Money & Life Report: December 2019
January 6, 2020
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from an investment property (which is all saved for future maintenance) and investing in dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks and cash back sites (Ebates, Mr.Rebates). Some posts have affiliate links that pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running and I’ve added a way to support the blog in the sidebar to the right!
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working because I know from my Mom’s experience that relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA.
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Dividend income.We received $298 in dividends in December. It was all reinvested. Our whole year of dividends from stocks plus index funds dividends adds up to $7319. We’re still not nearly close enough to making enough on the side to cover even half my income (less than PiC’s before benefits, grrr). I’ve been thinking about one of us going part time for family and health reasons but we can’t afford to do that yet without dramatic changes and I’m not prepared to make them (moving would be required).
Windfall. My work finally earned enough revenue to give a wee bonus this year! I never ever count on bonuses because it’s never certain whether it’ll be a good enough year for one so it’s extra sweet when we get one. It’s the perfect time. While I wish to hoard it like a dragon, it will be such a help with our bills from last month.
CD interest. Our emergency fund is mainly in CDs at Ally. I set it to pay out the interest annually which means Dec 31 is a fun day.
Side money. I didn’t have time to commit to any real side jobs this year but we earned $1,805.81 this year from Craigslist, cashback sites, MyPoints, Swagbucks, and Bing. Most of our side income wasn’t in the form of cash, so this money subsidized our household spending and freed us up to direct our cash where we needed it most.
Spending
Lumpy spending continued. Seamus has had a few bouts of random incontinence this year, soaking his bed with a lake of urine. SIGH. Thankfully the bed they love best is washable but it’s a lot of work – three loads of laundry worth each time. The orthopedic bed already has a waterproof cover but I had to get one for the fluffy bed that is washable BUT not protected. Double sigh.
I mistakenly attributed it to age but he did test positive for a UTI ($200) so it’s possible that may be the cause. We started antibiotics ($150) and have to retest him in a month to be sure his infection has cleared up ($200 again) and hope like heck that his UTI was the cause of the incontinence. Please cross your fingers for us all!
Frugal habits die hard. I don’t have any problems with buying necessities or buying gifts that I know will be loved and used by their recipients. But I have a $1 credit and a $3 book in my cart and I can’t click “buy” because “do I really need this?” (No. I didn’t.)
Holiday cards. In direct contrast to the not spending below, after we used up most of the old card stash this year, I picked up two packs of cards for next year’s kids. We got 34 cards for the kids, in two designs, for $11 thanks to a Papyrus store closing sale and a Barnes and Noble after Christmas sale. We just happened to wander into those stores, we weren’t intentionally shopping. But also I got a really cool “things are super crappy and they will get better” card for a friend going through really tough times ($3) and a box of just because type cute cards for our ongoing correspondences with friends through the year ($8).
Travel shopping. I’ve heard from adherents of the “don’t try to pack EVERYTHING because you can buy it” school of thought and I tentatively gave that a try this year. It worked but also I didn’t love it. It created a situation where I overspent on dog treats because of a Buy 3 get 1 free sale. I know we’ll use them all for training, but being on the road isn’t the best place to be hauling extra stuff even if they are consumables. But we needed the training treats for Sera, I didn’t realize that the Milkbone was such a good distraction for zir on walks until we’d left so it was really a case of bad timing. JB also unexpectedly got sick more seriously than we anticipated and ran through all our medication supply in the first few days. Usually ze only needs a couple days of meds and I’d brought enough for four days. I also forgot hand lotion so got myself a new tube which will be used but it wasn’t on sale! Grumble.
Not spending
Holiday cards. While we did buy some photo cards, I’ve been digging deep into our stash of old holiday cards. I set JB to writing cards to all zir cousins while I handled all the adult cards. We had a sizeable stack!
Travel packing, the corollary. I am glad to have packed antihistamines and antacids. I always needed those in the middle of the night which would have been an awful time to run to the store. Generally speaking, the packed “pharmacy” was exactly what I should have packed.
Giving
Company match. We wrapped up our year end giving with submitting claims for company donation matches. Annoyingly, the way the company processes the annual allotment for these matches makes no sense to me so I have to revisit it to make sure we can maximize it each year.
We had such a good run with this year’s drive, I plan to organize another giving thing this year for our Lakota families as long as we have interest. I should plan ahead again to make sure I have enough time to do all the work. I’m glad it was earlier this year so I was able to spread out the giving work and our ramped up holiday-adjacent work.
Saving and investing
I aimed to save A LOT this year for reasons, and I was really surprised that we did make it happen. Lots of scraping, some hard work, and equally lots of luck.
Net worth
Our net worth is up 21% from the start of the year. A lot of that’s just on paper, of course, and won’t mean anything unless we sell our assets. Going into 2020, I’m staying focused on investing.
I wonder if I don’t notice the same 5 figure swings that friends do because I just don’t pay attention to changes outside my control or if our numbers are smaller. I suspect it’s the former because I look at our investing contributions very carefully.
On Life
Food.
- Broth. My Crockpot finally got to come out to play. The turkey bones and some veggies went into the crockpot with water, salt, and pepper for 20 hours and I made up 4.5 jars of golden delicious broth. I sent two of them to friends who are always so generous with their homemade salsa.
- One of them went back into the Crockpot to make a fast chicken, potato, mushroom soup when JB took me down with zir cold again.
- Lots of people are all about the Instapot but I’m seriously pondering if there’s a place in our home for either an Instapot or an air fryer. I’m leaning towards the air fryer as a way to make more crisp veggies. Opinions? Thoughts?
Family and friends.
- I always have a hard time with the logistics of and socializing in December travel. We fine tune the plans year to year but we did manage a balance this year that I think we were both happy with in general. This is the first year we managed to allocate a good visit with each of the people we wanted to spend time with. Though we still missed some people, this year’s strategy helped us stay reasonably balanced and somewhat less stressed. It was still too much though. Even extra social JB wanted to go home 3/4 of the way through the trip. I hear ya, kid. I love these people but this is also a lot.
- Unfortunately the stress of the month (I assume that’s the culprit) means my worst pain was this month. Ugh.
We have both an air fryer and an off-brand Instant Pot. I never use the Pot, although my spouse does, because I prefer to crock pot things. We do use the air fryer fairly regularly, both for traditional fried things and for quickly heating things up when we don’t want to turn on the oven (a few slices of garlic bread, etc.).
I didn’t know the air fryer could be used for reheating! That’s good to know.
In theory, an instant pot could replace both a slow cooker and rice maker. But, we don’t use ours frequently, mostly because I never put in effort to become adept at planning recipes with it, and I don’t find it is something I can just wing. But, many people swear by it. The main cool trick is that it can do in ~20 minutes what a slow cooker can do in 6-8 hours, so you could get home from work and quickly cook some meat or something. But the prep work is about the same, and someone who works from home could easily just start the slow cooker at the right time.
It has other cool tricks, I’m sure, and I probably could invest more time in trying it. I did use it a lot postpartum to cook freezer meals I’d prepped. I’d be happy to loan you ours for a month or something if you wanted to trial whether it was useful to your family. (So, you can see I can live without mine for a month with no issue!)
I hope Seamus is doing well!
I’ve heard the argument that an instant pot can do both slow cooker and rice cooker jobs but that doesn’t work for me because I just as often need BOTH jobs done at the same time as I do separately.
I might just take you up on that loan! 🙂
We only use our instapot knockoff (I think ours is crockpot brand) for Indian food–stuff we never would have made before because it requires a pressure-cooker or would take forever. We have been using it about once every week or two, all using an Indian Instapot cookbook. I haven’t found another instapot cookbook that I feel like buying and the recipes that came with ours were not great.
My MIL made a really good roast with hers for Christmas (she has a Ninja).
I always feel like we should use our crockpot more, but I have to make an effort to remember to use it. I just don’t think of it in our regular menu planning. Most of the crockpot cookbooks I have seem to use the crockpot more as a gimmick than a useful way to cook something– I’m often like why not just put this in a regular pot. I dunno.
One of my colleagues loves her air fryer.
I use our crockpot irregularly, I could see replacing THAT with the instant pot maybe, to reduce cooktime for those days when I failed to think ahead. That might be the biggest draw.
I’m hearing a lot of votes for air fryers, though.
I have had tremendous success with our Instant Pot – usually for cooking meat or stock. I am not able to plan well enough to use a slow cooker (and even when I am, we are out of the house all day and I get too nervous). Ribs, brisket, and corned beef have all come out beautifully. Despite the successes, I rarely plan a meal that will use it, though not for any good reason. I also do not recommend trying to cook vegetables in it.
I rarely check account balance anymore. The daily changes are meaningless, and even quarterly / annual updates aren’t actually meaningful except when looked at as a historical thing. I was pleased/horrified to note that one account was up $50K in 4Q19, but my lizard brain just whispered ”probably it will crash by March.”
That’s good to know re the Instant Pot. I don’t seem to have a preferred rhythm for cooking in the oven vs crockpot vs trying anything new. But I am more and more tempted by the air fryer, especially since it should be able to handle vegetables.
Your lizard brain and mine are in sync 😀
Sorry to hear about Seamus being sick. One trick we used with our elderly dog was to buy human incontinence pads from amazon. They are thin, absorb, and easily washable. We used ones called Priva which were around 20. You can layer them under existing dog bed covers to make a waterproof barrier. We had about 5 in rotation and I even sewed cute fabric on a couple to make them look nicer.
Thanks. I was doing that for a while! But I needed both a more sustainable option in terms of actual energy and my personal energy. The waterproof liner protects the bedding and I only have to wash the one outside cover, so that’s working for the time being.