By: Revanche

Money & Life Report: April 2020

May 4, 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, $659.86; 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 can do while we can.

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Dividend income. We received $193.60 in dividends in April.

Federal taxes. I’m glad we filed on the last day of March. I know there was no rush with the deadline delay to July 15th but we were due a federal refund and I wanted our money before the virus spread brought the IRS to some kind of grinding halt. Our deposit arrived in about ten days so I stashed it immediately to pay for our CA tax bill in the summer. I’m not paying that until July. We have a little extra after we deduct our state taxes, but I consider that money already spent. I’ve been hearing reports from other bloggers that they’d filed much earlier but they were being asked for ID, birth certificates, etc, and their refunds are indefinitely held up. What gives?? What has your experience been with your tax refund?

Spending

Groceries. We have been working on reducing our grocery runs from every week to every 2-3 weeks. We managed to hit the 2 week mark on the regular grocery stores, and nearly 3 weeks on the Costco run. Pretty good! But we were fast running out of eggs and they were out of the green beans for the dogs, so we will have to do two Costco runs in May. Boo.

USPS. As a general rule, though I know their service isn’t uniformly stellar, I’ve always relied on USPS for personal shipping because it’s far more affordable than anything else. This month we committed to buying a large quantity of stamps to support them. I know it’s a drop in the bucket but I really don’t want the USPS to go away without having lifted a finger. We are also using up our current stash of stamps, sending mail to loved ones.

All the therapies. I deeply miss my massage therapy. Deeply. My massage therapist works minor miracles in keeping me functional. I’ve been buying gift certificates from her small business and hoping that there are other customers doing the same to help keep her afloat until we have a way to actually safely use those gift certificates.

I am incredibly lucky that I started telemedicine therapy before the shutdown so at least I am getting some health support, which is quite expensive as well, but it’s clearly helping me keep a grip on my horses. Some days, a few of them get away.

JB recreational and educational spending. PiC bought a bike for JB from Costco and I picked up necessary educational tools for them to use during lesson time. $340. $80! Muahaha we had a surprise no-contact used bike option arise and we snatched that opportunity with both hands and feet. My wallet is so relieved.

Refills refills refills. I’m trying to stay at least one month ahead on Seamus’s refills. My wisdom in this was proven on the ONE medication we didn’t do this with. It was a new medication so we didn’t fill 90 days’ worth. We needed to confirm it was and lol, it was immediately backordered a week in, so we’ve run out and I’ve been casting about for another supplier. I should have done it sooner but I just didn’t have the attention span for it. Thankfully it’s not one that affects his pain. Still this means I’m spending in 3 month chunks again which is why February was dramatically over budget. Better than running out of meds, though.

Not spending

PGE CA Climate Credit. This is a great time to get a $60 credit on our account. It’s helpful to offset our increased usage with everyone at home all the time.

Found technology. I had the time to go through one moving box and found my old iPad. If it can be reformatted and set up, I can probably set JB up with a few learning apps on there. We’ll see, one step at a time.

Giving

Patreon. I’ve added one more Patreon and we’re continuing to pay attention to where we can give money.

Time. Mostly I’ve been giving my time, expertise, and attention to the people around me who needed it. I’m tapped out.

Saving and investing

Debate: Do we pause investing entirely for 3 months while I make up some gaps in our buffers OR half invest and half save. I want to do the former to be careful in case PiC’s job IS in danger. That’s not clear yet and I am hoping that it is a false alarm. I want to do the latter to stay in the market because I am sloooooooowly making up for ten years of not investing regularly and not having a 401K. I’ve lost significant investing time in the past several years and pausing feels like failure. (I know it’s not, it’s just a feeling.) This is something that haunts me. Even though I have been making the best decisions I can with the information I have this past decade, the context that drives me is lost when I reflect on how fortunate we are today. We are fortunate but also I have a long history of not being able to do all the right money things because there were not enough dollars to go around. At best, between 2004-2017, I probably invested an average of $1000 a year. Maybe. I’m not going to go back and figure it out because that’s just a way to torment myself.

While I ponder on the correct approach for today and this year, I bought more VTSAX with the money that I had set aside earlier in the year for investing that was already in Vanguard.

Net worth

• The stock market makes no sense to me right now. We made back most of the losses from last month and I don’t get it. With this many unemployed people, why does the market keep rallying?
• I’ve been letting my CDs expire and go to cash since the interest rate on my savings (1.50%) is the same as the available interest on the CDs. It’s not worth locking it up right now.

On Life

Comic-Con 2020 was canceled. Even as I knew it was necessary and expected it, I remain ever so sad about breaking our tradition. I miss my SD family and we only get to see them in the summer.

Saving money on prescriptions. We are very lucky that our human prescription coverage is excellent so this has primarily affected us on the dog front. Seamus is on 6 different chronic medications regularly so of course I’ve been looking for a million ways to save a bit.

Our veterinarian helped us out at first, pointing us to Costco for the gabapentin since it’s a human medication. Costco has good prices AND a free member discount program that you can sign up for to bring down the cost of medications for yourself if not covered by insurance and for your pets. They do tax pet prescriptions though! Here, that’s an additional 10% so I stick with ordering his (horribly expensive) Galliprant from 1-800-PetMeds, they don’t charge tax.

The past two months, he’s also been going through new medications for his bladder issues, and RiteAid wanted $130 for the latest antibiotics. My eyebrows bounced off my face for a minute, and then I warmed up my Googling fingers.

GoodRX offered a coupon to print off for the pharmacy, and they showed me the cost across multiple pharmacies, including Costco. They reduced the price on this one medication by $100-110! This didn’t work for two of the priciest medications, the Galliprant and Optimmune are painfully expensive no matter where we get them but it does work for two of the other chronic meds. I’ll take my wins where I can get them.

Food in the time of COVID. I made three pounds of pork and shrimp dumpling mix and froze 2/3s of it for later. JB has become quite the intrepid dumpling wrapper. They prefer making the fan shape, I like the little cannonball shapes better. What’s your favorite dumpling (Asian) shape?

:: How was your April?

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