Net Worth & Life Report: July 2017
August 7, 2017
On Money
Income
Our normal income comes from two full time day jobs.
We experiment with earning money on the side, including minimal cash flow that we don’t touch from an investment property and investing in dividend stocks.
Some side income comes from Swagbucks, selling clothes on Poshmark which is hit or miss, and tracking activity through Achievement (my introduction to it).
The long term goal is to replace our day job income before my health declines enough to prevent me from working.
***
Poshmark sales! $28 for an amazing designer dress (bought on clearance!) that my post-partum body simply cannot get into anymore. Don’t think I didn’t try – and get very very stuck. I did. For a horrible five minutes, I thought PiC would have to cut me out of it.
$11 for a classic two button ten year old suit that, the fates willing, I won’t ever need again.
If I can average two sales a month, that’s a nice trickle of pocket change but my need to declutter would REALLY be tickled if it’d go up to two items a week. Just putting that out there, universe. Feel free to make it so.
Rental income: came in on time and covered the mortgage, HOA, supplemental home warranty coverage, insurance, and taxes (the latter two are escrowed) with $180 to spare.
Spending
Our normal spending includes the living expenses for two households so this update ignores those ordinary living expenses. When buying anything online, I always check Mr. Rebates and Ebates for cashback.
SDCC usually means a fair amount of spending. Because of the upcoming move, sometime this fall, I forced myself to keep it to the bare minimum. I only brought home a few books and souvenirs – a couple of which were gifts from my friend. He’s getting his gift from me that I preordered several months ago, and then promptly forgot about!
American Express Purchase Protection: Remember how I decided to charge everything related to the house? Turns out I was right to do that. Mostly the folks working on the house are careful but accidents happen and one did. A fixture that we had purchased well ahead of the planned installation date was absentmindedly used as a stepstool. Of course, it broke. Shattered, really. It was an accident, but one that would cost us another $50. For the first time, I submitted a claim with American Express, explaining what happened, and was told: Please allow for 30-45 days to resolve your claim.
24 hours later I was notified that the claim was approved, and the next day, the credit was already on my account.
The fine print: Purchase Protection is an embedded benefit of your Card Membership and requires no enrollment. It can help protect eligible purchases made on your Card when they’re accidentally damaged, stolen, or lost, for up to 90 days from the date of purchase. Please read important exclusions and restrictions to see if your item is eligible for coverage.
Thanks and thanks. JuggerBaby got THE BEST gifts this year from some super-awesome long-time friends. That called for some of our fanciest thank you cards. I believe in mailing thank you cards for as long as my fingers are still functioning, though there are quite a few days that they don’t.
Saving and investing
We max out a 401(k) and IRA every year. We normally save 20% of cash of our net salaries but that’s on hold while we get ourselves sorted out with the reno work.
Future travel. We don’t have any plans for travel and I have no idea when we’ll be ready to but that’s never stopped me from planning ahead.
See: “The striving, even when it wasn’t crystal clear what the striving would be in aid of, was worth it.” I’m setting an audacious goal of banking 300,000 airline miles to be saved for future vacations – one domestic, and one international. The reason it’s so high? To fly business class, or even first class, on that international trip. We survived that last trip but it wasn’t precisely fun and most of us got sick after that. One of these days, I’m going first class, baby! And then sadly back to coach class after that.
Our net worth update: on hold while reno is underway.
Links from this month
On Life
The circle of life. We’ve had everything this summer: new babies, new weddings, and now funerals. I never wanted to include this section in my monthly update but what a terrible month. We’ve lost a friend of this blog, and three family members, with two seriously ill family members. I’m holding up ok but there’s a layer of sadness tinging everything I do, and it will for a while. It gives me flashbacks to the years we were losing parents and friends, one after another, in what felt like an endless stream. It’s too early for this – for all of this.
I’m so sorry to hear about your losses. Huge, huge hugs.
Thank you.
Aww, hugs. I’m sorry for your losses and your grief.
I suck at thank you cards, but I still send them and make Little Bit make a thank you card or picture. It’s a good habit, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t appreciate them.
July was pretty productive for me, and August looks like it could match it if I don’t get sidetracked during track-out.
Thank you – it’s a little removed now which helps, but it’s still hard.
It feels like thank you notes are a good social practice to keep up with.
I have used miles to travel first class, and also business class. It’s amazing – but one thing I’ve done is use miles to fly economy TO my vacation (when I’m excited and will be jet-lagged anyway), and book only the return in business class (when any way to extend the vacation is a good thing). That can really lower the number of miles you need!
Thanks for the tip – that’s a nice way to extend our miles!
Oh geez, *hugs*.
Thank you.
Wow, sorry about your rough month with so many deaths. Many hugs.
I’ve traveled business class a few times and it *is* nice as expected.
Thank you cards are great!
Thanks.
Travel goals! 🙂
Speaking of bay area housing costs, I wanted to share with you the results of a little exercise I did today. I decided to check out our current net worth– I was surprised at how much it had grown since the last time I’d checked (stock market gains!) and wondered what that meant about our working lives (I’d previously calculated that we’d need something like 5 million to live on dividends alone without sacrifice, but that’s pretty impractical, so I was curious what the 4% rule and including SS would give). I was happy to find that so long as I work an additional ~11 years at at least my current salary, DH doesn’t need to get a job (so long as we’re willing to spend down savings).
With that information, I thought, well, what if I wanted to buy a house in a good school district in Mountain View. Is that in reach?
So I went to real estate listings and determined that those 2.2M to 2.8M three bedrooms were completely out of our range. But, if they were willing to accept that DC2 is in dual language, elementary zone wouldn’t matter so much. So I picked out a “cheap” house in a worse zone that was about equivalent to our net worth (condos and townhouses were less expensive, but also came with additional monthly association fees, so I didn’t want to deal with that). I put down the entire zillow value of our current mcmansion… and came up with a monthly fee of ~8K/month all told. Which … I don’t think we would be able to afford on the salary I think DH would end up with if we moved out there, and I have no idea what I’d be able to pick up in terms of income. Job loss would eat up our secondary emergency fund in about a year if we didn’t throw it into the mortgage downpayment.
So yeah… there’s a huge difference between living out in nowhere and buying a house in the bay area in terms of financial security.
Holy expensive meatballs!
I knew that the numbers don’t tally up for me, but I thought there was a strong chance I was being too conservative. I’ve been told that retiring would be possible with just $2M in assets but now believe that’s only true if that’s $2M in invested assets that produce income, aside from robust retirement accounts, and property. I wouldn’t include property as part of my retirement money anyway since it’s not an easily accessible source of money.
Virtual hugs from me too!
I include property as part of retirement since it largely eliminated one of your biggest expenses. Anytime I can eliminate an expense (such as getting solar panels) it has real value to me.
Thank you.
Right now I’m not including properties because so much of them are still owned by the banks. After we fully own them, I’ll feel more comfortable counting it toward retirement as an expense we don’t have to pay, but with property tax added.
Condolences on your losses. Here’s hoping they stop soon long enough to give you a recovery break.
I’ve flown first class and business class a few times and it is awesome. My first experience was an international flight in business class for work: Chicago to Amsterdam. In addition to the loveliness of extra space and services on board, I had a layover in Birmingham, UK on the way over and was amazed at the amenities in the lounge. Then on the return trip I had a layover at Heathrow and was even more impressed when I had a person meet me at the gate and transport me to the lounge. !!!
That was years ago and times have changed a bit. Now it seems that most airlines have done away with domestic business class. Even though they refer to the service as “first class” it’s pretty much on par with business class internationally. Not that I’m complaining! I love the extra room more than any other perk you get. (Although it is kind of nice to get an ice cream sundae in flight.) I’ve been able to use miles to do my upgrades, but I’ve used up most of my miles so I can’t do that anymore.
If I can somehow score a business trip to India again I should earn enough miles to make a big difference in my accounts, but I dont’ think that will happen any time soon.
Thank you!
I have been hoarding miles the credit card route because I don’t fly nearly enough to earn any significant number of them any other way. It’s going to take some time and effort but probably no more than what it would require if I were to do them the manual way 🙂
I’d love to fly first class internationally since it seems like that’s the last word in luxurious but I bet it wouldn’t actually be as relaxing as I’d want since we still have to entertain a toddler quietly while trapped with hundreds of strangers.
Jedi hugs, if you want them. I’m sorry about the continual sorrow and stress.
Hope to see you at FinCon17.
Thank you.
We’ll see, I can’t really see that far out right now.
Geez, I am so sorry. I can’t even imagine the amount of grief you’re experiencing right now. I know there’s not really anything I could say to make things better, but if you ever need someone to just listen, I’m here.
Thanks, FF, it’s been a heck of a time. But we’ll make it through.