By: Revanche

Money & Life Report: May 2020

June 1, 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, $1,570.70; Rural libraries, $321.62.

The world is on fire. I have some words to express on the subject but that will have to wait until I have a moment and mentally can string together coherence. It’s been a heck of a week and a weekend for a lot of reasons and I’m focusing on actions first, then words.

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 $734.94 in dividends in May.

Not spending

Our daycare has been waiving fees. For various reasons I won’t get into publicly, they don’t need our money to stay afloat, nor would they take it, so we’re taking that savings and redirecting the money.

Spending

Strange thing I’m finally caving on: hangers. We were gifted a set of baby hangers when JB was born, and I have been reusing hangers from any new clothes gifts ever since. I’ve avoided purchasing any more for five years but now JB is using more and more of our adult size hangers. Reducing my wardrobe in response to free up hangers is only going to go so far since I don’t want to get rid of perfectly good clothes just to free up hangers.

Thing PiC is finally caving on: a coffeemaker. He’s been making do, first with a 15 year old drip set up but it’s been making seriously subpar coffee because the water drains through too quickly for some reason, then with a manual version of a cone filter and that’s been a pain every day because the coarseness of the grind is constantly a problem. He’s finally starting to run out of the paper filters so we talked about getting him something that does the job without needing paper filters to reduce waste and we decided on a little Bodum French Press. No filters to discard and the coarseness of the grind shouldn’t matter nearly so much. Fingers crossed.

The daycare money is split three ways: paying for lessons for JB, bulking up our cash buffer for better peace of mind, and increased giving.

We’re still paying for: Massage gift certificates in hopes that my beloved massage therapist will be able to be back in business this year and not have to close up shop. She just launched her woman-owned small massage business two years ago when I first started seeing her, I was so happy to support a great small business. Hope hope hope she can hold out.

Purchases. I bought $30 of books for gifts and language books for JB, $60 of textbooks they requested for math practice (?? Is this my child?), and one $5 summer outfit to add to their rewards they can earn for filling out their Activity Board. Normally I only buy essentials like socks and underwear, everything else is hand me downs, but we are living in rather unusual times. Also we won’t be seeing the hand me downs selection at all this year, I suspect.

Giving

With various crises just a little less crisis-y by near the end of month, I had the attention span to get back on the horse and started giving again to the places on my list and directly to individuals, small businesses and regions hit hard by the pandemic.

Our Lakota Families update: We had a Three Bears contribution month – one small, one medium and one huge. It was wholly unexpected and thrilling, every penny of the contributions was deeply appreciated, and immediately translated into real help for people in need.

Contributors get detailed email updates on where our funds went but I like to share a summary here. As of this month, we have supplied 8 families, with a total of 46 individuals, with basics they needed to stay warm, stay dry, clothed, and clean. The supplies we bought: clothing, basic pantry foods, diapers and wipes for babies, menstrual products, towels, materials for them to make masks to protect against COVID.

I wish we could do more for all of them. Limited money and shipping restrictions mean we haven’t been able to fulfill anyone’s needs list quite as thoroughly as I would have hoped but we do the best we can with what we have.

I am so grateful to y’all for teaming up with me on this project to help those who are less fortunate than us and I’m looking forward to keeping it up through the rest of the year!

Saving and investing

My investing is on hold for at least another month while I shore up depleted savings. The rental, you may recall, wiped out its own entire savings to date from the property’s profit. The tenants are ok so far but to make sure my bills can still get paid if our tenants need a break on the rent at some point, I paused investing so I could build up a cash buffer. Since buying the place, I have had a rule that it pays for itself but these are extraordinary times. I have no intention of being the jerk who didn’t plan for a rough patch during a pandemic and taking that out on my tenants. We don’t rely on that income thankfully right now so I can afford to pivot our plans.

Also I’m glaring at the stock market’s behavior and the reasons for it. Many small businesses and individuals are hurting right now but Wall Street is booming? This is absurd.

Net worth

I haven’t actually had time to put our monthly numbers together! But that’s ok. It’s *waves hand* somewhere there.

On Life

Cost of living and quality of life. Talking to a friend from a much lower COLA, I discovered that we have to make at last $200k a year more to be matching their standard of living in their area. They make about half our incomes. Dang!

I’m a California girl born and raised, and have visited a dozen other states but have never had a strong hankering to be anywhere but here. It’s weird to see how that hobbit-hole emotion, my tendency to grow deep roots, translates financially. Being location independent is appealing to me for the flexibility I can choose to exercise but mostly the way I love to exercise it is in solitude.

They aren’t extravagant but they have a lot more choices than we do. Based on that comparison, though, she assured me that we are not rich by any stretch which made me laugh. It’s true. We’re fortunate, we’re stable, and so I say we’re rich, but we still have plenty of constraints on our choices. We cannot have or do it all. We cannot help every person who needs a hand, we cannot pursue a number of my philanthropic pie in the sky dreams.

We can’t laze around all day and let the hired help do all the work, even if we were inclined to longterm indolence. Short term, absolutely, I’m all for that. But we couldn’t do it for days and weeks and months.

FOOD. My appetite has been absolutely terrible so meals are totally hit or miss. I continue to survive on quesadillas.

This keto gluten free bread was a hit with everyone. Not that the others in my family needed it, they have plenty of baked goods they can eat! But I was willing to share anyway.

My massive craving for all things lemon culminated in trying this sugar-free keto lemon muffin recipe. But I was too lazy / tired / worn out to bother with actual muffins so I doubled the recipe piled it into my new loaf pan instead. I could have used the lemon loaf recipe but this one called for sour cream, and I had yogurt to use up, so I swapped that. I think that was more carbs but it was within my range.

READING. I don’t feel like compiling a Spring edition of The Fun We Had. It feels too weird to try and force a fun face on stuff so I’m just sharing my reads here.

• Mary Robinette Kowal, The Calculating Stars (Amazon, Indiebound)
  This was a wonderful read and I had to read straight through to the end. But. It was also a bit heavy for these times.
• Mercedes Lackey, Blood Red (Amazon, Indiebound); From a High Tower (Amazon, Indiebound). I really like the Elemental Masters series. Sadly, the library only has 2 of the series in ebook right now.
• Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January. This was almost devastating. (Amazon, Indiebound)
• Naomi Alderman’s The Power. This was a Wowsa heavy read. Very well written, I couldn’t stop reading, but a pandemic was definitely the wrong time to be reading this.  (Amazon, Indiebound)
• Jeanne Birdsall: The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy, (Amazon, Indiebound); The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, (Amazon, Indiebound); The Penderwicks at Mouette Point (Amazon, Indiebound)

When I have trouble reading, I watch a little TV. I’ve gone through The Good Place seasons 1-3, and the new Charmed.

:: How was your month?

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