August 29, 2018
A friend recently asked how I control spending. That’s both a simple and complicated answer.
If we’re just talking about the literal HOW DO YOU DO IT, these are the technical steps that I take:
First up is willpower! This is the weakest of the ways. Willpower is finite.
Depending on how challenging your days or your life feels, it can be so limited as to feel non-existent! I understand this: if you return to The Precious ten times and say no ten times, that’s 9 other times that you could have been saying no to something else or exercising better judgment.
However, it’s the most important initial set of brakes on the impulse to buy. Once I say no the first time and it pings my consciousness again, then I push it to the next step.
Sometimes I’m fresh out of willpower but I have just enough energy to pull out the credit card. Oh let’s not pretend I don’t have that card number memorized. I do.
So let’s say I don’t even have willpower or the precious little left needs to be preserved. Call in the reinforcements!
These pretty sparkly pretty (sparkly!) Star Wars flats lured me in ….
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August 22, 2018
One of my long-standing bastions of money irrationality has finally fallen! It’s been a long time coming and I’m very proud of making the progress, finding the emotional maturity and steadiness, needed to take it down.
This is the change in my money management that I alluded to a while ago.
I’m incredibly risk averse and conservative in my money management. This trait (habit?) goes waaaay back.
I was once a workaholic, wrapped up in building my career and scrutinizing every single move and communique like it might have hidden gold or a secret message for success because every penny mattered. Because I had to support a family even before crossing the threshold to adulthood, at age 17, any money that I earned went to paying down debt and building up a basic savings account instead of investing in a Roth IRA. I had to keep cash on hand at all times because there was always something going wrong: someone got sick, my trainwreck sibling had run up another utility bill, an endless stream of flat tires, dental emergency, or more dental issues.
Obviously, after many long, tough years of working and saving, I made it through that period. But also just as obviously, I bear the scars which translate to being even more risk averse. At this point in time, I’m highly concerned about the possibility of a recession in the next few years, as well as highly concerned about our job security. There’s always been a question mark over my job, but recently one has been hung over PiC’s job, and that brought all of my fears back to the fore.
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August 13, 2018
Within a 6 mile radius, we have 6 food sources. There’s something good at ALL OF THEM. Every single one has things that the other stores don’t and it’s led to some real inefficiencies. Three stores in a week is too much.
Costco
Things we buy and use in bulk: sliced cheese, bread, yogurt, my beloved white corn tortillas, green beans for 50 cents a can for the dogs,
Trader Joe’s
Can’t get anywhere else: sardines and glucosamine for Seamus, $3/lb ground turkey, $4 cauliflower pizza crust
Asian market
Can’t get anywhere else: very cheap specialty produce (snow peas, snap peas, peeled garlic), dried squid treats, my favorite rice crackers.
Sprouts
Can’t get anywhere else: my probiotics, regular sales on frozen shrimp, bulk staples (flour, sugar, nuts, some grains)
Safeway
Can’t get anywhere else: standard staples like generic soda flavors (used for cooking), egg noodles (which I guess doesn’t matter for me anymore since I can’t have them)
Local produce shop
Can’t get anywhere else: The cheapest and freshest produce. (more…)
July 16, 2018
While talking to Penny about debt repayment resources, I kept thinking of other bloggers who are focused on debt repayment. Debt was my old life, we’re building resources now – but …. but, wait, we are in debt! Somehow in the last six months, I stopped thinking of myself as in debt. Except I regularly say that we don’t own this house, the bank does, so how did I forget that we owe a TON of money and therefore are in debt repayment hell?
$576,006.92
After a big down payment, and a few payments to principal, we still owe more than half a million dollars. HALF. A. MILLION.
How on earth did that morph into “just another bill”??
For reasons.
One, we’ve always had some kind of monthly payment for lodgings: rent or mortgage. It’s a normal part of our lives the way a car payment used to be. (Not anymore!)
Two, while we’re employed, we make enough to pay the regularly agreed amounts plus a little bit extra every month on time. That’s a whole other world from where I came from.
Because of numbers one and two, three, debt elimination hasn’t been my sole focus. I’ve also been working on investing wisely and building our careers.
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July 9, 2018
FIREcracker says don’t give your kids money and let them fail if you want them to succeed.
That’s similar to my core parenting tenets.
I will save JB’s life when ze is choking or about to pelt over the edge of a cliff.
I don’t spare zir the bumps, bruises, scrapes and scratches that happen when you run pell mell through life without your feet under you. Ze takes after me so won’t ever be graceful but eventually ze will learn to stop falling so much. BY FALLING SO MUCH.
I just stopped being the biggest klutz in town at age 35 so I could send zir to gymnastics lessons for fun and an attempt to learn some physical balance, but my guess? Ze will just be pretty good at the sport and STILL go through life collecting bruises like Mario Coins. Fine. Bruises won’t kill you.
Back to the point – there’s more nuance to this whole parenting thing. We are saving a bundle for zir college education even while I’m hesitant to commit to paying for all of it because I think ze needs skin in the game. At the same time, I know what life was like when I had to work all through college – I barely remember anything I learned.
The reality is, if we’re doing our jobs right, ze will very likely have some resources inherited from us or from one of many grandparents. We must teach zir to fend for zirself, making a living wage, saving, investing, and making good decisions. In short, have the skills to survive without money coming from anyone else. But I also want zir to have the skills and discipline when resources are plentiful and not live in short-termism.
Some people are naturally frugal, some people learn it. If JB is the latter, the lessons should come from us – we have the knowledge. It would be a massive failure on our part not to try to pass along the lessons and philosophies that create the life that ze lives now.
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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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