March 24, 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.
Money
Our spending went way (waaaaaay) up this month because of the stocking up on food and medications and the house repair which had nothing to do with the pandemic, just the weather.
The groceries were manageable, I focused on sales and specific recipes to make the most of our food and prevent waste. I also picked up a lot of apples and oranges that will last a few weeks in the fridge to stretch out time between grocery trips.
The real kick in the teeth was the medications and Seamus’s final labwork. I think we spent about $800 all told on his stuff. But we simply cannot risk him going without his pain medications due to any interruption in the supply lines.
I canceled both our dogwalker and my massage therapy but I paid the former anyway and bought a gift card from the latter to help the business with a bit of income while they have to be shut down. Luckily, my brain therapy is already remote so I will keep that appointment this week.
As much as our budget can bear, I’m trying to anonymously help out folks who have lost their income.
We are both very fortunate that, for the moment, our jobs are relatively safe. We don’t know how long that’ll be the case and I have always planned against the worst case scenario happening and will continue to do so but I won’t forget to be grateful. The not great thing is that PiC had finally located some jobs to apply for and we don’t know if the companies will freeze hiring. I hope not. He’s been unhappy in this job for so long, I sure hope he still has opportunities open. But either way, we know we are so incredibly lucky and we are grateful for our current financial stability however long it lasts.
(more…)
March 23, 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.
Week 1 of shutdown in the Bay Area.
I haven’t written anything substantial about this because I’ve just been too busy trying to deal.
We had begun taking steps weeks ago. Around March 1st, PiC and I were adding moderate overage to our canned and frozen food stores.
A week later, I started cooking up fresh and frozen stores to make actual meals in case I got sick myself. (Not that PiC wouldn’t care for me but he’d also have JB and the two dogs to care for. That’s a lot for any one adult.) Traffic was noticeably light going to and from work this second week of March, many employees who could were already working from home. Unfortunately since we have no help, and we both had to work full time and on site (PiC), we weren’t prepared to make that shift. Still, it was in our future and I was going through our stores of supplies to create a Treasure Box for JB.
By March 14, I was on the verge of pulling JB out of school. We had planned to spend the weekend finalizing our stock up of our supplies and start to hunker down. Unfortunately, Mother Nature had other plans for us, and we had to spend the whole weekend fixing the house instead. That was frustrating but we were so (so so so) very fortunate to have a couple of friends who were available and willing to come help us with the repairs and with entertaining JB. I haven’t had local friends in a long time and I’m still stunned by their generosity.
By the evening of March 15, I couldn’t justify keeping JB in daycare even if they stayed open. I didn’t want to risk them being exposed to anyone who had been exposed to the germs over the weekend. We made the call when we went to bed.
By Monday when this post goes up, it’ll be Day Ten in calendar days but I’m only recording weekdays.
(more…)
February 10, 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.
Or somewhere in between?
Myself, I’m a chronic pessimist in all ways. That means that I’m highly risk averse. However, risk aversion doesn’t mean hiding my head in the sand, though sometime that’s really tempting.
We still invest in the stock market, real estate, and operate on the assumption that we CAN affect change in our financial lives.
But I periodically see people share these demoralized takes on their futures, and the futility of saving, and piles of people leaping in to agree. Maybe I AM a financial optimist. At least by comparison.
Public sentiment like this makes me wonder how far we PF people are from the norm and how or if we can change that.
Which isn’t to say I don’t think the world may be a hopeless hellscape by 2030. Between the governments in power, the climate crisis, and where the world is going, our planet may well be toast in less than a decade and that cheery thought keeps me awake at night.
But if it isn’t, if we (by that I mean, the WORLD and world leaders because individual efforts alone simply aren’t enough to change anything) actually step up in a way that turns the corner then I have a lot more hope for our financial future than when things looked awfully bleak. That was all of … 2006-2013? Longer, possibly. I didn’t start feeling, what’s the word, good? better? yes, better, about our financial position until very recently.
I went through the wringer so many times. A few little highlights:
-
- We couldn’t afford health insurance so my daily chronic pain that started when I was 13 went undiagnosed for more than a decade.
- Mom’s illnesses were poorly managed until her untimely death because the quality of Medicaid care was dismal.
- The family car was reposssessed.
- I was pressured to finance vehicles for my family members whose credit wouldn’t qualify for a loan and then had to sell one of them at a loss because the family member failed to keep up with payments.
I paid the poverty tax over and over and over for years. It was a horrible demoralizing grind.
So, I recognize and remember that hopelessness.
It makes me wonder … How did any of us coming from those conditions even see clawing our way out as a possibility to begin with?
I don’t think there’s anything special about me. My best superpower is I was a natural saver (harsher truth: I had hoarder tendencies and that extended to money) but I came from a poor family. We didn’t have money for any extras beyond food and shelter, we got our clothes from yard sales. My mom grew up in dire poverty so she only knew how to manage money as a poor person would: short term thinking and buying both wants and needs when you had it because you’ll just be wiped out in some other way later. My dad had a period of working hard when it was on his terms but his entire life apparently revolved around finding a way to get other people to pay his shot. He was basically primed to be a grifter. While he did work very hard, he didn’t work smart or strategically, and he took risks that he had other people pay to fix. For his whole life, he skated by on charm and his family covering up his mistakes.
Seemingly small decisions turned out to be a huge influence on us. (Well, me. My sibling turned out to be worse than my dad, so I’m the only one who made good.) The choice to raise us in the largely white suburbs, for example.
Part of this was because it was close to the Catholic families who sponsored our family and helped them adjust to life in America. Partly it was intentional immersion.
The net effect of growing up in a majority white suburb instead of the more popular metro area where refugees and immigrants typically moved meant we were forced to follow the more American ways rather than insulating ourselves in our immigrant culture. We spoke two languages and observed cultural customs but our lives outside the home were about assimilation and that was good for us. Er, me. I can’t see that it made any difference for my brother, in the end.
On the one hand…
Those tweets are from a random selection of random people, so it includes folks who lack education, some are ruled by fear or a refusal to take responsibility for their own actions. So this reaction is very apt:
I can’t imagine deciding that since I don’t understand how the “game” is played or since I hate the game, I just won’t participate and choose to ignore the cost of inflation, or refuse to even try to save. I can’t imagine choosing to give up before even starting to try. I can’t imagine refusing to try to educate myself. I don’t say that because things have gone well for me, they certainly haven’t always done. I say that because I’ve always been too flerken stubborn to give up before I’ve fought the fight. I was a literal fighter as a kid. My brother and I fought tooth and nail, actual fisticuffs, brawling, from the time I was a small child. He was bigger and stronger and faster, but I always fought him to a standstill. I would die trying to bet him and this is how I looked at life in general: angry, fists up, I would beat the system.
Even if I’m not doing nearly as much as I did ten years ago to make a penny, even if I choose to narrow my investing focus instead of widening it as I had originally planned, those are conscious decisions to allocate my mental resources.
It’s not giving up on a broken system. I will both fight to do well for ourselves in a broken system and to fix that system.
My point is: we’ve done really well in the past decade and even I can still feel that hopelessness in the big picture from personal experience. The aftereffects of the Great Recession on my psyche is not to be underestimated.
But we won’t let that despair drive the car.
On the other hand…
There are people I respect, who are doing their very best and make the best choices they can with a limited set of choices, and still feel this way.
Related: Done By Forty has numbers on the subject of the wealth inequality in the country.
I see a lot of gallows humor. They have struggled for the past decade, same as I have, but didn’t have their hard work pay off or good health. Poor health is a huge problem! I’ve been battling chronic pain and fatigue and depression since long before I was an adult.
My mom went through that despair. (At the time I wrote that post, I didn’t know she was also suffering from severe depression and anxiety so I was not as gracious as I should have been.) She put in 15 hard years of simultaneous parenting and entrepreneurship, only to see a combination of Dad’s overreach and a serious market downturn in their industry wipe out their livelihood. She wanted to turn to MLMs, after that, desperately seeking any semblance of control over a downward spiraling financial situation.
Or my friend Andrea, who has had even more challenges than I have and is still fighting to improve her circumstances, a little bit at a time. I don’t fault her for advocating “eat the rich” even if I am, by comparison, the rich. Because it’s obscene to see what billionaires are doing out here on the backs of individuals, it’s depressing to see the vast majority of the world’s wealth in the hands of a small group of people while there’s still childhood hunger, no clean water in Flint, abuse goes unchecked, and labor conditions in those billionaires’ factories and warehouses grow more dismal.
Diana put it so aptly here: I believe that material success is much, much more determined by external, random factors (parental income, location of birth, health conditions, etc.) than personal qualities, although personal improvements and education can help individuals rise to their most glorious humanity.
As hard as we work, we are also incredibly fortunate that we have PiC’s health, that I still have any mental fortitude after 20+ years of ill health, that we have both maintained steady employment with relatively stable companies since my long stint out of work. It wasn’t easy, that was the hard work portion. But there were absolutely larger issues at play like managers who saw our value and advocated for us, which you can only hope for. It could easily have gone the other way. My early career was marked with toxic abusive terrible employers, I could have continued that streak and failed to win my raises and promotions and had my health fail entirely due to the stress.
There are also huge systemic issues and a lot of people were impacted by the Great Recession in ways they may never be able to fully recover from. There are a lot of people who aren’t just foolish or ignorant or practicing learned helplessness. They’re facing real challenges and I understand their despairing laughter. I was there, too.
Abby made the case for hope in her post.
Where is that balance between acknowledging harsh realities and still focusing on what you can do personally?
I do much better with that balance financially than in any other part of life. I can only do my part to fight the ills of capitalism, to be a good landlord who cares about people as much as the ROI, to do my best to succeed in a broken system to protect myself and my family while also fighting to change that broken system.
I have these conflicted feelings about the climate crisis that people have about their money. It feels like I have to do everything I can but also that it’s hopeless if there isn’t change on a global and governmental level.
:: Do you have hope? What is it that gives you hope? What gives you the motivation to keep moving forward, even when you hit obstacles and challenges? Have you seen more growth than setbacks in the past decade? Did you feel like being part of this community, if you feel part of it, had anything to do with that? Has anything we’ve done here in the community that has helped you in some way?
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…)