2021 Archives - Lazy Man and Money

My plan this year was to do eight updates of my goals, spaced out every 6 weeks. I thought that doing it more often would keep me focused on the long-term plans instead of getting lost in the daily routine. The last update was in April – I’ve missed two updates and I’m a week late with this one. It’s been a struggle.

I have been keeping up with my passive income reports which includes a little slice of our lives (pictures and things we did) over the last month. I add that personal stuff in for the voyeurs out there, because the math can be boring. This goal update is a mix between the two, some money and professional as well as family goals.

For 2021, I made some goals to start the year like I do every year. However, year after year, I fail to make any consistent progress on my goals. I know I always plan to do too much. I also fail to review my progress and make corrections.

With the failure to review progress and make corrections for four months now, let’s see how it’s going:

August 2021 Goal Update

Before we get started here’s my spreadsheet. It’ll be helpful to follow along. If you have ideas on how this system could be better I’d love to hear them in the comments.

I don’t think I made very good goals this year. They are all over the place. Some of them are boolean (we either went to Europe or we didn’t). Some of them are based on numbers and others are based on percentages. If I can take a “win” out of these goals, it’s that many, many people were screaming, “Don’t make goals for 2021!” When the year started we didn’t know when we’d be eligible for vaccines or if there would be enough of them. At the time, Delta sounded like more of a college sorority than something that would threaten to spin us back to square one.

Money Goals

Make $60,000 – I’ve made $48,266.97 so far and I’m on pace for almost $75,000. In April, I declared this an impossibility since my dog sitting income was close to zero due to COVID. However, vaccines, summer travel, and pandemic dogs have been amazing! I’ve been hustling and my wife calls me the Walter White of dog sitting (not sure if this is a good thing). Anyway, the dog-sitting income will probably drop down for the rest of the year. There’s always a seasonal drop-off when the kids go back to school, but add in the Delta variant and the dog sitting income will start trending down.

Wife Retirement Savings – My wife’s retirement fund is $15,000 bigger this year, but we are still a little behind what I had hoped on this one. We’ve had a few months where we spent more money than we usually do. The travel section below covers most of it.

Business Goals

Content Audit/Article Refresh – I’ve completed 8 of the 40 articles that I hope for this year. I have a lot of articles from around 2006 and 2007 that are very short, filled with a dozen of spelling/grammatical errors, and not very well put together. I haven’t been able to keep up with this over the last four months. The scheduling of 40-50 dogs a month is a full-time job. It’s not so much the dogs as it managing the owners. This goal will most likely get pushed to whatever seasonal downtime we have coming up.

7,000 Twitter Followers – I manage to lose a few Twitter followers every update. I’m going to need some tips or something. It may help to have some big media coverage.

Minor Website Design – I made no progress on this one. I think the only way to move forward on this one is to put on a short-term to-do list, rather than this mid-long term one. Unfortunately, that short-term list is full right now.

Article for New Website – Five. I’ve gotten a couple more articles written for the new website I’m planning. This is not great progress. As with the content audit above, I’ll have to put more of my time towards blogging instead of dog sitting.

Personal

Lose Weight – I’ve lost 4 pounds of the 15 that is part of my goal. I’ve made some gains this year and then lost them while traveling and getting out of my routine. This is a long-term average throughout the year as measured by my Fitbit scale. It’s great to see the line moving in the right direction even if I had hoped to have more progress.

Bucket List/Dream Board – I’m still where I was in April with this one. That’s about 65% done with creating something. As for the 35% that I have left with this, I want to create a dream board to make it more visual. When these things sit in a spreadsheet on a hard drive, they just don’t get done. As far as checking off items on the Bucket List, my wife booked tickets for our flight to D.C. in November. There’s a military dinner where it is tradition to meet the Vice President and there’s a rumor that the President himself may be there this year.

Professional Skills – 20% done. I had made a list of blogging professional skills, but I’ve accomplished none of them. However, I’ve certainly made great progress when it comes to my dog relationship skills. I’m going to count it. I’m also better at working with people, which is a skill that has atrophied a lot when I transitioned to blogging.

Family

Travel to Europe – Nope. My wife had big plans to do a Greek cruise this summer. That wasn’t realistic, so she pivoted and came up with the idea of our Hawaii trip in April. We were able to get tested and fly over many states that would have forced us to quarantine. We had a great time. In June we went to Block Island, which is a local staycation. Rooms are expensive, but it’s great to get away from technology and hike around in nature. In July, just before Delta got bad, we went to Hershey Park and the Cartoon Network Hotel (it’s a motel) in Lancaster, PA. With Delta as bad as it is now and knowing that even though I’m vaccinated, I can get my kids sick, I treasure these trips more.

Remember above when I explained that we didn’t make as much progress on saving my wife’s retirement goals? This was one of the main reasons why. We have no regrets – in fact, my wife planned all these trips and the spending that went along with them.

Finish the Basement – We’ve got half of our basement cleared out as of a few days ago. We just need to make a call and get the contractors scheduled. We got pricing several months ago, but we got busy and didn’t have the basement where it needs to be. We’re there now, so hopefully, they can get started. The plan, for now, is to do half the basement and see how that room serves us. The other half is being used for storage for now.

Parenting

YouTube Channel – I bought a green screen. That’s all the progress I’ve made on this. I think I just need to point the camera and get the kids posting content no matter how unprofessional it is. It’s not like we have a plan to make millions. I’m just hoping they get some experience and we get a few laughs along the way.

Drone Flying – We went drone flying once since the last report. My youngest (7-year-old) got to be quite good with it. The drone they are using is about $25, so it lacks features that help with flying. I have a $75 drone that I got on an Amazon Prime Day that we can upgrade too soon. If they can fly these terrible drones well, they should be great with the expensive ones, right?

Outdoor stuff (hours) – I originally had 40 hours outside as a very minimum goal because the kids rarely do much outside. However, when we were in Hawaii we were outside almost all the time. This summer the kids have had camps (see below). The weekends have been tougher to get out because of the dog sitting, but we still managed to get some activities in. I got my first surfing lesson in. It didn’t go great, so I’ll have to practice a lot more, but it was a lot more physical work than I thought.

Computer Programming – In April the kids were reading Captain Underpants and making comic books and I thought this was a good enough learning activity. In the last week, the kids have had some time off of camps, so I got them started on Tynker.com’s computer programming courses. In one of the camps, one of the kids had some computer programming with Lego WeDo. If that’s all we get done this year, I’ll consider this completed.

Specialty Camps – We missed out on some camps because we were preparing to go to Hawaii (and going to Hawaii) and my wife deployed soon after. However, we got a couple of building camps, art camps, and cooking camps. This covers most of their special interests. My 8-year-old was the youngest in the cooking class and he loved being with all the older kids. Next year, my 7-year-old will be old enough to do cooking class too. It’s expensive, but it’s a good skill to learn, right?

Final Thoughts

Back in April, I wrote: “Overall, I’m not feeling like I’ve made much progress, but there are pockets of progress. Unfortunately, the next update probably won’t have more progress. My wife is deployed getting the vaccine in peoples’ arms, so I’m trying to make this time extra fun for the kids.”

The progress was so bad before that I couldn’t put out an update. However, as you can see, things have turned around significantly. I should be able to make (or come close) to everything but the blogging goals this year. Even those have a chance in the next few months. Whatever gaps I have in those business goals should be filled by the ones I’ve added with the dog sitting skills.

I hope your New Year is starting off well. The following is an article from Kosmo. I’ll be spending the weekend preparing some articles to help with typical New Year’s Resolutions for next week.

2020 has been a year that many of us would like to forget. As we finally flip the calendar, I’m looking forward to 2021 being much different. Here are the things I’m looking forward to in 2021.

Getting Vaccinated

The COVID-19 vaccinations have begun in the United States. I don’t have any health conditions that would put me in the highest risk category (although, like many Americans, I have hypertension), so I’ll be waiting a while until the higher risk people are inoculated. I look forward to the vaccine causing the curve to not only be flattened, but beaten into the ground.

Hopefully, we remember the lessons we’ve learned from COVID-19. There will be another epidemic of some sort in the future. It might be two years from now, or twenty, or two hundred. The next time we’re hit by an epidemic, we need to leverage what we’ve learned from this experience, rather than starting from square one.

Please do your part and get vaccinated, too. If you have concerns, discuss them with your doctor.

Vacation

We visited Door County, Wisconsin in 2017 and thoroughly enjoyed it. We planned a return trip to the same Airbnb in 2019, but it was derailed a family health situation. The owner ended up refunding 100% of his portion – despite being entitled to keep half of it – and we only lost the AirBNB’s portion of the reservation.

We tried again for 2020, only to be derailed by COVID-19 this time. We were able to use the entire amount of the trip toward a rescheduled trip in 2021. I’m really looking forward to a nice vacation at the beach.

Kids back in school

Some kids have excelled in online school, whereas others have struggled. My kids have excelled. My 5th grader is in the gifted program, and my 7th grader recorded a 3.87 GPA in her first trimester. They’ve kept in contact with friends over the phone and the internet.

Nonetheless, it’s not the experience they want. Although they did choose online school for safety reasons, they look forward to physically returning to school next fall, so they can hang out with their friends.

I’m also looking forward to this. Mostly, I look forward to it because it will make my kids happy. But I’d also like to be able to attend a work audio meeting without hearing a fight breaking out upstairs. We could use a bit less togetherness at times.

Last pinewood derby ever

My son is in Cub Scouts. Honestly, it has been a great experience. The one thing I dread every year is the pinewood derby. I am not someone who is good at building things. Trying to figure out a design that my son will like and that we can actually pull off is always a challenge. I’m never more relieved than when his car successfully navigates the track for the third and final time. We’re never going to win the derby – the goal is to end up somewhere in the middle of the pack. Putting the pinewood derby in the rearview mirror will take some of the winter stress out of my life. The Scouts, however, will remain a part of our lives.

First scout weeklong camp

My daughter is a girl scout. She has always been shy. For several years, we have attended the “daddy and me” overnight camp at the girl scout camp. We have always had a great time. I even managed to be the talk of the camp one year, when I dumped my kayak in the lake. Most importantly, it has been a good experience for her to interact with a different group of kids and come out of her shell a bit.

Several times, we asked her if she wanted to do a solo camp for a week. The answer was always a firm “no”. She didn’t want to be in a group of strangers without a parent around.

After the 2019 camp, she changed her mind. Yes, she would like to go to camp by herself. This was a huge change. We booked her for a 2020 camp – and then had to cancel when COVID came. We’ll try this again in 2021.

A new job?

I have been casually job hunting lately. I may end up with a new job soon, or I may end up staying where I’m at. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that I’ll be starting something new in the next couple of months.

I’ve worked in the same industry for 20+ years, but many of the positions I’m looking at are in other industries. Quite honestly, I’d like to diversify my experience a bit, so that I’m not pigeonholed into one type of work.

I’m written a full article about the job hunt, so I won’t bore you with the details.

My stamps

I began collecting stamps during the pandemic. My initial plan was pretty straightforward – collect every distinct design through 1970, but do not pursue watermark or paper variations. By my count, there are about 650 such stamps.

The good news is that I’ve collected about 540 of those stamps, including everything from 1941-1970. The bad news is that many of the remaining stamps are quite expensive. The mitigating factor is that many of these are fairly ugly postal fiscal stamps – stamps that could be used for either tax or postage. I won’t cry if my collection ends up missing a few expensive and ugly stamps that aren’t even normal postage stamps.

The bigger problem is that my collection has expanded beyond New Zealand. Someone in a Facebook group was nice enough to send me thousands of stamps. All I had to do was pay for the postage. I still have tons to sort through, but I’ve gotten exposed to enough other stamps that I’ve begun to diversify my collection. I have an album for the USA and a smaller one for Austria, and I’m sure I’ll be adding an album or two for the countries of the world. My goal is to collect a stamp for as many stamps-issuing entities as I can, as well as collected a few pages of stamps for countries of interest, such as Great Britain, Australia, and the Antarctic territories.

The Olympics

The International Olympic Committee postponed the Olympics when it became apparent that it would be a terrible idea to bring in hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world, have them share common spaces, and send them back to their home countries. That would have been a recipe for a massive super spreader event.

The Olympics are, for now, scheduled for 2021. I love the Olympics, and I’ll be glued to the TV. I primarily watch track and field and swimming, but I’ll watch bits and pieces of many other sports as well.

What about you?

What are you looking forward to in 2021?

Lazy Man Goal Update (August 2021)