July 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, $1589.82; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Weeks 15 and 16 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Week 15, Day 101: I think things are starting to open up in our county but I trust no one and when so many people are gadding about maskless, I’m staying home. I frame it as a choice so that it doesn’t feel like a forced confinement. My hands are still terribly swollen and my bones were filled with molten lava yesterday, so physically I’m not in good shape but emotions are a little less fraught today. It might be because PiC and I had a few good talks about our mental health and just basically took a little time to reconnect as humans. Also it might be because we pulled off a pretty nice Father’s Day weekend. Since I’m not an early riser (except for those days when I wake up in the middle of the night and simply can’t go back to sleep but that’s not quite the same thing), I couldn’t get up and surprise him with a Father’s Day breakfast and the whole deal.
Instead I played to my strength: dinner! I found two new to us local restaurants to order takeout from and we tried some fantastic Korean dishes and BBQ.
Week 15, Day 102: While I wouldn’t call it a silver lining to the pandemic, I am finding a few things that are not terrible about this situation for us personally. It only took me 100 days: No commute means I can rest a lot more and our mornings are about 90% less stressful – no rushing to wake up JB, no rushing. Social distancing means I don’t have to socialize with anyone I don’t have to (even if it also means I can’t socialize with people I DO want to, this is still a plus).
Week 15, Day 103: I didn’t leave the house at all today because work was a crushing load and also because I was busy checking on a family member who nearly died. STRESS.
Week 15, Day 104: We finally got confirmation that JB’s elementary school has set an early August start date and that their registration was processed so they are officially enrolled. This would be exciting in normal times but the complete lack of information on how they’re going to handle COVID means my excitement is in the negative zone. Best case scenario, according to their email, we will get a letter telling us how to prepare 5 days in advance, worst case is 2 days. What IS that?? I’d much rather they take the time they needed to plan and figure out how things will work and start late, with some real time to prepare, than this nonsense.
Also I finally got my act together and ordered some organizational storage bins. I’m not positive I made all the right choices but it was a start. I spent the next 36 hours eagerly anticipating my curbside pickup and hoping I didn’t run out of steam too quickly. (more…)
June 29, 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, $1,634.50; Rural libraries, $321.62.
I Haven’t Bought a Latte in 2 Months. Why Am I Not Rich Yet?
Originally I was just going to add @KWright0702‘s post to my link love with a comment but it brought up a lot of memories. This is just my recollection and reminiscing, this isn’t a “How you should…” anything.
I most certainly tracked every penny back in the day when every cent mattered and adhered to the general principle of the latte factor (roughly between 2000-2015).
I didn’t let a nickel leave my wallet if I didn’t absolutely have to. But that’s only what kept the bills paid at a bare minimum. It’s not what made me financially stable. That required many uncomfortable conversations advocating for raises, pushing my way up the hierarchy, negotiating hard for myself every single chance I got, and banking as much of those big dollar increases I could get my hands on. Then too, coupling up with a partner who wanted to learn better financial habits from me, and did so, and trusted me implicitly to manage our money for both our benefits was invaluable. I could have made it on my own eventually. But doubling the income with an actual partner to share the high COL SF area bills and only moderate conscious lifestyle improvements? That was a huge advantage.
The thing is, my building blocks happened to be those latte factor type ideas in the beginning. I can’t discount the fact that being a total tightwad made a difference because it did. It trained me to value every cent I made.
The next step was to look for all ways to maximize income so I could have enough of those cents to keep at least one for every one I spent. And then two for every one. Then three.
As they say in improv: Yes AND.
Yes I obsessed over every penny. And I pushed myself to make more dollars. Yes I paid off debt. And I stretched to save as frequently, if not as much, as I paid off.
By the time the credit card bills and the other family incurred debt that I knew of had been zeroed out, I also had a nest egg of my own: $5,000 cash.
I always had two goals going at the same time: fill that pit over there (debt) and build that fortress over here (reserves, savings, investments).
@KWright0702 got me thinking. How would I get through the pandemic today if we weren’t financially stable? (more…)
June 22, 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, $1,570.70; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Weeks 13 and 14 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
Week 13, Day 87: Mondays. Are. Terrible. PiC’s got half a day of meetings and I’ve got a full day of work every day, and so I have to oversee JB most of the day since my work doesn’t interact with other people. It’s fair in that when he didn’t have so many meetings, he’d take them all day but it’s also so frustrating to barely have the patience to deal with work nonsense and at the same time be patient in any way with JB’s shenanigans. They’re just being a typical 5 year old but my patience bucket has nothing left.
My sanity fraying is most obvious on Mondays.
Maybe it’s because I completely let it all go on the weekends now instead of trying to keep on top of some work and household stuff. Especially this past weekend. I did next to nothing because I felt terrible. Ten word searches, managed JB for some hours on Sunday, a fair bit of Sesame Street when I couldn’t get out of the recliner, started working on PiC’s Father’s Day gift.
PiC did all the grocery shopping and food prep both days.
(more…)
June 8, 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, $1,570.70; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Weeks 11 and 12 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
I had to change the day numbering so I would remember what day we’re on, total. It’s been that long.
Week 11, Day 69: A half day at work for me today! WOOOO. We had a very hot (for us, nearly 80 degrees F) day and I was basking in walking around in a tee shirt even in the house. It’s normally so frigid I’m in three layers all day long.
Week 11, Day 70: I woke unexpectedly early but crawled right back into my nest and then woke up late after 8. Oops. On the other hand, JB got enough rest and got themselves all dressed and ready, AND even remembered their assigned chore for the morning. Extra bonus, they went and filled in the chore on their activities board without prompting too. I thought the first week of the board was a dismal failure but maybe our little adjustments are starting to take hold. We’ll see.
Week 11, Day 71: JB has wholeheartedly and suddenly thrown themselves into the Activities board, racking up an all time high of 9 activities in a day: helping with the laundry, clearing the dishwasher, spending a lot of time outdoors. Most of this was made possible by PiC’s flexible schedule on this day. Most days are not going to be like this.
Week 11, Day 72: The world has exploded and my sorrow is endless. Why does our country think it’s better to viciously put down protests than to hold murdering cops accountable? None of this had to be that way. (more…)
May 25, 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, $1,570.70; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Weeks 9 and 10 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
Week 9, Day 1: Having geared myself up for a total shutdown to last several months, or even the rest of this year, I can’t quite wrap my brain around the idea of CA moving to Stage 2 of reopening. It feels like it’s must too soon when we still don’t have that much testing or any known effective treatments. My friends outside of CA who have been ill for weeks still can’t get tested. As a complete pessimist, I think this is my gut trying to protect me from getting my hopes up too soon that things will start to get better.
Related: I can’t think about the things I miss or how I want things to be later.
Also related: I’m worried about getting sick when things open up more because my immune system is trash. When I get sick with even mild viruses, I get hit really hard. It takes me 3-4x as long as normal people to recover. A 3-5 day illness for a normal person is a 3-5 week illness for me.
Week 9, Day 2: All the little things that bother me popped up today: I hate the way the wires under my desk are dangling, I hate our old round wooden chopsticks that hurt my hands when they’re swollen. I determined to fix those things NOW. I taped up the wires … but the tape that I had wasn’t strong enough. I searched and found replacement chopsticks but the shop wanted $20 for shipping – that was too rich for my blood. I guess it’s not my day for resolving issues.
I did order a gift of delicious small business cheese to a loved one sheltering in place alone who was recently hit with some additional bad news, though. One right thing was done today.
My workload was a bit lighter than usual so it was rather annoying that I couldn’t focus well enough to blow through the workload early and take the rest of the day at my leisure. But I suppose the upside is that I didn’t have to stress over the work piling up at lightning speed while I worked more slowly than I preferred?
Week 9, Day 3: Dammit-Sera is her official name now. I’ve cleaned up 11 piles of vomit and 1 massive lake of pee on my rug this past week. What’s going on, dog?? (more…)
May 11, 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, $1,021.58; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Weeks 7 and 8 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
We have a bit of a routine now. Mornings: Walk dogs, feed dogs, breakfast. JB has a lesson online, PiC and I work during that period (I oversee the lesson just as a behavior monitor.) Usually they are released to go hang out with PiC for a snack and games after the lesson unless he has conference calls. Afternoon: Lunch, I wander out after I’ve cleared the critical parts of my work (if I’m lucky). I’m juggling my work, training new staff, giving feedback, overseeing policy issues and questions plus the usual household stuff: ordering supplies, watching our spending, thinking about how to organize our lives a little bit better.
Week 7, Day 1: I had to run an important errand today and it threw my entire work groove out of whack. It took hours to get focused on work again, and before I knew it, I was derailed again by fatigue. Rude.
I did get lucky with the weather though! The sun was shining fiercely enough to be warm even with the usual gusty wintry winds we get through our neighborhood, so I set up camp in the garage for a couple hours to get “beach weather” while working. Ahhhh….. The change of scenery really did my mind and body good. I still felt ill and tired, but it did boost my spirits for a good hour and I’m grateful for it.
Week 7, Day 2:
I had to get checked out today and that was really weird. My second solo outing in two days, after 40 days of being home and around the neighborhood only on short walks, and I was feeling such strangeness of being out and about when the world is so altered. Seeing and talking to people at the doctor’s office was also incredibly strange. Some people were reassuring, some people were brusque and off-putting. Some people were slightly hysterical about the medical building’s policies.
One enormous sigh of relief: The possible crisis with PiC’s job blew over. We will be seeing some changes in May, details still unknown, but I’m so many kinds of grateful that it’s not the layoff that we were concerned about.
I’m thinking about how my mentor used to tease me about my 12 month cash emergency fund. She considered it excessive. It could be excessive for her with her very very stable job but I remember the Great Recession far too clearly not to want an 18-24 month cash fund. THAT was probably too much, though, considering how behind I have been with investing for the future. On the one hand, yes it was important to get off my caboose and invest. The habit was the important thing. On the other hand, considering last year’s high prices, I may have been better served if I had held on to the 18-24 month cash and invested a portion of it this year. Wait. No. That’s not true. In a pandemic, I wouldn’t have been able to let go of the cash and I still wouldn’t have made any inroads into our investing goals. Never mind. Hindsight fails to account for the behavioral changes I needed to make.
Anyway. The point is, if we hadn’t had a year of cash in hand, that concern over PiC’s job earlier this month would have been full blown panic. Facing one income when we need 2 to cover our expenses, less than a year of cash, the stock market down, and being stuck at home during a pandemic? Nope. No way. Eliminating one of those four factors as an issue made a big difference. Going down to one job with 12 months cash would let us hold out for about 18 months before having to sell stocks. If facing a recession and a down market, the longer we can wait to tap those stocks, the better.
Of course I don’t know what the heck the market is doing now or why.
(more…)
April 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, $640.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Weeks 5 and 6 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
This is a record of our weekdays. Video calls with other kids have been spectacularly Not Fun.
Week 5, Day 1: Most of the time, I’m dropping quick money updates in PiC’s ear. He may listen, he may not, but he knows I’ve got it. Things are exceptionally topsy turvy because he actually asked for a check in on our finances. Since I’m obsessively on top of them, it was easy to give him the birds’ eye view. Basically: we’re on the right track, we have a plan, I tweaked it a bit, but as long as we keep our jobs and incomes, we will be ok. We stash lots of cash in case of job loss, but you know I’m going to worry if we do lose a job. It’s how I’m built.
Jenny got me thinking about the Dragonbox apps as way to incorporate math for the kiddo. I would have to find my iPad and charger though. 😬
PiC has me concerned about his job security. I don’t want to have to add worrying about his job on top of my not sleeping, and my extra heavy workload. I just do not want one more thing on this plate please and thank you. I last resolved to go limp on this one and I am very bad at it.
Week 5, Day 2: This was a particularly grumpy day. JB was defiant and rude and frankly bratty most of the day, and simply could not deal.
I was not in the best form myself and my patience wore thin by the time I hit the 6th repetition of simple instructions that they refused to follow. Thank goodness for the one day of warm sun to at least somewhat offset the high level of grouch of the day.
(more…)