Money & Life Report: January 2020
February 3, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $521.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from an investment property (which is all saved for future maintenance) and investing in dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks and cash back sites (Ebates, Mr.Rebates). Some posts have affiliate links that pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running and I’ve added a way to support the blog in the sidebar to the right!
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working because I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA.
I aim to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Accounting and tracking. It felt great to switch all my spreadsheet tabs to fresh tabs for 2020. I have one for our net worth tracking and transactions history, one for our dividend investing, and another one for our index fund investing.
Smaller paychecks. I forget that the first part of the year always means smaller paychecks because we work on to maxing out PiC’s 401K as soon as we can. This is not helpful.
Dividend income. We received $165 in dividends in January.
Ko-Fi! A friend encouraged me to set this up so readers can support the blog. I was skeptical but then tickled to receive a lovely note and coffee from a long-time reader this month. Thank you! <3
Spending
Password manager. Several years ago, a friend gifted me one of their 1Password keys and found it incredibly useful because I’m the worst at remembering passwords. Unfortunately, when I changed computers, my account was frozen because they had gone to a subscription system. Of course they did. *eyeroll* I finally decided that it was time to have a family account so that PiC and I could both have access to joint account at all times, instead of me constantly having to update them. This is part of responsible family money management, saving him trouble trying to get into accounts he couldn’t access without the passwords, if I’m not around. Before I committed, I wrote to them asking if there was a way to move my current personal vault over to a family account. They confirmed it and also offered me a welcome gift of $20 for sticking with them for our first year of membership. Between the 30 day free trial, and the credit, it’s $40 for 13 months of password management.
Rental repairs. Work on the rental has begun and that repair bill is huge. It eats up our entire cash reserve in one go, and I’m still $2000 short. Ugh. I did run the pricing past an experienced friend who said it was a good deal but still. A conservative estimate says it’ll take 20 solid months of rent to replenish the cash reserve and make up for the lost rent. Awesome. Sigh.
WHY does it feel like spending in this start of the year is so painfully high? Ok I know part of it is because of those darn holiday costs that were unavoidable, and then the ones we chose, and together they are a monster. We do make progress over time but in the day to day, I can’t help feeling squeezed and I would like to stop feeling that way without having to reduce our saving.
Not spending
Hand me downs. I am so grateful that we have had a steady stream of hand me down clothing for JB. We won’t be able to rely on them for too much longer – the kids are growing at different rates, tastes are developing. I’ve been grateful for every bit that’s come our way, as well as gifted new clothing, and do my best to give back into the friends hand-me-down ecosystem. Plus I love that the clothes continue to be loved and used.
Free dog beds. FedEx royally messed up the delivery of my two dog beds from Chewy. After going round and round and round: checking in when it hadn’t arrived in 3 days, then again when it hadn’t arrived in 7 days, getting a courtesy discount for the week long delay on a 2 day delivery promise, checking again when it hadn’t arrived in 21 days, FedEx finally said it was delivered. It was. BACK TO CHEWY. Sigh. The CSR at Chewy I dealt with at that point wasn’t great either so I gave up and cancelled the whole thing. Then I remembered I’m me and made myself go back one last time to see if they could make it worth my while with at least the same or a bit more of a discount. Instead I got a good CSR who shipped me two free dog beds. I’m happy to have saved the money out of pocket but it was in exchange for a whole lot of irritation and time.
Comcast remains a thorn in my side. After a full week of constantly jogging the modem’s elbow, no amount of jogging got us reconnected so I had to go get tech support. It took an hour but they fixed the signal from their side and credited my account $10.
Giving
In case you missed it, I launched this year’s Lakota giving drive early! Huge thanks to J. Money for the mention. I added this tidbit to our launch post but to give you some perspective, last year we raised $2669.94 to touch a total of 27 lives.
We have enough in hand to start helping our first family so I will be working on that in February. It would be rather awesome if we could help an average of one family per month but I won’t count those chickens before they’ve hatched.
Our own other giving: I’ve finally signed up to Patreon to support a shepherd friend. We also supported a private fundraiser for education and The Human Utility. I’m thinking about our overall budget because I’d like to add another Patreon or two to our monthly giving. Like the Bitches who are amazing.
Then it was about giving to our PF community:
1) Agatha, formerly the Money Wolf. I sent a contribution through the Burning Limb Foundation option instead of the GoFundMe. because the fees were lower so I could give more directly to her.
2) I sent a contribution to the meal train for Mr and Mrs PIE.
3) Joe Biden the pupper, cared for by a former-blogging friend.
Saving and investing
Annual investing: I hoarded money all through 2019 so that we could max out our IRAs in January. I really like being done with it since I’m bad at lump sum investing. I think this means I should really shift to monthly contributions for this year. Haven’t I learned my lesson?
Banking: Every dividend we earn gets transferred into my investing account so I can use it to reinvest. Frustratingly, even though Ally claims they don’t charge commissions anymore, their system refuses to stop accounting for commissions in my cash balances and it plays merry hell with my usual transfers. I have a help ticket in with them but it’s taking forever to fix. I’m just annoyed with Ally’s website lately, it keeps hiccuping and signing me out every two minutes, refusing to submit transfer requests, telling me to sign in when I already am signed in, etc. I’m very tempted to move the whole brokerage account to Vanguard now.
Stock portfolio: I had a purchase order for ABBV for almost two months. I should have put in the purchase order early last year and forgot! Ooops. Well anyway, I placed a GTC order early last month at the price I was willing to buy, but the price was stubbornly refusing to budge, so I found myself contemplating whether I should just cancel the order entirely. Thankfully the price dropped before I ran out of patience. Then it dropped more so then I got annoyed at myself for not picking a lower purchase price. This is why I buy and hold – I simply don’t have patience.
Net worth
Our net worth is down half a percent this month. Who knows why? Something to do with market movements, I assume.
On Life
Random Milestone: Reading in 2019. I forgot to brag about this one in my year end summary and I’m happy about it. I read 134 books last year!
Brainspace. I had a holiday travel / socializing hangover. It took me nearly 2 weeks to get back in the mindset for being focused on work and getting things done efficiently. I hated that mental fug that was keeping me from focusing!
Pasta substitute! I’ve finally found a reasonable substitute for spaghetti / penne noodles! Hearts of palm. They have a faint taste of asparagus which is fine by me. It’s reduced if you soak them in water for a while before cooking, but even if you don’t, they’re fine if you like the taste of asparagus.
Goals. I didn’t have any motivation at all earlier in the month to set goals but halfway through I realized that I do want to do some things that aren’t just regular keeping on. At first it was create 12 books for sale and craft one publishable personal essay to submit to Longreads, but then I realized that this year is going to be challenging enough. So it’s now create 6 books to sell and craft one publishable personal essay to submit to Longreads. Who knows if the latter will ever be good enough but I’ve got to try eventually, right? One book down!
Our January wasn’t that spendy, but even a few days into February there’s a lot of $$$ going out. I think it’s just the new year kicking everything into gear again.
I love password managers. While I was doing our estate planning, I realized it’d be near impossible to give access to all our accounts without one.
That’s an impressive number of books!
I was really hoping to keep the spending down for more than a week or two but regular expenses are starting to pile on again to the tune of hundreds. Dog stuff!
Yes thanks for the reminder that I have to actually ADD passwords to the password manager for PiC eeps!
January is often a spendy month b/c the holiday bills from Dec come due. I have a large extended family, but luckily we have all agreed to do a white elephant exchange for the adults and just buy presents for the kids. In addition, we moved to FL from NY so that decreased spending due to geo-arbitrage. Net worth-wise, I wouldn’t worry about a half-percentage drop — that’s probably the spending which seems like it’s mainly investing back in your rental. With Brexit, coronavirus, trade wars and other market shocks, I’m sure our portfolio took a hit too, but we track monthly but only rebalance annually.
NW: Yes a drop like that isn’t really worth more attention than the one sentence I gave it š
January is such a rough month after holidays and related spending and related fatigue!