Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (226)
September 30, 2024
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 5, Day 166: Trainer time! I’m gaining confidence that I can do exercises without immediately sending myself into CFS / fibro traction and there’s something immensely uplifting about that knowledge.
Arms day is easier for me than legs day, and I attempted to max out my reps again. (spoiler: I was able to lift my arms again the next day. Yay!
TIL the acronym HENRY: High Earning Not Rich Yet. That’s us, since I define “rich” for us as being able to survive long term without our jobs. I’m always acutely aware that it can go away. My Great Recession scars are practically tattoos, they’re always out and always at least a little bit dictating my attitude towards money. We are currently high earning (though at the very bottom of the high earning wage scale in this area and compared to the other professions/industries around here, most daycare parent make multiples of what we both make combined), and we couldn’t maintain this lifestyle on one or no incomes. We splurge now and again, and we give more than we splurge on ourselves most months. There’s plenty of non survival (our survival that is) fat in our spending but I don’t consider it all non-essential. I would really hate to be unable to help folks out. But that’d be part of the reality of losing our incomes due to corporate cuts, along with other belt tightening we’d have to do. Actually, I can’t entirely blame the GR for my continually being on edge: PiC’s employer is going through yet another round this year, did I mention that? This is what, the fifth round this year. No wonder I’m always expecting it. What steams my cauliflower is that the parent corporation is doing Just Fine. They made many-digits of profit last year. Alright, I’d better leave it at that. We’re HENRY. Can’t wait to drop the NRY and the heartburn of waiting out round after round of layoffs, hoping we make it through another one. Between PiC’s income, benefits and the childcare being linked to his employer, we have so many reasons to hold on tight at least until kindergarten starts. Then it’ll be down to the income and benefits. Healthcare is such a huge question, and has the potential for such catastrophic consequences if you have a serious illness, I don’t know if I’ll ever not be nervous about that piece of the financial puzzle.
Year 5, Day 167: Everyone got up late again today. We weren’t late out the door but this waking up early is such a tough nut to crack. Even Smol Acrobat, usually an undesired reliable alarm clock, slept in. There’s something about this school year that’s making it all much more challenging.
Garden harvest: three snap peas, three mini cucumbers, and seven green beans! Our biggest green veg harvest yet!
Work: 👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼
I’m preparing a brief to get into yet another tiff (of sorts) with corporate on behalf of my team to get them what they deserve. Ahhh there’s nothing like a combination of intense pressing deadlines AND political bullshit to navigate to ring in the fall season! This is just the beginning of this particular advocacy, and it remains to be seen if I have a particularly powerful person on our side or not. That’s what I find out next week – wish me luck?
Year 5, Day 168: Chores day for everyone. JB needed to wash their lunchbox, plan tomorrow’s lunch, grind coffee beans, and put away the new load of laundry. Smol Acrobat is responsible for their own laundry so they had to hang up their own clothes and fold their underwear and put away the utensils. PiC prepared dinner. I assigned the chores, babysat Smol during their chores to help them over the little bumps, then spent two hours submitting FSA claims, and trying to figure out how to earn a few miles for our Alaska mileage accounts.
I ogled these cakes from a local(ish) bakery. I want to try some of their flavors but not at $35 for 1-2 servings. I’m not feeling that level of economically secure.
Year 5, Day 169: This weather cannot make up its mind: one day hot, one day cold, two days hot, two days cold. One day hot, one day cold. Today is Full Winter. Tomorrow’s forecast? Full Summer!?
Year 5, Day 170: Well, I’ll be darned. I was dreading the arrival of an envelope from the Passport Services Agency today – we only just submitted our applications last week and the only reason I could think of that they would be sending anything to me so soon after processing payments is that they were rejecting Smol Acrobat’s passport photo. I accidentally sized their head a little too large in the prints relative to the 2″ x 2 ” size and the agent said maaaaaybe they would take it but they might not, and they would mail it back if not. You could knock me down with a feather when I opened it up and found that it was my very own renewed passport! That was less than 2 weeks from submission in the new online system to delivery! Fantastically fast.
Trainer time: It’s arms day again and I’m maxing out my reps while I still can. 24 lateral raises, 18 almost-semi-kinda pushups. I can feel the ache but it’s not terrible.
Money things: PiC mentioned the cascade of upcoming big home maintenance things: getting the roof replaced, and then the gutters, and then (this is really ambitious) finishing the exterior paint which was started seven years ago but never finished. That made me a little nervous so I made a savings bucket in our Ally savings account to start to trickle in cash for big house stuff. I didn’t love how it felt to take the cash from our emergency savings even if we did make up that lost ground over less time than I had feared. At least this way we’ll have some cash set aside specifically for these things. I also made a travel bucket while I was at it. Historically that’s always just come out of cash flow but we also haven’t really done much big travel in the past 5 or so years, it’s easy to cash flow a road trip or three. Bigger travel is going to cost accordingly.
Also looking ahead to 2025 moneywise – I think the 401K contribution limit is expected to go up another $1000. I’ve been plugging in some of this year’s numbers into next year’s spreadsheet and it looks like our cash flow falls over into the negatives by May. Part of this is because spending is high. Well, I guess that’s just really the whole thing: our spending projections are on the high side. Since my takehome pay is hard to calculate for next year, I’m being very conservative about how much that might be for now. I’m also conservative with PiC’s presumed takehome pay for the early part of the year as well. We usually “run out of money” early in the year in the first few drafts of the annual spending projections and we don’t ever actually run out of money in real life but even knowing that, I still hate the early draft feelings of augh the numbers are going negative! And I still have more spending to add! Especially since, in keeping with everything else that keeps going up, our annual property tax bill is now over $12k total so I have to bump up that specific savings bucket. I can’t reduce our property tax or the daycare bill or the mortgage or the half dozen other necessities. I can only reduce the not-survival stuff like giving and travel. Boo. Do not like.
I’m entertaining myself by making up acronyms over here –
MIRE or HIRE – Middle (or High) Income, Rich Enough! Not you now, but you someday. I’m kind of there – if my job vanished forever I would be able to get by (barring expensive illness). I prefer to keep making money for sure, I don’t feel like I’m at the point to CHOOSE to make the job go away forever. But it’s a good line to be across for sure.
Yay for passport back!!! One down!
Hehe, I shall aspire to be at your HIRE level. I’m assuming the biggest obvious hurdles are the college medications, the health care, and frankly the worrisome utter unknown twists of fate that seem to tangle things up now and again. I worry about the future for us and for the next generation and whether there will be a next gen after that, the way things are going. That way lies perilous spirals.
But yes! Now waiting for five more documents to be sent back and the kids will be set. Cross your fingers that Smol Acrobat’s big head pic is accepted? 🙂
As the kids get older some things will get harder – but other things will get easier too. Like when Smol Acrobat starts sleeping solidly through the night? Nearly every night, or maybe even ev-er-y night? It’s gonna feel like little birdies descending from heaven singing the Hallelujah Chorus!
Feel free to warn me about the things that’ll get harder, let me try those on for size or at least brace myself 😅
That specific milestone definitely feels like it will be a giant dramatic huge thing. They show no signs of improving. They only sleep through the night sometimes if one of us is cosleeping, and definitely wakes up crying every night if someone isn’t there. I remember JB’s nightmare phases felt like they would last forever. Though those were dramatically less than Smol Acrobat’s never being able to sleep alone …. Sigh.