Lazy Man and Money

The Best Frugal Baby Toys I’ve Found

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Last week, my first son reach a milestone. He’s been alive one revolution of the earth around the sun. During that time we’ve both done a lot of growing. I’d like to share with you a few of the things that I’ve learned.

One of things we’ve learned is that he’s not impressed by expensive toys, yet. In fact, he loves a lot of really cheap toys. Specifically,

  • A Dollar Store Pot – A local dollar store had a plastic cooking set for a buck. The pot is perfect for him to hold and bang on any table, floor, or wood-burning stove (when off, of course). He loves the sound of it on different things. My wife thinks this is an indication that he’ll grow up to be a great chef. I just think he’s exploring the world. He’ll grow up fast enough, we probably don’t need to typecast to a career yet.
  • Giant Hand Clapper – This is another dollar store find. This may be giving the wrong impression that we do a lot of shopping at the dollar store, but these are the only two items we’ve bought. I’m hesitant to buy more, why mess with a perfect record.
  • Baby Crab Hat – It’s not the exact hat in the link, but that’s a representation of it. To be fair, this isn’t a toy and it actually wasn’t frugal. I had to throw it in so that I can write, “I got my baby addicted to pot and gave him crabs and the clap.” (I’d go into more detail, but I’d have to run it by my lawyer first.)
  • Curious George’s Opposites – This was one of the first books we got (it was a gift) and it was a hit from the beginning. I’m think it might have a calming effect like I get with an old Seinfeld re-run. In truth he loves all books, but he’ll go dig through his whole toy bin pick up the book and bring it to us to read to him. It was amazing to see him do that when he had just barely managed to crawl.
  • Look, Baby Flash Cards – This is just a step below Curious George Opposites. Between these two, I’ve been able to distract him from severe teething pain while the baby Tylenol takes effect. Combine all that with Baby Oragel and the biggest meltdown becomes sleepy time.
  • Baby Einstein on YouTube – We have a number of Baby Einstein DVDs, but I’ve found it is easier to call up YouTube on my TV. Can’t beat the price of free. I realize that there’s evidence that baby’s under two shouldn’t watch television, but he really enjoys it and I can tell he’s actually learning from it. If I were an expert in baby education perhaps I could a better job, but I’m not. My favorite of the videos is Primeras Palabras as it covers learning Spanish complete with baby sign language from Marlee Matlin.

    As for the watching of copyrighted material for free, I have to imagine that Disney, worth around 115 billion dollars this morning could easily get it removed if they wanted to.

What are the best frugal baby toys you’ve found?

Should I Look Into Baby Modeling?

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That was a bit of a misleading title, huh? Any chance I had at being a baby model went by the boards around 36 years ago. However, 7-month old Little Man is just the right age.

The idea to get Little Man into baby modeling occurred to me after watching this commercial for Kay Jewelers:

I’m going to put this as nice as I can as it is a delicate subject, but I don’t think Vivian Brady is threaten by the competition from this baby.

I think Little Man could compete with that baby model. Not only that, but he can model for the 4-5 months as he’s a little tiny and still hasn’t gotten any teeth yet.

This Jezebel says the life of a baby model isn’t that great. I’ve also read that there are a lot of scams… companies claiming to get your baby in the industry for a fee.

The one thing that struck me as odd is that parents are interested in having their baby be a model for the status. I wouldn’t be interested in that at all. I would want Little Man to be a model because it would mean he could earn income. Why is that important? Two words: Roth IRA.

Contributing to a Roth IRA requires that you have earned income. Since Little Man’s current skill set consists of dirtying diapers (which isn’t in demand) and looking cute, his avenues for earning income are limited. With him only 72 or 73 years away from retirement, the clock is ticking… best to get started on that Roth IRA now.

I find the whole earned income requirement for the Roth IRA to be so annoying that I started to think of a way around it. For example, imagine a pseudo-money laundering scheme were parents pay a company for placement of the baby pictures on a website… and then the company pays the baby for modeling on the website. The company and the website itself exists only to convert the parent’s earned income to earned income for the baby. That earned income can be contributed to a Roth IRA. Sneaky? Cool? Shady? What do you think?

How do I get Little Man started in baby modeling, I haven’t a clue. I did find that Parenting Magazine had these tips for getting the best pictures. This CBS News article also gives some baby modeling tips.

What You Can Learn from the 4 Events in 2012 That Changed my Financial Life

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I’m rarely one to follow the pack. So when everyone publishes a review of 2012 in the first week or January, I say, “Let’s make em wait until February.” Also, rather than just give an update of what I did financially in 2012, I’m going to dig a little deeper and get a little Fat Alberty on you delivering a lesson or two.

1. Having a Baby

One of the biggest events of a person’s life is when they give life another. This past year I got to experience that. And while it is fun to joke that Little Man is a nice little tax deduction, he’s a whole lot more than that. Having looked at the the cost to raise a child in the United States it looks like this USDA calculator estimates our costs to raise Little Man will be $28,500 a year.

We are only a little more than four months into Little Man’s life. I feel safe in saying that we are going to come in far under that… at least for the first year. Here’s a breakdown:

  • Housing – The USDA estimate is that it will cost us another $10,600 in housing. I don’t think our housing costs have gone up that much, but it’s hard to say since that’s related to the #2 event (our move).
  • Food – The USDA estimate is $2,450. I think we are under that, but it is hard to calculate because right now he’s on breastmilk. That indirectly leads to his mom eating more food.
  • Transportation – There’s an estimated $3,125 in transportation costs. We bought a new car due to our move to Boston, and part of that was because I felt I needed a safer car for Little Man. On the other hand, my 12 year old car probably need replacing soon anyway.
  • Clothing – Due to the generousity of friends and family, especially my own mother’s gift of amazing bargain hunting, we shouldn’t have to buy clothes for the next five years. The USDA budgets $1438 and I think we’ll avoid much of this expense.
  • Health Care – One of the best benefits the military has going is its health care. I think we’ll save a vast majority of the $1113 that the USDA has allocated. The exception is out of pocket things like baby Tylenol and the like.
  • Child Care and Education – The USDA estimates $7,538 and this is where my blogging career really pays off. I can be that child care provider. I had estimated day care for Little Man to be around $15,000 a year. Since that’s after-tax money, it’s almost like adding $20,000 in salary. However, as it turns out we might be able to get almost full-time coverage for $6,000 at a military base. We’ll see if that comes to pass.

I think the lesson here is that raising a child can be done on a budget. It certainly helps to plan ahead (be a blogger), have a great support system (thanks Mom!), and get a good breaks (military benefits rock). Oh and if you are going to be a new parent soon, here’s some of my favorite baby gear.

2. Moving Across the Country

This year we moved back to Boston, which has always been where my heart is.

One thing I can say about Silicon Valley. Having lived there, I understand how a foreigner would come to United States thinking that the “streets are paved in gold.” Silicon Valley is a lot like that too. There’s a ton of money due to all the successful technology companies such as Google and Apple. I don’t know if it is the money or great schools like Stanford, but there are a ton of very smart people there.

Not only is it a land of opportunity, but the three feet of snow that we are getting right now in Boston reminds me how wonderful the weather is in San Francisco.

As wonderful as that is there were two major downsides for us: 1) Our friends and family are in Boston 2) The price of housing is 3 times more than what we can get in the Boston area. That’s literally a million dollar difference.

It’s not like Boston is a horrible place either. With Harvard and MIT, there are some smart people here too. I’ll probably always wonder what life would have been have been like, not just for me, but for Little Man, if we stayed in San Francisco.

What’s the lesson here? It’s probably nothing new, but geography does play a huge role in personal finance.

3. Refinancing Two Mortgages

Lost in the birth of baby and the move back to Boston is the financial move that flew under the radar. I was able to use the government’s HARP program to refinance two mortgages. With the drop in value of real estate over the last 8 years, these properties no longer had 20% equity and we were paying on average 6% interest on them. We were able to keep the payments close to the same and change 22 year mortgages to a 15 year one. The reason we were able to do that? The interest rate of 3.5% on a 15 year lowers the payments to what we were paying on the 30-year at 6%.

It was extremely difficult, especially because I’m a self-employed blogger. I might as well be a third-class citizen to mortgage underwriters. The hours on the phone and email really paid off…

The result of eliminating 7 years of mortgage payments on two properties is tremendous. Some rough math tells me it will save us $225,000 in mortgage payments.

The lesson here is to take advantage of these low interest rates if you can.

4. Buying a New Car

In any other year, buying a car would trump the money moves. After buying a house, it is usually the biggest purchase someone makes. One month in, I still have no regrets on buying my Subaru Forrester.

Wait, maybe I do.

The last lesson is that before you buy a new car, look at what is coming down the pike in the near future. It’s something that I think about whenever buying technology, but I somehow forgot about it with buying a car. I think it was because I was going in with the intention of buying a slightly used car and saving on depreciation. However, they made the new car a lot better deal because they had dealer incentives and 0% financing for 63 months.

It wasn’t until a few days later, I found out that they are coming out with a 2014 Forester in a couple of months that is going to get 5 miles more per gallon. As it turns out waiting wasn’t a good fit for us because we need to snow-worthy cars in New England, but doing some rough math, the money that I saved with the 0% financing is about what I was likely to save on gas through the life of the car.

I might still come out ahead if Subaru bumps up the price of the 2014 Forester as many expect they will.

Putting it All Together

Most years, I don’t make too many big financial moves. Obviously some of them like taking a new job or having a baby are common life milestones. Other things such as taking advantage of historically low interest rates (particularly for mortgages and cars) fits in the category of making the most of opportunity presented.

Now it’s time to take a year to settle down.

The Super Fantastic Mega-Baby Post

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[Note: If you aren’t at that point of your life where babies are important, I understand, I was there last week… or so it seems. I suggest you scroll down to the part about the Rockabye CDs and think about picking up some soothing relaxing music and then go read another article.]

The last three days have been quite the blur. Over the weekend my wife and I put in a lot of time researching baby products. There’s so many of them. It seems like a vast majority are used for very specialized cases too. It makes me appreciate the simplicity of having a dog.

On Satruday we hit the local yard sales in search of deals. Yard sales are well known for being hit or miss. However, we ran into an additional problem that we didn’t anticipate. Almost everything was pink or blue, which is only helpful when you know the gender of the baby, which we didn’t. There were some items that looked like they were in tremendous condition, but we had to either let them go or risk having to resell them. We decided to just let them go.

Despite the gender issue, we were able to pick up a few items at the yard sales. At the rate we are going, we’ll have most of our stuff bought with months to go. That’s one post, I’m looking forward to writing. It will look a lot like this one: The Room that Craiglist and Yard Sales Built. I might even be able to reuse the same title.

Yesterday, we were able to solve our shopping problem. We found out that we’d be having a boy. It’s exciting to us, but I won’t bore you with more details on that.

Sunday we went to a baby expo that was called, no-joke, Prego Palooza.

Best and Worst at the Prego Palooza

Let’s get the bad out of the way first. The worst part of Prego Palooza was the first 45 minutes. I found that it directly compares to watching the first 45 minutes of New Moon, the 2nd of those Twilight movies. Pretty much every male, including myself, were wondering around like zombies. On some level, we were zombies… we simply had the soul sucked out of us.

The expo in general had a bit of a Shark Tank feel to it – many mom and pop small businesses trying to sell their innovative solution to a baby problem. One business opportunity that was overlooked was the convention itself. It may sound counter-intertuitive to sell shots of Jack Daniels at a baby expo, where much of the clientele can’t consume the product. However, I can tell you from experience there were a minority who would have put down big cash for a few shots.

There were a couple of great products at the baby expo:

The Rockabye Baby Lullaby CDs were the biggest highlight for me. These are famous rock band songs converted to lullabies. Think slower and more xylophone (as opposed to cowbell). Once you start listening them, it is hard to stop. The best executed in my view were The Beatles and Weezer. My favorite was Tool, though it didn’t have Prison Sex and sounded creepy – but in a good way. Other highlights include: Coldplay, U2, Queen, Def Leppard, Pearl Jam, and and many more. The one notable band that I see missing is The Who. Maybe there is a licensing issue holding things up.

Next up was a product that we actually bought: this 6-in-1 blanket from Babee Covee. It is a car seat cover, shopping cart cover, blanket, high chair cover, stroller blanket, and a nursing cover. It’s also one of the softest blankets I’ve ever put my hands on. At $40, it is a little pricey, but some of the nursing covers were just as expensive. Also, I like helping out a local small business.

Another good product that we saw was the Push Pack by Small Batch Studio. It is a kit of travel size essentials for the moment when the baby arrives and you don’t have time to pack. While I like the idea, most of the stuff we have at home, so rather than spend the $65 (it was $45 at the show), I emailed myself a link to their website. We’ll make a customized version of this ourselves and save a lot of money.

One of the reasons we went to the expo was to learn more about cloth diapering. The biggest thing we learned was that:

Everyone has strong opinions on Cloth Diapering

Without a doubt, the cloth diapering debate is by far the most polarizing topic known to man. When we mention we are going to give it a try the reactions are amazing. The reaction from friends and family who have parenting experience make it sound like it is similar to attempting to complete an Ironman triathlon while balancing an egg on one’s nose: “Good luck with that!” is the reaction.

However everybody at Babies R Us and any baby expo says it is an awesome choice, and by far the easiest, cheapest, most practical, best for the baby (less diaper rash) choice one can make. They stop slightly short of building a statue in our honor.

As best I can tell it is the difference between Boston and San Francisco mentality, with Boston being the former and San Francisco being the later.

I’ll have more on cloth diapering as we learn more and get some experience with it. There’s surely a cost comparison post to write if it works out. Though I’m pretty sure you can find a few of those at The Simple Dollar.

Planning a New Tax Deduction this Year

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Last night I caught up with SVB of The Digerati Life and a few other people for dinner and a game of Settlers of Catan. There I took the opportunity to tell her, as one of my closest friends, the big news. The wife and I are expecting a little bundle of tax deduction later this year.

We are beginning the process of learning all the new things that new parents need to learn. Financially, we’ve got a lot to figure out as well. I’m looking forward to documenting the financial aspects of this journey.