Jonathan at My Money Blog on college tuition. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as a function of our overall budget and what we should save and why.
My car incident over the weekend that’s going to cost money when I am already feeling squeeze is making me feel this post extra hard. We COULD dig into our savings and not live so lean but we do that for a very good reason and it’s worth sticking to that reason. It is. Remember that, self.
I’ve read quite a few FinCon recaps but OFG’s resonated most with me. Not a surprise, is it? It reminds me that I loved the two FinCons I went to because I got to connect with people I only know online the rest of the year and that the money part is actually just a bonus. That’s harder to see in lean years like this one where we don’t have much wiggle room in the budget to afford, basically, a mini vacation for me.
Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture. Obviously, I use gender neutral pronouns here for JB and I like that it pushes me to change my socially instilled default gender mentally from him or her to gender neutral and to reduce my assumptions of gender outside of this blog. I know it bothered at least one blog reader enough to snark at me about it but I’m sticking to it.
Beyonce’s Homecoming and the Emmy snubs. I don’t claim to understand the Emmys but how does James Corden’s light and amusing car show (which is a lot of fun) win over Beyonce’s intense Homecoming? I’ll never understand.
How does an actual agent not teach their clients the very basic things about what an advance is, how earning out works, and how does one land an advance of that size and not ask a lot of questions to be sure you know what’s happening and why? It felt like this was very much like lottery winnings going down the drain.
I’ve decided that while I’d like to go to FinCon 2020, I can’t justify it out of my regular income that’s all committed to other expenses. Between now and the end of January, I need to earn enough from my creative endeavors / from the blog to justify that FinCon ticket and trip. I’m going to continue sharing cool stuff I made in support of that:
Thanks to SP for the nudge, I just realized (duh) I can show a preview of the interior here even if I can’t show it on Amazon! Duh.
*-* I’ve always intended to put the monthly updates that I publish about JB into a book for zir. I made two books for that: Milestones, design 1 and Milestones, design 2.
I had noticed that Tanja’s blogging schedule had changed, I’m glad to read her reflections on why.
Not going to guilt myself on the fact that I don’t remember our list of 2019 goals, just leaving this here to remind myself to check in on them next week.
What do you think of accepting money gifts from bad people, institutionally? You’d think it would be simple but it is not. On a personal level, I refused to accept money to pay for Mom’s funeral (in the neighborhood of $5000-10,000) from her horrible parents and siblings who had hurt her for so many years in so many ways. Even in my grief I knew they just wanted to publicly rehabilitate their image and I knew that by the way they disrespectfully and relentlessly badgered me up until and throughout the funeral. Good people who want to pay for things out of love and respect conduct themselves better. They did not deserve public redemption by means of writing a check. Do billionaires get to absolve themselves so easily just because their checks are much bigger?
A small moment of niceness to start the week: I lost the part of the tape dispenser that holds the roll in place. After I explained what it looked like to the 8yo, he helped me build a replacement out of Legos! pic.twitter.com/4rm7KMTfJP
1000 praying mantises: A Twitter thread. And that last line might have been a throwaway but I had to look up whether they are an invasive species what with the gladiatorial assertions and was sad to see they are.
I neeeeeever wanted to have an answer to this question: When’s the last time you ran into your ex? How was it? Where were you? I had a firm rule developed some time in college: never look back, never talk to exes again. This was after my first serious boyfriend, I think, and was meant to include casually dated people because I didn’t really casually date. Welp, that changed last year. At a holiday outing, a person who looked vaguely familiar and his family joined our group. I didn’t pay much mind because logically, if I only vaguely recognized him, I probably didn’t want to actually recognize him. I was sticking to it. Then at the end of the evening he identified himself to me in one of the weirdest possible imaginable ways, thus shattering my rule and my plausible deniability. HUMPH. I had some ungenerous thoughts about him. That was just one of the few people I casually dated back in the day. I never ever want to run into an actual ex. Ever.
I feel like the first dog
Note: I don’t agree most anti-socialist judgements – they ignore all the realities of life like illness, disability, structural issues like racism and sexism. But the dogs are hilarious.
Angela’s Friday Five made me want to do better. As it often does. But in a good way!
Aitza’s cheap eats strategies for Europe. Ever since car seats became a thing in our lives, I’ve not felt any urge to travel internationally to non-Asian countries with JB (a number of Asian countries don’t require carseats and apparently it’s safe…) but the Done by Fortys are doing it!
This is why Alexa and Siri are banned from my home. It’s basically the equivalent of consenting to bug my own home for the benefit of tech companies. NOPE.
“In the company of their aunts, nephews and nieces know that they are privileged persons. The bonds of duty are somehow relaxed: they have no obligations but to be happy.” I relate to so many of those quotes. I have always maintained that loving aunties and uncles are a key to successful parenting. On the hard days, they can help out a bit or help us remember what is good about the kid. On the good days, it’s wonderful to share the love of the small human. Of course, JB adores the ones we have kept in zir life. And it’s so important to me as a person and as a parent to know that JB is surrounded by family we’ve chosen to fill in that hole left by the family we cannot have.
I thought Meg had published this under her byline but I guess I missed that Anonymous byline! I Make Twice As Much As My Husband. I absolutely aspire to make twice as much, nay, thrice as much, as my husband makes (based on his salary plus the value of his fringe benefits) right now.
If I’m doing this right, the Capacity Factor of our guest bedroom ranges from 12-18% depending on the year. On average, we might host 50 nights a year. The over/under depends on more random visitors, we host at minimum 36 nights a year. The Price Ratio is 6%.
All I read was the headline: “Would You Sell Everything to Travel the World?” I laughed. No. Never. Not if I had a choice about it, anyway. Zero knocks on people for whom that isn’t a laughable notion of course, I used to think a nomadic life sounded great too. I loved the idea of being a city girl, I loved the notion of being location independent. But at this point in my life, I know who I am and what makes me happiest. Even just traveling for up to 2 weeks reminds me who I am. After ten days away, I am awash with fatigue and a burning desire to be left alone. I am a homebody. I am the happiest in my hobbit hole and only venturing out when I feel like it and running back home to nest and read books and eat and read some more. I have no desire to constantly be on the move or even just without a home base. Who are you?
We talk a lot about what constitutes the middle class in the PF world. I consider us upper middle class but reading this WSJ article, it strikes me again (without judgement) that we have such different ideas of what the buying power of an UMC/MC income is. For example:
The two-child couple earned just over $100,000 until 2017. They had a roughly $106,000 mortgage, about $97,000 in student-loan debt and $24,000 in car loans.
Then Ms. Young, 33, moved from a full-time to a part-time faculty position at a university because of its budget cuts. With income reduced to around $70,000, they still felt confident enough in their earning power to borrow $48,000 to finance two cars in 2017.
We have a mortgage that’s twice our combined annual incomes and don’t have any other debt so we have a similar debt ratio to the couple in the article. But for us, at this ratio, I don’t consider ourselves in a position to be taking on additional debt. We will need to replace my car and I have to think quite carefully about what we can “afford” and how we’ll pay for it. We both blanch at the $30k price tags of any newer cars despite our very solid savings program because those savings are specifically for future retirement. I need to start setting aside savings that are meant for spending on a car but we simply can’t get behind the idea of taking on an auto loan again if it doesn’t make very clear financial sense.
That gap between what we think an UMC income, or even an MC income, should buy remains fairly large. Even I wonder why we “can’t afford” (cannot easily pay for, without financial consequences) to just buy a new car when we make and save as much as we do. The reality is still that becausewe have to save as much as we do, we can’t spend freely. It’s one or the other.
I adore Maggie’s latest coloring book: Pixel Museum Art!
