I’m lazy. Really lazy. I’d rather sit at my desk in pajamas and watch Hulu than go for a run. Unfortunately, that isn’t a very healthy lifestyle, and I realize I need to start exercising or I’m going to have to start asking my wife to open jars for me.

My solution to this issue is to tie my exercises to the health of my business. I’m still thinking through all the rules, but I’ve got one figured out already. For every $10 I make, I have to do a push up. So if I earn $100 in a day, I have to do 10 push ups. If I earn $500, I have to do 50 push ups. If I earn $10,000, I have to do 1,000 push ups change the rule.

I’m not always going to be able to do all the pushups in a row (hey, I’m just getting started..), but I’m going to commit to doing as many as I can in a row, and repeating as many times as I need to in order to make my commitment.

I’d like to find something to motivate me to do some other exercises, like crunches and short runs/jogs. Analytics metrics (like unique visitors, pageviews, or time on site) don’t seem like a good idea because they can fluctuate so much based on things outside of my control, like getting Stumbled.

Any suggestions?

This is my twelfth monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:

• Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. I know what I want to build. I have the plans. I have the shopping list. But, sadly, I didn’t have/take the time to do this.
• Launch twelve new websites. I failed. My December website was bigger than I could finish in a month. Okay that isn’t true, I just got lazy. But I did redesign Corban Works from scratch, so that is practically an entirely new site. And I redesigned the Fake Name Generator mobile site. So I kept busy at least.

I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:

• Start an email newsletter. Didn’t happen.
• Create a game for mobile phones. Didn’t happen.

Goals I’ve accomplished this year:

• Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. I hit this goal in October. December earnings were absurdly high. I hit my 2012 goal, but I don’t think it’ll happen again in January.
  
• Go back to college. I’ve enrolled in a distance learning program with BYU-Idaho. I got A’s in both of my classes. Yay!
  
• Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k and Roth IRAs are maxed out. Yay!
  
• Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
  
• Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
• Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I already found 2 typos (grr!) fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print.
• Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
• Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!

This is my eleventh monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:

• Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. Still nothing. Probably not going to happen.
• Launch twelve new websites. Created a quick and easy text conversion tool called ASCII to Hex. It converts to/from ASCII, binary, hexadecimal, base64, decimal, and rot13. I also put a lot of work into the Fake Mail Generator. I revived this site a few months back and have been trying to modernize it a bit. I’ve added a new logo and added MIME parsing, so it can display HTML emails.

I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:

• Start an email newsletter. I don’t think this is going to happen.
• Create a game for mobile phones. Probably not going to happen.

Goals I’ve accomplished this year:

• Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. I hit this goal in October.
  
• Go back to college. I’ve enrolled in a distance learning program with BYU-Idaho.
  
• Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k and Roth IRAs are maxed out. Yay!
  
• Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
  
• Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
• Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I already found 2 typos (grr!) fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print.
• Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
• Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!

My baby girl had her first half-birthday yesterday. It is crazy to think that it has been 6 months already since my first “holy cow I’m a dad” moment.

Anyways, my wife and I have a lot of goals for how to raise our daughter. We want her to have the resources to go to college, start a business, buy a car, go on a mission, or do whatever she wants when she leaves the nest in many many years. We also want her to be excited about investing, to understand how it works, and to see the benefits of it.

So tonight, after a few months of pondering, we settled on a plan: for Anna’s half-birthday each year, we’ll invest $250 into GE for her (keeping it in our name until she is old enough to really understand it).

Why GE? It pays dividends every quarter. She’ll get to see returns from the investment several times a year, even if the stock prices are down. We’ll reinvest the dividends, so she’ll also get to see her number of shares going up each quarter, even when it isn’t her half-birthday yet. GE is also very stable and diversified, so the likelihood of it disappearing is slim. It also tends to be cheap enough per share that we can get a decent number of shares.

There are a few cons to going with GE. Its performance hasn’t been phenomenal over the past decade. There are definitely stocks that have done better (and many that have done worse). It also isn’t a very exciting stock. A kid today would be much more excited about owning some Apple stock than they would about GE.

Why not a mutual fund? Well the goal is to teach Anna about stocks, investing, and to get her excited about it. It is hard to see why a mutual fund’s price has gone up or down. With an individual stock, like GE, we can look at the news or read press releases to find out why the price has changed. We can also talk about how the policies and decisions of our elected leaders can affect the price. I imagine her coming to me and being like “oh my gosh dad the GE earnings report is out!”, and then we’ll sit down together and look over it. (A father can dream…)

We plan on investing $250 each year and, unless she has a dang good reason, we won’t let her take it out until her 18th birthday. This means we’ll invest $4,500 for her over the next 18 years. If my parents had done this for me, then I would have had about $22,000 on my 18th birthday (and that isn’t even counting dividend reinvestments). Of course $250 was worth a lot more back then, and past performance doesn’t guarantee future performance, but I still think Anna will have a very healthy chunk of cash waiting for her.

Of course, I’m not sure how we’ll afford this once we get up to 8 or 9 kids…

This is my tenth monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:

• Read the Book of Mormon again. I’ve abandoned this goal because I’ve started taking a Book of Mormon class.
• Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. October was another awesome month. Earnings are way up, and I’ve exceeded my October and November and December goals, which means I’ve met this goal! I’m now earning as much from my side business (which is now my only source of income) as I was earning from my day job before I resigned back in July. I’ve increased my home business income by over 30% since July and I’m very excited to take some time next year to branch out into new revenue streams.
• Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. Still nothing and I’m running out of time.
• Launch twelve new websites. I’ve been wanting a recipe site for quite awhile now. I started a small recipe blog called Recipe Kabob. Still needs work (it will always need work) but I’m happy with the progress I’ve made.

I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:

• Start an email newsletter. I don’t think this is going to happen.
• Create a game for mobile phones. I’d like to play around with making a game using HTML 5, canvas, JS, etc. Should be fun.

Goals I’ve accomplished this year:

• Go back to college. I’ve enrolled in a distance learning program with BYU-Idaho.
  
• Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k and Roth IRAs are maxed out. Yay!
  
• Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
  
• Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
• Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I already found 2 typos (grr!) fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print.
• Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
• Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!

This is my ninth monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:

• Read the Book of Mormon again. I’m still behind, but I’m making serious progress towards getting back on track. The difficulty is that I’ve started a Book of Mormon class which has me reading the Book of Mormon from the beginning.
• Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. The beginning of the month was pretty depressing. Earnings were way down. The end of the month has shown an incredible turn around, culminating with my highest earning day ever. I’m very close to being back on track, which is awesome after falling way behind last month.
• Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. Still nothing.
• Launch twelve new websites. I’m on a quest to put all my dormant domains to use. This month I took namegenerator.in, which I’ve had for quite a few months, and finally put something up on it. I’m very satisfied with the outcome. Check it out at namegenerator.in.

I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:

• Start an email newsletter. I’ve been planning on doing a dating tips newsletter to go along with The Awkward Turtle site, but I have a new site in mind that I’m pretty excited about and would work well with a newsletter, so maybe I’ll do that instead.
• Create a game for mobile phones. I’d like to play around with making a game using HTML 5, canvas, JS, etc. Should be fun.

Goals I’ve accomplished this year:

• Go back to college. I’ve enrolled in a distance learning program with BYU-Idaho.
  
• Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k and Roth IRAs are maxed out. Yay!
  
• Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
  
• Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
• Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I already found 2 typos (grr!) fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print.
• Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
• Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!

This is my eighth monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:

• Read the Book of Mormon again. I’m still behind, but I’m making serious progress towards getting back on track.
• Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. If you didn’t notice, the economy took a tank this month. Fortunately my earnings didn’t plummet, but they didn’t go up either. I’m no longer on track to hit this goal.
• Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. Still nothing.
• Launch twelve new websites. I added significant new functionality to the Fake Name Generator. I’ve made it possible to log in and save your names, track your orders, and things like that. I also created 32-bit or 64-bit, which lets you easily determine if you are running a 32-bit or 64-bit OS.

I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:

• Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k is maxed out. Yay! The stock market dropped. Boo!
• Start an email newsletter. I’ve been planning on doing a dating tips newsletter to go along with The Awkward Turtle site, but I have a new site in mind that I’m pretty excited about and would work well with a newsletter, so maybe I’ll do that instead.
• Create a game for mobile phones. Haven’t put any time into this yet. Maybe will be working on something with my brother.

Goals I’ve accomplished this year:

• Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
  
• Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
• Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I already found 2 typos (grr!) fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print.
• Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
• Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!

This is my seventh monthly report on how I’m doing with my goals for 2011:

• Read the Book of Mormon again. I’m less behind this month than I was last month, so I guess that is progress.
• Earn as much from my side business as I was earning from my day job. This month my earnings were only slightly higher than last month. I’m not very surprised by this because last month’s new site was pretty bad. I’m still on track to reach my goal though.
• Build a dining room table. Build a piano keyboard desk. Build something. If this heat wave would go away, I’d be building something awesome right now. (I know, another excuse…)
• Launch twelve new websites. This month’s site is 8-bit Sprites. It was a ton of fun to make, but requires a little maintenance every week. So far it isn’t earning its keep, but I think it will given a little bit of time. I also created my first WordPress plugin, CW Image Optimizer, which I’ve been informed is already being used on a few sites other than my own.

I’ve also been working on a few goals that I didn’t originally blog about:

• Max out my 401k and Roth IRA contributions. The 401k is maxed out. Yay! I’ve also been filling up our Roth IRAs.
• Start an email newsletter. I’ve been planning on doing a dating tips newsletter to go along with The Awkward Turtle site, but I have a new site in mind that I’m pretty excited about and would work well with a newsletter, so maybe I’ll do that instead.
• Create a game for mobile phones. Haven’t put any time into this yet. Maybe will be working on something with my brother.

Goals I’ve accomplished this year:

• Quit my day job. I’m basically retired. I play with my daughter, work on hobbies, and sleep all day. Its a pretty good life.
  
• Become a dad. I’m a dad! Yay! My daughter Anna was born in late May.
• Publish my first book. I’ve published my first book (paperback, Kindle, and Nook). Took me a couple years, and I already found 2 typos (grr!) fixed the typos, but at least it is finally in print.
• Paid my taxes. I make money from a lot of places which makes my taxes really complicated, so getting this finished was awesome. I also started paying quarterly taxes because my self-employed income has gotten pretty high. It is uber painful to write a big check every couple months to the IRS, but oh well, that is the cost of making money..
• Get out of debt. We’ve paid off the last of Becca’s student loans which means we are now debt free! Yay!

I think it would be good to give my definition of retirement before going any further with this post: To me, retirement is having the freedom to do whatever you want without having to worry about the consequences of not getting something done. For example, the freedom to go on a week long car trip without worrying about what is happening at work. Or the freedom to work on an unprofitable hobby for a few weeks without worrying about your income.

Starting today at 5PM, that is what I have. It is a goal I’ve had for a very long time, and one that I never imagined I’d be able to accomplish at age 26, but with the help of my wife and a lot of work on my home business, I made it!

I’ll still be doing some work for Affinity4 / Beliefnet / BN Media (my current employer), but that is mainly because: A) I really enjoy my work, and B) the company has treated me well over the past 5 years and they haven’t found a replacement for me yet.

So what am I going to be doing all day? Well, I have a baby that I’ll be taking care of. I’m sure that will take a fair amount of time. I’m going to be cooking the meals for my family, preparing breakfast in the morning, packing lunch for my wife, that sort of thing. I have a few mobile development opportunities that I’m looking into. I’ll be continuing my “one new website a month” goal. I’d like to start exercising more (who am I trying to kid, I don’t exercise at all right now).

I’d like to point out that retiring wasn’t even remotely possible 2.5 years ago when I got married. I’m now making more off my home business per month than I was per year when I got married. I didn’t make some magic website that instantly made me piles of money. The “secret” to my success is consistently creating new websites that require little to no maintenance, and that each make at least a few dollars per day in revenue.

My point is, this is something anyone can do. If you can’t program, buy a book on PHP and learn. Pick an easy project and do something. It doesn’t matter if your code isn’t ideal and your page is ugly, just build something.

For my website-of-the-month for July, I’ve decided to turn my newly gained obsession with Perler beads into a full blown website.

8-bit Sprites, just launched, is going to feature a new Perler bead sprite every week. Each sprite post includes instructions on how to make it on your own, or you can leave a comment for a chance to win it.

This site was a ton of fun to make. Aside from making a couple dozen Perler sprites already, I also wrote some fun code to make the maintenance of this website easier:

First, I wrote a page that lets me fairly easily create an XML document that defines the colors and positions of the beads required for each design. It still takes a few minutes to manually translate an image into an XML document, but it is much easier than doing it completely by hand.

Next, I wrote a custom WordPress plugin that reads this XML document. It counts how many beads of each color are needed, how big of a pegboard you’ll need, and generates a pattern image that can be used by anyone that wants to create the sprite on their own. This is really cool because it lets me add new features to the patterns without having to update old posts.

The plugin uses custom shortcodes to make it super easy to create my weekly posts. One shortcode simply takes the path to the XML document as a parameter, and uses that to display all the details about the sprite. Another shortcode makes it easy to include consistent contest rules/guidelines on each post. It also uses the post date to automatically close the contest each week.

I already have a thousand ideas on how to make this site better, but I wanted to get the bare minimum done so I’d at least get it out the door and published before the end of the month.