My wife loves watching entertainment award shows. She even gets into the lesser-known ones like the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) awards from a few weeks ago. She loves to see “who the stars are wearing.” I know that it’s about fashion designers, but it always sounded a little too Buffalo Bill for me.

I’m not big on watching award shows like her. I’ll watch them if I’m in the same room. I liked the SAG awards because it seemed like there wasn’t the typical hype and marketing. This was the first year that I’ve ever tried to watch the big nominees. I watched Sinners with just a few hours before the show started. The irony: My wife was out of town, so I didn’t watch The Oscars at all.

I did catch a few articles about the Oscars, and one of the nominees for the Best Animated Short caught my attention. With a title of Retirement Plan, it was a perfect fit for this article. Here it is:

(I’m going to assume that you’ve watched it. If you haven’t, my thoughts won’t make much sense.)

This captures exactly where I am in my life… and where I have been for some time. In a lot of ways, I’ve felt retired, but not retired. I’m self-employed, but we do well enough that we don’t have to stress over money. My wife is still working, but we might actually have even less money stress if she retired. The “stress” that she has is more about optimizing tax brackets, which is best done when she is retired.

Many of the things that he wants to do are things that I’ve started to do. I start many things, but finish almost nothing. It would be great to finish something and move on.

I was amazed when I saw the credits of how many people went into making such a short animated film. In my head, I was thinking that I might be able to approximate the same message with AI. I would use Google Veo’s AI video processing, background music by Suno.ai, and a narrator AI voice from ElevenLabs. I would find some kind of imperfection that would drive me crazy until I walked away from it… only to revisit it when I retire.

Final Thoughts

Usually, I end articles with a “final thoughts” section, but in this case, the thoughts were the main article itself. With that in mind, I thought I’d throw in some other thoughts about popular Oscar-nominated movies.

What big Oscar movies did I watch, and how were they?

Glad you asked. Here’s my quick review from what I liked the most to the least:

Bugonia

This movie just hit on the kinds of things that I like. Unfortunately, it’s the type of movie that’s best not to know much going in, so I’ll just leave it at that. It kind of snuck up on me, but there are enough great Emma Stone movies to fill a whole weekend.

I haven’t been able to convince my family to watch it. Somehow, that makes me like it more. It’s as if it’s my secret – their loss.

Weapons

This was close to Bugonia. It was just as good, and it was also best left to watch without much knowledge beforehand. It didn’t have the Emma Stone factor. Also, my wife saw it before I did, so it didn’t feel like “mine.”

Sinners

I didn’t like this as much as most everyone else did. I feel like I missed some of the layers that would make more sense with an explanation. I found myself asking ChatGPT if I was racist, if I liked From Dusk ’til Dawn more. It explained that they were different movies even if they shared similar circumstances. That’s very true. I think I also had nostalgia for Dusk ’til Dawn, as it seemed to pop up quite often when I used to channel surf.

One Battle After Another

I had heard so much about this movie that I thought it would be the best. It felt like the director’s ADHD mind of which characters to follow didn’t jive with my ADHD mind. (I apologize to the director if he doesn’t have ADHD.) For this reason, it didn’t make much sense to me what story he was trying to tell.

Hamnet

I almost forgot about this being an Oscar movie. I tried to forget about seeing it. Imagine making a movie about a famous person, but then focusing on the person’s anonymous spouse. To make this person interesting, though, you have to invent some quasi-special powers to give her. She really only uses them in the first half of the movie.

If you want to watch a knock-off of Hamlet, catch a production of Something Rotten. I saw with my wife on Broadway quite a few years ago. We also took the kids to a children’s theater version last year. It was great each time.

The post The Seven Minute Oscar Short on Retirement That Broke Me appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

I usually do some personal or family updates before getting into this, but the snowstorm was a big enough event. Also, I’ve wanted to get this published all week, and the world has conspired against me. That’s why it’s being published on Friday, late afternoon.

Setting Goals for 2025

I put all my goals in a spreadsheet that I stole borrowed from Retire By 40. Here’s what it looks like for this year:

(Click it, and it will open in a new tab.)

Steal this idea and make it yours. I always make a bunch of goals that I know I’ll never complete. It gives me the flexibility to fail on some things as long as I’m making progress on others. Most people would do the opposite, focus on fewer goals, and aim to get them all done. It’s much less overwhelming. I’m unusual.

Passive Income

I used to have three side hustles with a passive component: a dog-sitting business, this blog, and a website I manage for a non-profit. They all required some active work. However, I could do them all even while working a full-time job. I considered those partially passive income. This blog and the retainer for the non-profit website are minimal, so consider it almost all dog boarding.

Dog Boarding/Website Income

This is the least passive of all incomes. I only count this as 50% passive. Dog sitting has been very steady over the last few years. It’s been close to $50,000. The biggest variable is how much we travel. I can’t board dogs while I am away.

February’s Dog/Web Real Income: $2,857.16

In January, this was $1,699.65. However, that’s the slowest month for dog boarding. Most people got all their travel out of the way in December. This month, we had February school vacations. We did around $2,000 more last February, so this year is starting off very rough.

Rental Property Income

We have two rental properties. Both still have mortgages, and the rental income is around $1,100/mo. One mortgage is done in 2027. The other one is a small loan, but it has another 15 years on it. If they were both mortgage-free, we’d make around $32,000 a year.

For the purpose of this report, I calculate the rental property income using the following formula:

(Rents After Estimated Expenses) * (Equity Percentage Owned) = Income)

The idea is that we only own a percentage of the equity, so I should only count that percentage of the rent after expenses. When we own everything, the equity percentage will be 100%, and it will just be the rent after expenses.

Estimated expenses are insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance. Equity Percentage Owned (EPO) is our total equity divided by the property value on Zillow. (Zillow is very accurate for our condos.) When the mortgages are paid off, we’ll have an EPO of 100% and be able to keep all the rent after estimated expenses.

In February, Zillow estimated our properties were worth $5,000 more. We also paid off almost $1,000 in mortgage principal. That meant our EPO went from owning 83.86% of our properties to 84.14%. The rents after expenses are $2,900/month. Using the equation above, our estimated income from this area would be $2,438. That’s up from $2,430 in January. This number almost always moves slowly.

Managing rental properties requires some work – a few days a year. For this reason, I only count 80% of this number as passive income.

Dividend Income

My wife and I have been nearly maxing out our retirement accounts for a couple of decades. The markets have done very well over that time. Overall, we have a nice retirement nest egg.

I don’t track dividends from all the accounts. I’m doing well to get my wife to log in to her TSP (the government’s version of a 401k) account and give me the totals. I simply assume we could invest the money into an ETF that pays a 2.5% dividend. For example, HDV, a high-dividend ETF, currently yields 3.10%.

I also have profit-sharing income with a private company in which I own a small stake. I get a check each month that behaves like a dividend – it’s just taxed a little differently.

February’s estimated dividend income was $5,949. In January, it was $5,960. It was up quite a bit until the war in Iran tanked the markets a bit. The loss of $11 is pretty small potatoes overall.

Unlike the previous two sections, this income is 100% passive. For this reason, I don’t have to adjust the numbers.

Total Passive Income

Dog/Etc.: $2,857.16 – Adjusted to $1,428.58
Rentals: $2,438 – Adjusted to $1,950.40
Dividends: $5,949 – Remains at $5,949

Dogs/Etc – Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line

Total Adjusted Passive Income: $9,327.98

Here’s a graph of the adjusted passive income since 2017, when I started keeping track:

The blue line represents the monthly total adjusted passive income. The Red Line represents the 12-month average. This removes some of the seasonality of dog boarding. That’s the important one.

The only positive this past month was the real estate, and it was next to nothing. Between that and the dividends, I lost $3. Maybe something more eventful will happen next month. So far, we have $18,082 of passive income for the year. That’s a pace around $108,500. That’s a ways away from my $125,000 goal.

My wife continues to work as well. She has 27 years of military service and will receive a pension that may double all this passive income. I also earn some income that falls outside of the areas listed above. It’s not passive, so I don’t mention it here.

I can’t think of anywhere else to put this information, but our net worth grew 0.46% last month, closing at an all-time high. That seemed like some kind of crazy voodoo math, but it turns out our primary residence was up a bit. Combine that with the growth of the real estate properties, and it’s a win. For the year, our net worth is up 1.5%.

Business and Other Money Goals

Personal Income ($80,000)

My income has been dropping over the last few years, going from $98K to 488K to $81K. Last year, I stayed mostly the same at $80,593.

As I get closer to retirement, I’m more than happy to keep pursuing the same goal.

In February, I made around $4,850. For the year, I’m at $8,490. It’s a pace of around 51K. That won’t get me to $80K. Fortunately, dog boarding ramps up in the summer months. I don’t know if it will be enough, though.

Improve My Dog Boarding Website and Operations

In February, I made a change to my email address. I had been using a free Gmail account. I’m still using that, but I made it so that people can email using “info@[domain].com”. It’s more professional and feels more premium than “He just grabbed a free email account.” It required changing several settings and signing up for a free service, but ChatGPT was happy to walk me through it.

AI Everything

In February, I spent a TON of time doing something… that’s tough to write. I know it’s going to be cringy. Please stick with me until the end of this for the explanation.

I planned a series of books with AI. I know that you, like everyone else, love to read AI slop. There’s not nearly enough AI slop out there, so I obviously need to add some more. I hope you can tell that I’m being sarcastic.

Not only does the world not need any more AI slop, but many people have little use for more long-form written words. Books simply don’t compete well with TikTok. If it were possible to make a Venn diagram of the worst business ideas, it might overlap a circle of AI writing with a circle of books.

I don’t know if I’ll ever publish the books, though. It doesn’t really matter. I’m having so much fun crafting and molding this fictional world. I’m learning about the process that real authors go through, and it is fascinating. There are so many layers of story grids, character sheets, Hero’s Journey, Save The Cat, chapter beats, etc.

My wife asked how many chapters I have done, and I just kind of laughed. It took J.K. Rowling five years to write the first book, and two more before it was published. In total, the series took seventeen years. I think I’m doing fairly well through the first 2 months.

What do you think? Does it count as AI slop if I work on it a lot?

Health

I turn 50 this year, so health is the most important thing. Last year, I wrote a separate article about health goals. I just reviewed them, and they seem valid for this year too.

Weight and Body Fat (Lean-(fat*2) mass >60)

My goal this year is a combination of adding lean mass and losing fat mass. It took a long time for me to figure out how to create a formula for this. I settled on the formula: lean mass minus 2×fat mass. This penalizes me if I add weight that’s a bunch of fat.

My weight this month was 172.9 lbs, and my body fat was 23.2%. That means my lean mass was 132.8 and my fat mass was 40.1 lbs. This is a score of 52.6 using my formula. Last month, my average weight was 172.2lbs, and my body fat was 23.2%. That’s a score of 52.3. It’s moving in the right direction, but barely.

My goal of getting this number to 60 could be achieved by losing 169 lbs and having a body fat of 21.5% . That might not be too ambitious, but changing one’s body composition is hard!

Body and Brain Points (300 and 225 respectively)

I score myself from 1 (poor) to 5 (great) each week for diet and exercise. I then add them up for the month. I got 20 points in January, which puts me on pace for 240 points. Most of the points came from diet. It was too cold for exercise. We have a treadmill, but even the basement, where it is, is too cold.

I measure brain points on the same scale. They are based on doing things like Duolingo (Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, and Chess), and the NY Times puzzles (Wordle, Strands, and Connections). I want to include more creative stuff, such as drawing and/or music. Until I add those, I’m likely to max out at 4 points per week by doing all the previous stuff. For January, I averaged 20 brain points. Getting to 225 should be no problem at this rate.

Blood Pressure (Goal: 115/75)

I started measuring my blood pressure every day (sometimes twice a day) last year. It was too high. However, it was never high in the doctor’s office, so my doctor gave me the lowest dose of medication. I got this blood pressure monitor and it tracks it over time in an app. I brought this to my doctor, and she upped my medication by a tiny bit. That link to the device is an affiliate link, by the way.

In February, my blood pressure was 138/83. In January, it was 137/84. It’s almost the same. Writing this paragraph became motivation to contact my doctor about a change to my medication. Accountability for the win!

Doctor Appointments

I got a filling last month at the dentist. It’s taken a few months, but two fillings and a crown later, I can eat without worries. That’s something you take for granted when your teeth have no problems.

Longevity Research (40 hours)

I did a little of this last year, but not enough. I’m renewing this goal for this year. I have to remember to keep track of time when I do it, though.

In February, I read this article about how dancing helps brain health (gift article). And here I just thought it was a good exercise.

That’s not a long research, but it’s something.

Hobbies

Most of my hobbies are going to be focused on the AI idea above. Here are a couple of others that I am working on.

3D Printing

We got the 3D printer working after a couple of years of being stuck, and have it gathering dust. My kids started selling fidget cones at school. I’m fairly sure that’s prohibited, and they’ll get in trouble when the school finds out. In the meantime, THEY STARTED A BUSINESS! I’m going to enjoy this while it lasts.

Unfortunately, it’s back to not working. I tried to get them to fix it because they helped when we got it working the first time. They haven’t done much with that. When they get home from after-school activities, it’s late enough that we just want to have dinner. It’s hard to start a good 3D print that late.

Play a modern song on a ukulele

So far, no work on the ukulele.

Year-to-Date Progress

I’ll give myself credit for 1/3 of this, as we got the 3D printer working. Another third would be the ukulele. The last third would be the AI stuff above.

Family

Declutter and Organize House

We got some water seeping through the basement and had to do quite a bit of cleaning for that. We didn’t do too much else. It was very cold in February, so it wasn’t worth working in areas like the basement and garage. Those need the most work.

I’ll give myself a 1% pity point for the work on the basement mini-flood.

Travel

We are still planning our trips, but it looks like Aruba in March, Alaska Cruise in June, Tuscany in August, and a quick Reno trip in early September.

This past month, my wife planned all the places she wants to shop at when we are in Milan. I learned that Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper is there, and it is extremely hard to get one of the limited viewings. We’ll prioritize that, and then I’ll take the kids to the science museum that is supposed to be exceptional.

When my wife bought the week in Tuscany as an impulse at an auction, I had no idea of Italy’s geography. It’s kind of a shame that it is far enough from Rome and Milan to make it difficult to do on a day trip.

Kids

The kids are at the age now (12 and 13) where they either love each other or hate each other. They are either working well together or getting into big fights.

After School Activities

I gave a long update on what they are doing, but for the most part, it’s Scouts and karate for both. One does plays, and the other does track.

Summer Camps

My oldest is doing seven weeks of acting camps. We have one more week to fill out before we travel. It’s a difficult week where a lot of camps are done.

My youngest is doing the stage crew for one play and his annual sailing camp. He’s also going to the Scouting Jamboree. This would be his first overnight camp, which is exciting. I don’t need to book anything else for him.

Final Thoughts

I feel like I’m behind on everything. That’s the nature of a lot of these goals. Dog boarding is always slow. It’s too cold to clean parts of the house or exercise outside.

I have to remind myself that it’s just the start of the year. Also, none of these goals is of critical importance.

The post My Passive Income and Life Goals Update (February 2026) appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

This made me wonder, “Do people even think about the library nowadays?” At its core, it’s a place to borrow books. Life moves fast, and it’s just getting faster and faster – who has time to read a book? Also, in a world where you can stream almost anything at any time, why get a car and go somewhere to get a book? When I was a kid, I would read all the Black Stallion and Choose Your Own Adventure books. That’s ten times as much as my kids read. I never even considered myself a reader.

(I apologize if I’m offending any book lovers out there. This blog is a 20-year testament to the written word. Like this blog, it feels like that’s in the past.)

Here’s how the library put money back in my wallet twice recently:

Free Subscriptions to Online News

Nearly every news site is behind a paywall nowadays. I often feel like I have the last website that is simply behind a wall of advertisements. A lot of newspapers tried that, but advertising hasn’t been good enough.

I pay for subscriptions to the Washington Post and a local newspaper. The Washington Post has been going downhill for a while and recently cut staff. I might not have that one for very long. I’ve been on the fence about getting a subscription to the NY Times. Ironically, I had a Times salesperson cold call me around 2003-4, and I eviscerated the poor guy. It was peak Boston Red Sox/NY Yankees rivalry, so why would you call someone in Boston and try to sell them a New York newspaper?

Anyway, I have a draft of an article that’s about 80% done. The core idea is that there should be a way to pool a group of people and have them share a few subscriptions. Few people have the money to buy multiple subscriptions. Also, it seems dangerous to divide people into groups based on who can afford to consume the news and who are choosing between paying for food, heat, and medicine.

It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago that I thought, “I bet the library has a lot of online subscriptions.” I was right! My idea of there being a pooled group of people sharing a subscription was smart – so smart that it was probably implemented a decade or more ago. I wasn’t smart enough to think of the obvious solution.

It turns out that my local library does have a NY Times subscription. You have to go to a link and “renew” it every day. That’s not a bad hoop to jump through if you bookmark it.

It looks like the full digital subscription to the NY Times is $390 a year. They offer discounts when you sign up, and there may be other deals. Clicking on the bookmark from my local library is a lot better than spending $390/yr.

Movies, Movies, and Movies

You may have noticed I wrote above that we’re “in a world where you can stream almost anything at any time.” I should have put more emphasis on “almost.” Almost every streaming service runs a Black Friday deal for a year of service at $2 or $3/mo. with ads. We have seven streaming services, but there are an amazing number of movies that aren’t available on any of them.

In the last two weeks, I looked for Easy A, The Hangover, and The Sixth Sense only to find that they weren’t part of any subscription service. These were very successful movies in the theater, not some hard-to-find indie flick. By the way, if you don’t know, the brilliant Just Watch website makes it easy to find almost anything. It showed that I could only buy them for a few dollars or buy them for more.

I hope your state’s library is as good as Rhode Island’s. They got a bunch of DVDs and Blu-rays at every branch. If it’s not at your local branch, you can request it to be sent there. It’ll take a few days, and then it’ll be on the reserved shelf for me to pick up.

I probably get around 15 movies a year this way. At around $4 for an online rental, this saves me about $60 year.

Combine these two non-standard library services, and I’d save around $450 year. Of course, your mileage may vary. If your local library is very far away or doesn’t have a good sharing program or digital subscriptions, it may not save you much at all.

Is your local library a good resource to save you money? Let me know your experience in the comments.

If you liked this article, I found out after I published it that I wrote a similar article back in 2018, Reminder: Libraries Can Save You Hundreds of Dollars.

The post Your Library May Save You Hundreds a Year appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

Before we get to today’s personal finance main course, I’m starting with a non-financial personal appetizer. On Monday, we got 34 inches of snow, the most in my lifetime. People are comparing it to the Great Blizzard of 1978. My kids are on their third day off from school, as many staff and faculty (and probably parents) still haven’t had their roads plowed. The white-out blizzard conditions prevented plowing for the first day. The kids’ annual school ice-skating party was cancelled on Sunday, so we just watched the US Men win the Gold Medal, followed by Miracle, the Disney movie about the 1980 Men’s Olympic team.

That’s enough snow and ice; let’s get to lifestyle inflation. It’s not something that I typically think about, but this article by Joe at Retire By 40 caught my attention.

In the article, Joe grades himself on the following areas of lifestyle inflation since he retired in 2012: Housing, Transportation, Groceries, Eating Out, Clothes, Hobbies, Subscription Services, and Travel. Finally, he gives himself an overall grade.

I’m going to do the same in this article. However, I do it with some hesitation. We’re not in the same financial situation we were in 10 or 15 years ago. If you’ve been significantly invested in the stock market, you probably feel the same way. If you had a thousand dollars invested in the S&P 500 in January 2011, you’d have a little more than seven thousand dollars today. If we only go back ten years, that thousand dollars is now over $4,200.

In short, the typical Lazy Man and Money reader probably has a net worth that has greatly inflated. Couldn’t we reasonably argue that keeping the same lifestyle in that scenario is failing? Last I checked, there wasn’t an award show for multi-millionaires living on Ramen and ketchup packets.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a good solution for grades. I’ll share my grades: A is a little lifestyle inflation, and F is a big increase. I still run various side hustles, so I can’t set a specific retirement date. If I choose 2012, we just had our first child, and that’s not entirely fair. I’ll wing it.

Housing: B+

We’ve lived in the same house with the same mortgage since 2012. Property taxes have gone up, but we can’t do much about that. We’ve spent a lot on renovations, though. Many of them weren’t necessary, so they fit squarely into the category of lifestyle inflation. We finished a basement, added multiple mini-duct air conditioning units, and built a deck and a fence. The fence has helped me earn over $300,000 in dog boarding, so maybe I shouldn’t count that.

Transportation: B+

We’ve kept our two main cars (a Subaru Forester and an Acura MDX) since 2014. However, we traded in our 2001 convertible for a new 2016 convertible. The two main cars cost us $60,000, which comes out to about $5,000 a year over 12 years. That’s not bad for two cars.

Transportation is much more than just the cost of cars, but our expenses in auxiliary areas aren’t that high. We don’t use much gas. My wife used to commute a little more until around 2018, when she has been home pretty much full-time. I work from home. Our insurance is mostly a fixed cost.

Groceries: A-

I’m terrific at saving money on groceries. It’s been my superpower for a long time, and I simply enjoy the challenge. I mostly buy the basic brands from Aldi and then shop the big deals at the other local stores. I can go to the nearby military commissary to get great prices on name brands, but I haven’t been in years.

In the last few years, I’ve been splurging more on organic food. That’s bringing my grade down a tick.

Eating Out: B

We eat out more than other personal finance bloggers, but probably close to the same amount as most people. I’m fairly good at saving money in this category, as our town has a Buy One, Get One meal book for most restaurants. Many restaurants also have Black Friday deals where you can spend $100 to get a $150 gift card. Combining those deals maximizes our restaurant spending.

Clothes and Accessories: B-

It was the best of times to save on clothes and the worst of times to save on clothes.* I almost spend nothing on clothes. I still wear a Patriots’ sweatshirt from 1994. The sweatshirt I’m currently wearing is from 2005, when they won their second Super Bowl in a row.

My wife has upgraded her clothes, purses, and shoes in quality and quantity. Sometimes I remind her that she only has two feet. She may have more summer dresses than days of summer. Her coat is made from special geese that have been bred and trained in Canada for generations to resist cold. I might be making up the training aspect, but it is priced as if it were.

That said, she earns about 2/3 of our income, so I don’t discourage her. In fact, I recently tried to help her find a rare designer purse. Don’t tell her, but I was secretly motivated by wanting to buy a new computer just to mess around with AI stuff. Those are not cheap as they require significant processing power.

Hobbies: A-

I really don’t have too many hobbies that cost money. If I buy the aforementioned AI computer, that would be the biggest expense. I bought a Drake Maye rookie card for $250 after his hot start. They were selling for $700-$800 before the Super Bowl. I just checked, and they were down to $350. Maybe I should buy a couple more? I am an OpenAI Pro and Claude Pro user, so that’s about $400 a year. Arguably, that fits better in the subscriptions section below.

My wife’s hobbies are running and skiing. The running expenses are shoes, race entrance fees, and one set of training classes she took. The health benefits far outweigh any cost. Skiing is more expensive, but she’s gamed that system too. The military Epic Pass is incredibly cheap at $200. That includes unlimited lift tickets at many New England mountains. She owns her own skis. She joined a ski club that owns a house in Vermont. For a small amount, she can bring the kids (who rent skis all season long for one price) and stay for a weekend.

Subscription Services: B+

We have almost all of the streaming services. Apple is the only one that we periodically get on a deal and cancel. There are no deals on Netflix, but we stick with the 1080P lower-tier version. I can’t tell the difference too much – my eyes aren’t that great. All the other services, such as Max, Disney+, Hulu, Peacock, Paramount+, and Starz, were bought around Black Friday when they offered a year of service for $2 or $3 a month with commercials.

The problem is that we still have cable and still pay full price for it. I almost never watch it. My wife watches some shows at night. We could get YouTube TV or SlingTV and save some money. The problem is getting local channels for football games and such. I might have to get an antenna for that. I’ve researched this project quite a bit, but I haven’t pulled the trigger because I always have something else going on.

I feel like we should subscribe to more things, but I can’t think of any right now.

Travel: C+

This is my toughest area to grade. You’d think I could just go back and review how much we spend on travel, but I don’t have the data. Sometimes my wife will pay for a flight or hotel with a credit card that I don’t have access to. Sometimes we’ll use points. It’s very disorganized.

What I can say is that we’ve started going to more places now that the kids are getting older. When they were 9 and 10, it was very easy to go to Disney World, which offers many military discounts. The last time we went (2024), we literally ran out of rides or things we wanted to do. Last year, we went to Orlando and didn’t even bother getting the cheap tickets. We explored the other great attractions down there.

As far as spending more, we flew to England last year to see Paramore in concert. They were opening for someone named Taylor Swift, who I guess is kind of a big deal or something? (My wife wanted to go to see Taylor Swift, but Paramore was the highlight for me.) We also went to Liverpool (to do nothing**), but entrench ourselves in Beatles “World.”

Overall: B

We got good grades in most of the most expensive categories. The areas with lower grades are very intentional lifestyle-inflation choices. In the end, I think grading should be on two axes. One is about whether you spend more, and the other is how much enjoyment the spending brings. For example, a convertible car brings great enjoyment. The same can be said of travel. I’ll assume my wife gets great enjoyment from clothes and accessories. If I’m wrong about that, then I get enjoyment from not living in the dog house for being a jerk on that spending.

* Dickens’ distant relatives are probably going to complain to me about how bad that was. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they sued me for some kind of literary malpractice.

As an aside, my wife and I disagree on a few canonical cover songs. Maybe leave a comment and tell me what you think of this. I associate Higher Ground with the Chili Peppers, while she associates it with Stevie Wonder. I associate Romeo and Juliet with the Dire Straits, and she associates them with the Indigo Girls. I could write a whole article about this. Is Come Together more Beatles or Aerosmith? I go with 55% Aerosmith and 45% Beatles. I need to stop this nonsense, or I’ll never publish this article.

The post My Lifestyle Inflation Over the Years appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

It was almost ten years ago that I wrote, The World Has Turned and Left Us Here. Big chain stores everywhere were closing due to online competition. Self-driving cars looked like they’d become a real thing. It felt like jobs were disappearing everywhere. I wondered what kind of careers would be available to my kids when they grow up.

Who knew the hard times were the good ol’ days? *

Over the last couple of years, AI has advanced rapidly. As a former software engineer, I can see that the career is quickly becoming a dead end. Last summer, AI won second place in a World Coding Competition. Articles abound about how recent computer science graduates are having problems finding jobs.

Last week, AI took another quantum leap.

1. Something Big is Happening

   Matt Shumer, CEO of HyperWrite, wrote the article linked above. Within a few days, it surpassed 100 million views. He argued that AI had crossed an inflection point. One of the biggest AI companies, Anthropic, quietly released that its latest coding AI tool was coded (in part) by AI itself. The CEO said that most of their coding is done with AI. It’s like evolving generations every couple of weeks. (That last human coder who won the context last summer was probably surpassed a couple of months ago.)

   Shumer points out that it’s starting with coding, but lists a bunch of careers where AI will take over. In a related story, a couple of weeks ago, my son’s school asked a few parents to talk to the seventh graders about AI. I volunteered to serve on the panel. We had been given guidance to point out where AI makes mistakes. Without that direction, I would have said something similar to what Shumer wrote. It felt dishonest to say anything less.

2. Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise’s Fight Shocked Hollywood

   China’s ByteDance (of TikTok fame) released a new AI video tool, Seedance 2.0, that can create nearly perfect videos. Here are two short 15-second clips of Brad Pitt fighting Tom Cruise spliced together:

   Some people say that they can still tell it is AI. That’s missing the point. A couple of years ago, AI was making videos like this one.

   One of the writers and producers of Deadpool said that soon, one person can make the next blockbuster movie:

   In next to no time, one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases. True, if that person is no good, it will suck. But if that person possesses Christopher Nolan’s talent and taste (and someone like that… https://t.co/hqHUgRk8N4

   — Rhett Reese (@RhettReese) February 11, 2026

   Hollywood companies complained of copyright infringement, and ByteDance took it down… for now. It’s not hard to imagine using AI to create a movie star bigger than Tom Cruise and his or her in that hypothetical blockbuster movie – no copyright infringement needed.

3. “The World is in Peril”

   The head of Anthropic’s AI safety research resigned in a way that didn’t inspire confidence. When the head of safety says “the world is in peril”, it goes viral. The tweet below has 14.7 million views as of now:

   Today is my last day at Anthropic. I resigned.

   Here is the letter I shared with my colleagues, explaining my decision. pic.twitter.com/Qe4QyAFmxL

   — mrinank (@MrinankSharma) February 9, 2026

   The article in the headline listed five reasons like this that signal that the “AI apocalypse” is coming. That kind of doom and gloom has been around AI for a while. However, when people inside companies resign and warn us, it feels like it is coming soon.

Final Thoughts

To bring it all full circle, I’m going to highlight what Microsoft’s AI CEO said last week. Essentially, almost all white-collar jobs are going to be automated by AI in the next 18 months.

A few years ago, I wrote that kids are doomed nowadays. Despite the title’s pessimistic tone, I put together several concrete actions kids can take to help secure their future.

And if all fails, just ask ChatGPT what to do.

* I’ve gotten into Paramore a lot lately and the lead singer, Hayley William, recently released a solo song with this line in it.

The post The AI Tipping Point Came Last Week appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

Typically, I’d put a personal update with a recap of all the awesome things our family did last month. This article is already overloaded, so I’m skipping it.

Setting Goals for 2025

I put all my goals in a spreadsheet that I stole borrowed from Retire By 40. Here’s what it looks like for this year. I’ll explain what each one is in this article and share the January results.

(Click it, and it will open in a new tab.)

Steal this idea and make it yours. I always make a bunch of goals that I know I’ll never complete. It gives me the flexibility to fail on some things as long as I’m making progress on others. Most people would do the opposite, focus on fewer goals, and aim to get them all done. It’s much less overwhelming. I’m unusual.

Passive Income

I used to have three side hustles with a passive component: a dog-sitting business, this blog, and a website I manage for a non-profit. They all required some active work. However, I could do them all even while working a full-time job. I considered those partially passive income.

That’s somewhat in the past. The blogging world has changed. I used to get traffic and readers from Google, but Google no longer sends people to individual blogs. People get their AI information or are pushed to shopping tips. In the rare case that an article is relevant to a search, Google will surface articles from a big company that’s essentially a content farm. That all adds up to no traffic, no ads surfacing, and no money.

The website that I manage for a non-profit was paying me about $90 a month. I found myself working 30 hours a month on it, so we’re making changes for 2026. I’m going to be offloading much of the work to other people. It isn’t technical, just using WordPress. I’ve also set it up so that I get paid an hourly wage. I used to do a lot of programming projects for the challenge, but now I’ll spec it out and prepare a bill for the hours it will take. The good news is that I’ll make more money in less time this way.

Thus, my passive income from side hustles is simply dog boarding until I can come up with something else.

Dog Boarding/Web Site Income

Because this is the first article of the year, I need to set a goal for this area’s earnings for the year. Dog sitting has been very steady over the last few years. The biggest variable is how much we travel. I can’t board dogs while I am away.

I’ll count the website maintenance for the non-profit as passive income for now. It may switch to an hourly rate, though. Also, while blogging is likely to be nothing, I’ll just roll it in. One of my goals is to return the blog to profitability, so maybe I can add that back in.

I count dog boarding income (and blogging income when I had it) as 50% passive. I can do other stuff while the dogs are here. My goal for the year is to make $25,000 in passive income ($50,000 in real income). Last year, I made $28,037 in passive income. I’m sticking with the same lower goal as last year, because blogging has gotten worse, and we might have more travel. Finally, I don’t mind doing less dog boarding – it’s nice to have to schedule life around dog drop-offs and pickups.

January’s Dog/Web Real Income: $1,699.65.

January is the slowest month for dog boarding. Most people got all their travel out of the way in December. The rest are saving their vacation days for February school vacations. January just has the long weekend for Martin Luther King, Jr. Last year, I made $3100, so this is a good deal lower, but it’s not too far off from 2023, which turned out fine.

Rental Property Income

We have two rental properties. Both still have mortgages, and the rental income is around $ 1,100/mo. One mortgage is done in 2027. The other one is a small loan, but it has another 15 years on it. If they were both mortgage-free, we’d make around $32,000 a year. One of the properties is being rented 25% under market, but the person there can’t pay much more. She’s extremely low maintenance. This year, we’ll look into selling it – we can probably make more by investing the money very conservatively.

For the purpose of this report, I calculate the rental property income using the following formula:

(Rents After Estimated Expenses) * (Equity Percentage Owned) = Income)

Estimated expenses are insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and estimated condo maintenance. Equity Percentage Owned (EPO) is our total equity divided by the property value on Zillow. (Zillow is very accurate for our condos.) When the mortgages are paid off, we’ll have an EPO of 100% and be able to keep all the rent after estimated expenses.

Last year, we finished with around $22,000 in income. I’ll set a goal for this year to be $25,000. This number usually doesn’t increase very quickly. Typically, the only two ways it can increase substantially are if rents/estimated changes rise or if the market jumps and Zillow estimates our properties as worth more.

In January, Zillow estimated our properties were worth a couple of thousand fewer dollars. We paid off almost $1,000 in mortgage principal. That meant our EPO went from owning 83.77% of our properties to 83.86%. The rents after expenses are $2,900/month. Using the equation above, our income from this area would be $2,430.

Managing rental properties requires some work – a few days a year. For this reason, I only count 80% of this number as passive income.

Dividend Income

My wife and I have been nearly maxing out our retirement accounts for a couple of decades. The markets have done very well over that time. Overall, we have a nice retirement nest egg.

I don’t track dividends from all the accounts. I’m doing well to get my wife to log in to her TSP (the government’s version of a 401k) account and give me the totals. I just assume we could invest the money into an ETF that pays a 2.5% dividend. For example, HDV, a high-dividend ETF, currently yields 3.36%

I also have profit-sharing income with a private company in which I own a small stake. I get a check each month that behaves like a dividend – it’s just taxed a little differently.

Last year, we made $64,339 in estimated dividends, beating our goal of $63,000. This year, I’m aiming for $75,000. This almost entirely depends on the markets, and I feel they are expensive. That said, I predicted a crash last year, and it never happened.

In January, we estimated dividend income was $5,960. That pace of nearly of $6,000 would get to $72,000, which is why I feel $75,000 is achievable.

Unlike the previous two sections, this income is 100% passive. For this reason, I don’t have to adjust the numbers.

Total Passive Income

Dog/Etc.: $1,699.65 – Adjusted to $849.83
Rentals: $2,185 – Adjusted to $1,748.00
Dividends: $5,146 – Remains at $5,146

Dogs/Etc – Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line

Total Adjusted Passive Income: $8,444.29

Here’s a graph of the adjusted passive income since 2017, when I started keeping track:

The blue line represents the monthly total adjusted passive income. The Red Line represents the 12-month average. This removes some of the seasonality of dog boarding. I’m mostly focused on that red line. We hit a record of $9,536.78 last month. We should be able to get $10,500 this year.

My wife continues to work as well. She has 27 years of military service and will receive a pension that may double all this passive income. I also earn some income that falls outside of the areas listed above. It’s not passive, so I don’t mention it here.

I can’t think of anywhere else to put this information, but our net worth grew 0.58% last month, closing at an all-time high. Last year, it grew by 11.53%.

Business and Other Money Goals

Personal Income ($80,000)

My income has been dropping over the last few years, going from $98K to 488K to $81K. Last year, I stayed mostly the same at $80,593.

As I get closer to retirement, I’m more than happy to keep pursuing the same goal.

In January, I made around $3,700 – a $45,000 pace. I’ll have to step this up.

Improve My Dog Boarding Website and Operations

I started dog boarding on Rover a little more than 10 years ago. They have gotten me hundreds of clients in that time. However, they also take a 20% fee from my earnings and add another 12% to the dog owner’s bill. When I can get a client through word of mouth or any other means, I can make more money and save my customers money.

To help customers book directly, I created a website and got business cards. It has worked fine over the last three years, but it is the bare minimum. This year, I want to make things a lot more professional.

This includes having clients complete an online new-client form and creating an online booking system. I also got a dedicated phone number through Grasshopper.com. I want to offer giveaways to customers when they pick up their dog. I know a printer who can do that. Also, they can print clothing to make it look more professional when I’m meeting a new dog owner.

All these should add value and help me grow the business. Potentially, I could package this solution and sell it to other Rover sitters.

AI Research and Such

I remember wanting to become a prompt engineer a couple of years ago. Are there still prompt engineers around? AI seemed to get good enough that it’s often unnecessary to create a complex prompt.

I want to explore creating AI human video avatars. That was a goal from last year that I’m carrying over to this year. I got around to cloning my voice with ElevenLabs. It’s very good, but I can do some more voice training to improve it. I might also use some of ElevenLabs professional voices with the Grasshopper answering service I got above.

I’ve been working on two books and several other projects. I’m not sure where it will take me as AI is evolving at light speed.

I explored creating some AI music with Suno. It was very easy. You can’t tell it to make songs that sound like Harry Styles. At least, I ran into problems with prompts like that. Famous artists have probably asked that it shouldn’t copy their sound. That’s definitely fair. You can get around this a bit by asking ChatGPT for an extensive prompt that describes Harry Styles’ music. Then you take that prompt and plug it into Suno. For now, my best idea for using music is to pair it with a movie-like trailer to promote the books above.

Finally, I want to explore coding using AI. A few days ago, my 7th grader said that they used ChatGPT Codex at school to make some simple games. These are exciting times! I’m going to enjoy the few days we have left before Skynet starts killing off the human race, like in the Terminator movies.

In January, I worked on learning how to use AI on my local computer. Most of it was with images instead of better-known chatbots. I might upgrade to a gaming laptop to do more advanced stuff. I also learned about story frameworks such as Save The Cat, Hero’s Journey, and Story Grid. That can help with one of my books.

Health

I turn 50 this year, so health is the most important thing. Last year, I wrote a separate article about health goals. I just reviewed them, and they seem valid for this year too.

Weight and Body Fat (Lean-(fat*2) mass >60)

Last year, I set a goal of going from 173 to 164 pounds and from 22.2% to 19% body fat. I lost one pound to 172, and my body fat went up to 22.5. I didn’t really change at all.

I’m going to try something different this year and reach a certain level of lean mass minus fat mass. I struggled with how to come up with one number that illustrates an improving health composition, but I think I figured it out. The weight and body fat from last year resulted in 133.3 pounds of lean mass and 38.7 pounds of fat mass. Originally, I was going to set a goal of 136 pounds of lean mass. However, I looked at my 2023 numbers: 140 pounds of lean mass and 48 pounds of body fat.

I settled on the formula: lean mass minus 2×fat mass. This penalizes me if I go back to 2023 and gain a bunch of weight that was largely fat. For example, this would have been 140-(48*2) or 44. Last year, I had 133.2-(38.7*2) or 55.9. If I get my weight to 169 and my body fat to 21.5%, I’ll get a 60. Alternatively, I can get to 60 by having a weight of 176.5 and body fat of 22%.

My goal might not be too ambitious, but changing one’s body composition is hard.

For January, my average weight was 172.2lbs, and my body fat was 23.2%. That’s a score of 52.3. I have some work to do.

Body and Brain Points (300 and 225 respectively)

I score myself from 1 (poor) to 5 (great) each week for diet and exercise. I then add them up for the month. I got 20 points in January, which puts me on pace for 240 points. Most of the points came from diet. It was too cold for exercise. We have a treadmill, but even the basement, where it is, is too cold.

I measure brain points on the same scale. They are based on doing things like Duolingo (Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, and Chess), and the NY Times puzzles (Wordle, Strands, and Connections). I want to include more creative stuff, such as drawing and/or music. Until I add those, I’m likely to max out at 4 points per week by doing all the previous stuff. For January, I averaged 20 brain points. Getting to 225 should be no problem at this rate.

Blood Pressure (Goal: 115/75)

I started measuring my blood pressure every day (sometimes twice a day) last year. It was too high. However, it was never high in the doctor’s office, so my doctor gave me the lowest dose of medication. I got this blood pressure monitor and it tracks it over time in an app. I brought this to my doctor, and she upped my medication by a tiny bit. That link to the device is an affiliate link, by the way.

In January, it was 137/84. It seems time to raise the medication a bit more.

Doctor Appointments

It feels like I’m the doctor or the dentist a couple of times a month now. Last month I had a crown and filling fixed. This month I’m getting another filling fixed. I’m due for another cleaning as well. When I’m done with that, it will be time to switch over to the doctor appointments.

For someone reasonably healthy, this is kind of crazy.

Longevity Research (40 hours)

I did a little of this last year, but not enough. I’m renewing this goal for this year. I have to remember to keep track of time when I do it, though.

In January, I read a little bit of The Washington Post’s longevity newsletter.

Hobbies

3D Printing

I had this on the list for a couple of years. I bought a 3D printer, but never got it to work. It seems to have shipped with the filament broken inside the tube. With my 6th grader’s help, we disassembled the 3D printer, removing at least a dozen screws to get the tube out. Then we boiled the tube for about 10-15 seconds. That allows us to clear out the filament by chasing it with another one.

Long story short, we got it working. Now my son wants to learn Blender, so he can 3D print characters he makes. My other son may make fidget toys and sell them. Finally, we’re getting some use out of this.

Play a modern song on a ukulele

I had this on the list last year, too. Maybe it will be like the 3D printer. This would do double duty with the brain exercises that I mentioned above.

Family

Declutter and Organize House

Every year, we aim to declutter and organize better than the year before. Stuff builds up over time. Much of it comes from kids growing out of things. The rest comes from me. I have difficulty getting rid of “good stuff with value” even if we don’t use it. It sounds easy enough to donate, but many places near us won’t accept it. If they do, then 90% of it ends in the trash anyway.

Travel

We are still planning our trips, but we have the following in some form:

• March: Aruba

  We have a Marriott timeshare and the kids have a school break. Usually, I just relax there and try to do absolutely nothing. This time, I’m going to celebrate my 50th birthday, so I’m going to try to get into all sorts of trouble.

• June: Alaska Cruise and Denali Land Tour

  My mother-in-law has always wanted to go there. My wife realizes she’s not getting any younger, and being the awesome person she is, booked this. It probably wouldn’t rank in my or my kids’ top 25 choices of places to go, but I’m sure we’ll have fun with the new experience. I’m worried it won’t be 70 degrees like it is at home. I had enough of this cold winter. I see no reason to trade summer days for winter days.

  We had to pay extra for a land tour to Denali, but that was part of what my mother-in-law wanted to see.

• August: Tuscany

  My wife got carried away at an auction and bought a vacation in Tuscany. She’s always wanted to go, so maybe it was a sign. Also, the auction money went to a local mental health non-profit. That’s a win.

  We haven’t thought much about what we are going to do. Actually, I’m sure my wife has some ideas, but she hasn’t shared them yet.

Kids

The kids continue to do their elite private school thing. It’s gotten absurdly expensive over the years, but my wife’s military discount gives us a big break.
We have to figure out what our 7th-grader is going to do in high school. Outside of that, the biggest things are summer camps, after-school activities, and the aforementioned vacations.

After School Activities

Both kids got their black belts in karate last year. They complained about going every day, so I was happy to reach the milestone and no longer have to fight with them. However, the dojo previewed some of the advanced stuff they’d do, and my kids loved it, so they signed up for another year. That was four months ago, and very little of the advanced stuff has taken place. They are back to complaining about going.

Both kids are in Scouting America, but they consider the outdoors their mortal enemy. It’s not ideal. They end up squeezing in whatever they can do around the rest of the stuff.

My oldest (13) added a local children’s theater to his schedule. His school already had many plays. Some days, he’ll have 3-4 hours of play practice between the two of them.

My youngest (12) finished up the First Lego League. Their team almost made the nationals. He’ll take track in the spring as his required school sport. Without his brother’s busy acting schedule, I’ll probably spend more time with him and on side projects like the 3D printer and learning Blender.

In previous years, I’d lament that they wouldn’t learn a programming language because there were no resources nearby. Fortunately, AI has solved that with vibe coding, so we might dig into that.

Summer Camps

My oldest is doing the acting camps. That’s all we have scheduled for now. We might do a cooking camp or a golf camp. He’s done a lot of the cooking camps, but the golf is new.

My youngest is doing the stage crew for one of them and his annual sailing camp. He’s also going to the Scouting Jamboree. This would be his first overnight camp, which is exciting. I’d love to get him to more cooking camps, but it’s never worked out with his schedule.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve been reading this blog for some time, this set of goals looks a lot like last year’s. Each year evolves a little bit.

There are a few changes for this year:

1. I’m not planning to put any focus on Kid Wealth. It’s still a great website/blog for helping kids learn about money, but I never got the readers or any money from it. It’s like building a luxury condo in the middle of a desert without access to roads or utilities.
2. I’m putting a lot of emphasis on AI. I find myself going to it more and more for solutions. I find it amazing that there is an essentially limitless tool to do anything with a computer. Yes, it makes mistakes, but I’m not doing it for anything that requires high-level perfection like brain surgery.

The post My Passive Income and Life Goals for 2026 appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

I wasn’t sure what to write about today, so I’m going with a mixed bag approach. Let’s get started:

Have you seen Bitcoin drop lately?

I started buying a little Bitcoin in April, 2021. It was around its peak at the time, at around $60,000. I invested $50 here and there. It was enough that I didn’t notice it, but I had hoped it would add up over time. It gradually dropped to $30,000, and I continued to buy occasionally. It really fell in June of 2022, getting around $18,000. That’s when I invested $250 a few times. Then I just let it sit.

That changed last November when it dropped from its high of around $125,000 to $90,000. I started buying once again, but in $50 and $100 increments. I bought at 85k, 82k, 78k, 75k, 72k, 67k and finally Thurday at 63k. That last one was $200.

It feels like gambling. There’s no business behind Bitcoin – no earnings or dividends to guide true investing. At this point, I’m basically putting money into the idea that it is too big to fail. There are financial companies with big stakes in Bitcoin.

Around one month ago, I wrote that TINA is back – which means There Is No Alternative. Everything in the markets was high. However, that doesn’t feel true anymore. If you are thinking about buying Bitcoin, proceed with caution.

Rental Property Finally Rented

Last March, our tenant broke the lease and left town. There was a huge health issue, and they needed to be closer to the hospital. We spent a few months completely renovating it. The market in Newport, RI, is very seasonal, with many going south for the winter. We missed the popular summer months, and no one was looking or applying. This week, we finally signed a lease!

Actually Focusing on My Hobbies

One of the main reasons for this week’s article delay is that I’m enjoying my new hobbies too much. Some are things that I meant to do all last year. Since that will be part of my monthly update next week, I’ll save it for then.

Super Bowl Prediction

I used to write a really long Super Bowl prediction article when the Patriots were in it. I suspect this got really annoying for readers not from New England. I tried to make it a “bonus” article on the weekend, but I still can see how it could have rubbed people the wrong way. So I’m going to keep this fairly short.

Seattle has shown itself to be the better team all year. That’s why they are the favorites. The Patriots’ defense has been tremendous when its two stars (Christian Gonzalez and Milton Williams) are on the field. In the three playoff games, they’ve allowed only 8.6/game. Because I’m a biased homer, I’m buying into the theory that the Patriots can force NFL turnover leader Sam Darnold into one extra turnover that will be the difference. Also, it’s hard to vote against a team that has the best player at the most important position. (Drake Maye was 1.3% votes short of the MVP in the closest vote in more than two decades.)

Score: Patriots 24, Seattle 20

The post Odds and Ends (February 2026) appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

Fortunately, an old college friend called, and she inspired this pivot. I hadn’t talked to her in several months. We talked about a variety of topics, but of course, I wouldn’t be writing this if we hadn’t gotten to personal finance.

She lamented that she and her husband didn’t really have the savings she expected. They are 46 and still working ridiculously hard. For a pair of doctors*, I can imagine why there is some disappointment. She analyzed it on the call – she doesn’t like to take risks. The husband sounds like he’s always been willing to take more risks. So they are looking to make a change.

She mentioned two paths they are considering. One is opening their own practice. I don’t know much about that area, but the start-up costs for equipment must be a lot. The other was investing in real estate. She didn’t know that we had rental properties for 20 years now. When she learned that, she was curious to learn more – “How has it worked out?” My short answer is that we made a good amount of equity, around $800,000. However, it’s work, and we currently have a property that has been vacant for about 10 months. We put $35,000 into fixing it up and haven’t been able to collect the $20,000 rent that we normally would if we could have someone in it. (Some of the 10 months were renovation. The rest may be attributable to Newport, RI being EXTREMELY seasonal.)

I told her that I’d send her some resources to get started. (Yep, I’m reusing much of that email as a blog post. Score me a rack of Lazy aura points!**)

Real Estate Investing for Beginners

I decided to go with a multimodal approach and focused on three areas:

Best Beginner Real Estate Investing Book (and Support)

A great beginner book is: How to Invest in Real Estate: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Getting Started by the Bigger Pockets duo of Brandon Turner and Joshua Dorkin. All the Bigger Pockets books are great, but this is literally the “Beginner’s Guide.” Of course, I couldn’t mention Bigger Pockets without mentioning the incredible community forum on their website. (The book is an affiliate link. I might make a few dollars if you sign up.)

Best Beginner Real Estate Course

Financial guru Paula Pant also has a well-known course, Your First Rental Property. I still remember when she introduced herself to me at the first FinCon and explained that her website Afford Anything doesn’t mean Afford Everything. Now, 15 years ago, and now she’s huge – even has her own Netflix show. I talked with her every year at that conference for a number of years, and she always had the coolest story to tell about some adventure she went on. I warned her that the course isn’t cheap. However, I think she’s been running for 10 years now, and the lifetime membership is a good value given that. Then again, when you are entering something with the idea of making hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s a drop in the bucket – as long as you use it.

(Note: That’s not an affiliate link. I don’t make anything if you buy the program.)

Best Real Estate Investing Tool

Maybe this isn’t the best, but this is my favorite. If you know of a better one, please leave it in the comments.

The best way that I’ve found to know if it’s a good time to buy is to use the NAHB/Wells Fargo Index. Just scroll down to the chart, and you’ll see that it dropped before the housing crash in 2007-8 and rose before the run-up around 2020. The average is 50. I’d look to buy when it is 30 and consider selling when it is 70. That’s an oversimplification, and buying and selling real estate isn’t just a few clicks on a website like your brokerage’s.

Of course, real estate is local. The national average is fine, but they also have regional numbers. The link just under the chart downloads an Excel spreadsheet with those numbers. I’m sure there are other great tools, but I never see people talking about this one.

Final Thoughts

I ended the email to my friend by saying I can provide some similar reading on investing in the stock market. That wasn’t an area that she had mentioned. Also, my stock market indicators, unlike the real estate ones, say it’s the worst time to buy stock in the past hundred years. Indicators can be wrong, and they have been for about a year now. I was happy to avoid that topic completely for now.

* They aren’t MDs, but doctors, like a dentist or a pharmacist. I am trying to keep things a little vague to keep anonymity.

** I’m practicing my Gen Z slang, so I can talk all the coolness out of how my kids talk. This roughly means that I’m being very lazy, which is “on brand.”

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Even if you don’t look at stocks every day, you may have heard on the news about a big drop in the indexes after the US took Greenland by force and ended NATO. I subscribe to a few financial newsletters, and they were all saying, “Don’t sell your stocks.” That’s been wise advice as the stock market has been extremely resilient. I would think people would shift their money to a more reliable place. Perhaps that’s part of why the international markets have done so well over the last year.

Rather than just telling people not to sell their stocks, we should emphasize the importance of ‘buying the dip.’ It doesn’t have to be one or the other—it can be both. Still, promoting ‘buy the dip’ effectively encourages holding onto stocks rather than selling.

I’ve found that consistent, small moves—shifting bonds to stocks during these dips—align with the core principle: use volatility as an entry point rather than a reason to panic. My increased willingness to buy the dip, even amid uncertainty about “The Big Drop,” is a practical application of this strategy. Large drops typically take weeks, offering several buy opportunities.

President Trump has caused enough of these dips that it’s earned a nickname. They call it a TACO trade – as in, Trump Always Chickens Out. It happens when Trump comes up with a particularly outlandish idea that is almost universally considered very bad. The market freaks out and Trump changes course. You buy (low) when the market freaks out and sell (high) back into bonds when he comes to his senses.

This week, the TACO trade was just a blip. Almost as soon as the market dropped, reports say Trump saw bond yields rise and changed course. He finally took military force off the table, and it seems like he pretty much got what he had before – the ability to have military bases there for security. He also claims to have gotten some mineral rights, but I don’t expect that to produce anything significant in his lifetime. I’ve read that it’s hard to reach all the minerals beneath the ice. In any case, it seems like it should be considered a bonus if it happens.

In the meantime, I’ll take my small gains. Let’s stay proactive and tackle the next drama sure to arrive in 3… 2… 1…

The post Making Money from the TACO Trade appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

Personal Update

The holidays always go quickly with so much going on. This past December, we:

• Went to the local boutique movie theater twice. We saw The Sound of Music and The Muppet’s Christmas Carol – two of my wife’s favorites. We had just stayed at the Von Trapp Lodge in Vermont at the end of November, so it was a priority to introduce the kids to The Sound of Music. The big cinema in town shut down a few years ago, so support this small one as much as we can.
• My wife took the kids skiing for a couple of days. I had dogs to watch at the house. They had a lot of fun, though.
• My oldest son was a big character in the school’s production of The Grinch. Their rotation is set to do a Christmas Carol next year, so he’s got his eye set on Scrooge. My youngest is in stagecraft and they were working on the Grinch set since September.

(My kids’ are Kings of the Hill with these sleds. They are each $178 now on Amazon, but we got them for $100 last year.)

We went to a bunch of other stuff, but that’s enough for now. Let’s get onto the goals and financials:

My Goals for 2025

I put all my goals in a spreadsheet. Here’s what it looks like for this year. I’ll explain what each one is in this article and give the results so far.

(Click it, and a bigger version will open in a new tab.)

Steal this idea and make it yours. I make an absurd number of goals I know I’ll never complete. It gives me the flexibility to fail on some things as long as I’m making progress on others. Most people would do the opposite, focus on fewer goals, and aim to get them all done. It’s much less overwhelming. As always, I’m pretty crazy, so do what works for you.

Passive Income

For years, I had three side hustles with a passive component: a dog-sitting business, this blog, and the last full article will help it make more sense.

Dog and Web Income

In December, we had a full month of dog bookings, a change from all the travel we did in November.

(My wife got Christmas presents for the dogs we are boarding)

For completeness, the blogging income was minimal once again. It didn’t even pay for the cost of hosting.

In December, I had income of $4,938.13 from these sources. That was a good deal better than November’s $1,956.19. For the full year, this added up to $55,003.05. Last year, it all added up to $55,918.63, so it went down about $900. That’s remarkably consistent for self-employment income.

Rental Property Income

We have two rental properties. Perhaps we should only have one? We still have mortgages on them, so when they are fully rented, we make around $700/mo. We will pay off one mortgage in 2027. The other one is a small loan, but it has another 15 years on it. If they were both mortgage-free, we’d make around $30,000 a year after all expected expenses, including maintenance.

Way back in March, one of our tenants broke the lease and moved out suddenly. We renovated the property, which took three months longer than it should have, and then put it on the market for rent. It has sat unrented for many months now. We lowered the price by 20%, and that didn’t help. We thought it would be best to start in December, but they needed three parking spots, and the condo association couldn’t help make it work. They backed out at the signing, and we are back to square one. We had another agreement to rent it mid-December, but they also backed out and went for another place. Neither of them seemed like they would be good tenants, but we were willing to compromise because it’s been vacant for so long.

We’ve had a couple more “almost rents” in the last couple of weeks, but nothing has been fruitful yet.

For the purpose of this report, I calculate the rental property income using the following formula:

(Rents After Estimated Expenses) * (Equity Percentage Owned) = Income)

Estimated expenses are insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and condo maintenance. Equity Percentage Owned (EPO) is our total equity divided by the property value on Zillow. (Zillow is very accurate for our condos.)

In December, Zillow estimated our properties were worth about $4,000 less than the month before. As usual, we paid off about one thousand dollars in mortgage principal. That meant that our EPO went from owning 83.97% of our properties to 83.99% of them. That’s the downside of the properties losing value.

A few months ago, I decided to make the terrible assumption that we’re going to get close to the price we’re asking for rent. I had to adjust that as we have lowered the asking price. The rents (with that assumption) after expenses are $2,823/month. Using the equation above, our income from this area would be $2,371. That’s $1 more than last month – not worth the time it took to type this. We’ll probably do better when it’s summer, and the demand is through the roof.

For the year, this number was $27,499, which was better than last year’s $23,760. That would pay a good number of bills in retirement.

Managing rental properties requires some work. With the recent renovation, we’re doing more than we have in a few years. For this reason, I only count 80% of this as passive income.

Dividend Income

My wife has been maxing out her retirement accounts for a couple of decades. I haven’t done quite as well, but I still have over 30 years of Roth IRAs and a lot of years of 401(k) investments. The markets have done very well over that time. That leads to a sizeable nest egg.

I don’t track exact dividends from all the accounts. (It’s a win if I can get my wife to log into her TSP account and give me the totals.) Instead, I assume we could easily invest the money in the accounts into an ETF that pays a 2.5% dividend. For example, HDV currently yields 3.30%. I DO track dividends in our main brokerage account that isn’t a retirement account. We average about 2.5% dividend there.

I also have profit-sharing income with a private company in which I own a small stake. I get a check each month that behaves like a dividend – it’s just taxed a little differently.

(My kids trapped themselves trying to move this gigantic Lovesac. To hide my son’s face, I used Google’s Magic Eraser and it removed his head. Somehow that makes me laugh even more!)

The stock market gained a tiny bit in December. The stock market value is very high now, so I am surprised by any gain. Last month, the dividend income number was $5,803. This month it is $5,838 – a gain of $30.

For the year, dividend income would be $64,278. That would cover all of our necessary expenses if you don’t count the kids’ private school. Also, those expenses would largely be a mortgage that will be paid in full in the next 18 months or so. Last year, dividend income was $57,304.00, so that $7,000 growth would more than fight inflation. If only we could count on the stock market doing what it did last year.

Unlike the previous two sections, this income is 100% passive. For this reason, I don’t have to adjust the numbers.

Total Passive Income

Dog/Blogs: $4,938.13 – Adjusted by 50% to $2,469.07
Rentals: $2,371 – Adjusted by 20% to $1,897
Dividends: $5,803 – Remains at $5,838

Dogs/Blogs Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line

Total Adjusted Passive Income: $10,203.87

Last month it was $8677.10. I went on vacation then and didn’t do much dog boarding. If I only count the stocks and real estate, it would be $7,735, which is a record for me.

Here’s a graph of the adjusted passive income since 2017, when I started keeping track of it:

(The blue line represents the monthly total adjusted passive income. The Red Line represents the 12-month average. The point of doing the 12-month average is that dog boarding has some seasonality, and some months are always busier than others.)

My goal for this passive-ish income was to reach $109,000 for the year. I got to $114,399, so that’s a big win. I can’t take too much credit, though; it’s the market doing its thing. If I gave up the dog boarding and just used real estate and dividends, it would be $91,777 for the year. That would be pretty good to retire on, I think.

My wife continues to work as well. However, as a pharmacist working with public health, she has problems supporting RFK Jr.’s disinformation campaign. She set a retirement date about a year away. She’ll have 27 years in the military and will be getting a pension that would double all this passive income. That pension grows a little each month, and now we’re keeping track of it precisely.

I can’t think of anywhere else to put this information, but our net worth went up 0.26% last month. For the whole year, it was up 11.53%. That’s a great gain considering that our real estate didn’t do too much – except be a money pit.

Business and Other Money Goals

Personal Income (Goal: $75,000. Actual: $80,593)

Three years ago, I made over $98,000 in side hustles. Two years ago, I made $88,000. Last year, I made a little more than $81,000. I see a trend, and it is not great. That’s okay; overall, our passive income is going up, so everything is going as planned.

This year, I aimed to make $75,000. With the very good dog boarding month in December, I made $80,593. Woo-hoo! Goal achieved. Since this is just a little less than last year’s, it looks like I should set a goal of around $80,000 going forward.

I had counted on blogging to go to essentially zero, but I hadn’t counted on growing the dog boarding. I also picked up some other side-work.

Complete Estate Planning

I got the estate planning documents from the lawyer back near the start of the year. This is done. Yay!

Kid Wealth (Goal: 50,000 Page Views)

For the fourth year, I hope to get to 50,000 page views on Kid Wealth. I thought something would go viral in the first year, and I’d get most of them in one day. That hasn’t happened.

It’s taken all those years to get to 50,000 lifetime views. It’s at 50,562 to be exact. Um, yay, I reached this goal. Since blogging is mostly dead now, this is like crossing the finish line when the crowd has already gone home.

I’m still looking for a partner or some motivation to make it into a business. Any readers interested? I simply don’t believe the money is in blogging anymore. I still believe in the value of the written word, but I think the brand needs to be something else. My interest has moved on to other projects for now.

Maybe it could be a non-profit and receive some kind of grant money? It’s a good brand and cause, and I’m sure it can be valuable with time to move it in the right direction. I’ve invested enough money and set up a good foundation, but it probably wouldn’t sell for anything much. It was never about making money, so selling it at a loss isn’t worth it to me.

Professional Improvements

I really didn’t do any real professional work. I did quite a bit with AI, but nothing that is probably going to move the needle long-term. For the year, I feel like I did a good amount of professional development. I’d like to see it translate into paying gigs.

(These lights were 50% off at Home Depot last year. I went near Christmas when there was a sale this year, to look for a Santa. I didn’t find one, but I did find two dogs, perfect for our dog business.)

Health

I’m putting a large emphasis on health these days. It’s so big that I wrote a separate article about it. My health goals for 2025 are here.

Weight and Body Fat (Goal: 164lbs/19% BF Actual: 172.1lbs/22.5% BF)

My average weight in December was 172.9 pounds. It was largely skewed from the Thanksgiving weight at the beginning of the month. The month that I weighed the most was April at 175lbs. The month that I weighed the least was October at 169.5 pounds. Overall, my body weight was fairly consistent, almost always within 2 pounds of 172. That’s down 9 pounds from last year’s average, but it’s deceiving because I lost that weight last year – I simply maintained where I was in December.

My body fat was 22.5% for the year, down 1.3% from the year before. It barely changed all year. These averages are from my Fitbit Aria scale.

Body and Brain Points (Goal: 300 and 200 respectively)

I score myself from 1 (poor) to 5 (great) each week for diet and exercise. Then, I add them up for the month. December was a cold month, so I didn’t get much exercise in. I also didn’t eat that great due to holiday parties.

At the end of the year, I had 295 body points. I got soooo close.

I measure brain points on the same scale. They are based on doing things like the daily Wordle and New York Times Connections. I also do Duolingo. Usually, I study Japanese, but I’ve been hooked on playing Oscar in chess. My ELO hovers around 1050. I also started to learn Esperanto. Why? Simply because it’s an unusual thing to do. Who in their right mind would learn Esperanto? Exactly! So far, it’s fairly close to the Spanish that I already know.

At the end of the year, I came in at exactly 200 brain points! I think I’ll retire this goal in the future. I’ve built a lot of good daily habits, so I feel like this would be a slam dunk.

Blood Pressure (Goal: 115/75 Actual: 132/80)

I have a family history of high blood pressure. I had a little medical scare in the first couple of days of the year. Now I think it is orthostatic hypotension, but I didn’t know that at the start of the year. It seems pointless to try to be healthy in a bunch of other ways and let high blood pressure create all kinds of problems under the surface.

My blood pressure last January averaged 138/92, which is high. My doctor put me on super cheap Lisinopril, and it came down.

I use this Omron Blood Pressure Monitor. That’s an affiliate link, so I might make a couple of extra dollars if you click on it and buy it. It’s a game-changer with how it does averages and makes graphs. It even creates a report that I can give to my doctor.

For most of December, the app signed out of my account and didn’t keep good numbers. It would have been nice if it warned me about that. Overall, though, it looks like it was the yearly average of 132/80.

Doctor Appointments

I had my annual physical in December and aced it, which was a good change.

During the dentist cleaning last month, I found out ALL my fillings are breaking down at the same time. One even broke down in the office during the cleaning. There weren’t any appointments for a couple of months, but I was able to sneak in during a cancellation. The dentist had to put a crown on a tooth and said it was one of the top 5 hardest he’s ever done. I guess I have an abnormally small mouth, and it’s hard to get back there.

It took so long to do the crown that he didn’t do any of the other fillings. I have an appointment this month (January) to either do the fillings and/or get the real crown. It seems that when you get a crown, they give you a temporary one for a few weeks while they make a long-lasting one in some kind of factory somewhere. This is all news to me.

Longevity Research

I didn’t do any longevity research in December. For the year, I didn’t do nearly as much research as I hoped. I give myself only a 65 out of 100.

I signed up for The Washington Post’s new longevity newsletter for 2026. I guess it is only 7 days, though. That’s something, right?

Hobbies

Prior to this year, I haven’t been doing well in developing hobbies. I’d say that I want to get into flying drones or something else, but I never seem to have the time. I started a new productivity system in the summer, and it worked for a little bit. Then I fell out of the habit. So far, in 2026, I’m doing much better with it.

Boost AI Skills

I’ve done so much with AI this year, and yet, I’m just scratching the surface. It’s impossible to follow the industry because there seems to be a hundred new breakthroughs each day. This past month, I found Sudowrite, which is a specialty AI app/website for writing a fiction novel. It looks very cool, but I think I can do most of what it does with Claude. I tried ChatGPT, and I couldn’t get it to write anything like I wanted. Claude got it the first time.

3D Printing

After doing about 90% of the work to hopefully get the 3D printer working a couple of months ago, I haven’t done anything since.

Journaling

I like the idea of journaling, but I didn’t get to it. I think I’ve written enough. LOL, I will probably retire this for next year.

Here are some other ideas of things I want to work on this year:

• Learn to fly a flight simulator – This didn’t happen
• Play a modern song on a ukulele – I’m going to try this again this year.
• Rubik’s Cube – I didn’t get any faster at solving it. I even forgot some steps. It comes back quickly, though.

You may recognize the last two of these hobbies from my brain health goals for 2025.

I signed up for Masterclass, which I thought could teach me the ukulele, but I haven’t moved forward on that either.

Family

Declutter and Organize House (120% Progress)

For some reason, I thought that we’d reach a point where I’d say, “Hey, we’re done.” Now, I’m starting to realize that we will never be done. That makes sense; it’s not like there’s a finish line with health.

(For the holidays the local grocery stores had prime rib deals. They were $6.99/lb, which isn’t bad for high quality beef these days. So I bought a few, cut them up, and froze them.)

Travel

We wrapped up our travel in November, so no travel in December.

Here’s our recap of the year:

• In March, we spent a week in Florida and then went on the Icon of the Seas around the Caribbean for a week. It is the largest cruise ship in the world. The ship was great, but the ports were kind of dull.
• In June, we went to the nearby Block Island for a few days. We try to do that every year. It’s great to get away from technology for a bit.
• In August, we took a road trip to Niagara Falls and looped back through NY. It was supposed to be longer and go to Canada, but my wife got deployed for a potential hurricane that never happened.
• In November, we went to Puerto Rico so that I could earn some continuing education credits. It was good to just swim in the sun for a few days. After that, we went to the Von Trapp Family lodge in Stowe, VT, to ski for a couple of days.

We’ve made more progress planning our 2026 travel. It’s looking like a week in Aruba, an Alaskan cruise, a week in Tuscany, a partial week in Aruba (work-related), and a trip to Reno.

Kids

The kids had a very successful year.

The 13-year-old got all A’s on his report card in the 6th grade. He might have gotten an A- in something. He’s solidly in all A’s for the first half of the school year in 7th grade. He doesn’t even try. When things get tougher, he’ll be in for a rude awakening. I just don’t know when it’s going to happen.

He’s been focused on acting in various plays. The school has a lot, but he added the local children’s theater. He often has 3 plays at the same time. One will finish just as the next one is beginning. Other than that, he’s probably a tremendous Fortnite player with all the time he spends on it. Oh, and great at watching YouTube as well. That’s just about every kid, though.

Our 12-year-old had some difficulties adjusting to middle school in the first month. They didn’t give out real letter grades in elementary school. It’s all the same physical private school, but somehow, they didn’t prepare well for this transition from 5th to 6th. From what I can tell, everyone got terrible grades to start the year. He dug a pretty deep hole. Once he understood what the teachers wanted, he was able to get A’s. That puts him in the B+ range now, except for math, which is somehow a 99%.

He didn’t really embrace any new activities like the 13-year-old. The local First Lego League robotics is kind of a joke. It gets a lot better when he’s in 8th grade.

Both kids earned their black belts in karate. They decided to continue, but the timing doesn’t work very well with their other activities. They are also in Scouting America, and it’s kind of the same story. At least it keeps them off YouTube and Fortnite a bit.

Final Thoughts

At this point, I’m looking more at setting goals for 2026. It usually takes me most of January to put them together. It’s very silly, because they are similar every year, except the hobby ones, which are things that I often don’t do anyway. I could probably save some time and say that I want to raise some chickens, win a dance contest, and eat with my feet. If I’m not going to do it, does it even matter?

The post My Passive Income and Life Goals Update (December 2025) appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

I was looking at the stock market recently, and I simply shook my head. I almost always have a pretty clear idea of what is cheap and what is expensive. However, everything looks expensive. For the first time since November of 2020, I felt like we’re in a true TINA situation. For those who don’t know, TINA is an acronym for There Is No Alternative.

When I say something “looks expensive”, I mean that it is priced near its all-time highs. It’s not too rare to have a few indices near the all-time highs. After all, the market generally goes up over time. The only way to do that is to break some records going up. But nearly everything is at an all-time high. When something is within 2% of its all-time highs, my spreadsheet gives it a blue coloring. I use that to tell me to consider whether it’s time to rebalance that position into something else that isn’t near its highs. (There’s no real significance to blue; it’s just a color that I hadn’t used. Maybe we can say it is like an ultra-hot flame?)

When I look at my spreadsheet, it is all blue. The general US stock market (VTI) is blue. International stocks (ETF symbols VWO, VEU, VXUS) are blue. Small caps (VB), dividend (HDV), and Bonds (BND) are blue. NASDAQ Cubes (QQQ) is not blue, but it’s super close. It’s also up 132.13% since 2023 due to AI driving the markets.

All those being near their all-time highs doesn’t necessarily mean that they are expensive. If earnings are through the roof, then paying a high price is justified. It’s still a good price/earnings ratio. However, the Shiller PE is in the dot-com bust range at over 40. That means that earnings are not keeping pace with prices. If you have money to invest, it feels like TINA – there is no alternative, cheap place to invest. That’s a tough situation with that Shiller PE signaling rough times ahead.

At the end of the year, many stocks pay their biggest dividends. I don’t automatically reinvest them, but use them to buy something cheap. So where do I go from here? Real estate (VNQ) is about 6% from its highs – a bargain compared to anything else. I’m not too enthusiastic about real estate lately. Energy (XLE) and utilities (VPU) are worth considering. If there’s a crash, they’ll probably do better than most stock ETFs. However, I’ve already invested in them, and I feel like I have a good asset allocation there.

This leaves me to look at individual stocks. I had been trying to sell off my individual stocks to simplify my portfolio. When you get to the world of individual stocks, there appear to be some bargains. The problem is that there are usually some red flags. Also, individual stocks have a diversification problem. Nonetheless, I think I’ve found a couple that I like:

Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) and Colgate-Palmolive (NYSE: CL)

Both of these consumer staple companies are trading near their 52-week lows. They both are Dividend Kings, meaning that they’ve increased their dividends for 50 years or more. They also have price/earnings that are attractive, around 21, nearly half the Shiller P/E. I couldn’t find any red flags with their businesses. It seems like investors are simply focused on big growth in the AI industry. That’s fine, it gives me an opportunity to buy low.

Now it’s your turn. What are you investing in? Let me know in the comments below.

The post TINA is Back! appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

I’ll stick to larger financial trends or macroeconomics if you like words with many syllables. Let’s start with the year in review. Since you already lived this year, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.

Year 2025 in review

Artificial Intelligence is the whole economy

A few analysts have shown that all the gains in the stock market this year are due to AI companies. That’s a big claim as the stock market is up almost 17% this year. I’m not sure if it is completely true, but it seems like every day there was a new $100+ billion dollar AI infrastructure deal. It was often one AI company passing it to another. For example, Nvidia invested in OpenAI. OpenAI invested in Oracle. Oracle invested nearly $250 billion in data centers. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta all invested in nuclear power.

(On a personal level, I invested in exchange-traded funds of ZAP and NLR. These ETFs hold companies that work with power grids and nuclear respectively.)

The whole AI boom has lead the Roundhill Generative AI & Technology ETF (symbol: CHAT) to 50% returns on the year. It’s impressive because a lot of the AI companies had already seen huge gains in 2024.

Tariffs weren’t that big of a deal

The big numbers that were given on “Liberation Day”, mostly never came to pass. Some countries made “deals” that they weren’t obligated to follow through with. For example, Japan promised $550 billion in U.S. investments in certain sectors by 2029. One of the sectors is AI and a Japanese company, Softbank, already agreed on co-funding a $500 billion Stargate project with OpenAI.

Trump got mad at Apple for making iPhones overseas. Apple gave Trump a trophy that was “Made in America” featuring New York-based Corning Glass and gold. Corning Glass has made iPhone screens since 2007. In fact, almost every phone manufacturer has used it for a long time. Trump loves anything gold. Apple also announced increased spending in the United States, some of which are… can you guess? You win if you said, “Data centers for AI.”

Most everyone that was due to get hit hard with tariffs quickly found out that they were able to get out of it fairly easily. Simply give Trump a promise so that he has something to brag about.

There were a couple of other reasons why tariffs didn’t impact consumers too much. Many companies bought supply in advance, so they weren’t impacted right away. They could spread the price increase gradually. Some companies “ate” part of the cost themselves. Studies have shown that tariffs were responsible for 0.7% of the overall increase in inflation.

The US Government got decimated

The government started the year in a civil war. DOGE became a government agency that was charged with cutting government agencies and programs. To use my favorite saying from Thomas the Tank Engine, it “created a lot of confusion and delay.” In the end, government spending was more in 2025 than it was in 2024.

The government was also shut down for about a month and a half, because Democrats noticed that some people were going to have super high health care bills in the New Year. Republicans wanted to ignore it and in the end the Democrats caved and no new health care plan was made. Republicans then spent the next month realizing that the Democrats had a point and should do something about it. They argued with each other about what to do and nothing got done in time.

If the two political parties had worked together on a compromise over the last two months, it could have been solved without a government shutdown at all. We recently found out that the DC pipe bomber from January 2021 hated both political parties. Clearly things have not gotten better. I pray that they start working together soon, because it seems like more and more Americans are considering violence a viable solution. To give some numbers to back it up, Pew polling shows that 85% of Americans believe politically motivated violence is increasing in the U.S.. It’s HARD to get 85% of Americans to agree on anything, so this is quite sobering. Additionally, NPR shows that more Americans say that they may have to resort to violence.

Sorry for getting a bit political there, but a stable government is a good thing for financial markets.

The Big Beautiful Bill kept taxes consistent

While Republicans were dead set against helping people with soaring health care costs, they felt very different about taxes. Trump’s Tax Act of 2017 was set to expire at the end of the year, which would have set taxes back to the higher rates in 2016. If Republicans hadn’t passed it, many Americans would have looked at their higher tax bill and been upset at taxes being raised. That wouldn’t be a good look for the next election. However, to pass it, Republicans had to find a way to cut spending. Otherwise, it would just continue to grow the national debt. They cut health care (Medicaid) and food assistance (SNAP) programs.

Overall the continued tax cuts will cost 4.5 trillion over the next 10 years and the spending cut was only around 1.5 trillion.

The Fed cut rates a bit

The Federal Reserve was on track to cut the rates a lot in 2025 as inflation had come back under control. However, increased inflation from tariffs changed the plan by adding a lot of uncertainty.

What’s going to happen in year 2026

I got a new crystal ball for Christmas and here’s what it says. We’ll find out if my friend got scammed next year.

The stock market will go down 3%

The stock market has been up three years. Historically, that’s not a great sign for the fourth year. In addition to that, the Shiller P/E is above 40. The only other time it spiked this high was a 19-month span in from 1999 to 2000. That was just before the NASDAQ crashed more than 75%.

I don’t think we’ll see a big drop like back then. Many of the companies investing in AI have been making piles of cash for more than a decade. They aren’t going to drop like Pets.com in the Dot-dom bubble.

AI will get even bigger

I talk to some people who still don’t use AI much. An electrician friend of mine recently said that he used to spend 10-12 hours creating an estimate for putting in the wiring of a new house. It was laborous with using a CAD program to measure wiring and spacing. It was the worst part of his job (doing the actual electrical work is fun for him). A friend told him that ChatGPT is actually really good at it. So he put it to the test and found that he could get about the same result in 20 minutes.

It was a complete game changer in a field that most people feel won’t be impacted much by AI. (That is, until humanoid robots get much, much better which will be at least another five years.)

I think people will find more wins like my electrician friend in 2026.

Government will get more back to normal

This isn’t so much as a prediction as just noticing a trend since DOGE went away. Also, it’s hard to go up from chaotic.

Fed will lower rates

I’m expecting about three-quarters of a point. I think a lot of people are expecting half a point, but Trump is going to be able to pick a new chairman. I suspect that will move things lower as Trump wants.

Final Thoughts

I wrote most of this today (New Year’s Eve), so one thing that I don’t expect to change in 2026 is my ability to procrastinate.

The post The Past Year and the Year Ahead appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

I know I haven’t been writing as much lately, so I’m going to leverage other people’s writing with a short post. I used to do this much more often when I was active on social media.

(I apologize for the marketing in the title. These are still relevant to read AFTER the New Year.)

The Nursery Method

(A Fable About Building a Business That Works When You Don’t)

I have to start with a disclosure. One of my best friends wrote this book, but I didn’t even know he was writing it. I found out about it from a LinkedIn post. Back in college, we’d invent all kinds of great money schemes from managing a concert to developing the first tablet – about 15 years before the iPad.*

This book is essentially the Lazy Man and Money philosophy in a nutshell. When I started this website, it was about keeping myself accountable while I explored how to avoid trading time for money. The story follows four siblings, each starting a business farming on the same plot of land. They all have varying degrees of success, but one stands out from the rest. It makes money while the main character is asleep.

The secret sauce is that this book provides you with the blueprint. I wish I had it when I was starting this website. Fortunately, it’s not too late – I plan to implement a few of the ideas from the worksheets included in the book.

You are the perfect audience for this book.

Finally, another disclosure, that’s an affiliate link, so I might make about 10 cents if you buy the Kindle version. That’s only about $4, which is much cheaper than the paperback. If you have the awesome Kindle Scribe, you can take notes in the worksheets.)

The 26 Most Important Ideas For 2026

This article covers the big trends happening right now. I found myself nodding with each one. Here are some examples: kids are reading less (almost not at all) and streaming more, alcohol is down, and marijuana is up, and GLP-1s are changing the food industry. None of that is probably news to you. One I found interesting is that Americans are losing interest in patriotism, religion, having children, and getting involved in the community. The area that’s gaining interest: money. Perhaps this website will see a second life!

It’s a great read from beginning to end, but you don’t have the time (who does!), you can skim it and read the ideas that you’re interested in learning more about.

That’s it for today, I’ve got some Christmas wrapping to do. Both the real thing and listening to that song by The Waitresses – my favorite Christmas song that few people know about.

* That may sound ahead of its time, but our idea was not really not much different than a laptop with a terrible keyboard on the side.

The post Two Things to Read Before 2026 appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

Personal Update

November was a busy month. My wife needed to earn some continuing education credits for her pharmacist license and decided to do them in Puerto Rico. The kids and I tagged along, and we had five days in perfect weather. It made me seriously consider moving to someplace like Florida.

At the end of the month, we had a great family Thanksgiving. In the morning, I did a five-mile turkey trot run, which is my personal longest. My time of 1:10 wasn’t anything to write home about, but I finished. After Thanksgiving, we took off to the Von Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont, for my wife’s birthday. I went skiing for the third time in my life (second in 20 years) and improved a good amount with a lesson. The rest of my family are intermediate level and go several times a year.

So in one month, our travel took us from swimming in 90-degree heat to skiing in 18-degree snow. It’s quite a change from our average temperature of around 42 degrees in Rhode Island.

Let’s get onto the goals and financials:

My Goals for 2025

I put all my goals in a spreadsheet. Here’s what it looks like for this year. I’ll explain what each one is in this article and give the results so far.

(Click it, and a bigger version will open in a new tab.)

Steal this idea and make it yours. I make an absurd number of goals I know I’ll never complete. It gives me the flexibility to fail on some things as long as I’m making progress on others. Most people would do the opposite, focus on fewer goals, and aim to get them all done. It’s much less overwhelming. As always, I’m pretty crazy, so do what works for you.

Passive Income

I have three side hustles with a passive component: a dog-sitting business, this blog, and a website I manage for a non-profit. They all require some active work. However, I can get paid by all three even while working a full-time job. I make a very little bit of money in my sleep from blogging and simply being available to do the website work. The same is true for dog boarding. I have to feed the dogs, but it’s a lot different than getting an hour wage. I consider income from these areas as half passive income.

(I do some other hourly work that isn’t passive income. That isn’t included here as there is no passive component to it.)

In the past, I’ve written a whole monthly article on this passive income. I’ve cut out the fluff to give you the numbers with minimal explanation. If this area seems off or confusing, reading the last full article will help it make more sense.

Dog, Blog, and Web Income

With the travel this month, we couldn’t book too many dogs. I closed for nearly a full week while in Puerto Rico. I had to turn away a lot of business the week of Thanksgiving because we were traveling. Many people were looking to book for the whole week.

[One day I had it in my head that our dog needed a walk to a new place. Usually, she just plays with the other dogs we are boarding. My wife came up with the idea of bringing her to the famous Newport RI, Cliff Walk]

Blogging income reached an all-time low. I’ll either have to come up with a plan for next year or just embrace that it’s going to be a hobby. I am enjoying many hobbies nowadays (more on that below), so there might be fewer updates if that happens.

Finally, I make some money by running a website for a non-profit I’m part of. I get a set amount every month, and most months, I don’t have to do too much.

In November, I made $1,956.19 in income from these sources. That was less than the $5,653.90 I made in October.

Rental Property Income

We have two rental properties. Perhaps we should only have one? We still have mortgages on them, so when they are fully rented, we make around $700/mo. We will pay off one mortgage in 2027. The other one is a small loan, but it has another 15 years on it. If they were both mortgage-free, we’d make around $30,000 a year after all expected expenses, including maintenance.

[Getting ready at the starting line of the turkey trot on Thanksgiving.]

Way back in March, one of our tenants broke the lease and moved out suddenly. We renovated the property, which took three months longer than it should have, and then put it on the market for rent. It has sat unrented for many months now. We lowered the price by 20% and that didn’t help. We thought it would lease in December, but they needed three parking spots, and the condo association couldn’t help make it work. They backed out at the signing, and we are back to square one.

For the purpose of this report, I calculate the rental property income using the following formula:

(Rents After Estimated Expenses) * (Equity Percentage Owned) = Income)

Estimated expenses are insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and condo maintenance. Equity Percentage Owned (EPO) is our total equity divided by the property value on Zillow. (Zillow is very accurate for our condos.)

In November, Zillow estimated our properties were worth about $4,000 more than the month before. As usual, we paid off about one thousand dollars in mortgage principal, leading to a growth of $5,000 in equity. That meant that our EPO went from owning 83.72% of our properties to 83.97% of them.

A few months ago, I decided to make the terrible assumption that we’re going to get close to the price we’re asking for rent. I had to adjust that as we have lowered the asking price. The rents (with that assumption) after expenses are $2,823/month. Using the equation above, our income from this area would be $2,370. That’s $21 more than last month, which is a nice gain for a single month.

Managing rental properties requires some work. With the recent renovation, we’re doing more than we have in a few years. For this reason, I only count 80% of this as passive income.

Dividend Income

My wife has been maxing out her retirement accounts for a couple of decades. I haven’t done quite as well, but I still have over 30 years of Roth IRAs and a lot of years of 401(k) investments. The markets have done very well over that time. That leads to a sizeable nest egg.

I don’t track exact dividends from all the accounts. (It’s a win if I can get my wife to log into her TSP account and give me the totals.) Instead, I assume we could easily invest the money in the accounts into an ETF that pays a 2.5% dividend. For example, HDV currently yields 3.41%. I DO track dividends in our main brokerage account that isn’t a retirement account. We average about 2.6% dividend there.

I also have profit-sharing income with a private company in which I own a small stake. I get a check each month that behaves like a dividend – it’s just taxed a little differently.

The stock market gained a bit in November. The stock market value is very high now, so I am surprised by any gain. Last month, the dividend income number was $5,726. This month it is $5,803. That’s a very solid gain for a single month. At the beginning of the year, this was $5,045, so it’s about a gain $750 for the year. That’s a good year. Overall, we’re making almost $10,000 more this year in dividends than last year.

Unlike the previous two sections, this income is 100% passive. For this reason, I don’t have to adjust the numbers.

Total Passive Income

Dog/Blogs: $1,956.19 – Adjusted by 50% to $978.10
Rentals: $2,370 – Adjusted by 20% to $1,896
Dividends: $5,803 – Remains at $5,803

Dogs/Blogs Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line

Total Adjusted Passive Income: $8,677

Last month it was $10,432. That’s a sizeable drop, and it’s related to the lack of dog boarding. The good news is that the stock and rental property income is $7700/mo, so we don’t need the dog boarding too much.

Here’s a graph of the adjusted passive income since 2017, when I started keeping track of it:

The blue line represents the monthly total adjusted passive income. The Red Line represents the 12-month average. The point of doing the 12-month average is that dog boarding has some seasonality, and some months are always busier than others.

My goal for this passive-ish income is to reach $109,000 for the year. It’s up to $104,195 and on pace for $113,667. When I was setting the goal, I didn’t expect the market to do as well as it has.

My wife continues to work as well. However, as a pharmacist working with public health, she has problems supporting RFK Jr.’s disinformation campaign. She’s set a retirement date, but it’s more than a year away. She has 26 years in the military and will be getting a pension that would double all this passive income. That pension grows a little each month, and now we’re keeping track of it precisely.

I can’t think of anywhere else to put this information, but our net worth went up 0.57% last month. For the year, it is up 11.25%. Our liquid cash went down around $8,000 and is down $12,000 for the year. We would be doing a lot better if the condo were rented.

Business and Other Money Goals

Personal Income ($75,000)

Three years ago, I made over $98,000 in side hustles. Two years ago, I made $88,000. Last year, I made a little more than $81,000. I see a trend, and it is not great. That’s okay; overall, our passive income is going up, so everything is going as planned.

This year, I’m aiming to make $75,000.

Through November, I made $74,621. That’s a pace of $81,404. I think I’ll finish around $80,000.

Complete Estate Planning

I got the estate planning documents from the lawyer back near the start of the year. This is done. Yay!

Kid Wealth (Goal: 50,000 Page Views)

For the fourth year, I hope to get to 50,000 page views on Kid Wealth. I thought something would go viral in the first year, and I’d get most of them in one day. That hasn’t happened.

In 2022, I launched Kid Wealth and wrote a lot of articles. It had 4,200 page views that year. In 2023, I got involved in other projects, but I tripled traffic to 13,708. Last year, traffic continued to grow to 16,352, even though I only wrote a couple of articles.

At the end of November, Kid Wealth had 50,047 lifetime views. It’s a very anti-climactic goal to complete. It’s like crossing the finish line when the crowd has already gone home.

I’m still looking for a partner or some motivation to make it into a business. Any readers interested? I simply don’t believe the money is in blogging anymore. I still believe in the value of the written word, but I think the brand needs to be something else. My interest has moved on to other projects for now.

Maybe it could be a non-profit and receive some kind of grant money? It’s a good brand and cause, and I’m sure it can be valuable with time to move it in the right direction. I’ve invested enough money and set up a good foundation, but it probably wouldn’t sell for anything much. It was never about making money, so selling it at a loss isn’t worth it to me.

Professional Improvements

A few months ago, I got really excited to create a new application. I did a solid amount with AI for a few weeks and then got distracted.

Health

I’m putting a large emphasis on health these days. It’s so big that I wrote a separate article about it. My health goals for 2025 are here.

Weight and Body Fat (Goal: 164lbs / 19% BF)

My average weight in November was 171 pounds – a pound and a half more than last month. My body fat was 22.9% which is a half percent more than I have been most of the year. The travel to Puerto Rico, Thanksgiving, and the Vermont trip caused everything to go in the wrong direction. It’s not too bad, though. These are averages over a whole month using my Fitbit Aria scale.

I’ve only lost about 2 pounds all year now, but I’m still in a pretty good place.

Body and Brain Points (300 and 200 respectively)

I score myself from 1 (poor) to 5 (great) each week for diet and exercise. Then, I add them up for the month. I did a 5-mile turkey trot race with my wife, so I gave myself an extra health point for that. I lost a couple of points for poor eating on vacation. Other than that, it was a very average month.

At the end of November, I had 275 body points. It’s a pace of… EXACTLY 300 for the year! Let’s go!

I measure brain points on the same scale. They are based on doing things like the daily Wordle and New York Times Connections. I also do Duolingo. Usually, I study Japanese, but I’ve been hooked on playing Oscar in chess. In about 30 matches so far, he beat me once, and I got stuck in 4-5 stupid stalemates. Whoever wrote the stalemate rule in chess should be ashamed of themselves.

At the end of November, I have 175 brain points. That’s a pace for around 196 points for the year. I’ve been making up a lot of ground, so I might be able to get this done, too.

Blood Pressure (Goal: 115/75)

I have a family history of high blood pressure. I had a little medical scare in the first couple of days of the year. Now I think it is orthostatic hypotension, but I didn’t know that at the start of the year. It seems pointless to try to be healthy in a bunch of other ways and let high blood pressure create all kinds of problems under the surface.

My blood pressure in January averaged 138/92, which is high. My doctor put me on lisinopril 10mg and then upped it to 15mg a few months ago. It’s amazing how cheap this generic medication is – less than $10 for a 90-day supply.

Several months ago, I bought this Omron Blood Pressure Monitor on Amazon on a Prime Day deal. That’s an affiliate link, so I might make a couple of extra dollars if you click on it and buy it. It’s a game-changer by creating averages and graphs. It even creates a report that I can give to my doctor.

In November, my blood pressure averaged 127/79. That’s barely changed from the month before and is still a tad high.

Doctor Appointments

I didn’t have a doctor appointment, but I had a dentist cleaning scheduled. It seems that ALL my fillings are breaking down at the same time. It feels like it, too. It’s a whole lot of fun (sarcasm). The good news (more sarcasm) is that my dentist was booked for a couple of months, so not much can be done. I

Longevity Research

I scheduled a DexaFit appointment and went for the first time in 18 months. I had hoped to do it every year, but I got busy. For those not familiar with DexaFit, they perform a series of tests consisting of a very detailed scan of your body, measuring your resting metabolic rate, and measuring your VO2 Max. They use this information with AI (because of course) to figure out a biological age.

There was some good news and bad news on this test. The good news is that I improved in every area. I had less body fat (29.5% vs. 31.4% before). One of the biggest concerns before was belly fat, which was at 3.57 pounds before. Now it’s at 2.51 pounds. That’s still over my peer group, though.

The bad news is that my biological age went from 49 to 51. Since I’m 50, I went from being on pace to being behind. I asked the franchise owner why my age would go up if I’m getting healthier everywhere. He said that they probably changed the algorithm in the last 18 months. I think that DexaFit tends to use its average client as a baseline, but the people interested in DexaFit tend to be athletic or more health-conscious.

Hobbies

Prior to this year, I haven’t been doing well in developing hobbies. I’d say that I want to get into flying drones or something else, but I never seem to have the time. With my new productivity system in place, I think I’m making better progress in this. Let’s find out:

Boost AI Skills

I was at the pool in Puerto Rico, and my wife was reading a book. She was telling me about how it had its own universe, such as Harry Potter, The Hobbit series, or the Sookie Stackhouse (known for HBO’s True Blood) set of books. I’ve always wanted to write a book, but it’s a LOT of work. I also feel like it’s a long ride to nowhere. There is much more content (movies, TV, social media, short-form video, etc.) than anyone has time for. Who wants to read a book from me? Plus, I’ve already got this blog that’s failing in this attention economy, right?

[For a couple of days we had almost the whole resort in Puerto Rico to ourselves.]

So, of course, with nothing better to do, I loaded up ChatGPT and started to do some market research on book universes. ChatGPT usually makes anything seem possible, but it told me that everything is saturated beyond belief. I was just about to give up when I remembered that I had wanted to write a book about a dream I had about a decade ago.

I started working on that with ChatGPT and had characters, outlines, and major plot plans for a series of eight books! I had ChatGPT put together a very short version – about 2000 words, and my wife and kids LOVED it. They usually hate all my schemes, especially AI ones, so this was different. I was talking with my 11-year-old and saying that it was a shame that I couldn’t work one idea I had into the series. Then he said something, and it occurred to me that it could be a whole separate eight-book series happening concurrently with the eight-book series that I had planned.

So now I have plans for sixteen books when I couldn’t even write one before. I’m fairly sure this will never happen, but I love doing silly stuff like this. I guess I’m a strange person who thinks strange stuff is fun.

3D Printing

After doing about 90% of the work to hopefully get the 3D printer working a couple of months ago, I haven’t done anything since.

Journaling

I like the idea of journaling, but I don’t think I’ll get to it.

Here are some other ideas of things I want to work on this year:

• Learn to fly a flight simulator – Either scrap or push to next year.
• Play a modern song on a ukulele – Either scrap or push to next year.
• Rubik’s Cube – I was able to solve it at the beginning of the year, but I had forgotten it. In November, I picked it back up and got back to where I was. At the start of the year, I had hoped to learn an advanced algorithm to do it faster, but it doesn’t look like that will happen.

You may recognize the last two of these hobbies from my brain health goals for 2025.

I signed up for Masterclass, which I think can teach the ukulele, but I haven’t moved forward on that either.

Family

Declutter and Organize House (105% Progress)

We’ve done more than I expected this year, but there’s always more to do. We’ll take the rest of the year off and focus on the holidays.

b>Travel

We did the aforementioned travel to Puerto Rico and Vermont in November.

[Turns out Stowe, VT is on the list of iconic Christmas towns. This picture seemed like it was out of a Hallmark movie, except that it was a little blurry.]

We’ve made more progress planning our 2026 travel. It’s looking like a week in Aruba, an Alaskan cruise, a week in Tuscany, a partial week in Aruba (work-related), and a trip to Reno.

Kids

The kids didn’t have a lot of school in November. They had Thanksgiving week off, and that travel that I mentioned above. I felt kind of guilty, but I helped them catch up.

[My kids used to fight ALL THE TIME. It’s great watching them get along.]

Our 13-year-old is in three different plays right now, and it’s a LOT. At least one of them has 95% of the rehearsals in school. The other two are often another three hours per day. He also earned his Second Class in Scouting America. I think he has most of First Class done.

Our 11-year-old had some difficulties adjusting to middle school. Fortunately, the school released a new online tracking system, so we could see when assignments weren’t getting handed in or fell through the cracks. We worked through some strategies, and he’s doing much better now. There’s even a decent chance he can finish the first semester with an A- or better in every class.

Final Thoughts

At this point, any significant productivity in 2025 is unlikely to happen. For the most part, I’m looking towards what goals are a good fit for 2026.

The post My Passive Income and Life Goals Update (November 2025) appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

That’s a question that popped into my head recently. What’s their origin story? They all have to start somewhere. The people I’m going to look at developed and made their billion themselves. For the most part, they grew up under normal circumstances. Yes, they almost always had more advantages than the Average Joe. It’s tough to become a billionaire, so I can overlook a head start such as growing up in an upper-class family.

There are also a couple of notable exceptions, which I will cover. Hopefully, there’s something we can learn from them as well.

If we look at a few of them, can we identify commonalities and potentially duplicate their formulas?

Start a Company

One obvious way to become a billionaire is to start a company. That’s the vast majority of billionaires. I could go through any number of examples, but some household names include Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg.

I realized after I picked the names that they all made their billions by starting technology companies. Technology scales due to vast network effects. That said, I’m still not sure how Amazon scales the way it does. That amazes me more than writing an operating system (Gates) and a social media app (Zuckerberg).

Invest Extraordinarily Well

Here’s where we get into the people who inspired me to write this article. Every reader here knows Warren Buffett and associates him with being an incredible investor. However, expert after expert, including Buffett himself, have said that picking stocks is a fool’s game. Academic after academic has shown that index investing always wins in the long run.

However, when you run the math, it’s very much impossible to become a billionaire with index investing. On the surface, even if it were possible, there are hundreds of millions of others doing it, so you’d be a drop in an ocean of billionaires.

So how did Warren Buffett do it? The best I can tell is that he invested very well, extremely early – when many people didn’t have much access to the stock market. We’re talking about days when you had to call a stockbroker, and he might charge a couple of hundred dollars in commission. Imagine being an early investor in Coca-Cola?

Another way Warren Buffett made his billions was by leveraging other people’s money. Often, leverage can be dangerous, but he realized that investing in insurance is different. People pay premiums upfront and only collect their money down the line. In the meantime, Buffett could use that money to grow his empire. I’m not sure how he did this legally, because it sounds kind of Ponzi scheme-ish. Even worse, it seems as if there were a bunch of claims at the same time, which could bring everything down.

As Berkshire Hathaway got bigger, Buffett got access to companies that the average investor simply doesn’t have. Mutual fund managers have similar access, though, and they haven’t duplicated Buffett’s success outside of possibly Bill Miller’s run with Legg Mason Value Trust in the early 1990s.

Bill Ackman is another well-known name who made billions by investing. It seems he started a hedge fund out of Harvard Business School. The hedge fund took off with some great investments. He has high conviction in the companies he invests in. His activist investing can scale to steer the company in a direction that makes him money. Finally, he has made bold and contrarian investments that have paid off.

Develop a Brand

There are a few people who have crossed the billion-dollar mark in developing a brand. The first name that came to my mind was Kim Kardashian. In this section, I am crediting her as a brand. She does have a number of companies, but they take advantage of her fame. I don’t think the companies would have been nearly as successful without her brand power.

Another powerhouse brand is influencer Mr. Beast. Some people estimate his net worth at around a billion dollars, and others a little more. Somewhat like the technology CEOs above, YouTube scales incredibly well. If I were to put it in terms of a TV show, he’s got the most popular show on the only channel that receives the majority of advertising dollars.

Develop an Extraordinary Talent

This category includes such stars as Michael Jordan and Taylor Swift. There’s some overlap between this and Develop a Brand above. Taylor Swift and Michael Jordan are definitely masters of their brand. However, they are also widely recognized as the best at what they do. (Arguably, I could have included Mr. Beast in this category, with this extraordinary talent being short video attention-grabbing. I felt like the talent of Michael Jordan was on a different level than Mr. Beast.)

Sometimes being a star can barely get you to the billion-dollar mark. Taylor Swift’s estimated net worth is between $1.5 billion and $2 billion. Being the GOAT in basketball got Michael Jordan to around $4 billion, but the GOAT in football (Tom Brady) is only worth around $300 million. Tom Cruise has been a Hollywood A-lister for decades and is estimated to be worth around $600 million. Elton John may be Tom Cruise’s musical twin with around $600 million as well.

There are probably some people thinking, “What? Mr. Beast has more money than Tom Cruise?” That’s what my research says.

Get Lucky

There have been several billion-dollar lottery jackpots. I’m only including this one for completeness.

Inherit and Invest from your Parents

This is where I start to create categories for some famous people. This category came from trying to categorize Donald Trump’s money. A New York Times investigation in 2018 found that he inherited around $413 million from his father. That’s money adjusted for inflation. If he invested in just an S&P 500 (or maybe the Dow 30 in those olden days), it could have been worth more than Warren Buffett.

From there, he’s invested it in a lot of ways, making some money and losing some money. Most recently, it seems that his money has come from crypto schemes and a social media company (Truth Social) that makes little revenue and has few users.

Hybrids

Some billionaires seemed to fit into more than one category.

Start a Company and Invest Well

Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal, which was sold to eBay. He used some of that money to become the first outside investor in Facebook. He also co-founded Palantir, which has been in the news a lot lately. On top of all that, he has invested in many successful start-ups before they went public.

If all that wasn’t enough, he did a lot of this investing inside of a Scandalous Roth IRA and probably never has to pay taxes on more than a hundred million dollars.

The Winklevoss Twins are also examples of starting a company and investing well. I knew about their early investment in crypto, but I have never heard of their Gemini crypto company.

A Little Bit of Everything

I have been trying to find a place to put Elon Musk. His path to billions is very complicated. He started out by founding a company named Zip2, which made city guides for newspapers. The sale of that company gave him around $20 million to invest further. That money went into a payment company called X.com (not the Twitter version that we know today), which merged with PayPal and was later sold to eBay.

He used this money to start SpaceX in 2002 and invest in Tesla in 2004. SpaceX almost failed, but in 2002, it was able to get a big billion-dollar NASA contract after finally completing a flight that proved the concept around 2008. He was an early investor in Tesla and worked to remake the company and effectively oust the original founders. It also almost failed in 2008 due to the financial crisis.

Tesla makes a lot of its profits from tax credits, which is part of Elon’s genius in working the system. With a little help from AI, it seems that it got around $11 billion in government credits while the cars themselves earned a profit of around $33 billion.

Finally, he recently got a compensation of a trillion dollars approved by Tesla’s board. It will take some time and require some very difficult standards to be met. A large part of how he was able to get this was by threatening to leave Tesla. Many say that the board realized that Elon’s brand was so important to Tesla that it was a wise investment in its future.

It could be said that he made his billions from everything: founding a company, investing well, developing a brand, and being extremely talented.

How Do You Become a Billionaire?

It’s not going to be easy. If it were easy, everyone would be billionaires. What of the above is feasible?

Let’s cross off Getting Lucky. You can’t count on winning a billion-dollar lottery. That’s not how math works.

I’m also going to cross off Develop a Brand. Building a brand is SO extremely competitive nowadays. When my kids were younger, they wanted to be the next Mr. Beast. Now they realize that they can’t really compete with the outlandish things he does with budgets of multi-million-dollar per video. There will always be new huge brands coming down the pike, but I view it as a combination of talent and luck that is similar to winning the lottery.

Next up is Develop an Extraordinary Talent. There aren’t a lot of billionaire spots available with this. As we saw above, it can be hit or miss. I do question the results of what I found while searching, though. For people like Tom Cruise and Elton John, it may be reporting estimated earnings, but perhaps they’ve been investing in the stock market for decades. It’s unclear to me if that’s taken into account. I just calculated the growth of $20 million invested in the S&P 500 from 2000 to today, and it grew to $140 million.

I will count being a household name star as a legit path to a billion dollars. What are your odds of that, though?

Now let’s look at Invest Extraordinarily Well. I could only think of a couple of examples, but I’m sure there are more. I don’t have the stomach to make big bets on things that other people think have low odds of success. If something is likely to be a success, other people would have already invested in it. Unless you are into venture capital, it is impossible to invest in an AI company and make a billion now. The ship to a billionaire status with Bitcoin has sailed.

Finally, we are at Start a Company. That seems like the best single path to billionaire status. Yes, there are a lot of companies started, and a very small percentage will make their founders a billion dollars. It still seems like that’s where the vast majority of billionaires come from. Perhaps the only thing close is being an heir to someone who started a company and investing that money well.

That brings me to my ultimate conclusion. It seems like the hybrid approach is the best. Let’s assume that you start a company and use that money to invest well. Some investments will pay off and others won’t, but hopefully, having millions will give you some insider access, and making a 15% annual return is possible. If you were able to make $20 million from the company and invest it for 30 years at that 15% return, you’d have $1.3 billion. Of course, inflation will eat into that, and you’ll need some money to live, but this also assumes that you do nothing else. (Investing well to make that 15% return could be a full-time job, though.) Also, if you made your $20 million at age 30, you are now 60 years old.

Are you ready to be a billionaire? Let me know in the comments.

The post Where Do Billionaires Come From? appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

Last year I wrote how to get cheap, generic GLP-1s. I had gone with Lavender Sky Health, which seemed to be the best price. They had a website that looked like my grandmother made it in 1994, but they partnered with top compounding pharmacies, so I didn’t mind. (They revamped the website, and it looks much more modern now.)

When I was just starting, it was around $136/mo. They now allow me to order in larger amounts, as my body has built up a resistance and isn’t just on the starter dose. My last order for generic semaglutide was for 25mg at $425. Typically, I use 1mg a week, so that works out to be $17/week ($425 divided by 25). That turns out to be around $900 a year or $75/month. It really is an amazing price. The pharmacy companies that make the name brands have lowered their prices a lot, but the cheapest seems to be $349/month.

I had expected that the generic, compounded ones would have been taken off the market by now. However, like nearly all things involving the US judicial system, the process is long and drawn-out. For once, it’s actually to my benefit, so I’ll take the win.

One Year GLP-1 Review

I’m 5’8″ tall, and I was at 191 pounds at the end of 2023. (All the numbers are using a monthly average of my Fitbit Aria scale.) A few days in there, probably after a meal and fully clothed, I was at 197 or so. That was enough for me to make the resolution to lose weight that no one keeps. Here’s how 2024 went:

I didn’t start taking the GLP-1 until November. That’s why this is a one-year review. Before that, I lost 10 pounds the traditional way of diet and exercise. However, you can see that I plateaued for five months starting in June. Then you see about a 3-pound loss in November and December. Here’s what 2025 looks like:

You can see that January was about 174 or so for another 3-pound loss. There was a big change in March when I didn’t bring the medicine with me on a two-week vacation. One week was a cruise with all-you-can-eat food. The extra weight didn’t factor in the charts until I got back and started weighing myself in April. The next two months brought me down to 171, which is where I’ve been. I have lost a little weight during the months that we aren’t on vacation, and then gain one or two pounds during the months we are on vacation. That brings us to this November. We went to Puerto Rico for a bit, and I’m sure that Thanksgiving will raise the numbers a bit again.

Final Analysis

It’s almost too perfect. I lost 10 pounds through diet and exercise, and another 10 pounds through medical innovation. I’ve purposely continued with the lower 1mg dosage because my BMI is 25.8. That’s still overweight, but I’m not in a race. I think the Average Joe would say I’m kind of crazy for taking semaglutide when it’s that close to the fit range.

The bigger change than losing weight is that I drink less. This is a common thing that people on semaglutide experience. That’s been a very good thing and probably helps my longevity more than losing the weight.

The other thing is that I feel like I finally have a modern science working for me rather than against me. It seems our lives get busier and busier. With less and less time, almost everyone is looking to take a shortcut. Unfortunately, that often means choosing ultraprocessed foods that are readily available, which have been designed to make people overeat. Maybe I’m crazy for justifying taking semaglutide that way, but I’ve been called crazy for a lot less.

The post GLP-1 Review: One Year Anniversary appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

Personal Update

Because I’m so far in getting this out there, I’m going to cut some corners and not upload any personal pictures. For the most part, we do things that we do every year: we went to the local harvest festival, the annual Jack-O-Lantern Spectacular at the Roger Williams Zoo (5,000+ carved pumpkins), and the local corn maze. My wife and I ran the Pell Bridge race. I came in almost the exact middle of the pack among some 4,000 people. We went to a local charity event to raise money for food grown here. Finally, my oldest son was in yet another play. That’s becoming a monthly occurrence now, since he’s in multiple groups.

My Goals for 2025

I put all my goals in a spreadsheet. Here’s what it looks like for this year. I’ll explain what each one is in this article and give the results so far.

(Click it, and a bigger version will open in a new tab.)

Steal this idea and make it yours. I make an absurd number of goals I know I’ll never complete. It gives me the flexibility to fail on some things as long as I’m making progress on others. Most people would do the opposite, focus on fewer goals, and aim to get them all done. It’s much less overwhelming. As always, I’m pretty crazy, so do what works for you.

Passive Income

I have three side hustles with a passive component: a dog-sitting business, this blog, and I manage a website for a non-profit. They all require some active work. However, I can get paid by all three even while working a full-time job. I make a very little bit of money in my sleep from blogging and simply being available to do the website work. The same is true for dog boarding. I have to feed the dogs, but it’s a lot different than getting an hour wage. I consider income from these areas as half passive income.

(I do some other hourly work that isn’t passive income. That isn’t included here as there is no passive component to it.)

In the past, I’ve written a whole monthly article on this passive income. I’ve cut out the fluff to give you the numbers with minimal explanation. If this area seems off or confusing, reading the last full article will help it make more sense.

Dog, Blog, and Web Income

Dog boarding income in October can usually be hit or miss. We had the best October in three years.

Blog income started to look up a bit. I sold an advertisement, and it was barely the most profitable month that I’ve had all year. Income is still down something like 95-98% from where it was a few years ago.

Finally, I make some money by running a website for a non-profit that I’m in. I get a set amount every month, and most months, I don’t have to do too much. I’m able to do a little more by experimenting with AI. I spent October making a lot of tools to help the group. There’s a small chance that I can grow this into a better income.

In October, I made $5,653.90 in income from these sources. That was a little better than the $5,291.55 I made in September.

Rental Property Income

We have two rental properties. Perhaps we should only have one? We still have mortgages on them, so when they are fully rented, we make around $700/mo. We will pay off one mortgage in 2027. The other one is a small loan, but it has another 15 years on it. If they were both mortgage-free, we’d make around $30,000 a year after all expected expenses, including maintenance.

Way back in March, one of our tenants broke the lease and moved out suddenly. We renovated the property, which took three months longer than it should have, and put it on the market to be rented. It has sat unrented for several months now. We lowered the price by 20% and that didn’t help. It looks like it might lease for December, but I’m not excited about our potential tenant. Beggars can’t be choosers.

For the purpose of this report, I calculate the rental property income using the following formula:

(Rents After Estimated Expenses) * (Equity Percentage Owned) = Income)

Estimated expenses are insurance, property taxes, condo fees, and condo maintenance. Equity Percentage Owned (EPO) is our total equity divided by the property value on Zillow. (Zillow is very accurate for our condos.)

In October, Zillow estimated our properties were worth about $3,000 more than the month before. After a couple of months, we’ll take any kind of rebound. As usual, we paid off about one thousand dollars in mortgage principal. That meant that our EPO went from owning 83.48% of our properties to 83.72% of them. We’re moving in the right direction.

A couple of months ago, I decided to make the terrible assumption that we’re going to get close to the price we’re asking for rent. I already did the math for this month, but next month, I’ll put in the rent that we’re actually going to get (assuming the lease signing works). The rents (with that assumption) after expenses are $2,806/month. Using the equation above, our income from this area would be $2,349. That’s only $6 more than last month.

Managing rental properties requires some work. We did a little of that recently for the first time in a few years. For this reason, I only count 80% of this as passive income.

Dividend Income

My wife has been maxing out her retirement accounts for a couple of decades. I haven’t done quite as well, but I still have over 30 years of Roth IRAs and a good deal of 401 (k) investments. The markets have done very well over the last 30 years. That leads to a sizeable nest egg.

I don’t track exact dividends from all the accounts. (It’s a win if I can get my wife to log into her TSP account and give me the totals.) Instead, I assume we could easily invest the money in the accounts into an ETF that pays a 2.5% dividend. For example, HDV currently yields 3.41%. I DO track dividends in our main brokerage account that isn’t a retirement account. We average about 2.6% dividend there.

I also have profit-sharing income with a private company in which I own a small stake. I get a check each month that behaves like a dividend – it’s just taxed a little differently.

The stock market didn’t move much in October. It was up a little bit, but mostly a big yawn. I don’t mind that at all because it has been going up so much lately. The valuations feel too high when a lot of America is fighting with the cost of living. We’ve given to at least five different food drives from organizations we belong to between the SNAP issue and the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday.

Last month, the dividend income number was $5,717. This month it is $5,726. That’s a boring move of $9. Believe it or not, there was a time when that would cover a Netflix bill. I’ll be telling my grandkids that story when it’s $99/mo.

Unlike the previous two sections, this income is 100% passive. For this reason, I don’t have to adjust the numbers.

Total Passive Income

Dog/Blogs: $5,654 – Adjusted by 50% to $2,827
Rentals: $2,349 – Adjusted by 20% to $1,879
Dividends: $5,726 – Remains at $5,726

Dogs/Blogs Blue Line
Rental – Red Line
Dividend – Yellow Line

Total Adjusted Passive Income: $10,432.15

Last month it was $10,237. That’s a pretty small gain, but certainly good for one month. The only big difference was the dog boarding, or the blog advertisement. So in a lot of ways, it was essentially a flat month.

That’s the fourth straight month in 5 digits, so I feel like that should be the norm. I’m probably speaking too soon as the dog boarding will go down with travel.

Here’s a graph of the adjusted passive income since 2017, when I started keeping track of it:

The blue line represents the monthly total adjusted passive income. The Red Line represents the 12-month average. The point of doing the 12-month average is that dog boarding has some seasonality, and some months are always busier than others. Using those 12-month averages, we’re at all-time highs in passive-ish income. Our mostly pure passive income (rentals and dividends) is at an all-time high of $7,605.20. If I end the dog boarding and blogging gigs, that money could sustain us for quite a bit.

My goal for this passive-ish income is to reach $109,000 for the year. It’s up to $95,518 and on pace for $114,621. It looks like we’ll exceed this goal. When I was setting the goal, I didn’t expect the market to do as well this year as it has.

My wife continues to work as well. However, as a pharmacist working with public health, she has problems supporting RFK Jr.’s disinformation campaign. She’s set a retirement date, but it’s more than a year away. She has 26 years in the military and will be getting a pension that would double all this passive income. That pension grows a little each month, and now we’re keeping track of it precisely.

I can’t think of anywhere else to put this information, but our net worth went up 2.04% last month. That’s a huge month. For the year, it is up 10.49%. That’s so much better than I expected. Our liquid cash went down about 2%. We don’t keep a lot of liquid cash, so this isn’t a big deal.

Business and Other Money Goals

Personal Income ($75,000)

Three years ago, I made over $98,000 in side hustles. Two years ago, I made $88,000. Last year, I made a little more than $81,000. I see a trend, and it is not great. That’s okay; overall, our passive income is going up, so everything is going as planned.

This year, I’m aiming to make $75,000.

Through October, I made $69,853. That’s a pace of $83,824. It looks great, but we have some travel coming up, and this may be close.

Complete Estate Planning

I got the estate planning documents from the lawyer back near the start of the year. This is done. Yay!

Kid Wealth (Goal: 50,000 Page Views)

For the fourth year, I hope to get to 50,000 page views on Kid Wealth. I thought something would go viral and I’d get most of them in one day.

In 2022, I launched Kid Wealth and wrote a lot of articles. It had 4,200 page views that year. In 2023, I got involved in other projects, but I tripled traffic to 13,708. Last year, traffic continued to grow to 16,352, even though I only wrote a couple of articles.

At the end of October, Kid Wealth had 48,665 lifetime views. It’s going to be close to 50,000 page views by the end of the year.

I’m still looking for a partner or some motivation to make it into a business. Any readers interested? I simply don’t believe the money is in blogging anymore. I still believe in the value of the written word, but I think the brand needs to be something else. My interest has moved on to other projects for now.

Maybe it could be a non-profit and receive some kind of grant money. It’s a good brand and cause, and I’m sure it can be valuable with time to move it in the right direction. I’ve invested enough money and set up a good foundation, but I doubt anyone buying it will give me any kind of ROI. It was never about making money, so selling it at a loss isn’t worth it to me.

Professional Improvements

A few months ago, I got really excited to create a new application, but I haven’t done anything with it for a few months. I spent a few minutes this past month to see if I could take what I have and turn it into something that is close to launchable, and there might be some hope for that.

I spent more time working on the tools for the non-profit, which is similar to a local Business Networking International group. It would be great if I could package the tools and franchise them. It’s a long shot that it turns into something.

Health

I’m putting a large emphasis on health these days. It’s so big that I wrote a separate article about it. My health goals for 2025 are here.

Weight and Body Fat (Goal: 164lbs / 19% BF)

My average weight in October was 169.4 pounds, more than a pound less than last month. My body fat was 22.4% which is about the same as it has been all year. I might be able to come close to the weight goal, but I don’t think the body fat goal is going to work. These are averages over a whole month using my Fitbit Aria scale.

This is the least I’ve weighed in over 10 years, which is as long as I’ve kept track. It’s down from 197 from about two years ago – 30 pounds lost! About half of those are from a traditional diet and exercise. The other half has been from a year of the generic GLP-1s that you read about everywhere. I take a low dose, because my BMI at 26 is just a little overweight. When I tell people that I take it, they are shocked because they say that I don’t need it. I certainly feel a lot healthier now than I did then.

Body and Brain Points (300 and 200 respectively)

I score myself from 1 (poor) to 5 (great) each week for diet and exercise. Then, I add them up for the month. I did a 4-mile race in October with my wife, so I gave myself an extra health point for that. I also had a week where I was very focused on eating well. Other than that, it was a very average month.

At the end of October, I had 243 body points. It’s a pace of 291 for the year. It’s going to come down to the wire, I think.

I measure brain points on the same scale. They are based on doing things like the daily Wordle and New York Times Connections. I also do Duolingo. Usually, I study Japanese, but I’ve been hooked on playing Oscar in chess. In about 30 matches so far, he beat me once, and I got stuck in 4-5 stupid stalemates. Whoever wrote the stalemate rule in chess should be ashamed of themselves.

At the end of October, I have 158 brain points. That’s a pace for around 189 points for the year. I might be able to get this done, too.

Blood Pressure (Goal: 115/75)

I have a family history of high blood pressure. I had a little medical scare in the first couple of days of the year. Now I think it is orthostatic hypotension, but I didn’t know that at the start of the year. It seems pointless to try to be healthy in a bunch of other ways and let high blood pressure create all kinds of problems under the surface.

My blood pressure in January averaged 138/92, which is high. My doctor put me on lisinopril 10mg and then upped it to 15mg a few months ago. It’s amazing how cheap this generic medication is – less than $10 for a 90-day supply.

A few months ago, I bought this Omron Blood Pressure Monitor on Amazon on a Prime Day deal. That’s an affiliate link, so I might make a couple of extra dollars if you click on it and buy it. I’m impressed as it creates great averages and graphs. I can have it email me a report so I can print it out and give it to my doctor. Because a lot of doctors use Omron products, they seem to be familiar with the reports, too.

In October, my blood pressure averaged 125/77. That’s still a little high, but it’s significant progress.

Doctor Appointments

I didn’t have any doctor or dentist appointments, but I got my Cologuard results back. I seem to be in the clear for a few years. Next time, I should get an actual colonoscopy instead of just doing the screening.

Longevity Research

I scheduled a DexaFit appointment and went for the first time in 18 months. I had hoped to do it every year, but I got busy. For those not familiar with DexaFit, they perform a series of tests consisting of a very detailed scan of your body, measuring your resting metabolic rate, and measuring your VO2 Max. They use this information with AI (because of course) to figure out a biological age.

There was some good news and bad news on this test. The good news is that I improved in every area. I had less body fat (29.5% vs. 31.4% before). One of the biggest concerns before was belly fat, which was at 3.57 pounds before. Now it’s at 2.51 pounds. That’s still over my peer group, though.

The bad news is that my biological age went from 49 to 51. Since I’m 50, I went from being on pace to being behind. I asked the franchise owner why my age would go up if I’m getting healthier everywhere. He said that they probably changed the algorithm in the last 18 months. I think that DexaFit tends to use its average client as a baseline, but the people interested in DexaFit tend to be athletic or more health-conscious.

Hobbies

Prior to this year, I haven’t been doing well in developing hobbies. I’d say that I want to get into flying drones or something else, but I never seem to have the time. With my new productivity system in place, I think I’m making better progress in this. Let’s find out:

Boost AI Skills

In October, I focused on a few projects to improve my dog boarding website. Some of that involved AI research. I am finding that a lot of what I do nowadays involves spending time in ChatGPT.

I also met with a friend who has been working on creating a business networking group. We did a lot of work with AI for planning the software for that.

3D Printing

After doing about 90% of the work to hopefully get the 3D printer working a couple of months ago, I haven’t done anything since.

Journaling

I like the idea of journaling, but I don’t think I’ll get to it.

Here are some other ideas of things I want to work on this year:

• Learn to fly a flight simulator – Either scrap or push to next year.
• Play a modern song on a ukulele – Either scrap or push to next year.
• Rubik’s Cube – I was able to solve it at the beginning of the year, but I think I’ve forgotten since I haven’t done it in a while. I had hoped to learn an advanced algorithm to do it faster, but it doesn’t look like that will happen.

You may recognize the last two of these hobbies from my brain health goals for 2025.

I signed up for Masterclass, which I think can teach the ukulele, but I haven’t moved forward on that either.

Family

Declutter and Organize House (95% Progress)

The decluttering and organizing never end. With my wife only working part-time due to the government shutdown, she listed and sold a lot of small items. It was a good time to sell some of the kids’ old Halloween costumes.

We’ll end up having made more progress than I expected this year, but there’s still a lot to do.

b>Travel

No travel in October, but we just got back from Puerto Rico. I’ll have more on that next month. Next up, we’re going to Vermont for a long weekend of skiing in early December.

We’ve made more progress planning our 2026 travel.

Kids

In October, we started to look at high schools for our 7th grader. That’s a weird sentence to type. The kids go to a private school on a military discount, but with my wife retiring, that discount probably won’t happen in high school. It gets really expensive, and as you can tell from the financial information above, we probably won’t qualify for a lot of aid unless it is merit-based. Since he’s looking at extremely good schools, they don’t do merit-based scholarships – everyone would get one. It feels like a college search.

I’m still a fan of public school, especially with an option like dual enrollment at a local college. He needs to be challenged, though, and I don’t see that happening (academically) in the public high schools we have here. There are some things you can do to go to a public school in another city, which is interesting.

I spent a lot of October going back and forth over it. It turns out that we are a year too early to look into this. Usually, the kids, as 8th graders, start touring the schools.

Final Thoughts

I’m writing this up on November 20th after having come back from our trip to Puerto Rico. Without going back through the pictures on my phone, a lot of October was a blur.

There is one notable thing that I haven’t mentioned above. Being from Massachusetts, I’ve been a Patriots fan my whole life. I watched them go 1-15 and, of course, celebrated the twenty years with Tom Brady and Bill Belichick. Those days are long gone, and they’ve been bad the last few seasons. However, this year, with a new coach, great development of last year’s rookie quarterback, and a historically easy schedule, they are back to being good again.

I never thought to buy a Tom Brady football card. Since I was just out of college, I was a decade out of my baseball card-collecting phase. I decided that I wouldn’t make that mistake twice, and I “invested” (i.e., gambled) $250 on a perfectly graded Drake Maye card in mid-October. The card had been around $125 at the start of the season, so I was paying double! With the great performance since then, the cheapest one on eBay is over $400, and the last one sold for $380.

I don’t imagine that I’d ever sell the card, though. It’s either going to be worth so much that I’d just as well keep it and enjoy having my cake and eating it too. Alternatively, Drake Maye could regress to the norm (or worse), and the card becomes worth very little. I’m not sure that I’d sell it then either, because what’s the point?

The post My Passive Income and Life Goals Update (October 2025) appeared first on Lazy Man and Money.

For years, I’ve always said that I don’t like gold. I’ve always heard that if the sh*t hits the fan, it will be the savior. Whenever I heard that, I pictured a world like Mad Max and couldn’t figure out why a colored rock would be useful. No one would be able to do anything with it. It has essentially no intrinsic value. (It is a really good conductor of electricity, but that’s not significant in the Mad Max world). However, I can see how a barrel of oil could be useful.

Over the last two years, gold has laughed at my ignorance. It has doubled in price. It has gone from around $2000 an ounce to $4000 an ounce. That’s almost Bitcoinian growth.

So it seems like a good time to revisit the case for gold. To do this, I’m going to highlight three articles that caught my attention over the last month.

1. Why I Don’t Own Any Gold

Ben Carlson’s blog, A Wealth of Common Sense, is aptly named. At the above link, he breaks down the performance of gold vs. the S&P 500 in each decade since the 1970s. In the 1970s, there was high inflation, a weak dollar, and a few other things that caused gold to destroy the S&P 500. In each of the next four decades, gold got destroyed. That’s a large reason why I don’t like gold. For almost my entire life, gold has been a pretty terrible investment.

In the 2020s though, gold has outperformed the S&P 500 by a decent amount thanks to its latest run. In the end, Carlson stands by his decision because the long-term performance of gold is so terrible compared to stocks.

That brings me to the second article.

1. Warren Buffett’s Master Class on the Problem with Gold

Warren Buffett is the perfect example of why investing in stocks beats investing in gold. He didn’t grow his net worth to nearly 150 billion by buying and holding lots of gold.

In the CNBC article above, it covers what Warren Buffett said about gold at the 2011 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. I’ll be quoting a lot of it, because I can’t possibly explain it better than Buffett himself. I’ll break it up a bit because it is a lot to read (but well worth the time):

“[There are] three major categories of investment. And you ought to think very hard about which category you want to be in before you start thinking about the choices available within that category.

Now, the first category is anything denominated in a currency. It could be bonds, it could be deposits in a bank, it can be a money market fund, it can be cash in your pocket.

And the — if you will reach in your pocket — I don’t like to do this, but — and pull out your wallet —

You’re watching an historic event. (Laughter)

If you look at this — and, I might point out, this is a one [dollar bill]. Charlie [Munger, Buffett’s long-time late partner] carries a [hundred] —

On the back of it, it says, “In God We Trust.” And that’s really false advertising.

The — if Elizabeth Warren were here, she would say, quite properly, it should say, “In Government We Trust,” because God isn’t going to do anything about that dollar bill, you know, if government does the wrong things, in terms of keeping it as valuable as it was when you parted with it to buy a bond or put it in a bank.

Any currency-related investment is a bet on how government now, and in the future, will behave…

Almost all currencies have declined in value over time. I mean, it may be built into almost any economic system that it will be easier to work with a value of currency that declines in value than a currency that appreciates in value, and the Japanese might reaffirm that here with their experience.

So as a class, currency-related investments, whether they are in the UK, or the United States, or anyplace else — unless we’re getting paid extremely well for having them — we do not think make much sense.”

As you can tell, he’s not a big fan of currency investments.

“The second category of investments regard items that you buy that don’t produce anything but that you hope someone will pay you more for later on.

And the classic case of that is gold.

And I’ve used this illustration before, but if you take all of the gold in the world — don’t get too excited now — and put it into a cube, it will be a cube that’s about 67 feet on a side. That would be 165,000 or 170,000 metric tons.

So, you could have a cube — if you owned all the gold in the world — you could have a cube that would be 67 or 68 feet on a side.

And you could get a ladder, and you could climb up on top of it, and you could say, you know, I’m sitting on top of the world, and think you’re king of the world.

You could, you know, you could fondle it, you could polish it, you could do all these things with it. Stare at it. But it isn’t going to do anything.

All you are doing when you buy that is that you’re hoping that somebody else a year from now, or five years from now, will pay you more to own something that, again, can’t do anything, but you’re hoping that the person then thinks that somebody else will buy something five years later from him.

In other words, you’re betting on not just how scared people are now of paper money, you’re betting on how much they think a year from now people will be scared two years from then on…”

He goes into the third category of assets, which is buying something that will produce for you. It could be a farm for food or business. Buffett doesn’t look for businesses that he can flip to someone else at a higher price. He looks for the money that the business creates.

It also mentions that Charlie Munger thought it was “peculiar to buy an asset which only will go really up if the world really goes to hell. It doesn’t strike me as an entirely rational thing to do.”

I agree with Warren Buffett and that’s a reason why I don’t like gold.

Finally Nick Maggiulli does a lot of analysis and finds that REITs and equities actually do better than gold during inflationary times. That’s well worth a read.

All of these articles have convinced me that I really don’t need to have gold in my portfolio. It seems like the professionals who recommend gold only advocate for a small amount anyway. So it’s probably not going to make a huge impact anyway.

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