Lazy Man and Money

A Brief History of 14 Years of Lazy Man and Money

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Today is the 14th anniversary of Lazy Man and Money. I’m 44 years old, so next year I will have spent 1/3rd of my life as “Lazy Man.” (Those who have known me through the other 2/3rds of my life may claim that it’s closer to 100%). For now, I’ll have to settle for my “inverse pi-anniversary” because 44/14 is a close approximation of pi. (That got way too nerdy. I’ll dial it down.)

There are only a few single-author money bloggers that have consistently been around longer. The only one I could think of was Jonathan of My Money Blog. There were several others that have taken a hiatus or sold their blog and came back under a different brand.

Consistent blogging is difficult for me these days. My priority is to homeschool the two kids (ages 6 and 7), while my military pharmacist wife is virtually-deployed* to help with the coronavirus. I don’t have much energy after putting the kids to bed. Trust me, I still have many, many money stories to tell. Hopefully, if I continue to stay healthy, you can look forward to being bored by them for decades.

The Beginning of Lazy Man and Money and FIRE

It might be hard for many people to understand what the blogging landscape was 14 years ago. Twitter had launched just a couple of months before so no one had heard of it. Facebook was only 2 years old. Lazy Man’s hockey stick growth curve has to be coming any day now, right?

With that historical perspective in mind, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at my first blog post, “Welcome”.

Here’s what it looked like in November 2006 from the Archive.org’s Wayback Machine:

In hindsight my first sentence of more than 2,558 blog posts (and 2 million words) may have been my best:

“This blog is about a man, a lazy man, and his quest to not only retire early, but to retire rich enough to live a comfortable lifestyle.”

I’m not going to say that I invented FIRE (I didn’t). But I specifically set the FIRE goal about a decade before most personal finance bloggers started categorizing themselves that way. The last half of that sentence translates roughly to what those FIRE bloggers call fatFire.

These concepts are the same by any name. They were here before the Great Recession of 2009 and they’ll be here after coronavirus.

I mention this because I ran a Twitter poll awhile back and most people didn’t consider me a FIRE blogger. I wasn’t sure whether I should be insulted or flattered. The truth is that I’m an overall money blogger. I’ve always tried to be a generalist. I’m not the best frugal, investing, real estate, military, consumer advocate, family blogger, but I cover all those topics.

You can think of me as the blogging equivalent of a Susan Lucci and a Jamie Moyer child, but not as talented.

A History of FIRE

Many people have asked me how I became interested in FIRE and why I created Lazy Man and Money. It was a confluence of four factors, in order from most to least importance:

  1. My military wife’s pension

    We were still dating when I created Lazy Man and Money, but she had mentioned that she could retire with 20 years of service – at age 43. Since she was obviously marriage material, I had to find a way to bridge the gap of 22 years from the typical age 65 retirement.

  2. The Dot-Com Bubble of 2000

    I graduated with my computer science degree in 1998. After a year at a century-old insurance company, I went to a big dot-com. I was a rising star, quickly becoming a manager of their search engine technology. The start of my career there until the end was only a couple of years. The Dot-Com Bubble lead to the entire technology team getting laid off. It was supposed to happen on September 11, 2001, but the company wisely rescheduled the layoffs.

    Like many software engineers at the time, I didn’t find steady employment until 2004, almost exactly at the time that I met my wife.

    I had come very close to financial rock bottom, that I knew I never wanted to be there again.

  3. Outsourcing of the mid-2000s

    In the wake of the Dot-Com Bubble, many companies realized that they could reduce their risk by developing software overseas. The cost of living is much lower, so oversea software engineers would work for less money than American ones. The movement picked up steam from 2003-2012. I have lost track after that since Big Tech has consolidated to several big companies.

    I got very worried that the economics of developing software in the United States simply wouldn’t make sense going forward. At this time, the iPhone wasn’t invented yet. And while its software is still developed in the US, the hardware is largely outsourced to China.

  4. Actual Laziness

    Staying competitive in the software engineering world is difficult. In many places, you have to work a 12 hour day and then go home and learn all the breakthroughs that other coders have made.

    Facebook flew me to their headquarters in 2006 and we mutually agreed it was a terrible fit. Like NFL running backs, I was on the wrong side of 30 (by months) and aged out of the Silicon Valley programmer club. I wanted to go home to my wife instead of living on campus.

    5. Unexpected Bonus 5th Factor:

  5. Starting a Family

    There are very few organizations that zero flexibility. You have to do what is required no matter what. One of them is the United States’ military. Another is being a parent. As a military spouse** with children (especially young ones), I have the flexibility of an icicle.

    Because I had a long-term view of our money management, we have some flexibility.

A 14-Year Financial Journey

With the image from Archive.org above you can see my goals (on the right side). I wanted to make around $1700/mo. in alternative income. I had made $23.

It was a start, right?

In my last passive income report I made around $7,500*** for the month. Those “***” are important as it isn’t liquid money we can spend right away. However, we can get to a large portion if necessary.

In that image from Archive.org, you can see that my net worth was less than 200K. My goal was to have a net worth of $3-4 million. What is missing from that is a timeline. I could lack through all my old posts to know for sure, but I think it meant for now when I hoped we’d retire early.

That projection included my wife’s net worth because $3.5M with the rule of 4% (the standard at the time) would allow $140,000 of spending a year. I wouldn’t need that much if I was just trying to support myself.

If you fast forward to today, my wife’s military pension is worth around 2.3M. Our net worth outside of that is less, but not much less. Most of it is tied up in retirement accounts and real estate investments. We’re expecting that all of this will bring in $200,000 a year in income in retirement.

Is it fair to say that we have achieved our goal? I don’t know. It’s not like we have millions in index funds actively throwing off dividends that we can spend. As we’ve learned over the last couple of months, we never know what challenge lies just around the corner. On the other hand, it’s not like our hard work is invested in Beanie Babies – it’s real money.

Nowadays, I try not to look at money as a destination. This article’s goal is to highlight that money is a journey. And in the words of my sons’ favorite TV show, “The journey continues…”

Final Thoughts

You may read financial magazines that project how saving and investing works in the long run. We’ve not only experienced it first-hand, but it’s documented here for all to see. Fourteen years can feel like a long time when you trying to reach financial freedom. However, looking back on it, the time flashes by in the blink of an eye.


* “Virtual deployment” means my wife is still working from home, but it’s 12-hours a day, 7 days a week for the next month.

** Happy Military Spouse Day! I’m double-dipping with two special days at the same time.

*** This number has a lot of qualifications attached to it. There’s a whole FAQ about it. The bottom line is that it’s the number that makes the most sense.

What’s Your True Investment Rate?

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Usually, when I start an article, I have an idea where it’s going until the end. This is not one of those articles.

Part of the reason is that things have been busy over the last couple of weeks. I’ll explain more in the monthly report, but our dog sitting has reached new records. At the same time, my wife has been spending more time office. I honestly feel like my kids, at age 5 and 6, are more competent than their camp director or counselors (but I try to go easy on them as managing many kids can’t be easy.) Finally, I’m feeling that summer is passing us by as it does every year. It will be back to school in about a month.

The topic of school is a large part of what I wanted to cover today, but first I want to review some FIRE basics. Most FIRE people would say that your savings rate is what impacts you the most about being able to FIRE (be Financially Independent and/or Retire Early). Some bloggers are saving as much as 50% of their income and investing it. With the power of compound interest and 10-20 years, they’ve got a nice nest egg to retire on. That would be a accurate, though oversimplified version of our financial situation.

Our situation is a lot more complicated with my irregular freelance, side hustles, and businesses (blogging and dog sitting), and our investment properties. For this reason, I don’t bother to calculate our savings rate. Instead, I’ve recented used a net worth growth to income ratio. They are both high numbers for us, so that’s a good thing. For most people a savings rate would be easier to calculate.

Spending vs. Saving vs. Investing

You’d think after blogging about these for 13 years, I’d be clearly able to delinate all these things. It’s not always so easy. In fact, there are mashups of them like “spaving”, which is loosely defined as spending money to save.

It possible to have a high savings rate, but not invest it. For example, maybe you love the safety of having cash in the bank, but it’s not paying a good interest rate. Technically, you may be investing on that savings account, but it’s called a savings account for a reason. A high savings rate doesn’t mean a high investing rate.

In our situation, we have a good savings rate. If anything, we may invest too much and it might be better to keep more liquid cash on hand.

I suspect that for most FIRE bloggers, once they get a nice cushion of liquid cash in their emergency, they invest a vast majority of the rest. When I read some blogs, it seems like most of that 50% gets invested. You’ll see the typical brokerage and retirement accounts mentioned: 401k, Roth IRA, SEP-IRA, TSP, solo 401k. Occassionally, you even see a 529 plan for bloggers with kids.

These are all great investment vehicles. We have them too. As explained above, we have a lot of unusual things about our financial lives.

What About “Invest in Yourself?”

For the last few years, we’ve paid around $30,000 a year for school. You may notice that I didn’t wrote “paid” not “spend.” What I really mean to say is that we invested an extra $30,000 in education.

With my wife graduating in about a week, we’ll be down to around $22,000 for the next few years for just the kids. My wife’s investment was for an MBA to add to her Pharm. D. (We’ve messed up our health system so bad that we are asking our pharmacists to have masters in business as well.) It’s too early to tell if that MBA will pay off, but the “powers that be” at her employment have seemed to change course on valuing it when it comes to promotion time. I could write another 3000 words on the topic, but it wouldn’t help anyone and possibly cause more problems.

If my wife moves on from the military to the private sector, the degree will have a large ROI. However, she may choose to just retire, now that she has her pension.

The other $22,000 is a private school for our two kids. We’re “spaving” a huge percent of the typical costs with my wife’s military status. It’s still a lot more than an average private elementary school. Obviously we think it’s an exceptional school. Would you pay half price if you got into Stanford or Harvard? It’s not an easy question at the elementary school level.

What if that money was put in a 529 plan? Almost everyone would agree that’s investing, right? So is this different? What if it leads to a scholarship down the line?

In almost all these cases, they qualify as the old adage of “investing in yourself”, except it’s literally the people closest to me.

It feels like the rest of the community would consider this as spending, no different than if we spent an extra $22,000 on a sports car.

However, if I were start to really calculate our savings rate and investing rate, I’d create a “True Investment Rate” that included school tuition. It’s not in a brokerage account, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less valuable.

What do you think? This is a complicated topic and I’m sure people have different feelings. I can see a lot of gray areas. Is a vacation to Paris museums an education investment? Are tennis lessons an investment?

In the end, I don’t think the characterizations matter. You are the judge of what’s the best value for your money. I find value internally knowing that the money is invested in personal development that matters deeply to us. For a long time, I felt like we should be saving even more in brokerage accounts or wondering why we don’t feel rich. Once I started to think of education spend as investing, my outlook changed dramatically.

When Investing is more than “Investing”

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This post brought to you by American Century Investments. The content and opinions expressed below are that of Lazy Man and Money.

The main focus of this blog is to save money, invest it, and reach financial freedom. At that point, you can do whatever makes you happy. Most experts say that leading a meaningful life is a critical ingredient to being happy. In my opinion, it is more important than money. What if there was a shortcut to leading a meaningful life while you are investing to reach financial freedom? That would be worth considering, right?

Let me introduce you to Jim Stowers Jr. with this video.

For those who are too “lazy” to watch the video, here’s the main message: Jim Stowers spent his life building the mutual fund company, American Century Investments. (As a software engineer, I appreciate the punch cards in the video. This is a subtle hint to go back and watch the video.)

The late Jim Stowers Jr. was a cancer survivor as is his wife, Virginia. That makes it easy to understand why they’d want to help fund the fight against the disease. I feel this at a very personal level. Not to be a downer, but my father died of cancer when I was 13… he was 45. I will turn 40 in just a few days. I often feel like I’m “racing the clock” just in case genetics deals the same hand to me.

What they did is create the Stowers Institute for Medical Research with a whopping $2 billion dollar endowment. Here’s a video telling you a little more about that. It stood out to me that they have 550 employees that are focused on more than just cancer. When I saw the video about their day-to-day activities, it surely looks like they are doing some great things to advance medical research.

More than 40 percent of American Century Investments profits have been distributed to the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, a non-profit basic biomedical research organization. The Institute is the controlling owner of American Century Investments and has received dividend payments totaling over $1.2 billion since 2000.

Here’s that shortcut that I mentioned above. While you are investing to reach financial freedom, you can rest easy knowing that you are investing with a firm that supports a higher purpose.

On a personal level, the idea of creating an endowment for a great cause changes my perspective. I’ve been focused on being frugal and using the savings to invest for financial freedom for our family. Maybe I’m being “self-limiting?” Watching the video made me think about how I can be like Stowers and create a similar endowment.

Even though this is a post sponsored by American Century Investments, I want to reiterate the good that can come from responsible investing. Life is about the impact you can make to a greater good for everyone directly or indirectly. Considering the opportunity to do so is worth your time and mine.

Visit Sponsors Site

Money Rules by Jean Chatzky Reviewed

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Money Rules by Jean Chatzky
Money Rules by Jean Chatzky

What’s this? Two book reviews in two weeks? Are you really reading Lazy Man and Money? Have I gone mad?!?!

For years I’ve shunned book reviews. Why? Reading a book in addition to all the blogs and other things I read daily is a lot. It takes me 6 to read a book on a good day (I’m not a fast reader), and then writing up the review can take a couple more. It’s a commitment and not one that fits well with my cat-like attention span.

So why am I reviewing another book this week? There are two reasons. One is that it’s from Jean Chatzky. Despite the fact that I’ve been waiting three years for an email interview that her publicist promised, I think she’s got some of the best advice of any personal finance guru. The other reason I’m reviewing it? It is 109 pages and just about every page consists of just a few sentences. Some are simply pictures. I didn’t time myself, but I’m guessing that almost anyone can get through it in about 40 minutes.

Today’s book is Money Rules: The Simple Path to Lifelong Security by Jean Chatzky. The book itself consists of 94 rules. I’m surprised at the number. You’d think they’d stretch it to 100 or 101 for marketing purposes. It seems like it wouldn’t have been that hard to come up with a few more. Since the book is so short, this review will be as well. The 94 tips in general are pretty good ones, but ones that many would expect to know. For example, there was one about smoking, essentially pointing out the monetary costs to it. I’m on the fence about criticizing it because if it weren’t there, the book might seem incomplete, but by including it, it went a little bit into the common sense territory. I think the best tips were the ones that pointed out the psychology behind spending or saving.

I didn’t find myself agreeing with all the tips though. Tip #19 suggested that you carry $100 bills rather than $20 bills because psychologically it is more difficult to spend that big bill. If you combine that with rule #18, which says that you’ll spend less if you pay in cash rather than credit, you may find yourself not being able to purchase things like lunch. Not every place takes $100 bills and some places limit the change that they have on hand. Another of the rules, #39 was so vague that I don’t understand it all, “Always get three bids. Never take the high one.” It’s in the spend wisely section, so I guess this would mean that I should get three bids for landscaping and never take the most expensive one. That seems to be over simplistic. I’m sure there’s a case where the most expensive of three landscapers does offer a better level of service.

Oh and I like do with all the books I review, just to prove that I did read the book I’ll point out the page with the error. Page 101, which has tip #88 should be “leaving $20,000 to your kids”, not “leaving $20,000 to you kids.” The irony that I’m a great proofreader of other people’s writing and a terrible one of my own is not lost on me.

The Bottom Line: I’m of two minds on this book. On one hand, there’s great value in having something concise and to the point. On the other hand, it’s not a lot of information for $13. I could see it as a gift for someone graduating college. It’s got enough of the beginner tips, and it doesn’t require a commitment to read. It also says, “I spent nearly $15 on you and I care about your financial future”, so that’s a good thing.

Best of Lazy Man and Money

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I thought I’d take a little time today to highlight some of the more popular posts I’ve written over the four and a half years I’ve been blogging. It has nothing to do with the great traffic I’m seeing this morning from Kimberly Palmer’s article on how to make extra money. It simply seems fitting to look back since it’s the start of the year. (Are you buying this? Even a little bit?)

For those new to the site, I’m a pretty lazy guy in general. However, the Lazy Man name stems from the fact that I had all these great business ideas, but never the drive (nor the finances and connections) to get off the ground. If I’m not going to actually implement these ideas, I might as well write about them, right? Well, somewhere along the line, my plan changed, and I started to focus on personal finance. The result is some 1,200+ articles about how I’m trying to save money, make money, retire early… all the things that you came here for.

I’ll let you be the judge if I did a good job at that. Here are some of the highlights:

  • Thousands of ways to save money – Unless you are unusually talented or lucky, it is extremely difficult to retire early without keeping an eye on spending. I put together a page of all my articles on how to save money on just about anything. The advice isn’t to cut all the fun stuff out of your life, but how to keep all the fun on a fraction of the budget. Warning, it’s addictive and you could lose a day there.
  • How To Be Successful – I wrote this article a couple of years back and it still resonates with people today. In fact, I got an email last night from someone who is trying to sort out his life after a bunch of missteps. As soon as I’m done with this post, I’m off to email him, to see if what kind of wisdom I can share with him. (This is a scary thought for me.) I always try to get back to my readers, so feel free to contact me.
  • MonaVie – I became somewhat famous (in blogging circles at least) for my article on MonaVie. In the article, I asked a simple question of whether it was a scam, since $45 for 25 ounces of juice isn’t the norm… it’s not close to the norm. The article garnered more than 5000 comments and lead me to create a spin-off site MonaVie Scam.

That should be enough reading to keep you busy. In case it’s not, these final two articles (not really the Best of Lazy Man and Money) round out a bit of what you’d read here:

  • Make SMARTER Goals This Year – I think I watched Office Space (if there is such a thing) one too many times before writing this one. If you are looking to keep your New Year’s Resolutions this is a great place to start.
  • Hedge Rising Food and Gas Prices with ETFs – I didn’t want to leave you with the impression that this website is just about saving money. You see a lot of investing ideas such as this one as well.

For those who came here from that Yahoo article, I’ve gotten tons of mail asking a question I should have anticipated. You want to know How to Start a Blog… well click that link and dig in. Please recognize that it is a broad question and that article is just geared to get you going.

P.S. Don’t forget to check check Kimberly Palmer’s book Generation Earn, which I reviewed here ;-).