By: Revanche

Money & Life Report: Sept 2022

October 4, 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.

***

Dividend income. We received $384 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.

*****

I will be getting a decent raise this year. It’ll help reduce the pain of daycare. Not that daycare only comes out of my paycheck. We pool our income and everything comes out of the one pot. It’s just the money pot is feeling the squeeze of higher prices everywhere plus daycare. Every bit of income helps.

*****

I finally won my battles with the IRS! They finally correctly calculated my tax rate for my long term cap gains and are coughing up the last $41 they owed me. I’ve had the bulk of the money since last October, but hesitated to deposit the check because it’d throw off my account balances and I wasn’t sure if they would issue a check for the difference or if they’d stop payment on this check and issue a new one. The latter solution wouldn’t make much sense but it’s the IRS and they don’t make much sense. I didn’t want to take any chances. So the big check has been deposited, yay! The last $41 should be coming in 4-6 weeks. ::skeptical face::

Update: they paid up! Woo!

Spending

We have been breaking our Corelle plates at an alarming rate the past year or two. All accidents, I think? They were originally a wedding gift, purchased from Amazon many years ago, and I’ve been waiting for them to come back into stock at Target instead. They have! I used my birthday 5% off combined with the Red Card discount to buy new sets of both the lunch and dinner plates to make up for the holes in our cabinet.

Planned: Our tax bill will be coming for us in a couple months and my monthly savings plan is ticking along nicely. We will have the cash to pay when the time comes without having to stress about the impact on cashflow.

Planned: I’d like to start JB in self defense classes. We get a free trial at a local gym for kid classes so we can see if we like them. If yes, we’ll sign up for a month to month plan. I’m not sure when we’d be comfortable committing to a full year at a time but at a guess, we’d need them to be enthusiastic for at least three to four months. It’ll cost $125 a month for the month to month option. We’d save $15 a month if we committed to the annual plan but we’re not ready to do that after only two weeks.

Inadvertent stress test: I had to float $3000 of expenses before reimbursement and it turns out that that’s too much for our cashflow to bear. Thankfully it was not for more than a month but it was long enough for me to see negative balances on my projected balances for the rest of the year. Good to know: don’t spend an unplanned and unbudgeted $3000.

Not spending

JB got a big bag of hand me downs. Yay! Either I fill in gaps in their next size up wardrobe or I get a great bunch of clothes to donate to our Lakota families. Mostly the latter this time.

And bonus! I also got a big bag of hand me downs. This never works out for me. A friend’s friend cleaned out her pre-pregnancy closet and had eight pairs of new or nearly new jeans that she was never going to wear again. Shockingly, I’m a weird size and this never happens, most of them fit me! I don’t have to shop for jeans! I don’t have to figure out what might fit and try on a zillion pairs! Free jeans! 🎉 And there were a stack of good pieces to donate too. Many wins!

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 given about $300 in direct aid this month and put in another $300 for the Lakota families this month as well.

I shopped for our Family #14 and got the three school-age kids all their school supplies. I worked on clothes for the younger two kids as well but we ran out of money before I could get clothes for the three older kids.

Unfortunately, and this speaks to how disconnected some folks are from the rest of us, we couldn’t get a hold of the recipient family for two FedEx packages. A harsh reality that very few of us experience is being so far out in these rural areas that you might not have a recognizable address to receive packages. Folks will use PO boxes but that only works if the store is willing to ship to a PO Box. Then too, they don’t have much money so they might not have a working phone line, so if we need to contact them for help with a delivery, they aren’t reachable. It’s a conundrum that hurts my heart for their situation. It reminds me of an elderly aunt of my own out deep in the countryside, with no phone line and no regular mail delivery back in Vietnam. We still can’t benefit from the instant and easy connectedness by phone or internet that many of us here have in more populated areas in the States.

The two FedEx packages were only 3 spiral notebooks so I asked the very kind lady at FedEx to send them to the Allen Youth Center instead so someone on the reservation will still be able to use it for school. The coordinator advised me not to send anything else for this family since we couldn’t confirm safe receipt.

The second shipment was one I packed myself: 25 lbs of mostly toddler clothes (sharing our bounty of hand me downs that Smol had outgrown), and few new adult (tags on even!) hand me downs from my friends. I added a few toys, puzzles, and coloring things.

#16 was a shipment of blankets to the Allen Youth Center to share with the members of the community who needed them.

Family 17 was an elder caring for many grandchildren and foster children. We sent them food and household basics.

Family 18 was an elder in need of a pack and play for her grandson she’d recently taken in. She’s happy with the high rated Graco we sent.

Saving and investing

I have two 5-year CDs earning 2.25% that mature next month. They’re paying 3% for the same 5 year term and will pay a 0.05% bonus if we renew.

For the past two years, I’ve put our cash into i-bonds where they’ll stay for a few years. That’s taking the place of our originally planned CD ladder since the CD rates have been dismal. There is a pesky $10,000 annual limit but I don’t plan to lock up all our emergency cash. That would be foolish, the point of emergency cash is for it to be accessible. These CDs will be cashed out so they can be liquid for emergencies.

Net worth

Big drop this month. No surprise there even for those of us who haven’t been paying that much attention to the numbers except for noticing that the VTSAX price is WAY down from the earlier highs.

We’ve contributed diligently through the year but our accounts have less than we did at the end of 2021. I wonder if this is the recession-y effects we were always expecting from the pandemic itself finally coming home to roost. I’m not focused on this since our jobs right now are to make income and invest income. I have to trust that in the long term, it’ll come back up.

I wrote that second paragraph mid month, but at the end of the month now I see a lot of folks raising some alarms about facing our next recession and how this may be a bad one. I haven’t been keeping up with the financial news much, but I’ve been expecting a bad recession since 2019. I’m not at all prescient, just seemed like we were due for one, so I haven’t really stopped mentally bracing for it to finally hit. At the same time, it’s very weird to think that it might finally now come along. It’s very much like earthquake prep. You do all you can but the quake will hit when it hits and it’ll always sort of feel like a surprise.

On Life

Privacy

I did my semi-regular search of my name on the internet and made sure that my personal information doesn’t appear anywhere. This is the first time I’ve come up dry! That was nice.

Medical stuff!

Boosters needed to be booked, the kids needed a new pediatrician, everyone has eye exams this month and dental cleanings the next two months. I’m grateful we have coverage but whew. PiC needs reading glasses and I might need a back up pair since Smol Acrobat broke mine.

If you also like Zenni Optical, this is my friend’s affiliate code for 10% off!: ZBET0A9SFX.

Reading

Blurgghh. I have had the worst trouble getting stuck into any book. I started Kameron Hurley’s The God War (highly recommended by other writers) and it was too Mad Max dystopian for me. I started Mira Grant’s (Seanan McGuire’s own name) Chimera and it was too good. Not damning with faint praise there, I was sucked right into the story but then it was too real. The untrustworthy government, people turning against people, I had to tap out for a bit. I started Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor and had to wade through an interminable swath, 21 pages, of frontmatter stuff. It was an excerpt from a guide with pronunciation and naming conventions, then many pages of names for people, places and gods. 21 pages of absolutely meaningless to me information before I even got to the book. I wasn’t sure I’d bother reading the actual story, I was so annoyed at being bogged down so much so early. Next time I’ll skip the fluff.

Seanan McGuire’s Rosemary and Rue (Amazon) hit the spot, though. I now need to read all the October Daye series.

I aspire to lounge in a hammock one day

exCUSE me, who taught the raccoon on my back porch how to use a HAMMOCK??

[Filmed from INSIDE my house] pic.twitter.com/1Z4UytqBvG

— Sarah McAnulty, Ph.D (@SarahMackAttack) September 9, 2022

:: How was your month?

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