Lazy Man and Money

“You’re on the wrong side of the equation.”

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I had this dream a few hours ago. It’s a true story. No, it’s not true the stuff that occurred in the dream itself. But it is true that it happened like this. Yes, I’m even including the parts where I am a bit of a jerk.

To start, this takes place back when I was around age 25 – a few years after graduating college. In the dream, I had two roommates from college and it was a Three’s Company situation – two women and me *. For the purpose of this article, it’s me living platonically with two of my very good (and real) friends from college. I never lived with them in real life though. These friends overspent on anything catching their eye and racked up big credit card debt. They planned to pay it back when they “made real money.” **

Imagine throwing a touchdown to this guy! He’s signalling that he’s open!
On this day, one of the young women decides that we simply must have the latest Pokemon football video game. I couldn’t fault them that much, because the idea of throwing a touchdown pass to Froakie with his jumping ability was one of the most vivid parts of my dream. (If anyone has contacts with The Pokemon Company make this happen. It will be a hit, trust me.) Unfortunately, the video game requires buying the latest gaming system and the game itself. For them, it also means buying a desk and a couple of chairs. I estimate the total bill was around $800 or $1000.

I am not sure this is a great plan, but they are determined. I decided that even though I want out, I will end up getting sucked into Froakie’s charms and play the game myself. So I offer to be part of the split. However, they decline because it would make ownership of the system weird. It was already weird, but this is a dream so I don’t question it much other than to say that they often seemed to share a brain when it came to spending.

I give them some money anyway with an explanation that I’ll end up playing it so I need to contribute something. Then I wander off. Suddenly my old high school friend is there. Because it’s a dream, he’s living with us now too. It’s funny how things like that change mid-dream. However, he points out that we’ll need to save our games and you need an extra gadget to do that on this system. We come across an Aimbo robot ***, which is one such gadget. It looks like a more modern version of the Nintendo robot that you could get with the NES back in 1985. This version not only can save your games but do a bunch of other things. None of the other things were explained in the dream, but it was clearly the “thing to get.” We weren’t 100% sure about buying it without asking the others. We went off to do that and they agreed it was necessary.

But when we got back, all the Aimbo’s were sold out. So we could “make due” with another thing that just saved games. It would tide us over while waited to find Aimbo back in stock. This substitute was almost as expensive, but the extra Aimbo things were an upgrade the group wanted.

My high-school friend buys the substitute and comes back to make an interesting observation, “The credit card processing fees are crazy! What a scam!”

I don’t know why in this dream he has to pay credit card processing fees. In every place, it’s the merchant, but maybe he’s trying to use a weird debit card or something. I simply take his remark at face value for being true.

This is when I ask everyone to take a seat while I go on a mansplaining ****, lecture. (This is clearly the kind of thing that surely makes me the life of any party.) I ask if anyone knows what I am going to say, half expecting they’ve heard me do this Brainy Smurf routine a hundred times. One new character shows up to go on a five-minute suggestion that was completely wrong. I don’t even remember what it was, but I guess it was only to give me the opportunity to be a bigger jerk and dismiss it outright? I don’t remember.

I said, “The problem is that you’re on the wrong side of the equation. You wouldn’t care about the credit card processing fees if you owned the credit card company and made money from them, right?”

I continued to explain that I invest in all these companies: the credit card processor, the maker of the video game, the store we are in, the furniture place that makes the desk and chairs, the game system, etc. So when anyone buys this stuff, I will get a fraction of the money back. Those fractions add up over time and I become more of an owner than a buyer. But to get there, I had to use my money to buy ownership in these companies instead of their products.”

This is when I woke up. I never got to see the reaction on their face to see if made any sense to them.

* If you are too old to know Three’s Company, I’m giving you some homework. Looks like you stream it on PlutoTV for free. It’s very formulaic with nearly every episode revolving around some misunderstanding because a word or two was heard wrong from the other room and hilariousness ensues.

** We were friends after college for a while and one did make “real money” and I assumed paid it back, but it took a while. I am not sure the financial situation of the other, but I think it followed her for at least a decade in some form. We didn’t have regular conversations about money.

*** I’m sure I took the name from Nintendo Amiibo, which is a real-life Nintendo gadget/figurine thing that I can’t wrap my head around.

**** Can you mansplain another man? I don’t think so, but it seemed the best word to fit.

What Does Your (Reasonable) Dream Home Look Like?

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A few months ago, one of my neighbors started some new construction on his house. My wife and I was curious about what pandemic feature they were adding. Was it an indoor pool? Was it a chess room? (I’ve always joked about having a chess room.)

Dream HomeMy wife knows the husband better than I do as they shared some military work talk. She found him one day and asked what about the expansion. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a pool or a chess room. His wife was diagnosed with something (Parkinson’s, I think) that makes stairs difficult. The expansion allows living on one floor a lot easier. It took a while to recover from that gut punch, she definitely seems too young for her body to start to go.

It naturally made me think that this house we are in may not be our “forever house” like I had imagined. I can definitely see the advantage of one-floor living as I get older.

That opened up Pandora’s Box. If this house isn’t the one we are in forever, what would that “forever house” look like?

Designing My Dream House

If you are a regular reader, you have probably read me mention that I need some hobbies, things I like to do, and/or a bucket list. I have a long list of things that I don’t like to do such as travel. Teleportation technology can’t come fast enough for me. My challenge is finding things that I do like.

One of the things that gets me excited though is looking at houses on Zillow. I think it’s because I’m naturally a “grass is greener on the other side” person.

It seems that once or twice a month, Zillow reminds me of this house I saved a couple of years ago. I don’t know why it sends me these emails as it isn’t for sale. I also don’t have a spare $7M lying around to make a bid on it.

It does make me smile though.

I started thinking about what I would want in a house. It doesn’t need to be that big, so maybe I could get by with a cheaper place. It also doesn’t need to be here in Newport, Rhode Island. In fact, someplace warmer would be better.

Rather than work backward from a $7 million dollar house, I thought it might make sense to move forward from our current house (we paid $400K for back in 2011). Here’s a short wishlist of things that I’d add to what we have:

  • I want a bigger closet – it’s very tiny now. My wife has a walk-in closet.
  • I want a mudroom area as a place where the kids can change their shoes, hang their coats, store their backpacks, etc.
  • I would like an indoor swimming pool (necessary in Rhode Island) or live in a place where outdoor swimming is easy (Florida for example).
  • I want a big spa tub. I’m secure enough in my manhood to admit that I like baths. Hopefully, I won’t be upset by the costs of heating it.
  • I want my own space – call it a man-cave if you want. It has to be big enough for a deluxe massage chair. The house should also have a she-shed for my wife.

What are some of the things that you would want in your dream home? Maybe there’s a master list out there somewhere to inspire us?

While I’m still figuring out what that ideal place may look like I’ve got the perfect transition house:

HGTV’s Dream Home

No, this isn’t a surprise advertisement for HGTV’s Dream Home. I wouldn’t take money, because then I’d probably be ineligible to win it. Yes, this year’s HGTV’s Dream Home is a couple of miles away from where I live now. It would mean driving the kids an extra 10 minutes to school each day, but I think I could manage it. Yes, it is also missing some things on the list above.

As beautiful as the HGTV house is, it might not solve my dream home goal. It turns out that almost no one keeps their HGTV Dream Home. Everyone has had to uproot their lives to move there. Fortunately, we don’t have to do that. HGTV should jump save everyone else’s time and just give us the house, right?

Moving to the house is only a small part of the problem. The much bigger problem is paying taxes on the windfall. The winner has to come up with $700,000 in cash to give to the IRS.

While the house comes with some prize money, it’s not nearly enough to pay the taxes. If we sold our house now, we could probably pay off all the taxes. It would be a stretch and we’d be “house rich, cash poor”, but not any poorer than we are today. It would be hard to dissuade my wife from taking the house.

Personally, I’d like to take the cash prize. It would mean instant retirement for my wife and the opportunity to move to a house that is more middle of the road than their dream house… just like my dream house that I described before.

Final Thoughts

Have you thought about your dream home? Joe from Retire by 40 has a Hawaiian paradise as his goal. I like the idea, but we’d have to settle for buying an ownership share in that. I’d have to win the lottery to afford to do it. That’s particularly difficult for me to do since I don’t play the lottery.

Three Dreams, Two Household Tips, and One Merry Christmas

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Money Gift

Last week, I wrote an article that was tough to publish because I was feeling very depressed. Tasks everywhere just caving in on me and I was getting buried… and I don’t even have a traditional career. Turns out that much of the cure for those feelings may have been just writing about them. Or maybe is was all the heartfelt comments I received. I’m sure the passing of time played a role as well.

Whatever it was has had a very interesting side effect. After years of only remember one or two dreams per year (at most), I now have a 3 day streak of very vivid dreams. It’s been years of since I had one vivid dream.

I wanted to share them, because they give a little peeks into myself, this blog, and have a little money mention in them. (I wouldn’t blame you if you just skipped down to the two household tips.)

  1. My MLM scam exposure stories haunt me (and Tom Brady)

    In this dream, one of the old MLMs that sued me into silence was upset about some kind of new story that was being done by a journalism student, Mary Higgs, on the Boston College campus. I guess she uncovered all my previous findings and wrote it into a story. No one would give me a clear story, but the lawyers were fighting and demanded I come in.

    Tom Brady happened to be taken a master’s course there for some reason. In fact, the Patriots had a whole satellite office there. All of it was connected, but no one would tell me how. When it finally came time watch the video of Higgs’ exposé, Tom Brady came in and asked if could talk to me for a few minutes. It was a clear distraction tactic. I don’t have many rules, but one is, “If Tom Brady wants to give you a few minutes of his time, you don’t say no.”

    Of course, I woke up before talking to Tom Brady or uncovering the mystery of the reporting and the connection to the Patriots. I could only assume it was like when the Red Sox players were caught in the MonaVie pyramid scheme.

  2. I sailed around New York City

    I’ve been sailing exactly once in about 10 years. However, I live in a sailing community, Newport RI, so that will change. On this day it changed really quickly as I hopped a quick flight to NYC (not sure how that’s quicker than driving) and rented a sailboat. I took it around the sea a few times and got a picture of the Statue of Liberty through some kind of arch.

    Since I was wet, I got a hotel room and showered. Then it was too dark to sail back to the rental place. A fine Japanese young man who happened to have a sail planned in my direction offered to guide me. I got the sailboat back safely. Then I rented a car and drove back home only with the fear of having to explain to my wife that I spent a few thousand dollars.

    In the morning, I checked my phone for that picture of Ms. Liberty, just to make sure that it didn’t happen.

  3. Barstool Sports makes my son famous

    I posted something on Lazy Man about my son’s scooter not being charged for school. Very mundane stuff. Barstool picks up the story and uses their traditional sarcasm to explain that he must have a howitzer to get girls with such a terrible ride. (Howitzer, is a reference to an old Barstool scandal.) I don’t know if they knew he was 5 years old, but the media jumped on them for that.

    All of this time, traffic to my Lazy Man story was going through the roof. The only thing is that I don’t check traffic very much and I had a full day of real world errands to run. I missed the whole media circus until everyone had moved onto the next interesting thing.

    Come to think of it, that very much sums up everything you need to know about blogging. (Also, I haven’t read Barstool in years.)

Hopefully those weren’t too long or boring. I promise not to give up personal finance writing for dream writing.

Two Household Tips

I realize that you don’t come here for the above stuff, but I didn’t think Christmas Eve was the right time for a deep analysis of the SECURE Act and stretch IRAs. As a compromise, I’ll leave you with two random household money saving tips that I’ve been saving up for years because they don’t fit anywhere else on the blog:

  • Fogless Shaving Mirrors Forever – I NEED a fogless shaving mirror in the shower. It’s the best thing ever invented. The only problem is that they lose their foglessness as you clean them. Sometime they give a 1/10 of an ounce cleaner and ask you to buy more. A better plan is to get RainX anti fog repellent for car windshields. I put a couple of drops on a piece of toilet paper and any old shower mirror is anti fog for a few days. A bottle will last you for years and years. It’s usually about $5, so Amazon’s pricing is very weird today.

    They seem to realize that people have discovered this trick and added that it works great on bathroom mirrors on the bottle. I’ve been on my same shaving mirror for 15 years now and before I had to churn through them every year or two.

  • Bullion Cubes – This is further proof that moms are the smartest people. My mom used bullion cubes fairly often, but I’m mostly self-taught cooker. I bought chicken broth in boxes. Then I’d throw half the box away because it was too much. Then I bought cans because I was less wasteful of broth – but probably more wasteful in creating trash.

    At Aldi’s I discovered bullion cubes on just a random glance on the aisle. It was about $2.00 for the equivalent of 25 cans of broth… in 1/25th of the space! It’s a perfect replacement. I don’t know if tastes the same, but fortunately my cooking is bad enough that no one will the notice the difference.

I hope you got something out of your time reading this today. If you have a favorite household tip, please share it below. Maybe we can compile a greatest hits and turn this into a valuable resource (minus my weird dream stuff).

Finally, I want to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. The plan is to do a financial year in review before the New Year.

The Power of The Dream

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dream-girl.jpg

“I’m the assistant to the traveling secretary. I’m going on the road trips with them! I’ll be on the plane… I’m working in Yankee Stadium! This is a dream, I’m busting, Jerry, I’m busting!” — George Costanza

I’m excited… like George I’m busting. A friend and I have a business idea that we think simply can’t fail. Like of the best ideas out there, it just fell into our lap. We’ve sat down and crunched the numbers about 30 different ways and each time, it’s profitable… very profitable. Our costs could potentially be low. The value we add would be great. The barrier to entry for other competitors is not huge, but it’s enough. That’s about all I can say for now – I’m not going into specifics while we are in stealth mode.

I haven’t felt like this since college. A good friend and I would stay up all night dreaming about business plans. We thought about putting on a mini-Woodstock at our college. We figured there would be no way we couldn’t clear a lot of money. We later found that there were a lot of difficulties in running a concert – we simply didn’t have the industry knowledge to know how much work there was. One of our other ideas was a premium vodka bottle – with cheap vodka inside – sold at a premium price. Our theory was that the bottle would convince people that the vodka inside was actually better than it was. I’m not sure it was the best idea, but you see a similar thing in the wine industry sometimes.

The result of this new business opportunity has me extremely excited. It’s amazing how much energy I’ve found. It’s night and day versus the time I was working full-time looking at another 35 years of the same routine each day.

Maybe the idea will flop. There is always the chance that our potential customers won’t understand the value we can provide. We believe we can build a very compelling case with oodles of independent research. Even in this worst case scenario, I’ll look back to what I’m feeling now and realize how successful it was. The power of a dream is priceless.

Photo Credit: Elfeda