January 13, 2020
Annual Lakota drive
Working on this project earlier in the year (scroll down to the Giving paragraph) worked out so well last year!
I wrote my update before the November 17th collection deadline. Donations had trickled to a stop, I’d ordered everything and confirmed the recipients all received them, we were pretty set. It seemed like a good time to wrap up the project and share how much good we’d done!
Then I was surprised with a couple healthy donations that same week. I happily went back to the drawing board and immediately bit off more than I could chew with the donated $250 and putting in another $50 out of pocket.
A big family with two parents, 9 children, and 2 grandchildren was in need of winter coats, diapers, and wipes for the grandkids. Yes, of course, that pick absolutely made sense with the $300 we had. Quite the bargain hunter am I!
I mused over the challenge with a visiting friend, still thinking I could outsmart the prices. They slipped me some extra cash. Not because they didn’t have faith in me but because they remain in touch with reality. It turns out they were right, I needed more than just $300 for 13 coats. I mentioned this on Twitter, and y’all seriously stepped up. Some folks sent a second donation, others sent their first, and we had soon enough to fill our biggest family’s needs!
Family 6 received: 13 winter coats – one for each member of the family. 2 giant packs of diapers and 2 cases of wipes for the babies. 2 shirts, a pair of jeans and a pair of waterproof work boots for the working parent in the family.
My heart swelled three sizes. Thank you all so much for caring and giving!
Bonus: One of the things I asked them to do when we figure out the matching funds is to create a “Warmth Fund” – a fund that can be drawn on to help families stay warm in whatever way is most suitable for their circumstances. This can be used to purchase blankets, firewood, space heaters, and so on.
For 2020:
I’d like to try something new this year: start collecting early, throughout the year, and make purchases for the Lakota-Okini families in the fall in the hopes that this would be helpful for a variety of budgets. I know that cash flow throughout the year often dictates what and when I can give. I do wonder if collecting throughout the year means it’ll mostly come at the last minute.
I am opening up contributions now through November 1st, 2020. Let me know in the comments if you’re interested in contributing and have an opinion about collecting all year vs just in a 6-week period like I did last year.
Edit to edit! Originally, I was going to shop in the fall but it’s still winter, the forecast is Bitterly Cold for some time yet, and people are hungry now. So as contributions roll in, it makes sense to help those who are cold and hungry right now, and through the year, instead of waiting until year-end. This will also distribute the work better!:
Edit to add: Last year we raised $2669.94 to touch a total of 27 lives. I would love to see if we can match that or do more in 2020.
Libraries, literacy and love of reading
I devoured library books as a child and was wretchedly grateful for every single book I could borrow because our family was too poor to buy books and Little Libraries weren’t really a thing back then. I used to stare at other people’s bookshelves like I was starving. We’d visit family and the people would simply disappear from my vision – all I could see was their books.
To this day I remain a voracious reader, and my birthday gift tradition has become a gift of money to our local library. My library allows directed donations and I support their ebook collection instead of buying books for myself. Accessible books for more people!
I’ve long dreamed of becoming rich and supporting rural libraries in a significant way but in 2020, I feel called to do what I can even if it’s just on a really small scale. I’ve known that rural counties simply don’t have funds for books, much less the kinds of extras I could not even have dreamed of as a child.
For example: tool libraries and health electronics that can be checked out, puzzles for kids, a massive selection of tv shows and movies! That’s just for starters. By contrast, rural libraries might maybe have bestsellers and discarded books from other libraries.
I’d like to help them out.
The best way to help them at this level is donations of cash. While I certainly have thoughts on the kinds of books and offerings that would be great, the person who knows best what their library patrons need and what they can actually manage to process and make available is the person who works in the library. They may need more of a specific category of books, e-books, new chairs, computers, keyboards or any number of things we don’t know about.
This year, I’d love to gift some money directly to two rural libraries: Culpeper County in Virginia and Chatham County in North Carolina.
Would anyone be interested in contributing to rural libraries as well? Like with the Lakota families, I will be allocating some of our annual giving budget to each library regardless of interest but if there’s interest, I’m happy to do any coordinating necessary to streamline it for the recipients. As y’all have shown me two years in a row now, we can do so much more together!
You can make contributions to ….
1. My Ko-Fi page (note: Ko-Fi flows through Paypal so they take fees out there since that’s my blog’s account)
2. You can send as a gift (otherwise PayPal will take fees out) to admin [at] agaishanlife.com. If you’re sending via PayPal on mobile, make sure to click on the arrow next to “paying for goods and services” to select “send as a gift” because that’s tripped up more than one person!
Edited to add: If you’d like to donate monthly (this has fees), you can use this donate link.
Whichever way you go, please A) specify what it’s for and B) if you want email updates.
Bonus: We can also get employer company matching for some of our donations though I am still trying to untangle the weirdness of their matching administration.
:: I’d love to hear your thoughts!
December 2, 2019
Dollar cost VERSUS lump sum
For traditional retirement savings, I’ve always been a dollar cost averaging investor. I fully believe in automating my savings and investing.
I do NOT believe in automating my bills because I don’t trust those companies any further than I can throw them. Look away and they’re tacking on extra unauthorized charges! And even the decent companies can make mistakes. And I can make mistakes that need to be rectified before the bill is closed out. So no automated bill pay for me but I am all over automating the money that goes back into our pockets!
Sadly, despite my honed and stellar money skills, I’ve never once had enough disposable income to max out an employer sponsored 401K plan. Not even close, not even within shouting distance of halfway close. Worse, my employer hasn’t offered a retirement plan for years and probably won’t for years. Finally accepting this reality, in the summer of 2018 I buckled down on making up for lost time.
For the first six months, I spread out the transactions.
After 13 transactions, I decided to give lump sum investing a try. It’s viscerally satisfying, I get nervous about regular contributions when I’m trying to keep our cash buffer healthy in case of market crashes *cough* hoarder! *cough* market timer! *cough*. I’m also curious about how that would work since I’ve never done it before.
There are also two practical, non-emotional, components to this. I could be contributing monthly but I don’t want to have to account for these withdrawals in my monthly cash flow. For later, not that I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, I want to reduce the number of lots we have to sell off.
I switched to hoarding cash to make a few big deposits in the year the way I do for our IRAs to keep things simpler.
Here’s what I noticed:
For our IRAs, I love it. This was somewhat accidental but I’ve fallen into the habit of saving cash the year before. In the first week of January, barring any complications, I max out both IRAs. Done and done. I only think about it again the rest of the year when I’m pulling together the next year’s contributions.
For our brokerage: In the first six months I became hyperaware of price movement. It shouldn’t matter but I was. In the run up to making a big quarterly deposit, I keep checking the price: VTSAX, VTBLX, VTIAX. I couldn’t shut off my urge to find the best deal! I lost all perspective. That’s annoying.
I really wished that I could just set a buy price and forget it.
After a full year, my hyperawareness calmed down a bit but not because I came to my senses. It was because I decided that with the recession still looming, my gut wants to hold on to the cash and buy in a really significant dip to make our cash go further. My VTSAX purchases have ranged from one delightful low of $59/share up to $71/share and I’d like a lot more of the lower share price thanks.
Tax efficiency: gain and loss harvesting
I’ve been feeling guilty over not engaging more fully in making our portfolio tax efficient. One of the ways I felt like I should be addressing our portfolio is using tax loss and tax gain harvesting. At the risk of sounding immodest, I had no use for tax loss harvesting because in our individual stocks portfolio, all of our stocks were winners between 2008-2017. Since, I buy and hold, the minor ups and downs of the stocks were of little interest to me. I’m only interested in the long term prospects!
I finally made a bad buy in 2017. I bought GE at $30 per share, realized that I didn’t have faith in the company over the long term, and decided that I’d rather lock in the loss than ride it out. That was my first tax loss harvesting and it was clumsily done. I exercised the sale at the end of 2017 so the sale didn’t even register until 2018! Whoops.
My lot sold at $17.59 per share and I used that loss to offset our taxes in 2018. The stock is sitting around $8-9 per share right now and maybe it’ll come up 4-5 years from now but I only buy and hold companies that I fundamentally believe in, so I’m ok with locking in that loss when I did. Who knows. I’m not a stock wizard, I’ve only done as well as I have because we’ve had an incredible bull market, but I’ve got to have some kind of rational blueprint for buying and selling.
That brings us to tax gain harvesting. I’ve vaguely had this sense that I was failing at advanced investing because I have never felt comfortable with the concept and harvesting but after chatting about it with money blogger friends a bit and doing more digging, it does actually seem like it’s not a tool we need right now.
If I’m understanding this correctly:
- Only long term capital gains tax would apply since I hold shares forever.
- We are married filing jointly, so our LTCG tax in 2019 is 15%.
- We’ve also been subject to the net investment income tax (a 3.8% surtax that applies to income from investments) in the past, when we sold property.
- In 2019, our LTCG tax only drops to 0% if our income drops below $78,750.
At the moment, I don’t see any benefit to our harvesting gains because we’d be paying the 15% capital gains tax and possibly an additional 3.8% surtax depending on the timing just for the privilege of resetting our basis. That’s really expensive for no real gain. I don’t expect to sell these stocks for income until we’re not making W-2 income, so even if we are still in the 15% cap gains bracket, we’d certainly be making less income than we are now. Holding off means we can avoid the additional surtax. Though we would arguably be more able to foot the tax bill now, it’s not necessary and we would assume
:: How do you invest? Are you using tax harvesting in any meaningful way?
November 11, 2019
***FYI: I have been collecting donations for our Lakota families (will continue until Nov 17th). Details in the Giving paragraph of this post. Half of any proceeds from the blog during this time (see sidebar) will also be added to those donations.***
I’m both thrilled to be able to do this work and sobered by it every single time. It’s most certainly an exercise in gratitude though that’s not why I do it.
I discovered the Okini last year and a group of friends pooled our money to buy holiday gifts for children who wouldn’t expect any gifts. This year, I had to start earlier in the year if I still wanted to do it, and of course I did, so I had to pace myself. It takes a lot of time and energy so I accepted that I wouldn’t be doing the holiday Okini.
Delving into this process of buying things for people who need it, I’m reminded again and again, there is so much many of us can take for granted:
- Basic clothing: Folks on the reservation don’t have seasonal clothing. Heck lots of the kids are growing fast and don’t have next size up shirts and pants, nor do they have winter coats.
- Heat: They often need warm blankets, space heaters if they have electricity to run them, and/or a hatchet to chop wood for heat.
- Light: Some families have to chop wood, or rely on space heaters if they have them and electricity, or bundle up in sweaters and blankets if they have neither.
- Some of our families can only cook food out of a can on a hot plate if they can get one. That’s assuming they have electricity.
- The ability to shop and have things shipped to your own address. For Americans, how many of us have to even think about whether a national chain store will ship basic goods to us if we’re domestically located? Hawaii and Alaska don’t always get the free shipping but it’s usually not a question of whether or not you will even be able to order at all. As I shared with the giving group, there are many stores that point blank won’t ship to PO boxes. For those that will, many items won’t be eligible for shipping to specific regions. I ran into this problem over and over, for every family. For our second family, I picked 18 items at Target. A grand whopping total of 3 of them were eligible to be shipped to their PO box. I had to start over, at least a few times, to get it right.
We have an unbelievable bounty when we think about the baseline they’re starting at.
The process of shopping was a bit of a throwback to my childhood. I lived in homemade clothing and hand me downs. We only bought clothes from yard sales for years. I didn’t know that clothes came from stores or how to shop in a store until I was 13. I certainly didn’t know how to look for things that fit! Similarly, many of these children and adults have never shopped for themselves so they didn’t really know what sizes they needed, they make do with whatever they’re given.
After determining which stores would ship to PO Boxes, I narrowed that list further to stores that have published sizing charts, free shipping and great prices. I considered shopping thrift but the cost of shipping is so high that it’s cost prohibitive, or negates the savings so we’re spending the same as you would on new things. Between the two options, I decided it would be nice for our families to receive new things. When you don’t have much, getting hand me downs is appreciated but it’s unusual to get anything new.
As money came in, I searched the sales to see which family we could best help with the essentials. I combined coupons and sales and then once orders were submitted, I updated the volunteer coordinators with every tracking number so they could confirm that the items were all received. I opted for consolidated shipments every time I could but sadly that’s not often an available option so each family’s orders ranged from 3-8 shipments each.
As of Friday November 1st, we had pooled a total of $1,141.33. I spent $5 more than we had so that was added to our personal contribution.
What did our money get?
We helped 5 separate families! I chose a variety of groups: a single adult facing homelessness, a single adult who took in an infant grandchild, a single parent with an elderly parent and young child, and a single parent with 7 children. That makes a total of 4 adults and 8 children we were able to purchase for.
Family 1: 2 pairs of sneakers, 2 pairs of jeans, 11 pairs of socks, 6 shirts, 2 pairs of jeans, 2 pairs of pants.
Family 2: 2 giant boxes of size 2 diapers, 2 giant boxes of size 3 diapers, a giant box of wipes (800 count), shampoo, conditioner, laundry detergent, hand soap, 10 bars of soap, instant coffee, tea, sugar, salt, pancake mix, syrup, mashed potato mix, 48 packs of instant oatmeal, 12-pack of canned beef barley soup, peanut butter, strawberry jam, whole grain fruit bars, Nature Valley bars.
Family 3: Shampoo, conditioner, lotion, toothpaste, toothbrushes, floss, underwear, socks.
Family 4: Seven warm coats, eight blankets, 7 multi-packs of underwear and 15 pairs of warm socks.
Family 5: Warm slipper socks, 2 pairs of warm pants, 2 warm shirts, 1 warm sweatshirt.
Why do this?
I suppose someone is going to ask this question, if only in their head.
Short answer: because I can.
Longer answer: Because we are so incredibly blessed to have enough good health to fend for ourselves. (Even though I’m not religious, I do feel that blessed is the right word.) We have love, we have the means to take care of each other in our little family, and we do that well enough to think beyond our own noses. We have enough to give to others without hurting ourselves.
I don’t expect to see any return on this. I do believe this is an investment in making life a little bit better for people in our global community, though. When I die, I won’t regret working hard to try leaving the world just a little bit better than I found it, in some small way.
Last and most importantly: thank you.
I’m so grateful for having this community where you felt moved to be part of this work.
I’m so grateful for having enough, every day, so that I could put my time and energy into this. I’m so proud of our group of friends who give to help others be warmer, be fed, be a little less uncomfortable, without expecting anything in return. Thank you for caring. Thank you for coming together and making this possible.
Together, we made a difference.
October 21, 2019
***FYI: I will be collecting donations for our Lakota families until Nov 17th. Details in the Giving paragraph. Half of any proceeds from the blog during this time (see sidebar) will also be added to those donations.***
I often grumble at myself that our monthly expenditures are too high – what are we spending on?? Where can we cut costs? Shouldn’t I be having so much more fun with our income level??
Oh yes, right, we made terrible choices. We live in the Bay Area with a mortgage (renting would save not much, if anything), a kid who needs childcare and therapy, and we take very good care of our dogs. Dogs and children are luxuries we chose.
I remind myself regularly that we aren’t carelessly throwing money out the window. That’s always my immediate assumption when bills are too high – we were reckless with spending somewhere. In reality, those reckless spends are always on the small scale. $5 or $10, maybe. By and large, we are making spending choices consistent with our values: taking care of each other, health, education. We are also making savings choices consistent with our values: we must have a very healthy portfolio of assets so we can retire with some level of income security, some day. Probably not early, but some day. It must be particularly robust to account for known and unpredictable health issues.
This was all by choice. I’m not failing to do money responsibly just because I feel squeezed as costs rise every month. I may always work on adding to our income and cutting our spending but all of these are part of our active choices in what we prioritize in life.
While filling out a survey, I was struck by how my answers about our finances don’t convey an accurate picture, and get to what I assume the researchers actually mean because of lack of context.
How would you answer these three questions?
1. During the last calendar year, how often did you put off buying something you needed – such as food, clothing, medical care, or housing – because you need the money? Would you say:
Never / Rarely / Occasionally / Frequently / All the Time / Don’t Know
2. During the last calendar year, how much difficulty did you have paying bills? Would you say:
No difficulty at all / A little difficulty / Some difficulty / Quite a bit of difficulty / A great deal of difficulty / Don’t know.
3. Thinking about the end of each month in the last calendar year, did you generally end up with …
More than enough money left over / Some money left over / just enough to make ends meet / not enough to make ends meet / Don’t know (more…)
September 30, 2019
I started blogging before the Great Recession and as I prepare for the next one, whenever it may finally touch down, I’m thinking about all the ways we’ve evolved since then.
1. I am a reformed workaholic.
This is huge. I didn’t think I’d ever stop being a work junkie, or stop chasing the highs of earning money and overtime and achieving. I never dreamed of wanting to let go of all that because it’s what paid off debts, paid bills, built up our savings and saved my bacon.
via GIPHY
After the Great Recession, I clung to that even harder because I got a sense of how much worse it could have been if I hadn’t been addicted to earning.
Cliched as it may sound, getting pregnant changed all that. It didn’t come in a dramatic blinding revelation or the glow of motherhood (I never got the glow, I feel cheated). It came, as most things do, in a flash of logic.
I thought about all the choices we were getting ready to make, all the sacrifices, and how it just didn’t make any sense to do any and all of those things if we were not actively choosing to be present for zir life as well. At the rate that I used to work, I would miss every second of it. It felt right to actively make the choice to shift my mindset from a woman for whom a career was everything to a woman who had chosen to embrace a career and a family with a whole heart. (more…)
September 9, 2019
So much of this article resonated with me: Why Does It Feel Like Everyone Has More Money Than You?
The three quotes that had me nodding:
“Regardless of how much privilege you have, if you don’t do the work, it’s not gonna happen,” Cowles says, “but having the privilege to direct your work into what’s going to pay off for you in the future, that’s a lot of privilege.”
My thoughts: It’s so true. You have got to be willing to make the most of whatever you have, or it’s just wasted.
I never had a penny of help with my expenses, from the cusp of adulthood, from my parents. They paid for food and a roof over my head until I graduated from high school. Then I nabbed my first full time job at 17. Then I paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and living expenses for them over the two decades that I supported them. For a lot of years my privilege was being able-bodied enough to work those years and make my way.
Conversely, I can’t even begin to calculate the opportunity costs because I don’t know the impact of what I missed. I couldn’t study abroad, couldn’t afford the trips or the lost income. I couldn’t afford to do internships, try different jobs, or even socialize. I have no clue what value those lost relationships might have held. I wondered, often, what I could have been doing instead but I continued to work my butt off anyway even if I wasn’t making the right connections. I wouldn’t have anything that I have today if I hadn’t made the most of what I did have, instead of focusing solely on everything I was missing.
The combination of her parents’ help and her own work ethic meant “I ended up being able to really get ahead in my life,” says Torabi. “You have to be comfortable with the beginning, middle, and end of that story.”
My thoughts: Self reliance became my story, my identity. It actually became a bit of a problem!
I was so deeply centered in pursuing my self-made financial independence that when PiC’s family became part of the story, and the occasional cash gift occurred as would have been normal even in my own family, I was no longer equipped to handle it. If I recall correctly, it was somewhere along the lines of:
It took me years to stop seeing such gifts, no matter how moderate the size, frequency or reason, however normal, as an area of deceit if I didn’t mention it here because I didn’t view the gifts as legitimately mine if I didn’t earn it. I did not feel that way about non-monetary gifts but those aren’t the norm in our family cultures – money is.
Regardless of my relationship with the gifter, I viewed money gifts that should have been the norm in my family culture (red envelopes for birthdays, Christmas, Lunar New Year, and any gifting occasion) as something to be batted away with both paws. I’d so firmly set in my mind that I had to earn every single penny my own self that it’s a wonder I didn’t mortally offend anyone.
I wasn’t comfortable with any deviations from my own story, and I had to learn to be.
As Caroline Moss tells me, “I think it’s more of a question of, are people who are afforded the privilege of getting help going to help others? … If you have the privilege of not having to pay 50 percent of your rent because your parents are paying, how can you advocate for interns to make a decent-enough salary, or for scholarships to support an intern or fellow? That’s where the change comes in.”
My thoughts: Though I’ve always been financially responsible for other humans and in my entire adult life, though I’ve never been able to budget for myself first and others only as a just in case, I never forget that I didn’t get here alone so it’s important to me to pay it forward.
I paid all my own bills from college tuition to gas, clothes, food, and utilities and that was a lonely path among friends who all had familial support but I was lovingly welcomed into my chosen families.
They welcomed me into their homes, hearts, and families, hosted with meals and given a bed when I traveled to see them or to attend Comic Con. Those seemed like small gifts to them but they were enormous in my world where every single penny counted and had to stretch as far as it could go. Each meal was a little shot of love that would bolster me greatly when the time came for me to cut ties with Dad.
An old friend with no financial obligations and a big heart would occasionally pay my way in order for me to join him and his SO on little outings because he valued my friendship and company more than the money it cost him.
A very budget vacation with a dear friend was made possible by chosen family because I could not afford the price tag and missing work at the same time. Even though we stayed in hostels and traveled ever so frugally, I couldn’t have managed the cost of that ten day trip without a big helping hand.
When we were deep in renovations with the house, my chosen family offered us a significant short-term loan to bridge a gap in the budget that – no hyperbole – saved my sanity. The loan allowed work to continue on the new place seamlessly and literally bought us some time to put off the sale of the old place for a few weeks until we could handle listing it. I paid that money back the millisecond that we had the cash in the bank a couple months later, but we were astronomically lucky to have the help in the first place. Most people don’t have that.
I made it entirely on my own for the essentials of life but loved ones helped me with the spice of life that I couldn’t afford. That was incredibly meaningful. Given my personality of being purely practical, those gifts were more meaningful than help with a bill or three. I probably would have forgotten how to live life entirely without them.
Money can be such a complex thing.
As a natural hoarder, my relationship with money wasn’t always healthy, particularly when money was especially tight. I’ve had to consciously teach myself to be open to positivity, to wean myself off the scarcity mentality. Not to fear the dips but to look for opportunity in them, not to let the fear of the future waste my present. It’s not all learned behavior, I always had a tendency to be that person as a pessimist, so I’m fighting against nature and nurture.
If you asked me ten years ago if I was more right about money or if PiC was more right, I bet you $10 that I would have said that I was. But over the years, I’ve come to realize we both are equally right, and thankfully, we’ve grown to meet each other in the middle.
I hope we’ll continue to evolve our relationship with money in a healthy way.
:: What’s your relationship with money?
August 12, 2019
Nicole and Maggie’s post stirred up so many feelings for me about family and money requests. My parents were able to keep a roof over our heads until about 1999, then Mom got horribly sick: diabetes, high blood pressure, TIA, early onset dementia, heart problems, severe dental problems, you name it, we had it. (A related APW post that also stirred up my blood and made me yelling NOOO)
I was already working to pay for college. That morphed into paying rent and everything else. It wasn’t easy on minimum wage, but much like that metaphorical frog, I didn’t notice because it was gradual. It started with covering part of rent one month, a utility bill another month, then a car payment, then more and more.
The money requests weren’t just from my parents. As soon as it seemed like I was flush – signaled by my paying all the household bills in full, on time which wasn’t really normal for our family circles – the requests started coming from all kinds of extended family. Word must have gotten around that I was a community bank without red tape. Wow, my naivete! For all my savvy about making and saving money, I sure didn’t have any about protecting my money from family.
Requests I’ve fielded over the past 20+ years (more…)