March 28, 2018
Back in ’15, I decided to slow churn cards on a regular basis, even if we didn’t have a specific trip goal in mind.
Quick notes:
- We still don’t have a specific trip in mind yet but I have my sights set on some kind of an international trip next year. For about 5 seconds I wildly dreamed about hiking through Patagonia but my body reminded where I live. Hahah, no. Dammit.
- For the purposes of figuring out whether we’ve wasted money on a card or not, I’m estimating the total value of our miles or points for each card to make sure that we are earning at least our minimum profit per churned card but we won’t know the true value until we actually redeem them.
- We haven’t been respecting the “no annual fee” rule for the past several cards as long as the miles or points bonuses were at least worth twice as much as the annual fee, if not four times as much.
- We ALWAYS pay the card balances in full. No exceptions.
- We time our churning activity with necessary spending. We never manufacture unnecessary spending for a card bonus. We’ll pass on a card before we do that. I keep a spreadsheet to track expected large expenses for this. (more…)
March 26, 2018
There’s been a whole lot of chatter on the interwebs about what income level you need to be considered middle class, or more.
My contribution early on was that a household income of $100,000 in most places is what I consider upper middle class. That wouldn’t sustain us or our current lifestyle in the Bay Area. We wouldn’t be able to afford daycare, or travel, or eating out. We probably couldn’t afford this house or our second car. We’d get by but it wouldn’t feel good.
Nevertheless, I started to feel wealthy a long while ago even though our salaries are laughable compared to Silicon Valley friends or more highly educated colleagues. That’s because I truly appreciate the value of certain small things.
BOOKS!
Reading the calendar, I see that our daycare is going to have a Scholastic Book Fair in a few weeks. I asked Twitter if they were pro- or con- SBF because I don’t know much about the program. Penny assured me that they’re great about giving teachers funding support which made my heart sing. Buying a book because we want to read, because our kids love to read, that’s the stuff that feeling rich is made of.
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March 19, 2018
“…education is the silver bullet. Education is everything.” Sam Seaborn, The West Wing
Is it better to be the comparatively poor kid in a wealthy school district or a relatively rich kid in a poor school district?
I asked this question on Twitter and the responses initially leaned hard toward the second choice, which would be good confirmation bias, except I’m actively second-guessing our decision. Then a lot of responses flooded in pointing out that the first choice is better for the poor kid to have access to connections and better resources.
That brought on a facepalm because I hadn’t thought about it that way and that’s stupid because ….
I lived the first scenario. As a poor kid in a modestly wealthy school district, I got a good education and the relative wealth of my peers wasn’t obvious. Kids weren’t obsessed with designer brand names back then, wealth wasn’t the ostentatious thing that it’s become today between Instagram and new iPhones for ten year olds.
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March 12, 2018
This is a reader requested post on a subject that’s been percolating for some time.
I say “our strategy”, but PiC trusts me with our money, even when I appear to be giving it away with reckless abandon. (Or maybe that’s how it feels to me, and he knows I’m rarely reckless with money.)
I’ve already talked about my philosophy on charitable giving. We’ve talked about increasing our not-significant giving each year, and I’ve committed to continue doing that this year. It seems like more transparency is in order to keep us on track, and perhaps sharing our thoughts with others would help them, but I’m not sure if others value that part. Let me know if it’s yea or nay?
Here, I’m going to share how we’re structuring our giving this year.
Warning: I’ve never been this organized before, but we’re also not all that organized by objective measures so, lower your expectations please!
NOTE: Cutting off Dad doesn’t mean we’re flush with cash now so that hasn’t had any effect on our giving. We originally needed to stop supporting him because we couldn’t afford it any longer. When we moved, our mortgage and our taxes tripled. YEEK.
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March 7, 2018
It’s done.
The gravy train has left the station.
You joined me on this stressful, ugly, painful path last year and I’m starting to breathe a sigh of relief as I share this: decoupling our finances is finally done.
I’ve stopped paying his rent.
I’ve stopped paying his utilities.
I’ve stopped paying for his gas, groceries, car registration, insurance, and cell phone.
We removed all identification information that I knew of from the old house so he doesn’t have easy access to my SSN and placed security freezes on all three credit reporting agencies so he can’t get to my credit.
He doesn’t know our new address.
He doesn’t have any of PiC or JB’s personal information, and their names are so common anyway that they don’t show up in Google searches.
My name is not common so I routinely request the removal of my personal information from data scrapers. (more…)
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.
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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.
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