By: Revanche

Money & Life Report: October 2020

November 3, 2020

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 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. 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 $193.60 in dividends in October.

My experience with ibotta so far is: it’s slow. We don’t buy a lot of the brands they have offers for. But it’s a handful of spare cash, whenever I finally reach a cash out point, so I have no objections.

I’ve been holding a grudge against Achievement for the past few months because it took so long to get my last reward but also because I’ve been too lazy to log back into my mapping apps. Both silly reasons. I should add that back for that slow trickle of earnings.

Spending

Seamus‘s arthritis is getting a lot worse. He’s been extra wobbly this month so I pondered on how else we could make him more comfortable and remembered that our vet had recommended we try CBD products for dogs to ease his discomfort. I checked back with the vet for recommended brands and bought a two month supply direct from the retailer. They happened to have a sale on their two packs and I had a discount for first time customers (which actually wasn’t valid for this particular order but they didn’t have any fine print, so I didn’t know at the time of the order). It worked out to about $90 for 4 bags of treats for large breeds and 2 bags of treats for smaller breeds so we have some flexibility in figuring out what dose works best for him over the next two months. Crossing my fingers that it’ll start kicking in and keep him comfortable.

Holiday gifts. I’ve been determined to get all holiday gifts out the door early this year since DeJoy gutted the post office and I know that waiting to send them out until November this year means that they probably won’t make it until January. Not that we usually do a ton of gifts, but since I’m skipping holiday cards this year for the most part and we aren’t seeing anyone, if I can, I’d like to make this work. We’re trying to support small or local businesses.

I ordered a stack of books from Mysterious Galaxy for local friends’ kids: a regular book and a comic each. It was hard to resist buying a whole stack of comics for the older kid because there are so many good ones. I also have some non-Christmas celebrating kids I’d like to send gifts to just because, so that order needs to happen soon.

We also have a few local friends who have been super duper supportive. We’d like to thank with something but I’m a little stumped as to what would be valuable and not a junk gift. I give myself until the end of this week to figure it all out.

Furniture. Our first round of sofa buying was such a bust. I still don’t have a sofa to rest my ever-burgeoning self on. *grump* I’m crossing everything that the replacement order gets here before Thanksgiving.

Clothing myself. I bought myself three pairs of soft pants since I couldn’t fit anything else in my rapidly dwindling wardrobe anymore. Even the elastic waist skirts I bought in various sizes were no longer stretching enough to go over my belly. Second pregnancy growth is no joke! I finally also ordered some nursing tops to try out. I’m hoping that at least three of the five fit comfortably.

Not spending

We’ve been steadily selling off or gifting pieces of furniture and other furnishings that don’t work for us anymore or were purchased for the reno years ago but were wrong and couldn’t be returned.

We never got around to rehoming a perfectly good ottoman we didn’t have room for before COVID and now it looks like it could be a useful addition to the living room next to the new sofa. Here’s hoping!

Prepping for baby. Though most people around us are done growing their families, a lot of them still had quite a bit of baby things and our friends in farflung states were super wonderful, sending us large baby showers in boxes with practical things like clothes and impractical lovely things like tiny hats and shoes for infants that are always funny. We’re grateful for the bounty.

Giving

I contacted our local library to confirm they’re still accepting donations and sent them my belated birthday present of a check to boost their book collection.

We also have a few more places on our usual donation list to send money to. I space these out throughout the year.

I’m planning to send out the rural library funds this week.

Saving and investing

I’m grateful to my PF friends for letting me bounce ideas off them. I was exploring Vanguard REITs because I’d gotten it into my head that replacing our real estate property with real estate investments made sense. And maybe it does, but I hadn’t looked at it from a more global perspective of my entire portfolio and how much exposure we want on each sector. So instead of hopping directly into that investment, just because the sale money bothers me sitting there, I will do an assessment of our portfolios first and then decide what to do.

Net worth

The graph will have to go up later because I managed to overwrite the post updates with it, but basically there was a small downtick. Nothing exciting here.

Odd that there’s been such minimal change to our NW even after the sale of the rental but I guess that goes to show that I was estimating the value pretty accurately.

On Life

Entertainment.

Netflix’s Enola Holmes. Mildly entertaining but rather unsatisfying in depth and plot resolution. I felt entirely at loose ends at the end. Susan Wokoma’s scenes were the best. And the weird use of two titles that don’t go together of what’s his name made absolutely no sense and was jarring.

Sonali Dev:
* A Change of Heart. I put all of Sonali Dev’s books on hold after finishing Recipe for Persuasion, thinking they’d be a similar theme and lightness. Boy was I wrong. This was very engaging but not at all light. Definitely recommend it though.
* A Bollywood Affair. This was a more fun read.

Food.

We did quite a bit of take out this month in part for time constraints and in part because cooking makes me nauseous again but I am particularly happy with a chicken and tofu soup I made from scratch. It was a little bit experimental because I had forgotten the original recipe, and we had that with mung bean noodles. Really quite good! Also I haven’t been liking my cooking very much lately.

Making ahead. I’ve made a batch of enchiladas, a pasta bake, and ribs to freeze for later busy times. It wasn’t very promising that it took me about six weeks to manage all that but that’ll feed us for about a week! Yay.

I’m really looking forward to making another meat pie with a gluten free crust, and a keto lemon cheesecake when I have some energy. The keto crust recipe that goes with that cheesecake can also just be cookies and that sounds awfully appealing too. I think that’s going to need to be a double batch so I can have the keto crust and a batch of cookies.