February 26, 2018
Photo by averie woodard on Unsplash
Are you naturally a money-worrier (hello friend), or does it depend on your situation?
It’s been said that you can’t rely on the wealth you accumulated, you can only truly rely on the skills that you have that would let you start over if you really had to. Having come up from near the bottom, for years, it was easy for me to agree with that.
I knew how to climb the ladder, having done it before. I have a strong work ethic and drive. It wouldn’t be fun or easy, but it was doable.
These days, it’s more complicated than that. It’s about money and it’s about more than money.
My worries about money on a day to day level are much reduced now that we bring in two good incomes and have dedicated savings. Some time back, our focus pivoted to building wealth with a background of simple living and frugality, no longer preoccupied to the point of breaking on survival. That was a massive change.
(more…)
February 21, 2018
Photo by Mark Eder on Unsplash
I found the flaw in my previous attempt at the CD ladder.
In hindsight, it’s incredibly obvious: The ladder should have started with 6, 9, and 12-month CDs, not 5-year terms. Duh!
My five year CDs were held in my Cash category but they’re so long term that, if I hold them to term, then they don’t actually make sense as my liquid reserves! I don’t know why I didn’t math out the whole plan before… oh, wait yes I do. I was impatient. Antsy, even, after a year of massive spending. That was foolish.
What I did earlier only makes sense if it was part of a 5 year bundle of cash and cash alternatives, though we’d then have to talk about the wisdom of having that much cash when we’re still far away from retirement!
Reclassifying those CDs makes our Investments category a little bit stronger at the expense of the Cash category but we truly needed the balance anyway. Across all our investments, our portfolio is incredibly heavy on stocks, I hold only one bond fund. That’s less than 1% of our portfolio and that’s way too aggressive.
(more…)
February 7, 2018
After I knew he had the signed title in hand, I emailed instructions on completing the process. I’d done everything needed short of signing his name, including filling out the statement of use, verifying that this was a family transfer and therefore should be free, but of course it still took him five days to bother to confirm receipt and, naturally, offer an excuse not to complete it.
The registration was due in a month, which is no impediment to transferring because you don’t have to pay til the due date, duh, he claimed he wouldn’t be allowed to re-title without paying the registration so I’d have to wait for him to scrape up that money.
(more…)
January 31, 2018
Shutterfly has this feature where they randomly email you “look what you were doing 3 or 5 or 12 years ago!” Sometimes they pick moments like JB’s birth, sometimes they pick a barely memorable random date from our first year together.
It makes me smile sometimes to see how much we’ve changed. You can’t see it in pictures alone (except for the hair – I used to have much better hair and my eyebrows were excellent) but I remember who we were back then.
Our Relationship
I’m so glad that PiC wasn’t as cool as I thought he was. (He laughed at the very thought.) We are both huge dorks, that what makes us fit. We’ve made lots of good memories, and had plenty of downs to go with the ups, but we also appreciate each other more deeply now.
Admittedly we have gone to having just about zero time for each other, solely each other, these days and that’s not good. But we don’t resent it, it’s a result of our choices and we’re still prioritizing each other in the daily choices we make. We’ll make some changes this year, like hiring a sitter on occasion, but I’m not going to worry about it. As long as we keep looking out for each other, we can’t go too far wrong.
(more…)
January 29, 2018
On occasion, we receive gift money in varying amounts and while I always know what to do with it, I don’t know how to write about that money.
When it’s a $5 or $10 red envelope for JuggerBaby, that’s easy. Savings, call it side money.
But when it’s a substantial gift to zir 529 fund or to one of us from, say, a relative disbursing money ahead of their passing as part of their estate tax strategy, what do I do with that? It feels somewhat dishonest not to discuss it when I talk about our savings and money strategies.
But am I being dishonest if I don’t discuss it?
(more…)
January 24, 2018
I’ve been battling back some seriously expensive impulses lately. It’s been months of being grumpy because my rational side knows it’s right. It’s not the right time or it’s not in the budget for us, given our financial goals.
My irrational sliver of self continues to whisper and it’s frustrating the snickets out of me. It continues to say, “yes, but ….” HUSH, YOU.
I make pragmatic decisions every single day, regardless of what I wished or hoped or wanted. It’s easy because my first priority is to be efficient and effective. So why won’t my whole self settle down?
This is my attempt to work out what the problem is.
It’s relatively easy to say that we will go to Japan for a three week food fest or Australia and New Zealand to hike for a month someday but not this year because I don’t want to leave Seamus that long. I’m still traumatized. Those are my castles in the sky. I know the kind of money we’ll need to have ready to spend, and we are not ready to spend 5 stacks of money on a vacation between dogsitting (3 weeks away would cost at least $1000!), airfare for three, lodgings, food, and so on. Time off isn’t easy to come by right now, either, but that’s neither here nor there without the money piece settled.
I’m fine with giving up some things now so that we can have financial freedom later when it’s going to be critical for my health to have that freedom – we moderate eating out and travel, for example. We don’t stop them, we just don’t do it every week. But some thoughts keep chugging around my brain like they’re stuck on a toy train track, refusing to accept the pragmatic “No.”
(more…)
January 22, 2018
This is old hat for old hands in the PF blogging world but in direct contrast to my move toward simplification in our investment holdings, I’ve finally decided to “complicate” our cash savings and set up a proper ladder. A CD ladder!
All of 2017, I’ve been fiddling with our cash reserves because it feels foolish to hold so much cash but it also feels foolish to invest when stocks are at all-time highs. Conflict!
On January 1 2017 I rashly threw a huge amount of cash into long term (5 year) CDs at Ally. I had no plans for this cash so why not? Then the neighbor happened. Dammit. When you break a 5 year CD early, you lose 6 months of interest, so I scraped cash together every other way I could before July 1 to pay for the house reno to avoid cashing out my CDs for less than the principal I put in. I knew those terms going in but on Jan 1st, it sure didn’t SEEM like there was any reason to need that money in less than a year. Fool.
(more…)