Slacker Interviews Lazy Man

Posted by Jacques - January 8, 2009

Lazy Man and Money

One of the blogs that I watch a lot is Lazy Man and Money (our logos look eerily similar). The concept is really cool, if you’re lazy but want to respect your money and time, then there are some basic concepts you should learn.

Lazy Man, thank you for agreeing to do this interview. One of the things I have to ask is if you think being “lazy” is good or bad, or just the way some people are?

I think you have to take the good with the bad when it comes to laziness. I often miss out on opportunities because I’m lazy. The other day I missed a deadline on a Black Friday rebate and I’m kicking myself for it. Lazy Man and Money isn’t about that kind of laziness. It’s about working smarter instead of working harder. It’s realizing that saving and investing today can put you in a position to not have to work tomorrow. I go into a little more detail on my About page.

You have a couple blogs, but one of the ones that interested me the most and is most relevant in the current economic climate was Lazy Man and Money. If you could only choose one piece of advice about managing your finances that lazy people will carry away from this interview, what would you want them to remember?

I think it would be the power of compound interest. Few things are lazier than buying a couple of broad index funds and waiting (assuming that time is on your side). Even better, I would recommend an automatic savings plan where money is invested on a monthly basis. Set it up once and then go have an iced tea on a hammock. Of course it’s difficult for many to think about investing and compound interest in a recession, but if you have the means, this may be the best equity buying opportunity in a decade.

One of the things I talk about is the Pareto principle (for our readers who don’t know 80% results with 20% effort). Sometimes I wonder if even that approach is a little dated and maybe even if 20% is too much effort, given the greater amount of things people THINK they need to do compared to before. What is your take?

I have often thought that with some tasks the Pareto principle could be stretched to 95% and 5%. Most of the time, I think the ratio depends on how smart someone is and what the task is.

Here’s are two examples:

I’m in a fantasy baseball league where it is extremely helpful to parse player statistics and put them into a spreadsheet for number crunching. I know some of the people in the league aren’t very technology-oriented. I imagine they go through a painful process of cutting and paste each player’s stats - potentially taking them many hours to finish. However, I realized that I could make a couple of minor changes to the whole document to make it suitable for Excel’s Text to Columns function to work on it. It’ll take me 5% of the time to achieve 100% of the benefit.

One the other hand, take the task of making a bed. I don’t think there’s a particularly smarter way to make a bed. Fortunately it’s the kind of topic that 5% of the effort is good enough - unless my mother-in-law is in town.

I think you have to take each task separately and determine if it’s one that you can true to do less work. Then you have to decide what threshold is good enough for that task. If you take the task of doing this interview, I could have come up with some quick answers in about 5-10 minutes and achieved a decent result. Instead, I’m putting in more time because I want as close to 100% of the readers to benefit. I guess that makes me a hypocrite ;-).

Do you think slackers are really a subset of lazy people if you will, perhaps, more educated and higher potential, but consciously choose not to underachieve or do you feel that there is really no difference?

I’ve always considered slacker and lazy synonymous. When I was creating my site, I didn’t really go into connotations behind them.

Finally, I would like to give you a chance to plug your awesome blog as I’m a big fan. What inspired you to write about your blog and the name of it, and why should slackers read it?

My main gig is Lazy Man and Money and I have a side project of Lazy Man and Health. I was inspired by some of the things discussed earlier in this interview - the search for an easier path to financial freedom. If that’s the kind of thing slackers are interested in, I would recommend they not only read Lazy Man and Money, but I urge them to comment. The community is important and the minds of 100 slackers are better than one Lazy Man. As for Lazy Man and Health, there’s too much focus on exercise for me to recommend it to slackers. Just eat lots of veggies and lean protein and do something active that’s fun - like ski or play basketball. That’s not a lot of work and you’ll get a lot of health benefit if you do just that.

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