Links & Snippets
October 8, 2012
A belated CONGRATULATIONS to Lazy Man and Mrs. on their new baby arrival!
Last week’s Carnival of Personal Finance: the Fall Traditions Edition was hosted by Tie the Money Knot and this week’s Carnival: The Leaves are Changing Edition was hosted by Walking to Wealth’s Adam Hagerman.
It’s the beginning of October and Kay Bell’s got a list of things to do for the month. Happily, in the chaos of all of Doggle’s health issues, and with the filing deadline of October 15th approaching, of course it seemed October 1st was the right time to sit down and power through. It only took about … 7 hours? Applicable excerpts for me:
Charitable donations other than cash: This year’s Goodwill donations included Mom’s entire wardrobe. I didn’t have it in me to go through that for anything to keep. Even now I can’t think about it. I know what was in there so I could list it for the donation, though, and it was substantial. But Dad wanted to donate everything but a small pile so I let him.
Medical costs: Out of curiosity, I just wanted to know whether I could deduct medical costs. Started to seem worth asking this year, having spent a few thousand or so on them. We would have had to have costs over $11, 500. Ooof. Ok, life doesn’t seem so bad now.
Athena just said good-bye to a lot of her mom’s stuff too. I’ve never been able to deal with actually being surrounded by too many things but it struck me how difficult it was to think about the idea of her things not being there anymore. Because it meant she wasn’t either. She used to rescue things that I planned to purge too, and I think it was to remind her of me. Now I have that double memory infused in that thing, as I let it go.
I grew up going to Chinatown in LA for cultural celebrations every year, shopping in the almost-musty shops several times a year, using the elderly and funeral services for my grandparents. I didn’t live in Chinatown but it was as much part of my extended neighborhood as any of the closely neighboring cities. And the idea of seeing a Walmart in that place that’s both a cultural entity and also a home is disconcerting. I wonder if the residential support for a Walmart comes from just wanting any general store in the area?
This is a super old story and I don’t know how I ran across it, but it was disconcerting anyway. Minnesota’s Public Health program and Team D was apparently how we managed to track down foodborne illness outbreaks so well in the past. I am so glad we shut that down….?
/sarcasm.
Not totally sure that we really needed this pointed out but NYTimes covers the perils of goalsetting. As in, you shouldn’t be setting goals without regard for how you reach them, or to the exclusion of all other things. Well, duh. “Reach this goal no matter what” generally results in bad. I’m certainly OCD enough that even I’ve had to retrain my brain to let in the rest of the world after focusing on Goals 1 and 2 but absolutely nothing else ever. Of course I’m saying this from a point of view of a person whose only goal is to freakin’ survive right now. So… you know. *shrug* Perspective. I got some.
Found this new-to-me blog called Farm to Kitchen to Table that occasionally shares recipes/creations based on a CSA box. I still haven’t convinced myself to get one because they are actually rather pricey, but someday….
Looks like Fabulously Fru-Gal also buys and returns (shoes) online. I do this for anything that has free shipping because I hate going to B&M stores. Energy is too precious.
DOGGLE UPDATE: Doggle’s recovering from his ordeal rather nicely so far, feeling full of himself and trying to go for broke on his limited walks. He’s doing much better than his mama, so I take that as a great sign!
MONEY UPDATE: Taxes were submitted and if I did everything right, we should be getting a rather large refund altogether. I wasn’t ready to screw around with our deductions from last year without having done a tax year as married filing jointly yet. Now that I have a single year under my belt, and waiting to see the IRS process it without hassle and quietly (fingers crossed, salt tossed, whatever), I may make some adjustments to our money.
I’m increasing his retirement contributions, definitely, to make up for my lack of a fund right now. I’m pretty sure we’re over the eligibility for ROTHs now but I’m not 100% certain so when I have some energy, that’s another thing to check. We may be able to increase his contributions to just max him out. I take over a different payment for him to balance the take-home cash availability since we don’t have time to deal with changing banks for the moment. Fair enough for both of us right now.
More plotting later ….
Thanks for the link, Revanche! 🙂
I’m so happy that Doggle is doing well, but not so happy about that mama comment. 🙁 I hope some of Doggle’s feel-good energy rubs off on you.
Thanks for the link back. It’s hard to let go to stuff that was or is tied to my mom but I think it’s becoming a bit easier, little by little. Good luck Revanche!