we humans possess. It can be used in so many ways and it’s one of the reasons I’m a writer today. It can make us laugh. It can make us cry. Today a lot of people cried including this one.