By: Revanche

Money & Life Report: July 2022

August 2, 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 $214 in dividends from the stocks portfolio. All reinvested.

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PiC’s company did a compensation evaluation and decided they were underpaying large swaths of employees and bumped up their salaries. Turns out he was one of them. Bummer that he’s been underpaid for the past who knows how long but yay for the out of cycle increase now.

I wasn’t surprised he’s been underpaid. He changed jobs in the middle of the pandemic and there’s been a lot going on with layoffs and suchlike. Despite being married to me, he’s never been in a situation where negotiating his salary was possible versus my consistent and persistent self advocacy for raises and promotions through the years. There’s an irony in that I’ve very actively grown my career at every step and I still don’t make as much as he does. I’ve been in a quiet competition all these years trying to beat his salary.

Anyway, I’m glad the dust has settled enough that they’re bringing people up to standard. As usual, I’ll take this opportunity to bump up our savings rate a bit to assuage my guilt over our spending.

Spending

New phone. $$$. My phone lasted 4 years and 4 months. I was going to keep hanging on but mid month, the battery started draining from 98% to 30% after a couple of hours of use. At 32%, it shuts down when I try to take pictures. Since half my day with the Smol Acrobat involves grabbing pictures of hilarious moments, that’s no good. A friend alerted me to a $100 off sale for the Pixels so I grabbed the 256 GB Pixel 6 on the premise it won’t be vastly different from my 2, except much more storage space and it’ll work. RIP Pixel 2.

Travel spending: $$$$. We shared the cost of a house for a week and paid for take out and groceries. We used points to cover our hotels for part of our travel so that was a nice sparing of the wallet.

Not spending

I am attempting to repurpose my elderly Kindle for JB’s use. This thing is only worth $5 for trade in, it’s so old! Which, if the trial doesn’t work out, is still $5 more than we had before. This requires us to set up a child Kindle account and then to test checking out library e-books for them. If this goes ok, they will get to use the Kindle for reading on longer trips. If not, away it goes.

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.

This was a very busy and expensive month for us so I was only able to organize a small amount of direct aid (someone broke into this artist’s car and stole all her convention stuff) and started two new Lakota donations at the end of the month. I’ll be working on those in August.

Saving and investing

Anticipatory savings: The IRS finally confirmed they will be paying one of our three remaining amended return refunds in 2-3 weeks! This is the medium sized refund and I’m looking forward to the mental *ting!* I get when it’s transferred to its final destination. *rubs hands* Can’t WAIT!

Net worth

On Life

We attended an outdoor only, vax and negative test required, wedding. We stayed masked for much of the event as well. It’s the first family gathering we’ve attended in a really long time. It was emotionally taxing. I wasn’t expecting to be hugged and welcomed. I haven’t seen so much family since our own wedding. I think I was expecting more snideness and snark since this was on my dad’s side of the family. That is mom’s side’s style.

There was a lot of reading but I didn’t have time to record this month’s, it’ll have to wait until next month.