Money & Life Report: February 2024
March 5, 2024
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. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.
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 $944 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
The second payment from the Lithium battery settlement landed: $1.44. Someone joked that they could keep that dollar, and I said, I’ll take it! Every one of our dollars goes somewhere important.
Spending
(Spending less) We got our car insurance renewal and it went up from $350 for 6 months to $436. This is for our non-operational car, so I’m confused. I knew that auto insurance was expected to go up in California, dramatically, but this makes even less sense. Update: I emailed our insurance agent a few times and finally got an answer. Someone dropped the ball on putting the policy on suspension so it should be reset by the end of this month to the correct amount.
(Spending soon) That “saved” $400 is going right back out the door to the lawyer to revise our will and trust ($900).
(Spending more) Every two weeks we’ve been doing bloodwork for Sera ($200-300 a pop). Including the initial consults and specialist consults, she’s running a $3000 tab and counting.
Not spending
PiC had been researching the next car seat / booster for Smol Acrobat who has only ever used JB’s old convertible seat that they’ve used for so long that it’s due to expire soon, sometime this year. Our neighbors who had no idea of this were cleaning out their garage and asked us if we’d like their youngest’s booster that’s still in good shape. Yay!
Giving
We have worked really hard and been very fortunate that our hard work paid off in significant ways that I only 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.
We donate to organizations that help people and animals in need and do direct aid.
The Lakota Giving Project is year-round now and we always welcome donations to support Lakota families. See how you can help at the link.
Mostly mutual aid this month: Tinu has cancer and Long COVID. Miranda Marquit’s niece has been working towards a 4-H exchange trip to Japan. This family is trying to get their loved ones out of Gaza. This GFM for Larime and his partner Svlvie is still up. Even though he’s lost Sylvie, he still needs help.
As I slowly pull myself together, I’m packing up boxes of community donations to send to the Lakota Reservation. I’m not quite ready to take on the task of shopping for a family yet but this I can do – wash and dry bedding, clean toys and books to see what’s in good enough shape to send off. Gathering treats. That sort of thing is labor intensive but brain light, and that’s what I have available.
Saving and investing
Sort of muttering to myself that of COURSE when I finally get enough cash savings set aside to start investing again, of COURSE VTSAX goes up to an all time high. It couldn’t have done this while I was on hiatus and then come back down? We need another 10-15K shares, depending on the price, to catch up to my goals.
Net worth
I’m primarily watching the yellow line (investments) to see if it’s making actual steady progress to the goal line. One of these days, I will figure out how to model this up and downness into an average progress rate and fulfill my curiosity about when we might actually reach the goal. But it is not THIS day! Nor tomorrow. If I were to take any one year chunk of this graph, it’d tell me that we’ll hit it in 6 years (Jan 21-22), or 20 years (July 21-22), or 4 years (Feb 22-23). Useful!
Compared to my conservative predictions of amounts invested + a 4% growth rate that I put together two years ago, I’m still $50000 behind the 2024 mark for steady enough progress to hit a goal in 8 more years. Modelling isn’t really my strong suit.
On Life
Entertainment.
TV.
Designated Survivor: I remember half considering trying this a while back and never giving it more than 5 seconds. I put it on now and it’s ok. Thoughts: Why do they keep referring to POTUS as “the leader of the free world” in every White House / Presidency show? That sounds so pompous. They don’t walk around the actual WH referring to themselves that way, do they? Also Maggie Q’s Vietnamese is about as good as my kids’. No, it’s a little better. Smol Acrobat changes the words completely.
Ballers: This was only because I was curious about what Dwayne Johnson’s character was doing here but it didn’t feel like there was enough character growth until maybe the last/fifth season. And I’m still not sure if there was. There was a lot of morbid fascination with the kinds of money that is involved with football contracts and the very real difficulties with coming from no money, coming into unreal amounts of money, and having it go just as fast as it came in. I think this reality is part of why I can’t get into actual football. That, and the amounts of concussions these players are taking which are absolutely resulting in brain injury – I can’t get comfortable watching that as entertainment.
Never Surrender: A Galaxy Quest Documentary on Prime. I wanted to watch this solely for that Alan Rickman burn on Tim Allen and PiC was game since we both really enjoy Galaxy Quest. I still don’t like Tim Allen but it’s hard to
The live action Avatar just came out on Netflix and, though it is certainly culturally problematic, the kids and I have enjoyed the cartoon for years. PiC and I started watching an episode together nightly which is the first fun thing we’ve done together in a long long while (without the kids) and it’s been nice to have a thing again. But that also means I have to wait to watch the next episode instead of binging.
DNF: I tried One Day on Netflix but couldn’t make it past Episode 2. I started Loudermilk but there were too many gross slurs about something, I can’t remember what.
Books.
This was a recommendation from Courtney Milan, IIRC. Mia Tsai’s Bitter Medicine (Amazon, Bookshop). I really liked it!
T. Kingfisher, A House with Good Bones (Amazon, Bookshop). As a general rule, I don’t read spooky or horror. I make exceptions for a couple authors, this is one of them. I had to speedread this. Even though I could tell what the shape of the plot was going to be, Ursula Vernon’s writing is always so good, I had to get through the whole thing to see how she’d write it and how she was going to twist the plot. As always, excellent engaging writing.
Remember when I was so excited about Martha Wells’s “System Collapse” coming out that I completely forgot I hadn’t read the three books preceding it? Yep that was me. I finally got my turn on two of them this month! Exit Strategy (Amazon, Bookshop) and Network Effect (Amazon, Bookshop), yay!
DNF: Chris Behrsin, A Cat’s Guide to Bonding with Dragons. I love cats, and I love dragons, but this writing just wasn’t my cup of tea. It wasn’t engaging, the prose was just clunky. Like this: “I couldn’t really focus on staying alive in there and talk to her at the same time. I thought I was going to throw up, and this time I’d do so on her back. But she stopped eventually, and the ground beneath my feet no longer looked like a chessboard, but rather was spinning around like a kaleidoscope.”
DNF: Brenda Trim, Packing Serious Magical Mojo. Also too clunky to sink into: “After Hugo left me for a younger, firmer woman, I had wanted to burn everything he’d ever touched. Dreya saved me from making a big mistake by having it all professionally cleaned instead. While Dakota had pointed out that he couldn’t have gotten too many cooties on the leather.”
DNF: Andi Buchanan, Succulents and Spells. Less clunky but still needed the help of a good editor.
There are writers whose styles are easy lifting for me as a reader, easy to jump into at any point: John Scalzi, Ursula Vernon, Daniel Jose Older, KB Spangler, Seanan McGuire, Kate Elliott, etc. That’s not to say their writing is simple or plain or easy. That’s not it at all. It’s the opposite of that. I don’t know how they achieve a voice that’s so easy to read and seems plainspoken. It’s just very clear, when compared to authors who don’t manage it, that their writing is well edited and polished. That’s really hard to do as a writer (from my POV, I can’t do it). It’s likely because they have excellent editors but they had to start with a clear voice to begin with, I think, because that doesn’t seem to change when they change editors. Anyway. All that to say, I really wanted to like these books and I couldn’t.
Yay updating the will!
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Almost there!
netflix: I just discovered Resident Alien and binged season 1 (10 eps). It’s Alan Tudyk come to earth and inhabiting a human form and trying to act human. Watching him try to laugh just kills me, it’s so funny. And I love his relationship with the kid-adversaries. There are 3 more seasons but I don’t know yet how they hold up.
Please let me know! I have always enjoyed his acting.