By: Revanche

Money & Life Report: February 2020

March 2, 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 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. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we have today.

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Dividend income. We received $545.98 in dividends in February. This was an unusual month.

Ko-Fi! Awwww, another kind reader! I so appreciate the support. Thank you! <3

W-2 income. We’re making a little more money this year. This was just about enough cover our increased costs of living with inflation plus a trickle to savings but thanks to my new health spending category below, that’s gone. Drat. Every bit counts. Especially with PiC’s increasing unhappiness with his job, and the peculiarities of his company’s financial stability, I am banking and investing as much as I can. We’re earning well right now but I also know that can go away very quickly. Maybe this is me being pessimistic but I don’t think so – he’s been unhappy for two years and they’ve been through five layoffs. Also I AM admittedly pessismistic because I feel physically terrible all the time. How long can I keep going?

Spending

Rental property refresh. This cost 5 figures. I checked the pricing with my veteran LL friend to confirm – he said all the materials and labor were a decent deal but also the damage done by the previous tenant was pretty egregious. There’s no way that was normal wear and tear. Who NORMALLY rips door frames off the walls in the normal course of their daily lives? This has totally wiped out all my reserves and then some. The rental owes our personal savings some cash. It’s going to take 18 months just to replenish the reserves. That puts me on edge, I hate not having dedicated reserves for the rental. I’ve updated our real estate records in detail in preparation for tax time.

We replaced all the toilets, the flooring, the baseboards, cleaned inside and out, repaired doors and door locks, replaced the carpets, and painted everything. The work looks good and it should be nice for the next tenant.

Trainer/walker. To help me out and to reinforce Sera’s training, I’ve hired a once a week dog walker. We’ve been making some real progress but we also seemed to be stuck on at a plateau and I’ve been wanting some training help. The trainer that I spoke to charges $300 a session! *mind boggled* This is a much more affordable way to go: she gets extra exercise and a desensitizing-training session for $22 a week.

Car. $400. It cost $400 to stop the car engine from smoking alarmingly when we drove short distances. Sigh.

Hobby. $150. PiC needed to get new safety equipment for his hobby. We had a real scare earlier this month and I’m just beyond grateful that nothing serious happened that couldn’t be recovered from.

Phone. $36. We replaced PiC’s phone battery which was significantly cheaper and more ecofriendly than replacing the whole phone.

Taxes incoming. I’ve been through this a few times and I think I have an estimate on our totals. Despite my best withholding efforts, I think we’re going to owe money again this year. I’m guessing it’s going to be in the neighborhood of $3000-4000. Sigh.

JB Health. $110. We finally got our butts to the optometrist and picked out prescription glasses for JB. They have been diagnosed with some astigmatism and some kind of issue that the doc wants to start working on correcting a little bit. Clearly JB did not get my eyes.

My Health. It’s been a long, LONG, time coming but I finally figured out what kind of brain therapy I might try to help with my pain. I’ve been to a therapist to talk about my anger with Dad but that experience was kind of useless. I have set up a series of appointments with a new therapist who was a direct referral from someone who has been doing work with a great therapist on similar chronic pain and health problems.

Not spending

Or trying not to. Mostly my money management makes sense. Sometimes, not so much. Our cash flow is Income minus Savings (automated savings for huge bill, and automated savings for investing). We get to spend what’s left. I leave a buffer in a linked savings account to cover ups and downs. Why won’t I allow myself a bigger buffer when I KNOW that it’s just going to cause me unnecessary stress? Why do I need to admit in writing that I am being silly before I fix it?

Actually, I know why. This is a leftover habit from when we couldn’t afford to have “lazy” cash just sitting there to be available to cover just in case expenses I had not planned for. I kept super tight controls over our money so we wouldn’t overdraw, as if that was going to influence our spending. Well, it did, but this habit needed to evolve to meet our present circumstances. There’s no reason to cause myself extra stress when we are already mindful about our spending. Granted, we could always make some better choices but there IS a line between “mindful” and “penny-pinching” – I have always had trouble staying away from the latter. So I’ve increased our cash buffer.

This is the first step in training my brain to be ok with the fact that some months we are going to overspend our ideal maximums and some months we will be under, and it will work out ok. (I need to worry less about not having under months.)

Less spending, this would be called. T-Mobile Tuesdays apparently heard me saying I needed them to give us more Rover credits because none of their other offerings are useful to me. They came up with $30 credits! WOO. Plus a friend used our referral code which gave us both $20 in credits. This saves me the cost of 3 Sera training and exercise walks.

Giving

Lakota: We’ve helped 2 families!

Saving and investing

I guess our home falls into this category. Talking about how squishy our numbers are for estimated early retirement income needed in this post got me thinking about at least figuring out how much longer we have on this mortgage. Figured out my goof: we haven’t been making those dreamt of payments to principal that would have decreased our mortgage timeline. We still have 27 years on this mortgage. That’s sad.

Since admitting that I am terrible at lump sum investing, I’m trying something new this month and probably for the rest of the year. I’m going to make small weekly purchases in our brokerage instead. Spreading it out should alleviate my strong temptation to time the market. Maybe even cure it??

Net worth

– Our invested assets allocation is hovering at 90/10 stocks to bonds.
– We’re at about 30% of our total invested assets goal. That feels like both a good amount and not a lot at the same time. #conflicted

On Life

Random Milestone: mileage. We hit 180,000 miles on my car. May our two geezer cars last at least two more years and hit 220,000 miles each before we have to replace them.

Goals. I’ve been consumed with helping a family member through bad times, I haven’t had a minute to dream up my essay or next book design. I’m still at 1 of 6 books for 2020.

Valentine’s Day. We are “anti-establishment” as PiC jokingly says – we don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day. But I’m also quite conscious lately of mortality and enjoying what we have in front of us so I made it a point to make a special dinner for our family anyway. Which JB completely failed to appreciate. Suddenly they don’t like scallops anymore. *shrug* More for us, then!

Breakfast foods. I’ve been working on making our breakfasts less boring, mainly for me, because I can’t have any of the usual carb-deliciousness that I would normally: muffins, croissants, toast, cereal, etc. Eggs every day is incredibly boring. Yogurt is too sugary (and if it’s not then it’s terrible) and I can’t add granola to make it palatable like I used to. Oatmeal, also too carby. Pancakes, waffles, ok I’m depressing myself now.

So, left with the options of vegetables and protein, I’ve been experimenting with different egg scramble combinations: spinach and cheddar; diced bok choy; diced grilled shrimp and caramelized (very thinly sliced) onions; just cheddar eggs; onions, mushroom, and spinach; mushroom, spinach, and cheddar.

Have you got any great combination suggestions?

Successful cookery. I got all the thumbs up on my pasta bake (half with no actual pasta, for me) and the lamb stew experiment (I only sort of followed the recipe since I didn’t have all the ingredients on hand). The latter was the most stressy for me. I’ve never done a Moroccan recipe before so between lots of prep time and seasoning combinations I wasn’t familiar with, I worried that I’d have to dump a whole pot of food if it turned out horribly. It didn’t. Thank goodness.

This calamari steak recipe worked well for us adults (JB pooh-poohed it).

Family. Half my month was consumed with making sure that dear family was getting regular meals, among other needs, during their difficult time. This support is going to consume much of my year. It’s my time and organizing skills that are being exercised, the money is coming from people who can’t supply time or skills. Community is so important.

:: How was your February?

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