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Auctioning Off Lazy Man and Money

April 1, 2022 by Lazy Man 9 Comments

Today, I announcing that I’m auctioning off Lazy Man and Money. It’s been a long journey (almost 16 years now), but I want to focus more on Kid Wealth. Like IBM selling off its mainframe business and focusing on artificial intelligence, it’s time for me to focus on the growth of Kid Wealth. I simply don’t have the time for Lazy Man and Money anymore and I think this article is Exhibit A of that

Need some more reasons why I am moving on? Here’s a few:

  • Auctions Are Fun
    Who doesn’t love a good auction? Remember when Sharper Image doubled its stock price simply by mentioning that it was adding auctions to its website. You don’t? That was nearly 25 years ago. It was the blockchain or meme stock of its time. Nevermind, I’m sure that I lost half the audience as they try to figure out what Sharper Image is.
  • Pricing
    I think I can get the best price from fans. You know the value of this website. You and see all the daily comments and the interactions.
  • Rights
    The winner will get access access to legendary articles such as Budgeting for a Tank, Monkey Butlers Reviewed, the WATER – work and toil/eliminate retirement movement, and calculating kids in your net worth.

    Sorry, it does not include the article on Bitcoin in 2013 that I sold as an NFT.

  • Incidentally
  • I just wanted to mention that the Badonkadonk Tank is still on my Amazon Wish List. I just had another birthday and yet no Badonkadonk arrived. I showed the kids and I have their backing. Maybe with the proceeds of this sale, I can make that dream come true.

  • Love
    You’ve shown me so much love over the years. It’s time for me to share it back.

Before you place your bids, I wanted to cover few more things:

  • Fair Market Value

    It’s hard to say what fair market value is for Lazy Man and Money. That’s why an auction format makes sense. I’ve run a lot of experiments on here. Let’s see where this final one takes us.

  • Opportunity

    There’s a tremendous opportunity with the Lazy Man brand. Lazy and personal finance have gone together for decades. Most people don’t want to actively manage their money. They want to put it on auto-pilot. The winner can clean up a couple of thousand old posts, focus on a few SEO things, and probably double revenue quickly and easily.

  • Outstanding Value

    I want to be sure that the winner gets outstanding value for their money. That’s why I’ll work 20 hours a week for one entire fortnight to transition the property.

  • Listing
    Stay tuned for more details on the listing, but feel free to help start the initial bidding in the comment section below.
  • Summary

    It’s the right time and the right day. Let’s see where this goes!

Filed Under: About / Admin Tagged With: april fools

Calculating Kids In Your Net Worth

April 7, 2020 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

If you’ve gotten this far in the article, you’ve probably guessed that it was an April Fools’ joke. In fact, the first letter of each paragraph spells out “April Fools Day Joke.” However, the story about the doctor presenting the black market offer is 100% true. To this day, we don’t know if it was his (bad) joke, a test, or something else. Also, the part about spending $250,000 on tuition for two kids through the 8th grade is also true.

A lot of personal finance “gurus” talk about whether kids are expensive. Almost anyway you slice it up, they are. The rare cases I’ve seen when they aren’t expensive is when a family is already financially independent, so a member isn’t working anyway.

Calculating Kids Net Worth
This caricature of my kids probably doesn’t increase their value.

Personal experts agree that for almost everyone, if there isn’t a large direct cost, there’s a large indirect cost. For example, adults have to make sacrifices at work to be there when kids need care. Those sacrifices often come due during performance interviews that determine promotions and/or raises.

Relating it our own experience, kids are expensive. The oldest only eats “prime rib” (his name for any premium steak). I’m to blame for some of the expense because I have a not-so-modest STEM toy addiction. Our biggest expense though is the $250,000 that it will cost to get the two kids through 8th at their private school – and that represents a 50% discount.

If we’re spending all this money, we’re going to have to figure out a way to quantify this investment in our month net worth statements.

Luckily, I have an idea.

Calculating the Value of Your Kids

First, we clearly made a pair of terrible decisions. How can we turn this around? How do we get a return on this investment?

One of the most obvious ways to calculate the value of your kids is to use their value on the black market.

Of course, this wasn’t my idea. It was actually our doctor’s idea. I don’t know if he jokes with everyone this way, but when our first was born, he said that we can get $250,000 on the black market.

Like it or not, I’m going to take his word because I don’t want my Google searches to put me on some kind of list.

Does that mean we can get $250,000 for each of our kids today. No, we’re going to make some adjustments to that.

Almost all buyers are going to want babies more, that’s more time to bond and mold them. Our 6 and 7 year olds may be too attached to us now. They probably wouldn’t latch on to the new family too easily. (Note the use of “probably” – there’s some room for doubt.) However, at 6 and 7 they are potty trained and can get dressed and make their own breakfast. That should count for a lot.

You could also guess that, having invested in their education thus far, they may be able to command some kind of premium on the market. To maximize their value, we’d probably have to get some IQ and neuropsychological testing done. I’m comfortable that would boost their value. We can do some physical testing as well, but neither father nor their mother are considered athletes. I feel like these kinds of tests are either all good (Olympic Athlete), all bad (serious medical condition), or a non-factor (the vast majority).

Just trying balance the two factors is difficult. I think the value of having a fresh baby may be worth more. I have nothing concrete to base this off of. Maybe because puppies are at a premium and older dogs are less likely to get adopted.

One way of balancing those two factors is to split it in the middle – the value, not the kids. (This isn’t a King Solomon story.) If our doctor’s appraisal was on the level, I would guess we could probably still get $200,000 for each child.

Kids aren’t typically viewed as an asset. As my old physics teacher might say, have much more potential earnings than kinetic earnings. Hmmm, maybe he used a different “E” word there.

“E”-words aside, I’m going to have to go with the personal finance experts on this one. It pains me to have to agree with them, but it doesn’t make much sense to include some theoretical (and illegal) value of your kids in your net worth.

Important Disclosure

There are a lot of articles asking brands not to do April Fools this year due to COVID-19. First, I’ve never considered this blog much of a brand. It’s just one guy typing. I don’t sell a product. I don’t do anything that any traditional business would consider marketing.

Beyond that though, I feel that we need humor more than ever. Obviously COVID-19 is terrible and should be taken seriously. Social distancing is difficult – humor can make it easier. Let’s not COVID-19 ruin all the fun in the world.

Also, I had drafted this idea in late 2019. It was literally the only article I had planned for 2020. It wasn’t created in the time of the COVID-19 being what it is today… and it certainly isn’t related to COVID-19 in any way.

Filed Under: Net Worth Tagged With: april fools

Why You Won’t Read a SmartyPig Review Today

August 1, 2011 by Lazy Man 31 Comments

A couple of weeks back the fine folks at SmartyPig wrote me to tell me about their new service. They even offered me a $50 gift card to either try the service or give away to a reader. I decided to keep it for three reasons:

  • I have had a bad history with giveaways in the past. Even recently, I was afforded the ability to give out Lending Club lending accounts with $50 in them – only to have them stop allowing people to lend for undisclosed amount of time. Given that I’ve never used this new service, I didn’t feel comfortable subjecting readers to another potential debacle.
  • By using the card, I can sign up with the service and actually give an informed review.
  • I like $50.

So today, I went to sign up with SmartPig to redeem the gift card they sent me. I can’t think of a more difficult process. I realize it’s a bank and needs to take security seriously, but they really take it to an extremely level. On thing that I noticed from the register page is that you have to have a driver’s license. I really don’t know why driving is a prerequisite for saving money, but luckily I’m one of the many people who do drive.

There’s a standard register screen were you give you basic information. Part of this is choosing a password. Since they are the only bank or online service that requires one upper case, one lower case, and one numerical character, I have to make up a completely new password rather than use the very complex set of case insensitive characters that have kept my accounts safe for more than ten years.

After the password, I have to pick five security questions. I keep looking to see if they’ve left up their April Fools page, but it seems that’s not the case. After answering the questions, I come away feeling that SmartyPig knows me well enough to figure out what color underwear I have on.

I finish with the security questions and I have to pick a security phrase. If you are curious my phrase exhibits the frustration that I have with SmartyPig’s sign-up process. I would have used some colorful language, but I’m afraid that they’ll make me start over if I pick an unfriendly word. After the phrase I need to pick a picture that they’ll show me when I log-in to prevent phishing. The choices are mostly fruit, bugs, and island themes. It would have killed them to have something like a baseball or a football.

Just when I think I’m done with the registration process, they throw me the biggest curve of all. They look up my credit report and make me answer four questions based on it. There are two easy ones, which of the following are streets and cities where you lived. There’s a tougher one about how much my mortgage is. I had to log into my bank to look up my scheduled payments to find out if it was fell into the under $1450-1550 range or the $1551-1650 range, just two of the five options they gave me.

The last question was impossible for me to answer. They asked the creditor of my mortgage. As some of you know, mortgages are sold fairly often after getting them. All I know is that I schedule my payment to PHH Mortgage and can go online to MortgageQuestions.com to view my account. Of course neither of these are one of the 4 options available to me. So I select the 5th – None of The Above. It didn’t seem to like that. I tried it again, because I am me and that’s the correct information to the best of my knowledge.

Of course it was wrong the second time. So now I have to do with the consequences – “After two failed attempts, your application will be cancelled. For security reasons, you must wait 72 hours before resubmitting your application to SmartyPig.”

I’m left to write the company representative who gave me the gift card and tell them why I can’t register for their service. I hope that they can restore my canceled account, because I’m not sure it’s worth my time to try to sign up again. If I didn’t have the direct e-mail address of their representatives I would definitely have given up on this service. And while I didn’t intend to write a review since I couldn’t sign up, I realize that I did indeed review the service – probably the most important part.

Filed Under: Review Tagged With: april fools, frustration, giveaways, saving money, security phrase, security questions

Alternative Income Streams – April 2008

June 14, 2008 by Lazy Man 11 Comments

I’m a little late with the report this month. My pseudo April Fools article about buying a tank had priority. I call it pseudo April Fools, because I honestly would like to own a tank someday. I have a pile of other frivolous purchases that I’d rather make first.

The second reason I’m a late posting this report is that I’ve taken a part time job. This blog, and it’s success, has directly led to a consulting gig. It’s 20 hours a week. I wish I could say that it’s alternative income, but it’s not. At least much of the work can be done whenever and wherever I want.

Since I’ve been busier with my conventional income, my focus on my alternative income waned. While I made $1837 last month, I found my alternative income drop to $1412. this month. I can attribute almost all of this to a drop in revenue from this website. I had been doing extremely well with various companies paying a premium to advertise on this site. Recently it seems that these companies have decided not to pay that premium.

I usually don’t link to blog about the business of blogging, but I’m going to break that rule. I’ve outgrown my current theme. I realize I can create a much better experience with a different theme – one that I’m creating almost completely from the ground up. It’s quite silly considering that my current theme is not very old. I would chalk it up to simply not applying all the knowledge I had acquired from years of web experience. I got Lazy in my testing. Some new opportunities have come along and this will allow me to take advantage of that. (I may be able to discuss these in the future, but the time isn’t right now.) Lastly, I expect to feature a professionally designed logo by a reader and frequent commenter.

Filed Under: Alternative Income Tagged With: alternative income streams, april fools, Blogging, new opportunities

Budgeting for a Tank

June 14, 2008 by Lazy Man 20 Comments

I have a confession to make. I have had a tank on my Amazon wish-list for over two and a half years now. As Lazy as I am, it’s time for me to make this a reality. No it’s not a hot water tank or a fish tank – it’s a drive-around-and-run-over-stuff tank. It even comes with a cool name – the Badonkadonk – or Donk for short. Let me be clear, I don’t spend the day thinking, “I really want to do some damage today.” Well, at least not every part of the day. There are a lot of other things that can be done with a tank (let me know in the comments).

badonkadonk.jpgMy friends had a lot of good fun when they discovered the Badonkadonk on my wish-list. If one them happened to win the lottery for a re-“Donk”-ulous amount of money, I think NAO Design would have an order in their in-box. Neither me, nor my friends play the lottery, so it’s going to take a little more planning for this to happen.

How am I going to make my dreams of tank ownership a reality? It comes down to budgeting. At a nickel shy of $20,000, it’s cheaper than the average car. NAO Design is clearly willing to take a loss on shipping as well. I live about ten miles from it’s Palo Alto headquarters, but I think it will still cost more than $14.99 in gas alone for them to ship it to me. However $20,000 is still not chump change (at least not for me). I need to have another plan.

I can see two viable ways of getting me in a Badonkadonk. The first would be to get those friends together and purchase it together. People buy timeshare vacations everyday – why not do that with tanks? We could be the pioneers of an entire “tank-share” industry. If I can convince 6 friends to give around $3500 we’d be there. That’s less than $300 a month. The downside is that each of us would only have the tank two months of the year. That’s still two months more of tank-time than I have today.

If I can’t convince my friends to join in, I have a plan B. I’ve got two words for you: tank rentals. I could rent the tank at the bargain price of $20/hr. At that price, I would nearly own the tank if I could have it rented for 1,000 hours of the year – just 20 hours a week. I could even rent it out for special occasions at a bulk rate of $250/day. I haven’t done extensive market research, but I believe this is a fair price for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. What makes a bigger impression at the prom – a limo or a tank? How about tailgating at Lambeau field before the Packers’ game? I think you know the answer.

If you see me posting less often in the upcoming months, it’s because I’m focusing on my efforts on making tank-ownership a reality. Once I complete that, I’ll be able to re-focus my goals on the journey of becoming financially independent.

Filed Under: Smart Purchases Tagged With: amazon wish list, april fools, battle tank, Budgeting

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