Lazy Man and Money

Lazy Man Goal Update (August 2021)

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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.

Why MLM is NOT a Business

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Stop MLM

[Today we’re continuing to celebrate National Consumer Protection Week with more MLM scam awareness. The FTC has some good advice on MLMs from its recent consumer warnings, “Most people who join MLMs make little or no money. And, if promoters emphasize recruiting as the real way to make money, walk away.”]

Multi-level Marketing (MLM) is not a business. Many MLMers say it is a business and act like it is one, but it simply isn’t. It is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

It’s a tall order for me to prove this. I’m a firm believer that big claims require big support. I don’t believe it is that big of a claim, just the big lie told by the MLM industry. It’s not a coincidence that the average person likely can’t distinguish them from a pyramid scheme.

MLM’s Deceptive Doublespeak

To start, MLM often attempts to disguise itself under other names in hopes that its terrible reputation is not detected. That’s why you see it called “Network Marketing”, “Direct Sales”, or even “Community Commerce.” For now, let’s agree to call it MLM because that’s the only term that explicitly states the “levels” that are the defining characteristic of every MLM. Direct selling could be hosting a yard sale or putting an object on eBay. That is clearly not MLM. Network marketing could refer to an advertisement that you see on ABC/NBC/CBS etc. which is also not MLM.

The naming deception is not one of the reasons it is not a business. I simply needed to address it before we can move forward. If someone tries to recruit you into “network marketing” or “direct sales” it is best to run away from their deception.

Why MLM is Not a Business

With that out of the way, here are just some of the reasons why MLM distributors are not businesses:

  1. Businesses obey the Commandment of Control

    This is something that I first read in The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco. (I highly recommend this book.) MLM Distributors do not have control. DeMarco explains:

    I was involved in four MLM companies. Not once do I remember dictating product decisions, research & marketing, marketing restriction, rules, cost analysis or any other activity fundamental to owning a business.

    If you aren’t participating in fundamental activities related to owning a business… you can’t call it a business, right?

  2. Business 101 Excludes MLM
    One of my brilliant readers noted:

    Business 101 teaches that in order for you to be considered a business owner there are three ‘musts.’ You must have control of the product, you must have control of the distribution, and you must have control of the pricing. These people are not business owners, they are recruiters/salespeople.

    Every MLM that I’ve looked at fails these three principles. MLMs claim that distributors set their own pricing, but MLMs set the pricing to their victims excessively high because that’s where they make the money. MLM salespeople can’t charge less or they’ll lose money. They can’t charge more for three reasons:

    1. The products are already excessively high priced from the MLM company.
    2. People can get the products at distributor cost (usually by signing up to be a preferred customer themselves)
    3. The MLM distributor can’t compete on pricing with the other salespeople. They can’t charge more, because they don’t add any value to the consumer.

  3. Businesses obey the Commandment of Entry

    This also comes from DeMarco above. You have to be able to build a moat around your business and prevent others from competing with you. DeMarco again explains:

    “Network marketing, or multi-level marketing (MLM), always fails the Commandment of Entry — unless you own and create the MLM company yourself. If you’re in a room with 2,000 other people who do exactly what you do, you’re fighting stiff probabilities.”

    One thing to keep in mind is that those 2,000 people are taught to recruit more people to compete with your business. There is no moat to protect your business. It is the exact opposite, where they are encouraging more people to compete against you.

    I’ll get to it in a few more bullet points, but this competition is part of the reason why 99% of MLM distributors lose money.

  4. MLM Doesn’t Obey the Laws of Supply and Demand

    McDonald’s won’t let franchise owners open up multiple ones on the same street unless there is sufficient demand. Otherwise, they would compete for few customers and go out of business.

    MLM has no problem with creating millions of distributors even if no one is interested in buying the product. They don’t ensure that there’s enough product demand for the distributor to make money. I often find that plenty of product is available with a simple eBay search.

    If you put ten McDonald’s on the same block, you’d expect them to lose money and go out of business. You wouldn’t blame the individual owners of the McDonald’s franchise. When 99% of MLM distributors lose money, they are the ones that are blamed for the failure.

  5. More than 99% of people LOSE money
    Some MLM companies produce what is called an income disclosure statement so that their distributors can talk about the MLM as if it were a business opportunity. Analysis of these statements show that more than 99% of people lose money in MLM. Need examples? See this or this. I did the analysis for MonaVie a few years long ago. It’s easy to see once you learn to read the fine print in the income disclosure statement. I cover how to do that in my Beachbody article.

    There are a lot of people in MLM bragging about making money. Many of them are “faking it until they make it”. As the FTC says, “blockquotMost people who join MLMs make little or no money.” Some of the people at the top might actually be making money. However, we know that a lottery winner is not the typical representative of what happens when you play the lottery, right? And if those people at the top are making that money from a recruited “downline” it is a pyramid scheme.

  6. MLM is Not like Any Other Small Business
    Some MLMers claim that small businesses generally have a high failure rate. “High” is a relative term… and it doesn’t come close to comparing with MLM.

    The U.S. Small Business Administration has this handy PDF of information. It seems that “7 of 10 survive the first two years” (30% failure rate over two years), “half at least 5 years”, “a third at least 10 years”, and “a quarter stay in business 15 years or more.”

    Let’s compare this to an MLM where 90% are failing every year. I’m being very generous given the proof above that 99% of them lose money. If we start with 100,000 people and 90% fail each year, there are 10,000 people after the first year. In the second year, another 90% fail, and we are left with 1,000 people. That’s a 99% failure in MLM vs. 30% in traditional small businesses in just two years. After 5 years, there is just a single person in MLM. In traditional small businesses, you still have 50,000 of the initial 100,000.

    Do you want a 1 in 100,000 chance of being successful or a 50% chance? If you have to think about this question, please have the self-awareness to realize you are not intelligent enough to be that 1 in 100,000.

  7. It Doesn’t Matter How Hard You Work

    As this article reads:

    MLM supporters will claim that those who lose money just didn’t work hard enough. That’s not true. It’s simple mathematics that guarantees almost everyone will lose money. You can only make money if large numbers of people are recruited below you. That necessarily precludes almost everyone from making money, because they can’t recruit into infinity. As the pyramid below you gets wider, the new participants added have an even smaller chance of making money because there aren’t enough people in the world for everyone to make money.

    It’s like telling someone that they can hit ten holes-in-one consecutively in golf. Anyone can work hard on your golf game day and night, but the circumstances of hitting ten holes-in-one are so extremely difficult, that’s hard to say whether it has ever been done. If someone fails to hit ten holes-in-one, we don’t tell them that they didn’t work hard enough… we simply say that the goal was unattainable to start with.

    MLMers might counter that another person in the MLM attained it. It’s always because they didn’t have to work their way up there competing against everyone else. They were people who started at the top or brought their pyramid scheme from another MLM with them.

I hope you made it through all the above (or at least enough of them to realize that MLM is not a business).

Typically, when people understand that MLM isn’t a business they ask me, “What’s better?” I counter with “What’s worse?” A minimum wage job at McDonald’s is much, much better than spending your time to lose money. You might not like to take a job picking up dog poop, but it is profitable in the first hour.

While those are true, they aren’t very inspiring. A McDonald’s employee has a job… he isn’t running a business either. A dog poop service is a business, but you might not be interested in that business.

So why not start a business on your own? Follow your passion… and see if you can find profitable ideas in that area of interest. Here’s an extremely well-reviewed book to get you started: The Lean Startup

This article was originally published on January 15th, 2016. Some of the links in this article may go to books or products where I would earn a commission if you buy it.

Starting a Blog: Step 1

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A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I started a new blog. I’m not quite ready to tell you about the blog I started. It needs a lot more work to be “ready.” You only get one chance to make a great first impression, right?

While I was going through the process, I thought to myself, maybe people would be interested in this? Maybe readers would like to read why some starts a blog. (Hint: If it’s just money you are probably not going to be successful.) Maybe readers would like to read how to start a blog. In any case, I’m sure there are people out there who find this stuff interesting.

Why Start a Blog?

The answer to this is most easily found in my Ten Reasons Why You Should be a Personal Finance Blogger. I learned a lot about the subject (personal finance), the technology, web design, the business of running a blog (including negotiating advertising), and how the Internet works. You can substitute a topic of your own interest and you’ll likely learn more than you ever imagined possible. It can even get to be a bit like Brewster’s Millions where you get too much of good thing.

How to Start a Blog

Keep in mind that this is step 1 of starting a blog. Starting a blog isn’t exactly rocket science, but it isn’t something that comes naturally either. There are a lot of little steps. Don’t worry, most of them are very easy. I’m going to start at a high level. We can drill into the details later.

Choose a Topic

If you are thinking of starting of a blog, you probably already know the topic you want to write about. That’s a great first step. However, depending on your goals, it’s not enough to be successful. Before I start a blog, I ask myself two basic questions:

1. Am I Passionate About my Topic?

There’s a lot of nonsense on the internet about “following your passion.” It sounds great, but as I turn 40, I realize that you need more than passion. For example, being quarterback of the New England Patriots is not in the cards for me. I would say that “passion” is just one ingredient in the “Success Cake.” It isn’t the “Success Cake” itself.

2. What Are My Reasons for Starting this Blog?

When I started Lazy Man and Money in 2006 it was about learning how to manage money, compound interest, and reaching financial freedom. I also wanted to connect with other people looking to make the most of their investing dollar. I was seriously considering a Condohotel at the time and it was obviously a very bad idea. To understand how bad an idea it was, this is the W Las Vegas that I was looking into.

(It’s worth taking a moment to laugh at how bad my first Condotel article was. It may only be surpassed by my second article on Condohotels.)

We all make mistakes, right?

I created Lazy Man and Money in hopes that I could find a community of people who could help expand my ideas of expressing a goal of achieving financial freedom.

I never expected to make money. In fact, after 6 months of writing, another personal finance writer wrote in a forum that you can make a $100 a month blogging. I was amazed. Who doesn’t want an extra $100 a month? That’s a utility bill for what I was doing anyway. So instead of watching reruns of Seinfeld, I put some time into learning how to add advertising and get to $100 a month. As it was 2006, blogging was very different… which means that making money with a blog was very different.

You should start a blog to learn more about the topic or connect with people of similar interests. If someone wants to throw money at you (like they did to me) to add advertisements, that’s awesome!

How Do I Get Started?

Once you have a topic, there are three basic steps:

  • Pick a Domain Name – In hindsight, LazyManAndMoney.com was probably not the best choice, but it worked. I usually go to InstantDomainSearch.com to see if what I want is available.
  • Find a Hosting Service – I recommend Bluehost and used them for my new blog
  • Install WordPress – WordPress probably powers 99% of all blogs and 25% of all websites. Bluehost makes it really easy

I should probably be more verbose in explaining these steps. If you agree, tell me in the comments, and I’ll work on another post fleshing these details out.

New Opportunities are Just Around the Corner

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Last week, I got an alert from Zillow about a house for sale that caught my attention. The price per square foot was under $110, which is less than half of our home would appraise at. At nearly 4500 square feet, it was quite a bit of house. The location was just a few streets over. I figured it must be a huge dump, but the pictures of TWO new kitchens indicated otherwise.

As luck would have it, the house had an open house scheduled. I had to check it out.

I pulled into the quiet cul-de-sac and there was a couple there about to enter. This worked out well as the real estate agent gravitated to them first. I like to look around, especially when I’m in browsing/not buying mode.

I quickly learned that the pictures were very strategic. The new kitchens were very impressive… granite counters and stainless steel appliances. They were big and there were a couple of big areas for entertaining.

The house even had a sound system installed throughout it. However, in sharp contrast to the kitchens, it was cassette tape. The bathrooms were from the 70s. There was certainly signs of age, but not nearly as much as one would expect for the price.

There was some work to be done, but I don’t think it would be too expensive to bring it up to date.

Just a Few Problems

I think the house is a steal for someone, but maybe not us. We just finished putting solar on our house, so we are somewhat committed for a bit. While our house may get a little small with two growing boys in it, this house was much bigger than what we needed. I thought about what it might cost to heat and cool it. Then there’s furnishing it.

It lacked some of the features of our current house such as a master bedroom with a master bath. It was nothing that couldn’t be fixed… the question is whether you wanted to.

The biggest problem though is that we don’t have the cash for a down payment. We could do something where the sale of our house is a contingency, but I don’t want to get into that situation. I don’t think it would be worth it considering the other problems.

Despite all this, I love a good bargain, and I have had the house rolling in my mind since I saw it.

Taking a Step Back…

It was then that I realized something, new opportunities are always just around the corner. It was just a couple of months ago, I wanted to buy a huge property for AirBNB. Before that, I was intrigued by a neighbor’s house that was put up for sale. I had envied it for awhile, but again the liquidity wasn’t there to seriously consider the discussion.

If we go back a year or two, we did take the opportunity to expand our real estate empire, and thus far it has been a terrific decision.

I’m starting to learn that it is okay to let things go. There’s something else coming around the bend. Time to work on getting prepared for it.

Setting Goals for 2015

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There’s some irony in sitting down to write this article on the morning of January 29th. I had hoped to have it done a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully that’s not an indication on how my goals are going to go this year.

I’ve thought long about how I set goals every year just to find give myself a D+ the following year. The fundamental problem I’ve been having is to look at things from a year-long perspective. There’s always next month to hit revenue goals. I can lose 5 pounds next month. I’m trying to do something a little new and set goals by the month. For example, there’s Setting Goals for January 2015.

I’m not going to take this space to set monthly goals though. It doesn’t make sense at the financial stage we are at. The closest thing I can think of is building up emergency fund, which we are making great strides in.

There are a couple of things that I want to shot at though:

The Big Net Worth Milestone

One of the biggest goals I have is hitting that big net worth milestone. I’m not saying what that is, but if you read the comments, you should be able to put it together. Much of our net worth is not liquid, tied up in real estate investment properties and retirement brokerage accounts. Unfortunately, I don’t control either the stock or real estate markets, so my influence is limited to what I can save. I have to leave the rest up to “the powers that be”.

I’m wondering if those “powers that be” are related to low oil prices. Though we probably will see a raise in interest rates this year, the low oil prices should help company’s profits. (Perhaps the strong dollar eats into those though.) If consumers save at the pump, they might have more money for rents and houses, driving the theoretical value of our investment properties up. We’ll see what happens. At any rate, it will be fun to look back on this paragraph a year from now and see how crazy it was.

This is a terrible goal to set due to the factors outside my control, but I also see it as a can’t lose situation. If I don’t achieve it, I won’t be disappointed because I’ve managed my expectations to start. If I do achieve, then it’s “unicorns, show ponies, ‘where’s the beef?’!!!”.

Business Goals I

I continue to try to keep Lazy Man and Money as a daily money journey diary sharing my favorite tips of what works for me, while looking out for consumers to keep them safe from scams. Currently too much of my income relies on this website. I would like to diversify. It’s not just for the purposes of where my income comes from, but to match my interests. There’s more to life than money, and I want to write about it.

I realize that not everyone is a fan of reading about MLM scams. They are interesting to me from an intellectual standpoint and the number of comments I get tell me the articles are extremely useful. Overall, I’d say that 95% of the population doesn’t care. Of the remaining 5%, I’d say that 99% of those people are wrapped up in the pyramid schemes and not open to me exposing the fraud.

With that I’d like to announce the launch of a new website: Be Better Now. It’s a self-improvement site with a few unique twists to set it apart from anything else I think you’ve seen. I’ll go into it in more detail later in a separate post. For now I suggest you go explore, but here’s why you’ll love Be Better Now.

(Side note: To all those MLMers, who send me death threats or simply try to sue me, your best move is to help me be extremely successful with Be Better Now. Time that I spend there is time that I am not spending exposing your pyramid schemes. Also, you do your “industry” no favors when you attack people who are trying to help others.)

With the two websites combined, I hope to have 800,000 visitors throughout the year. I’ll put a huge stretch goal at an even million. Like the net worth goal above, I control some things such as how good the content is. I don’t control other things, such as getting people to spread it or search engines to say: “This is really useful!” If I build it, will they come? I guess we’ll find out.

Business Goals II

(With the upcoming Super Bowl, I’m in a Roman Numeral mood.)

Aside from the obvious website businesses, I’m still the a full-time family CFO. This means that I’m focused on ways to save money such as shopping for bargains or refinancing mortgages. It even includes our foray into solar power.

There are a lot of these little thing that I do which stretch the money we make further.

The closest thing I have to a goal for this year is to finally sign up as a host at DogVacay and bring in some extra money outside of website stuff. I estimate that I could make about $30 a day or roughly around $2000 a year doing it around once a week. It isn’t huge money, but when you already know how to stretch a dollar, $2000 is more than you might think.

Everything Else

I have bunch of tiny goals, but nothing sweeping like the yearly ones. One example might be to drink at least 50% almond milk instead of my current milk. I’d like to investigate all those tiny health choices I can make and really cement them as habits that stick. Most of this is going to be covered at Be Better Now on a monthly basis.

When it comes time to look this over at the end of the year, I’ll go and grade those monthly goals and come up with a meta-analysis of how things went.

… And if all this doesn’t work, I’ll look to improve the process for next year. I view it as an evolutionary process.