Money & Life Report: April 2022
May 3, 2022
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. There are ways to support the blog and our charitable giving in the sidebar.
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 $284.46 in dividends from the stocks portfolio. All reinvested, of course.
Little gripe: I’ve been trying to hit the $20 cash out threshold at Ibotta for months and months. I’m determined to get that last bit of the way there before I close my account. Just another $1.30 to go!
Both federal and state refunds landed already from our 2021 filing. Also, one more tax amendment refund came in as well. Everything went straight to our savings. I joked PiC could have $35 of the amendment refund since they calculated a slightly higher amount than we submitted for but ha ha just kidding he can have it when we retire. That leaves me waiting for two federal and one state refund. Naturally the biggest refund has been on hold for the longest time for evaluation. Ugh.
Spending
- We bought this last December but I just wanted to comment that the Le Crueset pan we blew our 9 year old gift cards on to replace our flaking non stick pan(s) is working well. I still can’t figure out how to make the eggs NOT stick, and it’s far too heavy for my pain days, but lucky me I’m having more extreme fatigue days than pain days, and it’s relatively easy to clean after a soaking, so it works out.
- I increased my Patreon ($36/year) for Pikaole because I foolishly showed their merch to JB who is now obsessed and it feels mean to hoard all the adorableness to myself. Because I will not share my current stash. Hissss! Mine! $
- Our check for the first month of Summer Camp for JB was cashed. $$$$ buys us all day coverage and weekly field trips.
Not spending
- My phone limped into April! It’s glitching more and more now, turning off at inopportune times or freezing, but I’m trying to eke out as much life from it as possible before spending a bucketload to replace it.
- I’d like to tip my hat to our Roku which has been trucking along pretty well for the past 8 years, allowing us to cut cable. I hope we still have decent choices for years to come. The shift to many splintered streaming services isn’t a great sign but here’s hoping.
Giving
On giving: we have worked really hard and been very fortunate that our hard work paid off in significant ways that I couldn’t have dreamt of when I first started this blog. Though we have not reached our FI number where I can feel like all income is gravy, we’ve always felt it was important to lend a helping hand. Many people say they’ll give back later, when they’re financially set. I say that if we don’t practice and prioritize giving now, we won’t give later either.
All year round I run the Lakota Giving Project, donate to organizations that help people and animals in need and do direct aid.
We’ve helped six Lakota families so far this year! That’s more than one family per month which is pretty great, considering I had to hit pause for a bit during my fatigue and pain spells.
We’ve done direct aid for @Tinu who has been strugging with cancer and Long COVID. I know we had other direct aid but can’t remember what it was now.
Saving and investing
I’ve got a Big Number goal for investing this year, we’re about 52% of the way there. I have a stretch goal in mind and we’re 43% of the way there. I think there’s a good chance we’ll end up somewhere in the middle of the two. My need to not just meet a goal but get there ahead of the deadline might not be one of my more healthy impulses. It’s mostly automated though, and I mostly noodle around with the day to day budget to squeeze out more savings about as much as I spend time on our giving pursuits. I’d like to say this is all projected to massive gains and a definite early retirement but both my conservative estimates, and our big mortgage, suggest that it’s still quite a long ways off. Nonetheless, I do my best with what I have.
Net worth
This dropped a significant amount this month, the markets are doing their dance. It doesn’t register too much on our graph since our numbers are high enough to absorb some shifts.
On Life
Entertainment.
Learning to sew comes in fits and starts. I’ve practiced sewing seams. My seams need a lot of work but I am slowly building muscle memory. I want to start making zippered pouches next, and asked friends to link me to tutorials. This one will be useful for repurposing non lined bags.
I started Netflix’s Always A Witch about a black girl who is a time traveling witch. I was very interested! But the plot (spoiler I think) is based on her being a slave who fell in love with her owner’s son and that grosses me out too much. I cannot stand media that pretends that enslaved people had any choice in how they were used by their owner. Not that people who are enslaved are not capable of love, of course they are, but romanticizing a relationship between an enslaved person and their owner does not work for me.
Amazon Prime’s Upload was probably supposed to be more of a lighthearted comedy but it raised all kinds of ethical quandaries for me. It also raised the intriguing question of whether I’d be willing to move my consciousness elsewhere if I could – to escape this incredibly flawed body that is always dragging tired and severely limited?
Books. (As usual if the bookshop links say they’re broken, they’re not)
This Time for Me, Alexandra Billings (Amazon, Bookshop). DNF. The writing style was compelling but the organization of the memoir was hard for me to follow after a very long day and the hardships were just too much. Put bluntly, there’s a stomach-churning amount of sexual assault and I couldn’t take it. I don’t mean to diminish the author’s life experiences, I just couldn’t read about it all.
Wild Magic (The Immortals Book 1, Amazon, Bookshop), Wolf-speaker (The Immortals Book 2, Amazon, Bookshop), Emperor Mage (The Immortals Book 3, Amazon, Bookshop), The Realms of the Gods (The Immortals Book 4, Amazon, Bookshop), Tamora Pierce. I loved this series about Daine but I very much disliked the romance arc given the age difference at their specific life stages (minor and an adult, nope).
MY TURN on Seanan McGuire’s Spelunking Through Hell (Amazon, Bookshop) came up and I’ve read it twice. I love this series so much.
Food.
I made chicken adobo this month and shared this recipe with friends – it’s a hit! Made a lot more of that baked panko chicken. It goes well with rice and veggies and the kids eat it right up. I really need more / better vegetable recipes.
Wow, that’s some good progress toward your investing goal!
Yay on the LC pan. I struggle with our cast iron, but I do like the functionality.
Yeah I think we have more income earlier in the year than I plan on when I set the goals, I suspect that the progress will slow down once we hit the middle of the year.
Recommendation for a great graphic novel series about a time-traveling Black American witch girl: The Okay Witch by Emma Steinkellner. No enslavers involved. Romance is also not a main thing, more of a side thing for adults only.
I’ve started just not finishing books where the hero is like 10+ years older and watched the heroine grow up and all of a sudden she’s hot. Just really not into Gigi tropes. (Most recently, returned Shadows of Swanford Abbey for that reason). When there’s a large age difference but they only met each other as adults and she’s in her mid-20s I just pretend he’s younger (since there’s no real reason he has to be 45 or whatever– the story would be identical if he was closer to her age while still an established adult) and keep reading. But when her having a childhood crush on his adult self is a big thing, I’ve been noping out of there. I have known extremely few relationships in real life where the may-december thing didn’t either result in an abusive (or in one case, pedophile) december or the december having a mid-life crisis that involves him leaving a wife and kids from a first marriage. Basically I can think of one, and she retired early to become a care-taker for him because 20 years is a big difference. (I don’t read Tamora Pierce because I disliked the mentor/mentee relationship becoming a sexual romance in her first series. Gross. Even as a pre-teen it felt like a betrayal. I want to be mentored by men in my work-life without anyone ever even thinking about it becoming sexual. (I also disliked her relationship with her boss becoming sexual in the same series, though that one ended predictably with her losing her job because of it.))
Ooooh thank you!!
I am guessing that I read Tamora Pierce’s series out of order so I didn’t realize that the first series had that element in it. I also really hate all media that uses the dating-the-boss trope. YUCK.