Lazy Man and Money

Happy 529 (and Memorial) Day!

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Does everyone have fun Memorial Day plans? I’m taking care of dogs, but I don’t mind. They are a terrific group and the holiday pay is very good.

My wife got up at 3 AM to fly to New Mexico. That’s military life sometimes. Instead of deploying for months like some military, she makes shorter trips. This one is ten days, which seems like a lot to me, but many families are further apart.

Memorial Day is different for us. Strictly speaking, Memorial Day is about honoring the Armed Forces who died for our country. I’ve come to stretch the definition of the Armed Forces a bit. While my wife is weapon-trained, her pharmacist duties don’t require her to carry a gun (usually the meaning of the military). Nowadays, guns are useless against many of America’s threats. These threats can be Amthrax (2001) or Katrina (2005) here, Ebola there (2014), or COVID everywhere (2020).

This is where the United States Public Health Service comes in. Just like the Armed Forces, they are on duty 24/7, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. When my wife returns from these ten days in New Mexico, she’s going on the list to deploy to the border.

Outside of this blog, you may have never heard of the US Public Health Service. Perhaps you’ve seen some of the officers in some COVID briefings. In general, though, they are invisible. You won’t see their Super Bowl commercial. A promotional budget would be ridiculously comical when they don’t have a base. Instead, officers cobbled together some of their own money to make a high-quality PBS documentary (narrated by Ali MacGraw of Love Story fame):

If you have an hour today, please watch the video and make them a little less invisible. It’s important as they continually face political pressure to lose their funding. You can also share it from PBS’ website or with just this link.

This is a personal finance website, so we need to get to National 529 Day (it’s 5/29 – get it?)

529 Day

I’ve been writing about 529s for years. I started one for my nephew when he was born, and he’ll be able to access it in a couple of years. I only contributed a little money, only $50, on birthdays and Christmas. However, it’s grown to around $5,000.

Most personal finance gurus fund their kids’ 529s more than we do. My wife’s GI Bill will help cover a lot of college costs. We also expect to have more money available as our mortgage will be paid off. Finally, we’re paying a lot for private school now. We get a generous military discount for the school. I believe investing in their education early “snowballs” like compound interest. Hopefully, they’ll get some great aid and scholarships. We’ll also do some college hacking, like dual enrollment.

As I’ve written many times before, our military status is an early retirement cheat code. When it comes to college, that’s definitely true. If you don’t have a cheat code available to you, a 529 plan is the next best plan.

I’ve written two articles that focus on 529 plans:

You may see these bumped to the top of the blog throughout the day.

Waiting for the Million Dollar Email

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We’re on pins and needles in the Lazy Man household. Two days ago the Million Dollar Email (MDE) had a 33% of arriving. Yesterday it had a 50%. Today, it has a 100% chance of arriving. Well maybe 99.9% chance, just in case the internet goes down.

I’m getting ahead myself. What’s this Million Dollar Email about, right?

For the last 7 years, the end of June has become “the wait.” That’s when the military promotion list comes out.

My wife has been up for promotion 7 times and each year it has ended in disappointment. At her level, almost no one gets it the first time. Each year the promotion board has come back with new recommendations. One year it’s “Get a certification.” The next year it is “Get an MBA (to add to your Pharm.D).” The next year it is “Lead an organization.” The next year it is, “Not the top pharmacy organization of thousands of people, but a military one.” The year after that it is, “Vice President of the top military organization isn’t enough. Do better.” One year it is, “Deploy more, we don’t care that your boss rejects your deployments.” Another year it is, “Get more awards, we don’t care that we gave you the top award and later sent you an email that it was taken away.”

This year she’s President of the organization. She deployed a lot last year. The awards… well… the promotion board can still ding her for that.

In any case, this is for all the marbles. She’s made it no small secret that she’s done jumping through hoops. If she gets the promotion, she’ll consider continuing to work without all the second job of hoop-jumping. If she doesn’t get the promotion, she’s O-U-T with her military pension.

With the promotion, the following happens:

  • Continuing to work at a six-figure salary, with an increase of $1500 a month.
  • A pension that is worth $12K more a year for life
  • Kids’ private school continues to honor the military discount, a “savings” of $12,500 a year. (This is our luxury item, please don’t judge too much.)

Does that add up to a million dollars? I’m going to fall back on my Lazy Man moniker and not do the math completely. A back-of-the-envelope calculation says it may be $500K in pension. I think the other 500K can come from working at the high salary, the raise, and the kids’ school discount. Maybe it isn’t a million dollars, but I think it’s close.

Without the promotion, she can break away from the “one more year” hamster wheel that she’s been on. That might be worth it alone. I suppose that either way, our life will significantly change.

The reason for the suspense is that the promotion list has to come out in June as it has done for the last 20+ years (maybe decades longer). If it doesn’t the payroll for July first becomes a mess (from my understanding.)

As I write this, June has less than 12 hours left in it… tick, tick, tick.

Update: She didn’t get the promotion, so it looks like she might retire over the next year. They only promoted 9% of the eligible people. It used to be 30%, then it was 25% and was 12% before. I guess few pharmacists did anything worthy over the last year…. /sarcasm.

Stay-at-Home-Dad, Wifeless-Style

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On Tuesday of last week, I celebrated my birthday, very happy with a fully vaccinated wife, a single shot of my own, and two healthy kids. The kids have been in school since September. I don’t want to pretend it is all a picture-perfect family. I don’t think anyone’s is, but, in general, we had the river current of luck/awesomeness flowing in the right direction.

There are a lot of families whose lives have gone in the opposite direction since the pandemic started. My wife and I were mostly stay-at-home workers before, and we continued to be over the last year. It didn’t change much, except that I had to teach a 6-year-old how to read and 7-year-old multiplication, but I was fortunate that I could keep a little part of my career going on the side. That was only a couple of months nearly a year ago though.

My birthday celebration went south fast.

I’m usually not a fan of promoting the obvious things that everyone knows. (What’s the fun in that?) I’ll make an exception this time. Though it’s been quoted hundreds of times, this is the best quote for how I feel right now (well at least part of it):



“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Sometimes you don’t have time to look around. My wife got some vague notice that she could be deployed in a few days. In less than 24 hours, we were waking up the kids at 5 AM and bringing them to the airport in their pajamas. “Mom’s” cattle-plane wasn’t going to wait. (There were no Ubers or taxis running in our area of the suburbs, it simply doesn’t make sense at that time in the morning. In fact, all our local taxis are closed due to COVID. We could have stuck the gov’t with the parking for more than a month (it’s fair to expense it), but maybe $1000? That is crazy! With the last-minute information coming down, there was little time to think.)

I wrote a hasty note to the kids’ school that they may be grumpy. The kids seemed to rise up to the situation though, because they were extraordinarily well-behaved according to the school.

That school day wasn’t just a flash in the pan, they have become almost completely different people. They (mostly) have gotten along. I’m at 12% confidence that the government has some kind of behavior ray that they use on families when a parent deploys. Maybe they use it more when there are young kids going without their mothers? I’m also at 100% confidence that I’ve jinxed myself with this. They will likely harm each other greatly later today.

Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t say why my wife is away. I respect the secrecy of our government operations. However, in this case, I think we all know the deal. If it was a secret it would be the worst-kept government secret of all time. Our President has made it clear that his top goal is getting vaccines in people’s arms. My military pharmacy wife obviously can play a role in that.

My wife has been “virtually deployed” a few times before this year. There was a need for policy and planning a lot of COVID-19 stuff. This time is different. EVERY ACTIVE DUTY personnel needs to move to get the shots in arms. I put that last part in bold/caps to emphasize again that we all to work together to get this done. Also, it’s not just a few military people… everyone is getting called in on this. In 20+ years of military service, my wife has never seen anything like this. That’s fair because we have never seen anything like COVID-19.

My kids won’t see their mother for the next 5 weeks. Five years ago, my wife was deployed for two weeks. That was tough. At 2 and 3 they weren’t able to “wiping their own butts” (our terminology for being able to take care of oneself). They are older now (7 and 8-year-olds for the math-lazy). We have some systems in place. They can feed themselves a bit (cereal) and make their own drinks. They can dress themselves. For those of you with younger kids, life gets a lot easier when they can dress themselves.

Kids (maybe just boys?) at this age have their own set of challenges. There is a constant need to escalate wrestling moves until one kid cries of unbearable pain. I try to mitigate this, but I’m fighting thousands of years of evolution. Fill in your favorite cliche here. Two suggestions: “Boys will be boys” or “It is what it is.” In the end, they are each other’s best friend. However, they are their own worst enemies.

As you can tell by now, my brain isn’t working on its typical levels. I’m better than Buffy’s “fire bad, tree pretty”, but definitely 100%. Sometimes it seems to super-charge itself into some kind of survival mode of “Do everything now!” That’s great for getting stuff done around the house, but it’s not conducive to writing a blog post.

I’ve rambled so very much, but it is time to put a bow on this. Here are my main thoughts to pass on:

  • Money – Money is the least of my worries right now. Part of having good money systems in place above means that I don’t have to think about it much. Err… except for the fact that I need to write about money most days. At least I don’t have to think our money for awhile.
  • Hawaii – When I wrote about our Hawaii trip during COVID, I was expecting so much hate. I didn’t get it, so maybe readers simmered a bit inside? If any of this sounds like you (or not), my wife opened up and said that she felt this was coming. She said this was a big part of the reason why she made the judgment call of traveling to the safer state for time away to enjoy family. (She’s at least 10x smarter than I am.)
  • Career Opportunities – I need to put pause on two exceptional career opportunities – the best two I’ve seen in 10+ years. The job descriptions seemed to be tailor-written to me. I haven’t seen anything more perfect since my old engineering days of running a search engine and applying to be the boss of myself. (I got the job!)

    It’s very weird that both of these jobs came in at the same time. Unfortunately, that was over the last couple of weeks. I had to tell one of the jobs that I simply wasn’t going to be reliable for the next month and a half. I got a sense that their ship was already moving a certain direction, but I had a strong chance of changing it. Sometimes you just have to own up to the bad timing.

    As for the second job, I don’t know them as well. They don’t know me either. We were doing the get-to-know-you dance like some mating rituals. Things were really going great, but then Hawaii happened fast, and now this. I don’t know much about life, but I do this… when you use the moniker of “Lazy” for your brand, you lose any benefit of the doubt.

    I won’t hide it, I extremely miss being part of a team doing great things. Also, my social skills have devolved to saying stuff about Pokemon, Gumball, and Teen Titans Go!. Maybe I’m evolving from talking about how Henry getting bricked up is so wrong in Thomas the Tank Engine.

  • Military Service – I appreciate all the “thank-you-for-your-wife’s-service” comments that I’ve gotten in person. I really do. I’m very fortunate she’s a military pharmacist who doesn’t have to go typically go into war zones.

    That said, there are places in the United States where military service members are not particularly welcome. My wife is going to one of these places. Some friends and family have asked me whether I’m concerned about her safety. I trust the system and I hope that Americans will respect other Americans trying to provide them with life-saving medication. On a national level, Americans helping Americans is an easy win. On an international level, people helping people is also an easy win.

    This is the first time in my lifetime (and probably anyone’s alive today) where everyone SHOULD BE UNITED to fight a common foe. (The alien invasion is 7 years away so we have time to prepare after this.) We can get this done.

    If you can, please support support the USO. In a world of partisan politics, I think that’s one thing that I hope we can universally agree to.

On that last note, a lot of people have asked how I feel about my wife going away. One of them said something like, “Why would they take a mother from their kids? Why 5 weeks?” I’m not particularly excited about the situation or how the deployment was managed. However, I can’t be too upset. We receive a lot of military benefits. Our health care is very good and very cheap… and we can keep it after my wife retires. There’s a very good pension. I can shop for cheap groceries on the military base. We receive a generous discount on the kids’ private school. We can use my wife’s GI Bill to pay a substantial part of their college. The kids have been to Disney so many times. I’m probably missing a lot, but you get the idea. There are so many positives that would be a real jerk to hold it against the military when there is a time of need. (I can be a jerk about a lot of things, but this is a hard one.)

As the saying goes, you take the good. You take the bad. You take them both and there you have the facts of life.

Travel Hacking with Rewards Cards (Part 1)

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I hope all the Americans had a good Independence Day yesterday. Even if you don’t live in America, now is a good time to reflect that half of 2017 is over. Hmmm, let’s be optimistic about having a whole half of 2017 left!

This week doesn’t feel like a real week. Many people weren’t working the Monday before the 4th and we’re taking a little time off on Friday to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. So exciting! It’s the busiest dog sitting time of the year, so I could use a little break.

Travel Hacking with Credit Cards
Travel Hacking with Credit Cards

Today, I’d like to write about rewards cards. I’m presuming readers here have at least a couple. I realize some people are against credit cards and that’s okay too. Personally, I like the opportunity to get some money back on something I was going to buy anyway.

For a long time, I’ve been a fan of Fidelity’s Retirement Rewards card. It’s been a steady 2% statement credit for years (once you reached 25,000 miles). Unfortunately, the last time I tried to redeem for statement credit, they changed the miles so it would only give me 1% of the value back. You can still get 2% if you transfer to a Fidelity Retirement account, which I have. I preferred the immediate statement credit much more.

Travel Hacking: The New Reward Card Strategy

Over the past month or two, I’ve been revamping our credit card rewards strategy. I’m trying to hack as many travel rewards as possible. There are two major reasons why:

  1. Our children are 3 and 4, which means we now have to pay for full seats wherever we fly. It’s hard to see our costs to fly double like that.
  2. We’ve had a few big expenses come up. For example, those surprise condo assessments. In addition, my wife is going back to school to get her Masters. She can pay that with a credit card. Finally, we’re nearing the last few months of being able to pay for pre-school with a credit card. In September the new school is going to ACH and checks only. We should have been working to earn bonus points the whole time.

For those new to travel hacking with credits cards don’t be ashamed, my hand is raised too. The general idea is to spend a certain in a certain time. Typically you need to spend around $3000 and $5000 in about 3 months. If you complete the requirements, you’ll get a tens of thousands points as a bonus. They can usually be used for cash back, but are best used for travel rewards. The travel cards tend to give you more value when using your points for travel (which is easy to remember because it makes sense!) And if we using the points for cash back, this wouldn’t be a very good travel hacking article.

I’ve found that the rewards for the best cards are worth about $500 (used cash) or $625 (used as travel). Those are rough numbers, but since we need to spend about $3000 a few times, we might as well get 20% back in the form of travel, right? And that’s just the bonus points. We’ll get regular points on the spending of $3000 itself (about 3000 miles/points). So maybe we get around 22% in travel expenses overall. That’s a lot better than 2% in Fidelity rewards. (Sorry Fidelity, it’s not your fault.)

I used to think it was a ton of extra work, but with autopay on the credit cards, I don’t miss any payments. There’s almost zero risk of incurring any extra fees. The money comes out of my bank account just like any other credit card. Setting up auto pay with Chase and Amex are very, very easy. (I haven’t tried other banks.)

The Cards We’re Using

A friend gave me a tip on credit cards which have “hot” rewards now. That said, there are always a few “old standbys” that you can usually count on.

My first card was a Starwood Preferred card. This was directly on that tip from a friend, which I took on blind faith. It looks like this card bumped up the rewards from 25,000 point to 30,000. (I may be off on the exact numbers here, but I see 34,066 points in my account which would be consistent with 30,000.) I’m reading that Starwood points are pretty valuable and worth about 2.2 cents a piece. If true, that’s roughly around $650.

Next, I got a Southwest Preferred Card. They are running a 60,000 point promotion, where it’s usually 40,000. If you fly Southwest, this is the time to get it. My wife had gotten the 40,000 point last year and we cashed in nearly $1000 of travel rewards to go to Aruba later this year. It’s about the half off. That’s conveniently enough for the two kids to fly free. I’m 40,000 points away from a companion pass for next year. I’m hearing that some people sign up for the Southwest Plus card as well, so get that. I might try that in September or October.

I’m seeing that Southwest points can be worth around 1.5 cents, so the 60,000 should be worth around $900.

Lastly, I got the Chase Sapphire Preferred card. I should have gotten the Reserve version when they were doing a 100,000 promotion, but I missed it. Instead, I’ll only get 50,000 worth of Chase Ultimate Reward points. In the travel hacking world, these supposedly have a tremendous value in cashing in with a ton of airlines. With the Preferred card, I’ll get a bonus and the 50,000 points should be worth around $625.

My wife got a Starwood Preferred card to use. That’s another $650.

As the fourth card in a short time, this is enough spending for now!

If you add it all up, we’ll get around 200,000 points on various programs. If we spend them right, I think they’ll be worth around $3000… maybe just a little shy.

Active Duty Bonus Leads to One More Points Card

My wife got a credit card offer in the mail last week. It’s a rare 100,000 American Express Platinum card. I believe this is the highest amount of points that American Express offers. The only downside is a HUGE annual fee. I think it’s around $550. However, the card comes with $200 Uber credits (that are parsed out monthly and expire monthly) and another $200 in airline credits (for things like extra bags, food, or other fees outside of the core cost of the ticket). There are other perks as well such as a few different airline lounges and possibly that speedy pass to cut the long lines at airports. (See how technical I am with all this stuff!)

This wasn’t exciting until I learned that Active Duty get their annual fees waived at most credit card companies (except for Chase it seems). So this American Express looks to be 100,000 points and hundreds of dollars of value… for free! Why thank you for the invite, Mr. Express… or should I just call you American?

One More Card

And of course, there’s always one more thing, right? Steven Jobs wouldn’t have had it any other way.

While I was going through the research of the Fidelity card’s statement credit change, someone in some forum mentioned USAA’s Limitless Cash Back Card that pays 2.5%. That’s another Active Duty benefit (though military and family are likely eligible to join USAA). I take the extra 0.5% and phase out the use of Fidelity card.

A natural question to ask is, “Why have a 2.5% card at all, when I’m getting 22% in travel rewards?” The answer is simple. These are one time bonus rewards. We’ll have to cancel the cards, wait some time, and try to get them back in the future to get the bonus points. (Although I think we’ll just keep the American Express forever.) I’m not sure how that process works. I know that Chase has a limit a 5/24 limit which means that they’ll probably not approve you for a new card if you’ve gotten 5 in the past 24 months. I’m probably going to be close to bumping up against that.

Final Thoughts on Travel Card Hacking

There was a lot of research that went into writing this. However, you can tell that it gets so complex, I “yada yada yada” most of the details. (Although they are minor details in this case.)

I’m just starting to “build a base” of understanding the ins and outs of various programs. I’m a little torn, because there’s something nice about using the USAA Limitless card and getting an easy 2.5%. I think that if there aren’t bonus points to be earned by spending, I’ll just use that card. Then again I carry a few other credit cards such as an Amazon one (5% back for Prime Members) and an American Express Blue Preferred (6% back at grocery stores).

Have you done any travel hacking with credit cards before? What are your favorite cards?

Our Extremely Bizarre Early Withdrawal Drawdown Strategy

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I had great plans for today’s article… and then I read Our Unusual Early Retirement Withdrawal Strategy. Record scratch! I’ll get back to that article later this week.

It seems that a lot of FIRE (financial independent/retire early) bloggers are writing about how they are going to withdraw money from the nest egg they accumulated when they retire. That sounds simple, but it gets complicated fairly quickly. I’ll be linking to articles later on.

If Retire By 40’s withdrawal strategy is “unusual” (I think it is), then our’s is extremely bizarre. In a nutshell that strategy is: Don’t Do It. I lean much more towards Frankie Goes to Hollywood than Nike.

This bizarre strategy is brought about by a unique circumstance… my wife’s military pension is worth an estimated $50,000 and it’s adjusted to inflation.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Hey that’s cheating!” You’re not wrong to be thinking that. Pensions are very rare nowadays. In a lot of ways we are blessed. In other ways, we pay a price. My wife (a pharmacist) could have earned a lot more for years if she worked in retail. She wouldn’t have to think about being deployed for Ebola or Zika outbreaks. If she takes a day off on Friday and the following Monday, she loses 4 days of leave. We work around military restrictions and we receive some benefits for that. In my opinion there are more pluses than minuses.

Let’s put that $50,000 pension aside and pretend it doesn’t exist. After all, for perhaps 99% of you, it doesn’t exist. The idea of that pension kicked me in the butt! I’m not going to be the chump that worked to 65 when my wife retires at 44. Hells no! That’s why I started this blog more than 10 years ago. I wanted to explore how people become financially independent.

Like any money journey there’s been twists and turns. If you want to read 10 years of that history, my archive of articles is here.

A strange thing happened and advertisers started to email me about ad placement on my blog. I didn’t understand it, but if someone wanted to pay my landline bill (people had landlines back then), I was all for it. In fact, I feel it would have been hypocritical NOT to take the ads.

I presume that my blog can earn a revenue of $30,000. I could be crazy as blog income is not reliable at all. However, I have talked to bloggers who stopped blogging more than 5 years ago and it still brings in an income. I also do dog sitting, because… well dogs are awesome and there’s no explanation necessary. I’ve only been doing for the last 20 months, but it seems like an income of $15,000 is possible in my area.

Let’s suppose you say that the military pension and my blog is cheating. I’d argue that we could have earned more money and saved up a bigger nest egg to draw down. I don’t want to get tied up in those hypothetical situations.

Instead, let’s focus our real estate situation. We have a small real estate “empire”. I expect that it will generate around $30,000 of income (after maintenance) when the 15-year mortgages are paid off in 2027.

Also around 2027, we’ll own our home as well. Without mortgage payments, electricity payments (thanks solar panels), limited transportation costs, and military health care, our expenses should be very, very low. I expect that the real estate income would cover 90% or more of those costs.

There’s going to be time when Social Security kicks in. I believe that taking Social Security early and investing it is the best plan. I covered that here. For the purposes of the discussion here, we’d get around $50,000 if we took it at 66.

So, let’s pretend that military pensions don’t exist. Let’s pretend my online income goes to zero. Let’s pretend that I suddenly get an extreme allergic reaction to dogs (let’s not pretend that… I don’t want to live in that world). Let’s pretend that our real estate assets somehow ceased to exist. Let’s pretend that Social Security is not solvent (not too hard), but also that people aren’t paying in at all (which would prevent us from withdrawing money from the system).

Let’s also pretend that I couldn’t find a way to earn an income. Honestly, I’d love to revisit my teenager years in fast food. I wouldn’t want to do it full time, but there’s something greatly satisfying about being able to completing a task by rote. Let’s also pretend that my wife can’t find a job as a pharmacist.

In that contrived scenario, we’d have to look into drawing down from our retirement brokerage accounts. I don’t know how to begin calculating that. Since it is “plan G”, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Our strategy is to never draw down from the retirement accounts (until the RMDs kick in). As I wrote in the title, it is bizarre. Is that rational? Let me know in the comments.

If you are looking to more conventional drawdown ideas, please see the following:

Link 1: The Retirement Manifesto – Our Retirement Investment Drawdown Strategy

Link 2: OthalaFehu – Retirement Master Plan

Link 3: Plan Invest Escape – Drawdown vs. Wealth Preservation in Early Retirement

Link 4: Freedom is Groovy – The Groovy Drawdown Strategy

Link 5: The Green Swan – The Nastiest, Hardest Problem in Finance: Decumulation

Link 6: My Curiosity Lab – Show Me The Money: My Retirement Drawdown Plan

Link 7: Cracking Retirement – Our Drawdown Strategy

Link 8: The Financial Journeyman – Early Retirement Portfolio & Plan