Lazy Man and Money

We’ve (Almost) Survived 2020

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(I’m not a fan of clickbait titles. I wrote the title meaning that 2020 is almost over, but I now realize that it could imply that my family didn’t survive 2020.)

This is the Christmas week post I thought I’d ever write and certainly not the one that you probably thought you read. Like everything else this year, the words, “But here we are!” apply.

I thought I might write a review of the last year. That’s typically what I do this time of year. For the first time ever, it seems that everyone can agree that we don’t need that.

Still, some things stick out in my mind and it’s worth a quick look back review.

I remember when I started to realize that COVID was going to be something different. It was February 24, when The Atlantic put it bluntly, You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus. I remember sharing that idea in a conversation with a medical professional and having it dismissed. After all, there were only 35 known cases in the US at the time (note there was almost no testing available). Three weeks later, much of the country locked down. Personally, our Rhode Island location was sandwiched between big NY and Boston outbreaks.

The lockdown was a very strange time. Remember being told not to wear masks because the frontline professionals needed them and that they wouldn’t work? As we learned more, we found that masks were perhaps our greatest defense (along with social distancing).

My biggest COVID story (so far), was trying to run to separate schools, kindergarten and first grade, in my house at the same time. My wife was virtually deployed and could help out for a couple of hours of the day, but it was exhausting. Our biggest expense is a private school for the kids, so paying tens of thousands of dollars to teach your kids was an extreme disappointment, to say the least. It also meant that I couldn’t blog and lockdowns meant that my dog-sitting business went to zero.

I complained about everything, but the reality is that we were healthy and our finances were doing well (despite the loss of my income). Our kids were learning. Sometimes life throws you a curveball and it’s all you can do to foul it off and get another pitch to hit. Everyone got a curveball in 2020. I hope you were able to foul it off. I think that in 6 to 9 months from now, we’ll be primed to knock the next pitch out of the park.

Reviewing the “Good Stuff” of 2020

As I wrote before, no one wants to review 2020. However, what if we focused on just the good stuff?

“Good stuff?”, you ask?

Yes, there was truly good stuff in 2020, Virginia

Here are a couple of examples:

  1. 50 Surprising Wholesome Christmas Gifts – Warning: Your heart will grow three sizes while reading these.
  2. Wired’s 20 Positive News Highlights from 2020 – Warning: Panda Sex!

We’ve had big achievements at the science and history level… and big achievements at the personal level.

With that in mind, I’m going to close out the 2020 review with a personal review. But, before I do, I expect to publish a goals review for 2020 next week. Hint: It is going to be ugly! Early on in 2021, I have some timeless tips to reset and move forward. I also have some investing tips and one thing new that is motivating for 2021. I rarely plan a week of posts in advance, but here I am with three weeks of posts.

Lazy Man 2020 Reviewed

  • January
    We started the year, literally Jan 1, with a kid who got scary sick. He wasn’t able to eat or drink much for a couple of days. We brought him to the peditrician and she sent him to the state hospital on emergency appendicitis speculation. Without thinking much about it, I offered him a full-sugar Coke on the way. We don’t allow the kids to drink much (maybe 3 times a year), but he drank it down on the way to the hospital. There they performed all the tests and came up with nothing. After an IV, he was mostly a normal person.

    We all got sick a week later. We were told it was a virus. Was it COVID? I doubt it, but we certainly thought more about it in March.

    My favorite part of the review is my new 6-year old building an extensive Pokemon Mew model. We were all sick so he was on his own. I also taught my 7-year old to add some two-digit numbers, and he came up with the best strategy with the ones he didn’t know: “Ask dad.”

    This month was packed with a trip to Ice Castles, hitting 100K miles on a car (remember driving?!?!), archery practice, and skiing. The sky was the limit in January 2020.

    My least favorite part of the review is about how spry my dog was. He’s going to be 84 in dog years and is not very spry anymore. Hopefully, some supplements we have in the mail helps with that.

  • February
    My wife and I had our annual overnight at a romantic hotel. Unfortunately, that’s not possible in 2021. We also had a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner, where we ran out of conversation in the first 10 minutes of a 3-hour meal. We’ll try again in 2022.

    I went ice skating because the kids made it a condition of them doing it. It was a horror show, but everyone had a good laugh. Most importantly, the kids learned that they can be better than their dad if they try (or in this case, just exist).

    The highlight was Mardi Gras night at the local Navy Base. My wife didn’t want to do it because we knew we wouldn’t know anyone. We danced the night away and no one had more fun than my wife.

  • March
    The start of COVID of course. You can see a downturn in my tone.

    My wife bought me some great steaks for my birthday. I’d rather go out to dinner, but we have to do our part.

    I have a picture of my dog on a beach walk with a caption of, “Before they closed the beaches…”

    The kids school has a normal March break where we usually travel. We couldn’t travel as we expected, so I ran my own “homeschool” consisting of chess, scootering, Mythbusters Jr., Ruff Ruffman, and anything else I could do to keep kids mentally and physically engaged.

    The highlight was one snow, just one inch, the only one of the year. It turned to rain briefly and froze over. I rushed the kids to a hill and we got an hour and a half of sledding on icy snow. They could go a mile on that icy inch of snow.

  • April
    April was the most challenging month of the pandemic. Trying to teach two curriculums is tough, but it rain almost every day. We weren’t just locked down from seeing other people, but we couldn’t easily go walk the dog down the street.

    We had some help from Jack Johnson (a video concert), learning how to cook, Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand, a visit from the Easter Bunny, and a Harry Potter puzzle.

    The highlight was simply having the energy to move forward and try to turn this negative situation into something positive. That burst of energy, unfortunately, didn’t last long.

  • May
    I thought April was the worst with learning how to homeschool in daily rainstorms. May brought police brutality and system racism to the forefront. My personal finance annual conference, FinCon, got “cancelled” due to some controversial conversations from the founder.

    Kids continued to cook and hike. They camped out on their floor under a tee-pee. We took the Mustang convertible for a ride – the first time the kids were old enough to be appropriate seats that worked. We even had outdoor dining.

    The highlight was that we can look back on those pictures and realize that, under the circumstances, we’re doing well.

  • June
    We took the opportunity to escape to Block Island. It’s the smallest town in the smallest state – a great place to hide from COVID. We were fortunate that we could vacation in our own state. The local mom and pop hotel we usually stay at called and asked us to come. The entire island is summer tourism and COVID hit them bad.

    We didn’t have school or camp for a time during this month. With my wife working full time, this put me back into “Dad school” mode. This is when having STEM toys really paid off.

  • July
    The kids started camp and it went well. We had them signed up with a lot of exciting special camps, but they all canceled. Outdoors with masks in a place with very few COVID cases was a winning combination. The kids got a lot of beach and swimming time in. They also picked some blueberries.

    My wife and I had an outdoor anniversary celebration as well.

    This was the start of learning to adapt to life with COVID. That said, our area’s circumstances allowed to have a very good summer.

  • August
    We went back to Block Island. My wife became obsessed with finding one of the glass orbs that they hide every year there. I suggested that we make it a competition and we divided into two teams. Team Floppy Whale (me and my 6-year old) against team my wife and 8-year-old’s team Fire (something). We made up shirts and flags – turned it into a whole event.

    Neither team found an orb. It usually takes a few years to find an orb. There’s always next year.

    We lost electricity as Hurricane Isaias knocked out the power. I thought we might be out for days, because it takes time to restore power to an island. We fled until we got to a place with electricity so we could at least check the news. (There’s no news when local cell towers and radio stations don’t work.) It wasn’t bad, so we enjoyed a meal and went back. My 6-year-old asked for only brown M&Ms in his dessert so he could make his gummy play. I explained how ridiculous the request was, but the restaurant did it anyway.

    The kids played with Gravity Maze and we watched the Trolls World Tour movie for free from Redbox. They learned some sweet dance moves in the special feature.

    The highlight was the trip to Block Island, but there was an honorable mention. The kids got to go to a local water park. “Water park” may be stretching it for two water slides, but it’s 2020. For 2 hours, the max allowed, they got about 12 slides each.

  • September
    By this time, you’ve noticed that I’m happiest when the kids are happiest. That’s why almost all of these reviews go through the kids. My wife and I are working and we don’t have much to share from an adult perspective. Plus, I don’t think you’d want to know it anyway, right?

    September was the start of in-person school. However, we still had a corn maze to do. The kids started in-person karate. They love it! I think this will be a thing that lasts for many months. We also went to a food truck event.

    We did a family event called the BouldrDash. It’s one of those “extreme” obstacle courses but designed for a family with young kids. My anxiety level went to 11 before the event but wasn’t bad at all.

    Lastly, our 7-year old turned 8. We had a socially-distant birthday party. We also had our annual Gregg’s birthday cake. (Gregg’s is a Rhode Island restaurant chain.)

  • October
    We did more cooking with the kids. The kids also learned how to play Stratego. We had “the best Halloween yet” that was just a trunk or treat with a lot of candy. We even got to see some friends, because that was something we could do.
  • Novemeber
    My 6-year-old built a Nintendo Labo Robot. I needed to help him a little, but not too much. We did a lot of cleaning of a new rental property (we sold one and bought one). We had a good Thanksgiving and set up the Christmas. I shared some of my 6-year-old’s unique thinking on homework – change the problem and solve that one instead.

    • We’ll get December next month because we’re still living it.

    Wrapping up 2020

    It’s fitting that on Christmas Eve I’m wrapping this up and putting a bow on 2020. Please note that all the family stuff above is the top 10% of everything and not the typical 90%. I recommend going through your phone and seeing if you can find some good moments in 2020.

2020 Goals and Resolutions

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New Year's ResolutionsWe’re solidly into 2020 now, most people have their resolutions set and are working on them. Last year, I didn’t get them done until late February. This year I’m already ahead of the game as I have most of them outlined.

Outlined is the operative word. I don’t them fully organized. Hopefully by the end of the month, I can put them into a pretty spreadsheet like Joe from Retire By 40 does. For now, I’m just happy to have several areas to work on and have them broken into months.

Here we go (in no particular order):

Lazy Man and Money Goals

I have a lot of goals with this blog. I need to put more of a priority than I have on it over the last few years. I’m doing so much other stuff that it’s been difficult. I can be more efficient with my time. Here are some things I’m looking at:

Content Audit

With 14 years of blogging now, I’ve got a lot of old articles that frankly aren’t very good. Blogging in 2006 was about expressing an idea quickly. It wasn’t about having a fully polished article that you might read in a magazine. The idea was to get feedback and begin a discussion. Nowadays, this is happening on Twitter and Facebook. Blogging nowadays is about having a full polished article of more than 2000 words. Many of my articles in 2006-2007 were about 300-400 words.

A content audit is when a publisher goes back and looks at the old articles and says, “Is this still useful today? Is it polished? Can I make this better?” I need to do this with all my old articles. It would be very unusual if I didn’t learn anything over the last 14 years, so I should be able to make the articles better. One example of this is my article on investing in condo hotels.

For 2020, I’d like to pick one year each month and do a content audit on it. It’s a very aggressive goal to tackle a whole year of content in just one month, but anything is an improvement. Maybe in 2021, I do it all over again. With only 12 months to the year, I won’t get to the full 14 years of content, but the last year or two of content is modern enough.

Get Active in Social Media

I’m active on Twitter. I’d love to grow my 6,500 followers to 10,000, but I’m not actively researching how to do it. Maybe one month in 2020, I will look up ways to grow your Twitter account. That seems reasonable even if the research doesn’t lead to any action and nothing comes of it.

I’d prefer to learn more about Pinterest. I’ve outsourced my Pinterest account in the past, but it seems impossible to retain anyone. Also, it usually costs hundreds of dollars a month, and I’m not sure I’m able to get a return on that spending. I was hoping to hire someone who could guarantee me results or at least make it a significant part of the payment, but everyone rejected me. It seems that many Pinterest specialists don’t believe in themselves to drive traffic.

I’d also like to do more with Instagram and Facebook. I don’t do much with them now so this would be a low bar to reach.

Since there are about four services, I expect to spend a quarter of the year rotating through them month-to-month with my focus.

Other Lazy Man and Money Stuff

I need to do some design upgrades. I’m not sure how relevant my Feedburner number is considering it was shut down in 2012.

I also need to reach out to more bloggers to collaborate with them. I’ve already started on that with a few. My goal is to do something with 3-5 bloggers a month – hopefully a lot of new ones who I don’t necessarily talk to on social media.

Finally, I’d like to publish 100 articles here this year. That’s two a week, which will be difficult, especially if I’m guest posting on other sites. At Retireby40, Joe uses an academic system, where if he get 85 he’ll give himself a B. I think I’ll adopt the same here, because I don’t think I’ll get an A+ on this due to vacations and other life interruptions.

Health

It wouldn’t be a New Year’s Resolution without something related to health, right?

Diet

This year, I’ve created a spreadsheet of several different healthy activities that I can do or could do. There a diet side with things like intermittent fasting, eat one low/no-carb meal, have one of my super protein shakes, etc. It’s any one thing that’s in my extreme diet. For the last several years I wouldn’t do any of them in a typical day, so if I can get one of them for most days, I’ll be doing well.

Body/Exercise

On the other side of the spreadsheet, I have a list of body/exercise items. They include things like running, weights, push-ups, and even brushing/flossing/flouriding. I count the teeth and the push-ups as half points. That way, even if it’s raining and I can’t make it to the gym, I should still be able to do push-ups and take awesome care of my teeth. Like the diet items above, I hadn’t been the best of doing this in 2019, so tracking and scoring points should motivate to do more.

Overall, I’d like to end 2020 having ran a 5K with a stretch goal of running 5 miles. I’d also like to lose 20-25 pounds to get my BMI in a healthy range. I had ballooned up over the holidays, but so far I’m down 5 pounds. Losing weight is always a difficult one, but hopefully my spreadsheet of diet and exercise keeps me accountable. That will also make it easier to run a 5K.

Declutter

Last year, I aimed to declutter one area of the house each month. I was successful only half the time with this. Half is better than nothing and despite adding more stuff as we always seem to do, things are less cluttered than they were a year ago. That goal is the same this year.

In addition to that, I’m adding two more decluttering plans:

  1. Post 5+ items on Ebay/Craigslist/Facebook Marketplace/etc. a month – My wife has been doing this in the past, but I need to contribute. I don’t know if the things I post will sell, but that’s the goal over time.
  2. Do a browser tab declutter 3x a month – I have been known to keep hundreds of browser tabs open. That’s simply not useful. I need to take a few hours a month and just trim down all the old stuff that I thought would be interesting “one day.”

Productivity

I’m still working on what I want to do for this section. The only thing I do know is that the Pomodoro Technique works well for me, but I struggle to keep using it. I want to measure how many days I can do it each month. If I can do it 20 times a month, it would be almost perfect since I wouldn’t use it on the weekends.

Kids

Usually, I have a bunch of things that I want the kids to learn. This year they are getting old enough to tell me what they want to do… and that they don’t want to do some things. The six year old is usually open to anything, while the 7 year old is starting to become very picky.

One of my goals is to stress more coding toys. I think we must own every robot or kids computer course by now. I think some of it is starting to work, but it’s a little slow going at this age. I was happy to find this Artie 3000 which teaches Logo, perfect for kids this age.

We’ll have to see what else we can do.

Money Goals

Since this website is all about money, you’d think I would have a lot of money goals. Unfortunately, I do not. Our savings are largely tied to the stock and real estate markets. I don’t think it makes sense to create a goal around something you can’t control.

We’ll do the usual saving and investing like we do every year. That’s not much of a goal since it’s been on autopilot for so long.

This year, I’d like to get an estate plan and all the documents that go with it together. I’ve tried to do this in the past, but I ran into blockers that didn’t make it possible. (I’m not going to get into specifics of why.)

One money goal is to make $75,000 working from home. I came close to that in 2019, falling just 10-20% short. Maybe I can find one more freelancing gig or something else that I can monetize. That’s a reasonable goal, right?

Special Projects

Every year, I have a few long term projects of things that I’d like to do. I have quite a few things that I think are interesting, but none that excite me. That means it’s going to be difficult for me to prioritize them. However, here are a few and hopefully, I can put more thought into this by the first report in February.

  • Create a Long-term Bucket List – It seems like bucket lists come natural to other people. They want to swim with dolphins or hike in Australia. I don’t have too many of these things. Maybe it’s because I simply don’t enjoy travel. Maybe it’s because traveling with young kids isn’t easy. I should be able to come up with some things though, right? Maybe there’s a website of crowdsourced bucket lists where I can get ideas.
  • Improve my Japanese – In 2019, I completed around 250 consecutive days of Japanese with Duolingo. As impressive as that sounds, I can’t say much. I need to spend more than 5 minutes a night and it wouldn’t hurt to use other tools like those suggested by Adam at MinaFi. At the same time, I’m not passionate about learning Japanese. The 5 minutes a night may be a good way to make slow, gradual improvements over a long time, which suits me just fine.
  • Create a YouTube Channel – This is the one I’m most passionate about. I want to learn how to film and edit video. (If you have suggestions on how to best do this on Windows, please leave a comment). I have two child actors, age 6 and 7 who would love to put on productions. I like the idea of them getting more comfortable in front of a camera. I don’t think we’ll make a channel that brings in significant money, but learning the skills can only help us all in the future.
  • Self Publish a Book – I have 3 or 4 ideas of books that I think would do really well. I’m not sure if I’m ever going to have the time to put it all together especially with all the work I want to do for Lazy Man and Money. However, it would be good to have a product to sell on the site. It would help with my income goals.

Final Thoughts

There’s a lot here, more than enough to keep me busy for a year. I’m not sure how it’s going to go, but I’m banking on the monthly updates keeping me going.

So far, I’ve done well on most of the health goals this year, but I’ve fallen behind on everything else. I think it may be because I have that part of my spreadsheet set up and little else. The accountability is easy. We haven’t had a day yet this year where someone in the house wasn’t sick, so my schedule has been off.