June 25, 2018
I wasn’t there so I’m light on details but we’ll be digging into our savings to pay off a $1000 charge on the AmEx because of Sera. She got into a tussle over Father’s Day weekend and because she outweighs the other dog by 40 pounds, the other dog got the worst of it.
When PiC called to tell me that she’d wrangled with another dog, I knew just from his breathing in the three seconds before he actually said anything that something had gone terribly wrong. I hate phone calls. They’re never good news.
Sera was responding to aggression and thought she was fighting in self defense. The other dog definitely thought she was responding to Sera’s aggression and fighting in self defense.
Sera carries more than just the physical scars of healed bite marks on the top of her head that stay bare of fur, the still open wound in her ear that can’t heal because of where it is. When a dog makes aggressive noises at her, even if only warning her off, she reacts with fear because she’s learned that means she’s about to be attacked. She learned this from her family, the one that gave her up too late for her to trust other dogs easily, only after she’d been attacked several times by the family dog.
It could be a lot worse.
Sera’s wounds were generally superficial. I cleaned them and wrapped them up in ten minutes before we headed over to the clinic. The other dog’s wounds were manageable but the bites were still deep enough that they required surgery to be sure that they wouldn’t get infected. We sat with the owner at the emergency clinic until after the exam to make sure that she knew we were going to take care of it. It might not have been Sera’s fault but it was still our responsibility when she hurt the other dog.
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June 20, 2018
I’ve got a backburner full of unanswered questions, none of them big enough for a post, and all of them bothering me enough that I want to dump them out of my brain.
It always helps me to write through my puzzlement, and I’m hoping that putting them out here will help me make decisions on at least a few of them!
Keep or return the large WaterPik set that PiC bought on sale to Costco?
I haven’t had time to do more research on what set makes the most sense for our situation but I wanted something that would be relatively portable because we have limited counter space and travel regularly.
Conclusion: I think we should return this for now.
Buy dog health insurance or self insure?
The Nationwide quote was $1100 a year for full coverage which gives 90% back on vet bills, and you can use any vet:
Accidents & injuries, Hereditary & congenital, Cancer, Specialty & ER coverage included, Dental diseases
Eye, musculoskeletal & blood disorders, Behavioral treatments, Rx therapeutic diets & supplements
Alternative & holistic treatments, Wellness*
*The relevant wellness stuff that I expect to pay for every year would be far less in any given year than the premiums except for the dental cleaning. Any year she got a dental, the cost would likely be at least $1000:
Veterinary exam fees, Vaccinations, Heartworm test, Fecal test, Flea control, Heartworm prevention, Tick control, Dental cleaning
A recent quote for Seamus ran into the $2000s but that also included some extractions, a mass removal, and biopsy.
Conclusion: undecided
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June 18, 2018
Our mortgage, recast twice though it has been, is still an astronomical 4 figure number that I’m quietly desperate to reduce as fast as possible. To that end, though we don’t have much spare every month, our payments have been rounded up to the nearest thousand to whittle away at that principal slowly. Drip drip drip!
Before I could bask in the rewards of taking a long term approach, I discovered a hole in our plans.
We started paying a multi-hundred dollar therapy bill monthly at the end of 2017 and I blithely assumed we could cash flow it. Yes, but…
This is where the drips worked against me. I lost track of when the extra therapy bills ate up our whole cash buffer in the checking account but we slowly dripped and dribbled that “extra” money out the door. It’s entirely gone now and we’re back to a paycheck to paycheck situation.
All our money first goes to their various prescheduled destinations (investing and savings), then we have exactly what we need to cover our bills as they come up. This is NOT ideal. As loathe as I am to have money sitting in checking accounts not earning any interest, the scenario where a missed paycheck would send me straight to pulling money out of our savings and that stinks. We do maintain a large cash savings for major bills like insurance and property tax but that isn’t intended to be tapped for any normal recurring monthly expenses.
Sadly this means I’ve got to make even more budget cuts. The “big” mortgage principal payments of $200 are now reduced to only $20 extra per month. Our cash buffer needs to be at least $3000 to be useful for more than a minute and that’s going to take quite a while to rebuild. In the meantime, I’m considering the impact this will have on our charitable giving.
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June 11, 2018
Thanks to being featured by the lovely ladies at Women Who Money, I realized that I should update our money process because it’s evolved since the last time we talked about it.
Ours to have and hold
Budgeting the money
Pretax contributions come out of his paycheck first: taxes, retirement contributions, health, dental and vision coverage, pre-tax FSA, his disability and life insurance. His benefits are way better than my employer’s.
After that haircut, our paychecks hit the joint checking accounts. 30% of our total take-home pay is immediately transferred to our joint savings account for long term savings or investing, another 10% is sent to a savings account, held against the large bills coming up in the course of the year: life, car, home, and earthquake insurance, property taxes (A DOOZY), income taxes if we unexpectedly made more and deducted less over the year. That will need to increase to 15% in 2019.
The remaining 60% covers all living expenses: mortgage, utilities, daycare, credit cards (gas, groceries, discretionary spending, dog supplies and medications).
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May 30, 2018
I’m loving Angela’s recent sustainability tips and Cassie’s posts on deciphering those recycling symbols, buying cleaning products in bulk (though I would have to find the US equivalent), low waste food shopping. Also Miser Mom’s gift to her church that keeps giving.
PiC and I aren’t zero-wasters but we make an effort to be as low waste as possible. Here are some of the things we’re doing now:
1. Reusable shopping bags and produce bags
I didn’t get on this bandwagon until plastic bags were banned here in Northern CA because we always reused our plastic bags for the garbage, but we had a good stash of reusable bags from Comic Con to use when that ban went into effect. We’ve also added mesh produce bags to our shopping trips to reduce the number of small veggie bags that we use, and may soon switch over to using free newspaper to line our tiny trash bins to reduce our use of plastic even more.
2. Recycle!
Everything that can be, is!
- Food is kept separate from paper and plastic recycling to avoid contamination.
- We have small appliance and household waste recycling through the city,
- and film plastics recycling at Sprouts,
- and electronic waste recycling through work.
- I’ve even found textiles recycling for shoes and clothing that are simply too thrashed to be handed down or donated.
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May 28, 2018
Tending to our Net Worth update, I signed in PiC’s Chase account to check some balances and my jaw dropped.
WHAT IN THE SAM HILL.
WHERE ARE MY POINTS???
I had to nag them for Six Frakkin Months to get my rightfully earned 100,000 points for opening a mortgage with Chase during their promotion for massive points for doing a thing we were already going to do.
[panic flails]
Then it dawned on me.
Yet Another PF Blog done alerted me, I thought.
“Odd, I should look into that,” I thought.
Then it completely slipped my mind!
The reasons? I have never had my earned points or miles tied to keeping an account open so it literally didn’t occur to me that they would be (even though YAPFB TOLD ME), I completely missed that we only have 30 days to cash them out in the Rewards Agreement, and … there’s no real excuse. This was my own damn fault.
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April 23, 2018
The Phone Chronicles
I let PiC pick my new phone because he wasn’t really picking for me – he was picking his future phone. I have to learn to use whatever phones we get first so that I can troubleshoot them because I am IT, and I don’t much care about which phones we use as long as they’re functional and not Apple, now. (I refuse to give Apple any more money on principle. I find their confession to throttling older phones, and their excuse, to be fishy. Also, I HATE iTunes and iCloud and all the proprietary, frustrating as all get out software, and Apple ID, with a hot fiery passion and never want to have to see it again. Ever.)
Then again, since he inherits my now “old” phone which has quite a lot of use left in it, I’m destined to spend a few more years with them.
He was debating the Google Pixel and the Samsung Galaxy, and I decided in favor of the Pixel 2 since I would like the option to go to Project Fi in the future to save on monthly costs. We’re still getting service from T-Mobile but we’re paying more than I want to for cell service.
I don’t like buying new phones but it was originally to give us some flexibility as to our phone plans earlier on. Now, while I’m happy to sell our old phones, I am doubtful about buying used/refurbished – what if we get a lemon? Transferring phones is already a colossal PITA buying new, is buying used another layer of risk? Maybe no more than it is with a car which we DO believe in buying used.
I need to hunt down a verified reliable source for refurbished phones for the future. This time we simply didn’t have the luxury of waiting because his phone suddenly made the acquaintance of a large rock with extreme force and prejudice. Actual chunks of the screen were falling out when he got home from that run. Given the choice, I’d prefer that he temporarily lost it again but clearly the choice wasn’t mine.
Quick review: The phone is fine, though too big for my hands, but I HATE the Android WordPress app. It’s so bad that I’ve stopped blogging on it so that’s going to seriously slow down or cut into my blogging.
Phone: $706
Phone case: $14
Phone screen protector: $9
Phone cable (because I didn’t realize that the Pixel uses USB-A grrr): $12
Total: $741 (more…)