March 5, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $521.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
I have hardly anything this week because it’s been a heck of a week on top of the COVID-19 outbreak worries for people it’s affecting and the uncertainty. I feel like I haven’t read anything of note but here’s John Oliver on coronavirus.
February 27, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $521.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
This employer is so icky.
Don’t break your own heart.
Something I have to practice to battle pain-induced stress brain: The Peaceful Place exercise is practical yet grounded in evidence-based clinical theory. It is one you can do within two minutes’ time with practice. What is the most peaceful place you have even been? Close your eyes and use all of your senses to recall it. What does it sound like, look like, smell like, feel like and possibly even taste like? Be there for at least two minutes. Feel it resonate throughout your whole being. Why does this work? Because our brains are like computers and only respond to what we input.
My Money Blog on Healthcare sharing ministries. TL;DR: his advice is do not buy. I know folks who use them and have had good experiences but I’ve been through the gamut of bad to good insurance and if I have the choice, I’m avoiding HCMs. Insurance is bad enough with their loopholes (though my insurance right now is stellar), I’m not signing up for an even less certain care plan where they aren’t overseen by any agency at all and provide no guarantee of payment at all (at least my health insurance has some guarantees).
Self forgiveness is something I have to keep working on
February 20, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $521.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
The Guardian: White supremacist propaganda in US more than doubled in 2019, report finds
“If Simon & Schuster and the authors want to make this right, I would like to be credited for my work and see sizeable donations made to the Ali Forney Center, The Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, and The Campaign against Hunger.” From @tangerinejones: The Privilege of Rage
Yay for building out Signal! I use it. Privacy should be the default, not a special thing, so I am increasingly moving to services that respect privacy like this and Duckduckgo.
I couldn’t see myself living in a space like this, there’s too much stuff for my liking, but I admire the colors and design.
Mr. Tako on non-financial abundance. If I don’t focus on the need for money to fund an early retirement (chosen or forced), I do a lot better at focusing on the richness of our lives. I try to generate this kind of abundance in food even though we can’t garden yet, we are cultivating friends who enjoy trading food and I love it.
Congrats to Mrs. Rich and Regular!
I support some creators on Patreon but I resent the way they act like the creators aren’t the entire reason they have money in the first place. No, Patreon, you are a business that exists because we want to support creators in a meaningful way, YOU don’t pull in business. Ugh: “Patreon Capital exists because Patreon is itself a business, one that pays out a significant amount of the money it pulls in to the people who populate its platform. “The reality is Patreon needs to build new businesses and new services and new revenue lines in order to build a sustainable business,” the company’s CEO said in an interview last year, a year when it paid more than half a billion dollars to its creators.”
Best cats
February 13, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $521.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
If you’re allergic to wool and need cold weather layers, Blair Braverman made some recommendations.
Tanja’s (of Our Next Life) article on Marketwatch made me laugh. It’s so true what the FI community judges to be acceptable expenses. And THIS: “We’ve accidentally created the archetype of a certain kind of early retiree: an outdoorsy, fully able-bodied, not too aesthetically focused, beer-drinking guy.” ALSO TRUE. I refuse to read bloggers who pretend that there’s only one way to live FI.
Our friend Kara at BravelyGo, a feminist financial education company, has launched a Patreon!
Marriott has made huge changes to their redemption rates effective March 4, 2020. FlyerTalk put together a summary and it looks rough.
There’s a scammer impersonating a literary agent out there. Not cool.
Anytime people say money can’t buy happiness, I scoff. Oh yes it can. How to get it. We’re almost always mindful of how much we spend, and we are fans of strategic spending (sport for PiC, massages for my pain, a bit of help with the dogs).
Adventures of Coyote and Badger
February 6, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $521.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
I love everything NK Jemison has written. The New Yorker does a good interview / profile with her.
Pick that scat up and/or let it go, a story from Rich and Regular.
“Spending money is a failure to solve problems by smarter means.” This is just a snippet from Jacob’s (ERE) update that made me smile a bit. I don’t REALLY think it’s a failure but this is the gist of a philosophy we try to practice: try not to spend money until you’ve explored other options. For conservation, for practicing self reliance, for exercising brains that might become flabby and weak. There are plenty of times I will actively choose to spend money instead of trying to find the smarter means because I don’t have the time and leisure to do it myself but I like to remind myself to try, too.
PSA: Don’t postpone joy. I am constantly having to remind myself this and trying to figure out that balance in the big picture. It’s hard not to just intensely stare at savings goals for the future when they help me have hope and they take me out of today. That’s a good thing when I’m in so much pain. BUT they also take me out of today. It’s a hard balancing act. (more…)
January 30, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020? Current total: $443.24 for both initiatives.
One Frugal Girl and I are kindred spirits in chronic pain and our pain has been exceptionally bad these past few weeks. I would envy her the financial independence that gives her the ability to not work to pay the bills during her flare-ups, it’s something I don’t have that eats at me, but that would imply that I resent her having it when I don’t. I don’t at all. I’m so glad for her that she does have that ability to not work while having flare-ups. I’m just wistful and wishful that I had made better choices earlier, that I had seen Dad’s fraudulence earlier, that I’d saved my money for myself instead. I’ve never sought FI for travel and glamorous life type reasons. It’s always been self preservation. I just wish I’d seen the self preservation part earlier. I wish a lot of things.
Our immigration policies are ugly and awful and have real consequences for real people.
I watched Togo and was definitely stressed in the tough parts and wanted to read everything about sled dogs (I always do). Blair Braverman came through with a twitter thread on lead dogs.
More Excel formulas to learn! I know a few but I don’t work in Excel that much so there’s lots to work with here.
Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village
I don’t know why this is limited to California but if you want to tell Target not to sell your info, you can! Personally I feel like all companies should be required to not sell info we have given them but that seems unlikely to happen.
Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market
January 23, 2020
I haven’t figured out makes up my metric of “enough”. Since my baseline is so different from other people, some days, enough is the absolute bare minimum: ate a food, drank some water, basic hygiene (maybe). On better days, it might be: prepared food, did some work, read something for fun, walked the dogs, paid attention to our money in some way. What’s your enough?
There are official rules and there are the real rules. It took me forever to learn this and I caused a lot of trouble while I was figuring it out. When did you learn this? How did you learn it?
Rules for girls. I’m sad that not all the posts are live anymore.
This neighbor gifted ham is kind of funny, though it brings back memories of the ham that bested me. Do you and your neighbors give gifts to each other?
We’ve had our share of problems with Marriott points but nothing on this level. They kept telling PiC that his points were about to expire in March, but when logged online his points were “already expired”. Calling customer service came up with “they’re still live but could expire at any moment without notice.” I miss SPG so much. Marriott’s service is nonsensical but I have a lot of points with them so we need to use that up.
Yetanotherpfblog’s charitable giving in 2019. Do you have a giving plan for 2020?
I felt like nothing big was accomplished in my 2019 too but I loved this reframing of that being a good thing (I too read a lot of books): “Transitions, even good ones like promotions, are hard on people; please be kind to everyone (including yourself!). Because I am in a place where I am grounded deeply in living the rewards of having made many positive life choices over time and not too many unexpected curveballs were thrown my way this year, I was able to accomplish a lot. (#stability is a kind of #privilege).”
me after the holiday season