By: Revanche

Money & Life Report: June 2018

July 2, 2018

On Money

Income

Our normal income comes from two full time day jobs. We earn money on the side, including tiny cash flow we don’t touch from an investment property and investing in dividend stocks.

Our side income comes from Swagbucks, infrequently selling on Poshmark, using cash back sites like Ebates, Mr.Rebates, and tracking physical activity through Achievement (my introduction to it). Some posts have affiliate links that pay a (very) small commission to keep the blog lights on.

The long term goal is to replace our day job income before my health declines enough to prevent me from working.

***

Micro-income 1. I complained to Comcast about their scheduling maintenance during the work day but not bothering to warn us about it, and they credited my account on request. For 2 cents. Wow.

Micro-income 2. I don’t do much with MTurk now but occasionally they’ll email me to do the odd survey. $0.50. 😀

Micro-income 3. I won a $100 Visa gift card. It covered our cell phone bill this month! With the remainder, I bought a tiny $5 gift card to defray future purchase costs. I pulled $100 cash out of our checking account to put into temporary savings so that it would be meaningful savings.

Micro-income 4. I sold an undergarment on Poshmark for $8.

Craigslist sale. We sold an espresso maker we got for pennies. $80!

Spending

Vet bill. Seamus’s dental has been scheduled for next month. I expected it to be about $1200 … now I wish it were! The quote is between $2000-2200. That makes my micro-income above feel even more small.

The other vet bill. Seraaaaaaaa.

Phone bill. I’m doing research on alternatives to our current $90 a month T-mobile bill (2 lines, unlimited everything but only 2 GB of high speed data). I need at least 2 GB myself because I’m a heavy user and occasionally have to tether my laptop for a connection when Comcast fails us. I know people have been happy with Cricket and Republic Wireless but their plans only save us about $15 which isn’t enough to make up for the loss of other benefits like international roaming and data. I was tempted to try Sprint, for FREE, but their coverage map is trash.

At the moment, Mint Mobile is looking attractive with a decent coverage map, and prices that are low enough justify having to pay for international data sometimes. Have you used them before?

Imperfect Produce. I’m trying an ugly produce delivery service! The premise is that tons of ugly, misshapen, and oddly sized fruit gets wasted every day because they won’t get shipped to stores for consumers to buy. This service gets that produce direct from the farms and distributes what you choose, weekly or every other week, to reduce that waste and offers it to us at a cheaper price. They also support food banks and other services that help feed people who need help which also get first pick of the ugly produce so we’re not taking food away from people who need it. If you want to give it a try and are in their service area, use my referral link up there to get a $10 credit. I’ll report back on the first box and how we used it when I’ve gotten through it!

Wish list:

• Robot Vacuum. I’d been “saving up for” (delaying) the purchase of a robot vacuum that could handle pet hair because the prices were outrageous – over $500, and closer to $800. This is around the middle of the wish list. If I keep waiting, maybe the prices for a really good one will drop even closer to $100!

Not spending

Replacement blinds. I was incredibly frustrated to find that all our retractable blinds don’t work right. We had this problem with one of them right off the bat and had that resolved relatively promptly but the rest of them went kaput this year. No matter what we do with the tension rods, no matter how many YouTube videos we watched, they won’t work consistently. The whole point of getting them was to spare my pain-filled hands from wrestling with blinds. I was even MORE frustrated to hear that despite after all the trouble we went to make them work, the first customer service rep I talked to refused to do more than send replacement parts and he sent them to the wrong address twice!

I went back to customer service via Twitter this time and expressed my polite frustration. They finally agreed to remake the blinds so that we won’t have this problem yet again.

Months since last shoe purchase: Nikes, July 2017, 11 months!
Months since last clothing purchase: Jeans, October 2017, 9 months!

Saving and investing

Beneficiaries! I took it for granted that these are already set but I decided to check and be sure. It’s darned good thing that I did – maybe the account changed hands at the administrative end but PiC didn’t have any beneficiaries saved anymore.

We have multiple accounts across Vanguard and Fidelity: 401K, IRAs, Roth IRA, brokerage. The first step was setting the joint account email as the contact for all the accounts, and then I made sure that I was the primary beneficiary of all of his accounts and he was the primary beneficiary of all my accounts. That felt kind of shady, setting myself as a beneficiary, because it’s a thing that feels like someone else should be doing! Weird feeling but true. Anyhow, that’s done.

Rebalancing portfolio. Our portfolio as a whole is almost entirely stocks so I’m taking new savings and putting them into bond funds instead of selling stocks to make the purchases as is often recommended. I may still sell some stocks to buy more bond funds but I have a bit of an aversion to selling unless I absolutely must. For now, this’ll do.

Miles & points

Alaska miles: 215,045 and $120 in travel credits
Chase Ultimate rewards: 310,262
Starpoints: 165,074

Net worth

It went up this month but a little bit was an accidental artificial inflation. I had recorded the wrong numbers for our portfolio last month, just the stocks and not the cash in the account, so this month the course correction made it look like we had a major increase.

On Life

Sleep deprivation. There was never a time in my life when all nighters were fun but I could do them if I absolutely had to. These days, though, losing even a few hours of sleep can tip my precarious moderate pain status right over into Barely Human pain levels. I’ve been forcing myself to stop reading and go to sleep by or before midnight for a week and it’s made a real difference. It’s tough to fall asleep when your body hurts too much though! And of course it hurts too much because it needs sleep. Bodies. Are. Weird.

Gluten free eating is starting to become a little easier, except for when I occasionally forget to that check all the ingredients on anything processed. We’re down to only one mistake every couple of weeks rather than monitoring what I consume hour to hour. An update is forthcoming this week!

:: How was your June? Do you always have that “it’s summer, school’s out!” tickle in the back of your mind in June even if it’s been more than 20 years since you were in school? What’s on deck for the 4th of July if you’re in the US?

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