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Two Months to Take Charge of Your Money

July 30, 2018 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

This article contains affiliate links.

Three weeks ago my son discovered Pokemon. It derailed my grand Summer of Math plan. At first I tried to ignore Pokemon, but I soon learned that wasn’t going to work.

Magikarp - Gyarados
Magikarp is a joke of a Pokemon with no powers, except the ability to evolve into Gyarados one of the most powerful Pokemon

Instead, I did the exact opposite, I embraced the phase. I evolved from Magikarp to Gyarados. I went to the library and got a this Pokemon guide/directory. My 4 and 5 year old are now teaching themselves dictionary skills as they look up various Pokemon and their abilities.

The lesson here is simple: Ignoring a problem doesn’t make it go away. Embracing it can be an opportunity to learn and grow.

Right now you are reading the money blog that I started in April, 2006. I didn’t know where the blog would go, but I knew I didn’t want to get down to my last few dollars like I did with the dot-com bust. I knew I wanted a strong Plan B (and C an D) in case software engineering jobs continued to get outsourced to foreign countries.

Today, I can look back and say there were a lot of pieces of the puzzle. I started tracking my net worth (first with a spreadsheet, then with Personal Capital. That forced me keep my spending in check as I wanted to see that number grow every month. There were other factors, the greatest being marrying well. There was a lot of good luck as well, even if some of that was just avoiding disastrous bad luck.

However, everything started with one initial spark. I saw a few blogs where people wrote about money. I decided why not give that a try? I quickly realized something that I that I had forgotten:

The best way to learn is by doing.

By pressuring myself to write about money every day, I had to some up with something to write about. Some people lose weight by making food journals. Starting a money blog is your food journal. (If you are looking for a cheap, easy place to get started, Bluehost can help you out.)

Maybe I’m living up to my Lazy moniker, but I often find that I get excited about something and then forget about it as life “happens.” After all, even though most people don’t think I work, I’m always busy with a number of things.

This is where the “two months” comes into play. In about 2 months, the biggest personal finance blogger conference is happening: Fincon 2018. That’s enough time to establish a yourself as a blogger. It’s also around the time when the initial excitement of starting a blog seems to wear off. It’s really the only place where you can meet face-to-face with more than a thousand of people who are (more or less) like you.

Prices go up at the end of the July (Tuesday midnight), so you may want to sign up for this first.

Finally, if you book the conference now, you’ll lock yourself into blogging consistently until then. It’s a little like committing to running a race. Whether, it’s a 5K, half marathon, or marathon you’ll have created a goal in the future.

I will be the first to admit that going to Fincon is not cheap. Between tickets, flight, and hotel, it can add-up quite a bit. It certainly isn’t for everyone. Personally, I’ve been to every one except for the one where I stayed home to see my son being born. This year, the whole family is going, and we’ll celebrate his 6th birthday in Orlando. Do you think we’ll find any fun things for kids down there ;-)?

As I wrote in the beginning, this article has affiliate links. Roughly 10,000 of them, give or take several thousand. That means that if you click on pretty much anything other than the Summer of Math article (or how I keep myself busy) and decide it is a good service that you’d like to try, I’ll get a little money. That includes even the free Personal Capital service. However, I honestly believe that if you track your finances, start a money blog, and network with other money bloggers, it will put you on the right path to improving your finances.

I can’t think of a single personal finance blogger who has seen their financial lives get worse since they’ve started blogging. In a dozen years, I’ve probably talked with several hundred personal finances bloggers.

I feel that’s a very strong percentage and great odds at success.

Filed Under: Blogging, Financial Planning Tagged With: Blogging, FinCon, Track Finances

“So What Do You Actually DO?”

August 31, 2016 by Lazy Man 1 Comment

I have a friend who I think crossed the territory of “I’ve known him longer than I haven’t.” That’s actually a paraphrased quote of his, but I’m stealing it, because it is awesome. We were on a road-trip recently and he asked me:

“So What Do You Actually DO everyday?”

He knows I’m blogger. It’s kind of an usual job and I understand that people find it interesting. I don’t remember if I went straight into the explanation, but if I didn’t, I hope I pointed out that no one in 15 years has been able to figure to out what he does. He doesn’t help his case by saying that doesn’t know sometimes. (This is all a joke, because he’s a manager of a very specialized division of a highly profitable tech company.)

The strange thing is that I didn’t answer about anything related to blogging. I started off with getting the kids ready for day care… and picking them up. There are 2-3 dog walks in between. There’s cooking dinner and lunch. I probably didn’t mention laundry… I’m not sure my wife fully trusts me with that chore, but launder the safe stuff sometimes.

I also grocery shop at 5 different stores, which was a post ironically inspired by this very same friend. This sounds like it would take a lot of time and be very wasteful on gas, but they are mostly a couple of blocks away from my house. I am very efficient in grabbing staples from them and can get in and out of them in 45 minutes. It helps that I’m able to shop in off-hours when the stores are empty.

It also helps that I’m able to keep a database of great prices in my head. I can usually save 30-50% over what it would cost me if I did my shopping at the local Stop and Shop.

Oh and I mentioned the siesta. I usually wake up around 6AM, but today, I’ve been up since 4:30. Going to sleep around midnight means I nice little siesta of 45 minutes in the middle of the day. It is my favorite perk of working for yourself. I can’t tell you how great it is to be able to work refreshed in the middle of the day.

So while I may have sounded extra lazy with the mention of a siesta, overall, I probably get by on less sleep than most people.

And this is where the conversation moved to another subject. Looking back at my answers, I probably sound like I live up to my name.

However, there are a few things that I probably should have mentioned. I think he knows them, but they certainly make a huge difference:

My wife works (4) 10-hour days

This means she has Fridays off. Blogging allows me to create my own hours. I’m going to be working extra Monday through Thursday to be able to take some time off with her… even if it is just doing errands. I effectively have an extra weekend day, but I also have to get the same amount done in less time.

Rental Property Duties

We’ve got three rental properties and no property manager. It’s not like something is always broken, but it can feel that way. Add in primary residence duties and it is pretty significant.

This Blogging “Thing”

I’m going to borrow from this description of what people think about bloggers, “No, I don’t just sit around, drink coffee all day long, and sit on Facebook. However, that’s what many believe actually happens in the average day of an online business owner.”

I write articles. I write a lot of articles… more than readers here know. Some articles are quick and I can get them out in an hour. This one is probably going to come in at 2.5 or 3 hours. I think my blog post on Nerium took more than 20 hours.

The average reader can see that and get it. What the average reader doesn’t see is all the stuff behind the scenes. It’s like an iceberg where you only see the tip. There’s so much more going on behind the surface. I’ve covered a lot of them back in 2007, but here’s just some of the things that I have to deal with.

I’m the bookkeeper. I’m one who negotiates with advertisers. I’m the marketing manager. I’m the networking guy, making new relationships in hopes they pay off down the line. I’m the technology expert. That includes understanding how search engines work, to social media, to coding HTML and PHP. I even run my own Amazon Web Services server where I put on my Linux sysadmin hat every now and again.

I’m doing all this and keeping up with dozens of email inquiries every day. I’m doing all this while trying to read dozens of articles a day, which gives me inspiration to write new material.

I deal with lawyers. Oh do I deal with lawyers. I’ve got 4 of them working on various aspects of blogging, but I’ll get to that in a little bit.

In short, the “blogging thing” is running a company from top to bottom. It may not be the best company and I may not be the best at all parts of it, but I’ve always loved doing different things. I get bored doing just one thing, so this works for me.

Here’s What I Don’t Do

This past weekend, I met up with an old friend and he asked what I did. I used to respond that I’m a software engineer, as I would view myself that way, but lately, I’ve just being saying it, “I’m a blogger.”

It’s a little like how my wife and I would talk around how we met. We met online in 2004. That was just something that did not happen. The news interviewed us for how unique we were. The stigma was that you must both be such damaged goods you couldn’t meet in the physical world. A decade later, I wonder if people meet any other way.

In 2006, being a blogger was weird. In 2015, it is much less weird. In fact, most people find it very interesting as I said at the outset.

This friend’s response was, “Oh yeah, I heard you disparage companies.”

My first thought was: “Oh eff-no.”

My actual response was something like, “I aim to help people find financial freedom by saving and investing in 401Ks, Roth IRAs, real estate, and other business ventures. I also expose MLM/pyramid schemes because they directly harm more than 99% of the participants from achieving this.”

It wasn’t that well-worded… a martini was involved.

I had to look up “disparage” when I got home, because I wanted to make sure I got the connotation right. I originally thought my problem was with the word “disparage”, but it is fairly accurate. My real problem is with the word, “companies.” While Enron and Bernie Madoff’s company were technically companies, they earned all the “disparagement” they had coming to them as they were probably best described as schemes.

If you are running a company and making money by providing a helpful product or service to consumers, I’m generally cool with you. I’ve written about dozens of these companies, from Fitbit to NutriBullet to Aldi grocery stores.

If you are running a company that is trying to make money via some kind of scam or confidence trick, I’m going to call you out for it. Consumers deserve to have access to the information and make their own decisions.

Final Thoughts

I realize this post went in a few different directions. I don’t often like to talk about my motivations for what I do or even how I do it when it comes to blogging. I don’t think that’s the interesting story. It’s like a reporter talking about his daily process for chasing leads. I don’t think the public wants to read a lot of articles about it.

Sometimes it is interesting to get a behind the scenes look. However, most of the time, I just want the actual story and not the details about how it came about.

Filed Under: Introspection Tagged With: Blogging, life, MLM

Start Your WordPress Blog Today

April 3, 2017 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

Back in 2006, I thought I’d start a blog, because I wanted to learn about why people blog. I also wanted to learn the technical aspects of running your own site. Facebook was still for colleges (for the most part) back then and YouTube had barely been dreamed up.

Somewhere along the way, I learned the value of creating a journal for yourself. I learned to connect and share ideas with like-minded people who I wouldn’t have run into otherwise.

Blogging for money?

I often get asked about making money from a blog. My response is pretty much the same, “Don’t waste your time.” It is very competitive (there’s very little barrier to entry as we’ll find out today) and to create a blog in the top billionth of a percent that makes money (I may be exaggerating) you have to have a lot of knowledge. You can read about blogging all day, but a lot of that knowledge comes from the experience of running a blog.

Many people I’ve run into say that you can’t just be a blogger any more. You have to be YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. You have to create podcasts. You have to write eBooks and give them away to build your mailing list. That’s just creating content and doing a little networking. I don’t want to get into the advertising side of things. I’ll just state that I have a dozen form letters for different advertisers approaching me about how their great program is going to make us both rich.

One of the things you learn by experience, is that advertisers need publishers, so they offer the world. After you join, you get days when you earn 12 cents.

Blog for the love of the game!

When I started blogging, I didn’t know that people could make money. I thought online advertising was only for ESPNs or the CNETs of the world. It isn’t like Reebok is going to call me up and try to negotiate a deal with me.

That’s the way, I think everyone should look at blogging. Just start something of an online journal. Create information that you think would be beneficial for others, but include some personal stories as well.

If you aren’t a writer, you are going to suck. I sucked too. Everyone has sucked at writing at some point. I was always a math and computer science in high school. I still think I suck, but some people have said I’m good. As always, you the reader, is the ultimate judge.

I do know that I can write this article as a constant stream of thought and intertwine useful information with my personal experience. I certainly couldn’t write anything like this back in 2006. Probably the closest I came was much, much worse and took 3 times as long.

Let’s get started

I’m hoping that by this point, you see some value to creating your blog. I understand that it isn’t for everyone, but if you were on the fence, hopefully I’ve convinced you of the benefits.

Prior to this year, I hadn’t started a blog from scratch in a long, long time. However, with the incoming new year, I launched Be Better Now. The website is a lot like Lazy Man and Money, but focused more on personal development than just money. It is more visually appealing because I include pictures with my articles. It also had no advertising (and probably won’t for at least the first year). I invented some awesome organizational tricks to give you just the information you are looking for. For example, save-money.BeBetterNow.org will give you just tips on saving money. You never have to read articles about health or even investing if that’s not your thing.

In creating Be Better Now, I had to learn things about blogging that I hadn’t come across in a long time. There’s buying a domain name, finding hosting, connecting it all up. Then there’s getting email set-up, creating a blog design, getting all those social media accounts.

It’s a lot. I’m not going to cover it all today, but I’d like to focus on two aspects to get started quickly:

1. Get a host with an easy to install WordPress blog such as 1&1. Maybe it’s because I’m a weird tech nerd, but I find signing up and getting a blog running easier than using Facebook.

2. The next hurdle is picking a theme for your WordPress blog. I would love to give some intelligent advice in this area, but I don’t feel it would be genuine. There are probably hundreds of thousands of themes to choose from. It’s too much choice and it is hard to find the perfect theme, though you feel it must be out there. I can only suggest that you go with what’s “good enough” and not waste your time looking for that perfect theme. At the end of the day, it is going to be your writing that matters.

You can have the blog up in minutes and logo design done shortly thereafter. That’s really there is to getting started.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: Blogging, hosting, logo, make money, Wordpress

Vacation from Blogging (and Personal Finance Links)

September 20, 2010 by Lazy Man 7 Comments

Last week I tried an interesting experiment. I decided to not write at all and see what would happen. I expected the to sky to either rain frog or just fall and hit me on the head. Neither happened. It got me thinking, what are the consequences of not writing?

Losing Money? This didn’t seem to be the case. One of the days was one of my top 5 or 10 income performing days of the year. Maybe after more than a week, I’d start to see some negative effects to the income from blogging. However, I’m not going to continue on with the experiment… I’d miss not writing too much.

As much as I’d miss the writing, I’d miss the interaction that I get with you, the reader. I paid twice as much attention to comments that I got during the time that I wasn’t writing. Fortunately they weren’t all comments on my MonaVie post (more than 4700 comments and counting). A lot of them said that they came from Smart Passive Income where Pat mentioned me via his Facebook page as helping out with traffic when he was getting started. I don’t use what Bill Belichick calls “My Face” very often, so I would have missed it. Thanks Pat and those who came and commented.

I plan to continue with my usual writing schedule, but a minor announcement that I have set for tomorrow may impact that decision. To make my writing schedule seem even worse, I’m going to follow that up with a guest post. However, it is a good guest post… which is increasingly rare these days.

Until then, here are some personal finance links to tide you over:

Money Writers:

  • Brip Blap on how to deal with a financial crisis.
  • Digerati Life wonders if you know what to consider before you cancel your credit cards?
  • Frugal Dad asks do we have a right to line dry our clothes?
  • Generation X Finance writes the lost decade of investing: was all really lost?
  • Million Dollar Journey gives a primer on corporate bonds ““ II (credit risk).
  • Money Smart Life presents waterproofing your basement against costly damage.
  • My Dollar Plan shares financial management for newlyweds.
  • The Sun’s Financial Diary says U.S. poverty rate reaches 15 year high.

Top PF Posts:

  • Smarter Wallet asks can you start an internet business with no money down?
  • Free Money Finance with a $1 gold coin update.
  • Get Rich Slowly shares a story about entrepreneurs in kids these days.
  • Frugal For Life reviews handmade bar soap vs commercial bar soap.
  • My Wealth Builder posts why to not work in retirement.
  • Hundred Goal$ says loaning money is stupid .
  • Canada Personal Finance Website asks what is employment insurance (EI)?
  • Money Reasons examines minimalist vs misers, money fight match-up #2.
  • Darwin’s Finance says fantasy football can get you fired ““ score!
  • Saving to Inve$t offers up 10 ways to boost your retirement savings starting now.
  • Frugal Village with tips to make eating at home easier.

Filed Under: Links Tagged With: Blogging, Vacation

Alternative Income Streams ““ August 2009

September 9, 2009 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

I’m a little later than usual reporting my alternative income. Why? While I’d like to say it took my accountant a long time to count the millions, I can’t. I have no good excuse, other than being extra Lazy. This past month I focused on a few things:

  • Getting back to writing general personal finance posts – I went into budgeting a lot more than I usual do. I still have a few articles left on the topic, but they are still in the editing room. Hopefully, I can get them out early next week
  • Building a foundation to start full-time blogging again – With my contract ending soon, it’s time to take care of all the loose ends and whittle down that to-do list, now. I have a pile of to-dos for this blog.
  • Being Myself – I’ve been heavily, heavily considering a new blog branded with my real name. I would give up my anonymity here except that I don’t want my real name to be synonymous with “lazy”… and there are probably about 200,000 MonaVie distributors who have a bounty on my head because I asked for evidence that their juice is worth $40 a bottle.
  • Obsessively watching How To Fix – I have to stop refreshing stats and tell myself that the traffic there is insignificant until it is at least 1/3 (more likely half) the Lazy Man and Money traffic.
  • Adding new writers – I’ve been adding writers from Elance.com for side projects (like How To Fix). Unfortunately, they were backed-up for much of the month, which makes it difficult to really expand this month, but next month is looking good.

From a financial perspective, I made $1,711.44 after taxes in August. For the billionth month in a row, it didn’t go up. It’s not that surprising since my full-time job and taking care of the 9 month old puppy has left me with an hour or so. When I have that hour, I tend to lean towards online news and entertainment rather than focusing on the drive to make more money.

I should add that (if all goes to schedule) tomorrow will be a blog announcement and on Friday, I will try something new as I write a post to one person and let you eavesdrop.

Next month’s report is likely going to be a few days late as well as I have a vacation and a wedding at the beginning of the month.

Filed Under: Alternative Income Tagged With: Alternative Income, Blogging

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