Lazy Man and Money

The Cost of Summer Camp

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This past weekend, I finished signing up the kids for summer camp. Camps have changed a lot since I was a kid. I think my mother said she spent about $25 to send me to camp for a week. That was around 40 years ago though. It might have also been subsidized. In any case, we pay a lot more than that for our kids to go to summer camp nowadays.

We used to send the kids to the local YMCA for most of the weeks. That was similar to the camp I had growing up. Play sports, do arts and crafts, go on hikes, and have a little swim time. The price for the YMCA is reasonable and they have long hours which is good for me. Unfortunately, the kids hate the YMCA camp. The camp counselor takes away anything fun if one kid misbehaves. Their groups are big (that’s how they keep the price reasonable), so there’s always one kid that spoils it for the whole group.

This is the first year that we skipped YMCA or a general, old-fashioned camp. Instead, the kids have picked the camps they enjoyed the most over the last few years. Unfortunately, those happen to be the most expensive camps. This is one of those cases where Kids Ain’t Cheap. The good news is that there’s a lot of enrichment.

Kid 1: Nine-Year-Old

We signed up our oldest for 4 camps. He’s doing a theater camp, a sailing camp, a veterinarian camp, and a cooking camp. The theater camp is 3 weeks and the sailing camp is two weeks.

Sailing is big in Newport, Rhode Island. It’s so big that the National Sailing Hall of Fame is moving here. The theater camp is fairly renowned. The veterinarian camp fits well with my dog boarding business. If I’m going to spend a lot for a camp, I don’t mind the money helping out our local animal shelter. I’m a huge fan of kids learning cooking – it’s a lifelong skill that will save them a lot of money.

Kid 2: Eight-Year-Old

Our youngest is signed up for 6 different types of camps. One camp has four separate weeks of activities. They are a maker camp, art camp, Lego robotics, and a sports camp. Drawing and building are what he loves and does best. It’s also being done at his school, so there’s a good chance he’ll know some kids.

Like his older brother, he has a sailing camp and a veterinarian camp (a more junior version of the same veterinarian camp). He also has a cooking camp, but it’s only 3 days as an introduction. Essentially he traded his brother’s theater camp for building and art.

The Cost of Summer Camp

Summer camp has become a big business. Consumers will pay for the education of their kids. Perhaps it is a trap, but I’ve fallen for it.

The 9-year-old’s camps add up to $2,150. The 8-year-old’s camps add up to $2,420. That’s over $4,500 for two kids to have 7 weeks of camp. We are taking three weeks of camp off, but they’ll be small road trips. With hotels and driving and events, they’ll be even more expensive than the camps.

Are we spending too much on camp, or are we investing in education and things we believe in. Perhaps it is a little of both? What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Kids’ Camp Conundrum

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(I love alliteration.)

You may have noticed that my posting schedule has slowed down recently. Some of it is due to vacations. We’ve had two in the last two months. Some of it is due to the vast number of dogs we are sitting lately. However, this week it’s something new, a grueling summer camp schedule. (Me, my wife, and a kid all have colds too, but I wanted to focus more on the summer camp.)

Warning: This is a rant. I understand it may be off-putting to complain about child care when so many people have had little or none for over a year now. I ask that you read it through and think about the overall value. Then I think you’ll be able to see the conundrum.

Here’s what my day with the kids’ summer camp looks like:

8:15 – Leave the house to bring Kid 1 to camp by 8:30
8:42 – Return home to pick up Kid 2
8:47 – Leave with Kid 2 to bring him to the SAME CAMP
9:15 – Return home to start the day

During this time, I’m feeding dogs we are boarding, shopping, doing laundry, cooking, dishes, some light cleaning, clearing out emails, and miscellaneous stuff like a dog doctor appointment and a dentist appointment. I guess you’d say that typical errands you might do. Then:

1:15 – Leave to pick up Kid 1
1:45 – Return home
1:45-2:30 – Free time (45 minutes)
2:30 – Leave to pick up Kid 2.
3:00 – Arrive home with Kid 2.

It’s two hours of driving to accommodate the camp’s staggered drop-offs. They are doing that for COVID, but we are talking about kids, outside, wearing masks, in a highly vaccinated state (RI)… and in this case in the same family. I’m all for COVID precautions, but even the most stringent CDC guidelines would be against that.

That 9:15 to 1:15 block is four hours of productive kid-free time. We pay extra for “full-day” care or those end times would be even sooner (12:30 and 1 PM).

We had no way of knowing the full schedule of things when we signed up. The logistics of the staggered drop-offs were a surprise to us until before camp (too late for refunds). The camp offered us the ability to drop the kids off at 9:00 and pick them up at 1:30, but that’s still the same 4 hours of productive kid-free time. That “solution” saves driving, but it also means less camp for each kid or wasting the money we paid to extend the day for the second kid.

The price of the summer camp for the two kids (combined) is around $750 a week. That’s roughly $3,375 a month as the average month is 4.5 weeks. Or if you want to put in yearly terms, that $750 a week is $39,000 a year (750 * 52). That’s after-tax money, so it can be seen as requiring around a 50k salary for these 4 hours of productivity (or 4.5 hours of the time they would be in care – it would be unfair for me to hold the driving time against them if it was a standard drop-off).

So I think I’ve set the scene accurately with this camp… except for one thing… these are specialty camps within a camp.

One of them is a Snapology franchise, which is a robotics class using Lego WeDo. They build the Lego bricks and code how they work in small teams of 3 people. I’m a little jealous that I couldn’t be a part to be honest. My 8-year-old loves it! Every day he has a billion things to say about how great it is.

My 7-year-old is doing and art specialty. It’s not a fancy franchise, but it is the one that runs longer in the day time and is a little cheaper. The art camp seems to cover several different classical techniques from Monet to Van Gogh to Jackson Pollack. I’m not sure my 7-year-old is going to become an art history major based on this one-week class, but exposure to all these types of art is great for him. The only downside is that he caught our bug and missed a day – $75 down the tubes I guess. He isn’t as enthusiastic about loving it as his brother, but that’s not really his personality. He made it clear it was awesome.

I think you get the point, this camp is very inconvenient (for me), expensive, but the kids love it. There are other camps like this in the area. It’s a picture of privilege as you might in Newport, Rhode Island. We have the Tennis Hall of Fame and they have a camp. It runs for about 3 hours and it’s expensive. It wasn’t running this year due to COVID, so I can’t compare the numbers. Sailing goes for only 2.5 hours, but is only $170 for the week. We tried to get in that, but maybe it’s for the best we didn’t make the deadline. It’s a longer drive (30 minutes each way), so I’d be tempted to stay there and try to work off a mobile hot spot.

If I haven’t already lost you, none of this is where I wanted or expected us to be. All the above camps are a lot different than what I had growing up. I think my mother said she sent me to camp for about $25 a week. I built zero robots, but it was fine. Fine in the sense that it built character. The swimming lessons were at 9AM and the pool was ice cold. You could opt-out, but that meant missing free swim when it was 3 PM and a day in the sun has worn you out. They had arts and crafts and sports, which were (again) fine. We went on long hikes which were not fun, except for the destination, which was usually a great view or a dinosaur rock.

The Traditonal Camp

The equivalent to that near us is the local YMCA. They offer around 3-4 different types of camps with prices around $225 a week (give or take $20 depending on the camp). They have a gymnastics camp, a ninja camp (which seems to be boys gymnastics), sports, traditional, etc. For both kids combined it would be $450 a week or possibly a little less as members get a discount. (We found that membership in the past was worth it just for the camp discount.) The hours are 8 AM to 5 PM (but camp starts at 9 AM and ends at 4 PM). With this camp, I can get close to 8 hours of work in. There’s no staggered drop-offs that make our current camp difficult.

To put the math in perspective, here are the costs of the two camps per hour.

Current/Specialty: $750 for 45 hours (4.5 day * 5 days * 2 kids) = $16.66 per kid hour
YMCA: $450 for 75 hours (7.5 day * 5 days * 2 kids) = $6 per kid hour

It seems like our current camp costs more than 2.5x more than the YMCA camp. Building robots and specialty art is expensive.

This is a financial blog, so I have to crunch those numbers. What’s more difficult is to quantify the kids’ enjoyment of the camp. There is no excitement about the day at YMCA camp. It’s often a coin flip between fine and bad. They both complain that YMCA yells at them. The “swim” is more of a slip-and-slide than a pool. The quality of camp seems objectively very, very different.

Middle Ground?

I’m not sure if a middle ground exists. I’ve researched camps extensively a couple of years ago, but COVID closed everything but YMCA last year. (YMCA had no COVID cases all summer.) My research was mostly focused on what the kids were interested in. I eliminated the tennis camp very early because 3 hours was ridiculously too little. I was interested in the sailing camp, but they were too young at the time, so it was easy to dismiss.

So that’s the conundrum. I could also keep the kids at home, which comes at costs zero dollars. There is an opportunity cost though. With the kids at home, I don’t have much time to work. I know the kids wouldn’t mind this, but it’s also not the best thing for them.

Next spring I will look at camps more discerningly, but it might be a mix of all three: specialty, YMCA, and camp.

What do you think? Do you have kids and send them to camp? Is this conundrum (outside of the Newport stuff of sailing) something that you experience or is it just me?

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Holiday Sundries: Mesh Wifi, Best Investment Idea, and No Camp

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I hope all my United States’ readers enjoyed their Independence Day holiday. The July 4th holiday is a good market for half of the year being completed. I’ll be reviewing my goals for the beginning of the year soon. I know I’m behind where I wanted to be with decluttering, but still ahead of where we’ve ever been, so that’s win.

Pell Bridge Sunset
The sunset view before the fireworks in Newport, RI

I hope to publish a financial update through the end of June in a few days. I ran some preliminary numbers while we are still waiting to receive rent checks and the numbers are looking amazing.

It’s a good thing too, because the past week was a really difficult one for us. There are some things that I can’t get into, but one of them that I can was a dog I was sitting on Rover. This puppy was kind-hearted, but it just chewed up everything. I couldn’t leave it alone for more than 5 minutes. Most of the time the dog sitting gig is great. However, not every job is perfect and this was a reminder of that.

I have serveral longer articles almost finished, but I didn’t want to get anything too deep due to the holidays. Instead, I’ll go with a few little thought nuggets.

Installing a Mesh Wifi System

I used to laugh at the idea of mesh wifi systems. I figure it just made sense to use an old router as a repeater. Maybe we have too many devices now, or maybe it’s that my recycled repeater router is 10 years old, but we’ve run into a lot of wifi problems in the house. I decided that life is too short to go through it with bad wifi. (I’ve been thinking that a lot lately.)

I did some research and it seemed to say that one product was the best. So I ended up buying a renewed/refurbished version of this Netgear Orbi RBK50 for around $200. Some mesh systems are $400, so hitting the $200 number was important to me. There’s also a new standard coming out soon, so I’ll feel better replacing a $200 system in a few years than I would if I spend $400. For now, I’ll hopefully be able to sell my old routers for $50 combined.

Unfortunately, the process of installing the Orbi requires a reboot of the cable modem. I rebooted my cable modem a few weeks ago and it took a call to my cable company’s customer support to resolve it. It turned out to just be dumb luck that it decided to work. This time my cable modem didn’t come back. It’s 6 years old, and I stored it in a drawer where it was likely overheating. I went to Amazon and bought a new one. In the meantime, I’m renting a combo router/wifi from my cable company that is terrible, but it at least gets us online.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to review the Orbi soon.

My Best Individual Investment Idea

Pell Bridge Night
A view of the same bridge at night.

In reviewing two years of stock picks it seems like my hand-picked value stocks far out-performed the market. I’m still the person who held onto oil and Twitter for years just to see it do nothing, so I don’t claim to be a stock picking wizard. I’m very much an believer in buy and hold index investing.

However, if you were to look at those articles in the past and how the stocks did, you might ask me, “What are some example stocks that are going to break out in the future?” Unfortunately, I don’t see any from the group that I track that seem particularly good. The closest I have is Kraft-Heinz (Nasdaq: KHC). It fits the model because the stock has been badly beaten (for good reason). It still pay for a very healthy 5.24% dividend, but that dividend may get cut in the future.

I think the company will figure things out and turn it around. It could be months or it could be years. I don’t think anyone’s crystal ball is perfect when it comes to picking company stocks.

If stock picking isn’t your thing, I’m planning to write something in the next week or two that will be of more interest to you. Here’s a preview: Bonds look to be a much better investment over the long term than I thought.

Keeping Kids Home During the Summer?

Joe from Retire By 40 is having a whole summer with his son. This struck me as odd as I grew up in an environment where kids went to summer camp. It was just what is done and I never gave it a second thought. When my kids were younger, I appreciated any time off I could get, because taking care of a 2-year old is much more tedious than a 7-year old. With our kids being a year apart, it was “double trouble.”

However, now that they are older and largely take care of themselves (not that they always want to), we could use the summer to do more family stuff during the week. I have largely ignored the cost of camp and let my wife handle it. However, it’s nearly $50 a day per child, so $100 for the two. The easy math shows that it is $500 for the week or $2000 for the month.

That’s a lot of money especially because it’s only 6-hour days. As soon as I drop them off, I feel like I’m picking them up again. I feel it’s important for them to have a camp experience and play with kids their own age in a fun environment that’s less structured than school. I also feel it’s important to me to still have some time to focus on work during the summer.

Maybe next year, we’ll do a 50/50 camp/home split – one week on, and one week off. There are some specialty camps that I’ve been looking at, but they are a little more money. It’s much more affordable to do 5 weeks of specialty camp and home with dad than it is to 10 weeks at general camp.

I’m coming up with this idea on the spot. I’ll have to see what my wife thinks of it.

Have yourselves a great weekend. I highly recommend Toy Story 4 if you want to beat the heat. I’ve also started the new season of Stranger Things on Netflix, but I’m sure some of you already finished it.

A Salad of Business Thinking (Part 1)

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I have a bunch of ideas to share today. There’s thread tying them together, other than them being about business, so I’m just referring to it as a “business thinking salad.” Hopefully, it’s good and you don’t spend your time picking out the metaphorical red onions.

The first two headings are about personal/family stuff… along with some blog direction. Feel to skip them if they are not your thing. I, personally, love to learn more about the people behind the blogs I follow.

Freedom?

My 3 year old has his first day of camp today. This ends a 10-week string where I was a stay-at-home dad. As Retire By 40 put it, “Any stay at home parent wants a little more time to do what they want. RB40Jr was out of school for two weeks and it was rough… By the end of the two week break, I was getting easily irritable and I didn’t like that.”

I don’t know how other stay at home parents do it, but I’m guessing they aren’t trying to balance 3 other businesses and most of the household chores as well.

The grandparents chipped in with a several days of help, but it was often 2-3 days of overnights. The needle moved sharply in the other direction and I missed him. It’s almost like starving a person for weeks and then giving them all-you-can-eat lard. There’s no balance… it is simply not healthy.

All the time, there was a looming feeling of Cat’s Cradle (Chapin, not Vonnegut)… I’m sure I’ll want to have all this time back with him in a few years.

Expect action on this blog to pick up. I’m going to start by looking for a new writer (my old one got a new job). If you think you’re a good fit reach out to me here.

Father’s Day and the 2-year old Competitive Eating Champion

I had a great Father’s Day… two of them actually. My wife took me and the kids out for lunch… the best BBQ in town (there’s not much competition). The 2-year old slept through it, so he had lunch when we got home. Three hours later, we all went out again for my father-in-law’s celebration. Because I had just eaten, I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, a half-pound burger, to split with the 2-year old. (The 3-year old had fallen asleep this time.)

When the burger arrived, I almost got sick as it was so big and I was still so full. Fortunately, my 2-year old is the next Joey Chestnut as he ate 90% of the burger, not to mention quite a few chips and fries. The running joke for the next couple of hours was, “So how was your burger?”

Enough family stuff… let’s move on to the business ideas.

Ever Wonder? Is This Business Idea Any Good?

I wonder that all the time. In fact, I’m often so paralized by the question that I can’t move forward. Well, I may have found the answer.

Pat Flynn had his Will it Fly book on Kindle available for 99 cents this weekend. That price is no longer available as I write this, but there’s arguably a better deal.

The Audible book is still $1.99. (I hope that’s still the case as you read this as it seems an oversight.)

You could can pay around $15 to read a paperback or have your Amazon Echo read it to you for $2.

Good Marketing, Bad Marketing, and False Marketing

I’m often annoyed by marketing. I can understand a company explaining why people should their products. That’s good marketing. Sometimes the companies use misleading information and a bunch of psychological tricks. This morning I was reading Root of Good’s article on focus groups and some examples of these were brought up. I considering this bad marketing.

There’s sometimes a very thin line between the two.

Then there’s simply false marketing. There are probably at least 20 marketing statements I hear a day where I think, “That can’t be right.” When I have the time to look into them, I find that 90% they simply aren’t right.

To give you an example of what I mean, I watched John Oliver on Brexit (warning: very adult language) this morning. He pointed out a commercial that appears to have blatantly lied, stating that there are 109 European Union regulations to making a pillow. He shows that’s simply not true.

This stuff probably seems like common sense, but it’s odd that the first two articles I read today had significant mentions of bad and false marketing.

Should You Get an MBA?

I looked into this question over a decade ago. The more I looked into it, the more it seemed that the value was mostly in networking with others, not the education itself. I feel like you can get much of the education through books like The Personal MBA.

It was kind of gut feel from all my reading, but there was never one specific thing that I felt I could point to. This weekend I found an article on The Atlantic that is the closest thing to it: The Management Myth. The article should open your eyes about how weird “management” is.

Sometimes my wife brings up the idea of getting an MBA to pair with her pharmacy degree. I cringe a little bit, because it doesn’t feel like the time/money investment is worth it.