December 19, 2016
I’m not big on Christmas gifts like I used to be. I used to overcompensate for loneliness and being poor by trying to give as many gifts as I could, wrapped and tied up with a nice bow.
These days, I have as healthy and happy a family life here in the Bay Area as I could hope for, and supportive friends all over.
I still love giving gifts but only when they’re truly meaningful, usually practical, and serve a purpose in the lives of the recipients rather than taking up room, gathering dust, or being regifted because who needs a fourth coffeemaker in their kitchen? I know some people have go-to gifts they give everyone for simplicity’s sake – I give books, for example, but can it please not be a huge, clunky, appliance that only one person in the family can actually use?
At this point in life, my money wants to go toward retirement investing, building our real estate empire, and helping people and animals.
Fantasy gifts: if money and space were no object
$290: Seamus would get the 93-inch plush bear from Costco. Currently on sale for $260. It’s a tossup whether he would sleep on it or tear it apart. Probably both.
$70: JuggerBaby would get this magnetic tiles set. But ze would have to donate or pass along at least three other toys.
$290: I would get this Kindle Oasis. Just kidding, I don’t need all that flash. I’d get the Paperwhite for a third of the price. (But the Oasis is so LIGHT.)
$5000: PiC would get that super fancy bike he admires from afar and we’d get a sitter twice a month so he could go on super long rides on the weekend.
$2000: We have five favorite daycare full time teachers, and five part time teachers or support staff, who have been amazing with JuggerBaby. They’re warm, caring, attentive, all things that make it possible for us to leave zir and work on the weekdays. We’d love to be able to give them each a substantial thanks.
$5000: There are several charities I’d like to support with more than just a small bit of cash.
Reality gifts: because money does matter
$250: Family gifts. I think all but $50 of this is frivolous and we should skip doing it altogether but we have yet to convince the family of this so here it is. The remaining $50 goes towards clothing for the kids so I don’t mind that, since we all pool the clothes we use and pass them along.
At least $100 of that $250 will be gift cards that I purchased at a 4% discount, using GiftCardGranny. The second $100 will mostly be covered by a gift card we received, and the last $50 was covered by gift cards that I earned through Swagbucks and the Carter’s Rewards from last year’s gift purchases. Most of these gifts won’t cost much out of pocket at all, I’ll just have to wrap them.
$75 + $100: The daycare organizes gifts for the center by way of contributions from parents, requesting $60-75 per child, per family. They pool it, then split it across all the teachers and staff at the center. We give the $75, which works out to about a dollar per person, but we’re also going to give some small token of appreciation to our favorites. A card, and perhaps a small gift card? I’m not sure yet but we have about a day to figure this out.
Making new traditions
While I work towards a gift-free holiday season, PiC and I splurged on our own Christmas tree for our home. We went with an artificial tree, to my inner sadness because I miss the smell of a fresh new tree, but the deal was good enough for what we were looking for. We found it at Target, originally $67, marked down to $42 which was covered with a gift card. Add a couple strings of lights and a few ornaments, and voila, 4 weeks of wintery, Christmassy cheer in our living room.
It feels very splurgey, we don’t typically spend money on decor, but it’s a long term happiness thing.
:: What are your favorite winter holiday traditions? Do you typically exchange holiday gifts? What’s your perfect gift to give or receive?
November 30, 2016
A More than Minor Injury was sustained by JuggerBaby.
We shared many moments of toddler distress, and equal parental distress for the pain ze was experiencing. Zir whimpers of pain were pathetic, especially for a kid who shakes off bleeding wounds if there’s something better to pay attention to, and heartrending when it escalated into cries of distress.
After a worried hour of coddling, icing, comforting and feeding but no resolution, we ended up at the ER. They were, despite zir panicked screams and tears, caring and efficient, trying their best to put zir at ease and bribing with many many stickers. Despite their best efforts, we ended up back in the hospital doing follow-ups when that treatment didn’t resolve the issue, and then several more hours picking up medical supplies.
Prognosis? About three weeks of healing.
If that’s all it is, and I’m hoping and praying that’s all it is, then it could have been a lot worse. JuggerBaby left a trail of snot and tears streaked across a few of my shirts so ze might have a different opinion, but I’ve tended to far worse wounds in my day. For now, ze isn’t an unhappy camper, ze is more comfortable and is coping bravely.
There were a lot of moments when I didn’t feel anything in particular. It wasn’t panic numbness or guilt-spacing out, it was knowing that this was painful and inconvenient and difficult, and just plain awful as parents seeing their child in pain. But foremost in my mind was thanks for our good fortune in life right now, because even as we tackled one hurdle after another, it was entirely manageable. Tiring, even exhausting, hauling many pounds of distressed child, trying not to jostle zir, but as long as ze comes out of it fine in the end, that’s all we have to really care about.
We are so fortunate that we have good health care and insurance.
The ER visit copay was $100, our followup copay was $20. Our FSA covers that with ease. The five x-rays were torturous, and the casting was worse, but we didn’t have to ask how much every single test or exam cost. I know exactly how much it costs to take X-rays for dogs and I swallow hard whenever we have to take Seamus back for another $200-400 visit – human medicine is multiple times more expensive. Part of this is because we chose an HMO, part of this is because the level of plan we have in the HMO is really good. Our premiums are relatively high, but the tradeoff was not having to think and worry about the cost of every item.
Intertwined with that lack of worry was the level of care we got. When I wanted an extra x-ray to be absolutely sure there wasn’t a third problem lurking, we had already been surprised twice, the technician got right on the phone to request it, and made sure that we got authorized for exactly what we asked for.
In my decades-long history with medical care, I’ve been seen by grossly incompetent doctors, strings and scads of them, who dismissed my pain as imaginary or in my head. I was prepared to go to war for my child, but I didn’t have to. They accepted that zir pain was legitimate and treated it as such.
We are so fortunate to have money.
We’re not rich, hence my iron-clad rule that we always save first and never spend more than we make. That means that we have reserves in case of emergencies.
That means that cost didn’t determine if we would get the medical supplies and clothing ze needed to be warm and comfortable.
We can afford ten dollars for a cast cover for daycare, since they won’t be able to take the same caution we do to keep zir cast dry. When it became clear that zir arm wouldn’t fit into any sleeves, I had a hoarded gift card to cover the cost of a warm coat – 50% off, a bargain hunter never quits!
We are so fortunate to have the mental space to plan ahead.
I always keep an eye out for clothing 6-12 month sizes larger than ze is currently wearing, gathering them piece by piece so that when ze has a growth spurt, we’re not scrambling to keep zir dressed. Ze needs looser, roomier clothes for a month? No problem, I dug out the little stash of larger clothes. We’ll have enough clothes to last a week.
We are so fortunate that our jobs aren’t run by tyrannical nincompoops.
When we had to drop everything and go back to the hospital, without a question we both got ready to go. We spent the time we needed taking care of our child with a second thought. The nurse asked us if we needed doctor’s notes during one of the visits and we both just looked at her blankly for a couple minutes before realizing why she asked.
What an utterly upper middle class reaction.
It’s been a decade since that was my life but I remember shift work. I remember not being able to make a doctor’s appointment without finding a replacement to cover for me. (My managers never used to find coverage for us so, sick or bleeding, you had to cover your shift. They sucked.)
I remember that I couldn’t afford to lose the wages by being out sick, so I worked through illness, and pain, and without a doubt exacerbated my fibro. I had to suck it up, I didn’t see a doctor.
(And that’s when I was lucky enough to have health insurance. In the year before I was working a full time job, in the early days of my fibro, we couldn’t afford health insurance. I didn’t know what the “oh, self-insured” comments meant for years but opted out of the repeat humiliation of trying to be seen at the local clinic. When I did get an appointment, without fail, a mid-50s male doctor would look at my x-rays and tell me that my pain was in my head. There’s a reason I look at male doctors sideways to this day.)
I hate that this happened but …
Comparing this ordeal with when I had to deal with Mom’s illnesses, the near-hyperventilating math trying to figure out where the money was going to come from, while navigating the near impossible, many hours-long waits in the Medicaid-accepting medical offices – it’s just no comparison at all.
Money and good care makes life a thousand times easier. I cannot be more grateful that while I couldn’t provide the care that Mom deserved, we can now for JuggerBaby.
At this moment in time, even with all the worry, numbness, anxiety, and wondering what the heck is going to happen, we are in an incredibly good place for this and I cannot help being grateful. I cannot let it go without passing on some of our good fortune when there are so many in the world doing without, or suffering terribly.
There are so many, but right now I’m thinking of Aleppo. I’m thinking of the X Clinics and especially the one in Texas serving rural populations who have the least access to reproductive healthcare.
:: Who would you support when your cup runneth over? What are you grateful for today? Have you ever broken a bone?
November 28, 2016
I’m not trying to be pessimistic. I never have to TRY to be pessimistic, I was born expecting the glass to be empty and missing if I turned my back on it. This explains why I’m prepared for most wound care up to a broken bone.
Naturally that means I’m concerned about the state of the nation but also leaves me at a bit of a crossroads with our money.
I’ve got the usual conflicting goals of needing to secure stable income and preserving capital versus needing to use our capital to invest aggressively to grow our wealth while time is still on our side.
This is further complicated further by my family. No matter how much I resent the situation they’ve created, I can’t find it in myself to pretend I won’t care if and when Dad gets sick and needs better care than he can get from Medicare. I know Medicaid care. Mom had it and it was point blank terrible. She was miserable for far longer than she needed to be because they weren’t that interested in finding a diagnosis nor were they interested in treating her. They really just wanted to get her out of the office at each visit and didn’t ask even the most basic questions about how she was coping. She didn’t help matters by putting on a brave front trying to pretend she was fine but someone who is fine doesn’t have blackouts, six accidents in as many months because their vision blurred out or greyed out, or forget where they’ve lived for the past 15 years.
Needless to say, I expect Medicaid to be not much better for Dad.
Ponderable 1: This year I started moving a lot of cash into our investment accounts. I was also hoarding cash because I’ve been looking for another rental property. But with all the I don’t knowness in the world today, I’m not sure that committing us to a third mortgage sits comfortably. How much of a mortgage debt:cash ratio am I comfortable having? Not counting our brokerage account which I consider a long term investment, we’re at about 2.3:1 mortgage:cash right now. If I take on a third mortgage it would feel like a fairly large imbalance. Maybe the more important questions are whether the income that it will generate long term is worth taking on the debt, and whether we could bear up to a year of expenses (repairs, vacancy) without income in case of a job loss.
Ponderable 2: apocalyptic planning – as I’ve said before, I’ve friends who grew up in internment camps. This has and can happen again. With that in mind as a possible worst case scenario, it’s hard not to want to plan for losing everything including freedom despite it being such an major set of unknowns.
Ponderable 3: I have no idea how much I need to save in case of a serious illness and any long term care Dad might require. Maybe $250k? Should that just be considered a cost we deduct from our cash and non-retirement accounts? Probably yes.
Ponderable 4: How aggressively must I invest, and spread out risk, to achieve income replacement in ten years, given the other likely demands on our money? How comfortable can I get with that? And how likely is it that this Presidency will result in one or both of us losing our jobs? I think mine is more at risk but PiC’s industry isn’t invulnerable and our fields are small enough that a sharp contraction would leave a whole lot of us out in the cold.
Ponderable 5: Can we afford to add to our family any time soon? Going by JB’s costs, if we were to add naturally (if we could, and wanted to), childcare would add about $20k to our annual expenses, before food and anything else. If we were to adopt, those costs would be so variable it’s probably not worth guesstimating right now. Either way, probably no. And, dare I? It terrifies me even more now to imagine how we’d protect THIS child, if things go Deep South, and that’s with a two to one adult-child ratio. I had protective worries when I was pregnant before but they were run of the mill compared to now. I’m watching this irrepressible child and thinking back to the Diary of Anne Frank and shudder to think how impossible it would be to hide zir if it came down to that.
I have more questions but these are top of mind as I try to make sense of the hate and ugliness. A Jewish friend has had her car vandalized twice now since the election with swastikas and “Hitler” among other vile things scrawled across it. DT hasn’t even been sworn in yet and the repercussions of his hate rhetoric are affecting real people deeply.
:: What’s on your mind, money or otherwise? Do you see a clear or murky path ahead?
November 21, 2016
Between the election, hosting guests, and other demanding personal events, open enrollment flew right by. We scrambled to update our selections on the last day of the period instead of the first day like I like to do. I’m super glad PiC caught that because my attention was elsewhere and I would have been ticked as all get out if we’d missed it.
Most things are staying the same: medical, vision, dental, long term disability, life insurance, dependent care FSA.
We’re increasing our FSA allocations to the maximum possible $2600 in the hope that PiC will be an eligible candidate for LASIK, as much as the idea of having his eyes operated on horrifies me, because we’ve discussed it for years and objectively, if they can do some good, we should go for it.
I found a goof from last year’s open enrollment though. Can anyone tell me why I added JuggerBaby to our vision and dental plans when ze didn’t have teeth yet? I s’pose I didn’t know ze wouldn’t have to see the dentist at all this year but my child was toothless as of last year’s enrollment period and that was a curious waste of money. It wasn’t a *lot*, probably around a few dollars a month and possibly I chose to pay it just in case ze needed dental care early, but it’s unlike me to waste any money if I can help it.
My company shed a ton of benefits in the past few years, so we rely on PiC’s employer’s great benefits. This puts me on edge, in light of the possible threats to the ACA, because I feel like we’re just one job loss away from serious instability. Not only would be we be out half of our income, we would lose access to the remaining 401(k), FSA for health and dependent care, medical, vision, dental, and disability and life insurance benefits. We do carry private life insurance for me but not for him. Our costs would increase at the same time as halving our household income, so I’m considering how I might want to deal with that if he were to be injured or out of a job.
:: What benefits do you have, or miss? What do you wish you had?
October 26, 2016
A story of denial
Does everyone have a price? I thought yes. Then, no. Then changed my mind again.
I wanted to believe the answer was no. I needed to understand the answer was yes.
Integrity and moral fiber become inherent, I used to think. They are part of consistently learning to be, and making the choice to be, a good person. To choose to do the right thing whether or not it was easy.
Suffice to say, that I could still believe into my mid-30s despite all my experiences that prove otherwise suggests a bedrock of faith I didn’t know I had until it crumbled.
But the story doesn’t start there.
It started with my first lessons in the school of hard knocks, toiling to save my family from financial ruin. I was 17 when I learned we were more than broke. We were in debt, deeply in debt, and my parents saw no way out of the quicksand they had built our lives on. Credit cards were used to make ends meet, too often. It wasn’t frivolous but it was absolutely foolish. When their siblings needed cash, or a parent needed a replacement something, they turned to my parents. Saying no is not an option for that generation, so they found a way. Half a lifetime of solving other people’s crises left them carrying six figures of debt on credit cards and personal and business loans.
Making mistakes didn’t make them bad people. My parents deserved my help because they always helped others. For a decade I made it my life to help them back, but I also learned from their mistakes. I helped them but I saved.
At first it was paltry. I was literally saving pennies. Nickels and dimes were salted away. I scrimped and skipped meals, worked overtime, saved like my life depended on it.
In a way, it did. More than my life, this was my Hope.
After more double shifts and sleepless nights than I care to remember, I invested my painstakingly hoarded nest egg. It grew a little bit and I reinvested it repeatedly.
18 months ago, the investment matured at $15,000, and I asked my father to pick up the cash. I hadn’t decided but was almost certain it would pay for JuggerBaby’s daycare so that’s what I told him the money was needed for. No immediate rush, then, I said, but I would absolutely need it by fall.
He’d been my loan courier for the interest payments in previous year but, this time, I wouldn’t be able to pick it up from him for two months. Two long months where I ignored my sense of misgiving over his characteristic silences, chiding myself for being worried, chalking it up to a hard-won sense of skepticism gone haywire.
By this summer, I had been put off several time. He was busy, they kept missing each other when he dropped in to pick up the payment. All normal, plausible, reasonable except it felt a little off. Nothing I could pinpoint but my instinct’s honed on decades of accurately identifying my brother’s lies. They had long outnumbered his truths, his half truths, and I’d become an expert at gauging when he was trying to con me.
I had never wanted to learn the art of detecting deceit in another family member.
An old friend always says, “your instincts are your best friend,” and I should have known when I was deliberately ignoring mine that they weren’t wrong.
They weren’t. But I wasn’t either.
I wasn’t prepared to accept another betrayal. I was trying to avoid it by pretending I didn’t sense the wrongness, the lie underneath, by giving him every opportunity to make it right. To make a clean breast of it and pay me the respect of treating me like an adult. Just a regular adult he cares about, never mind the fact that I’d sacrificed my life and health for his comfort and safety.
But denying your instincts always kicks your ass. My nightmares of fighting with my family started again. For years, they were so common PiC had mastered the art of soothing me without even waking himself. I’d wake screaming at my brother as we grappled over yet another bad decision.
Prepared to deal or not, once those nightmares started again, I knew I had to confront the situation head on.
A story of anger
So I did. And I saw the man who taught me to have integrity, to build a life by helping others and doing no harm, crumple under direct questioning. He had taken that money and used it to invest in a venture that was “expected to pay out within 6 weeks but…”
I watched as his face, once beloved, revealed that I could no longer trust anyone in my family. He regretted betraying my trust, he said, but the betrayal went far deeper than he understood.
Having made the colossally bad decision to take my money, my baby’s money, he then lied to me. Kept lying until he was backed into a corner.
The kindest possible interpretation is that he’s still grieving, that he’s eaten up by the shame and guilt of dependency, and the only way he knows how to deal with it is to try and make the most of any opportunity. Even if it wasn’t an opportunity that was offered. Even when it was clearly not his to take.
Some part of me still wants to be kind because any harsher interpretation is harsh for me too. But it’s been five years since Mom died. Three years since we had the incredibly hard conversation about our feelings of guilt and hurt and trying to mend things. Seventeen years since I first picked up this work of supporting my family and we had our first fights about honesty and making the household work.
He’s had time. He’s had enough chances to learn to work with me, and has proven in the starkest possible way that another chance is just another costly disappointment.
He promised to pay it all back when the money came back but in past year he’s called me once, and only because he thought he was returning a missed call and then to ask when we’re coming to visit. No updates on what’s going on, no calls to see how we’re doing. Not a word about receiving an email full of pictures of an (I’m not biased at all) incredibly cute grandchild growing up fast. Nothing.
That money, in other words, is lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Clementine.
What does this all mean? How do you go forward when you admit this is the state of affairs?
In practical terms, not much. I won’t put him out on the street by stopping his rent payments, I won’t punish him by stopping his utility payments. I’m not able to assess the cost of his betrayal and theft as equal to that of his right to live like a human with basic needs.
But it has cost him my love, my regard, and my trust.
The hardest realization is that I’ll never trust him alone with his grandchild. I once believed he would protect me at all costs and have now learned that we’re not even worth $15,000. I was his own child, his only daughter, his sole support, and he’s abused my good will and manipulated me under the umbrella of good intentions for years.
He’s rationalized it all as his way of helping me. He was working hard to make sure that I didn’t have to pay more than I already do to subsidize my sibling. So it naturally makes sense that he would take the money intended for my child’s care, daycare that is necessary for my health and for my income which he relies on, as seed money, then cover up his actions with lies.
That was his “better course of action.” Not: communicating clearly with me about his needs or his plans. Not asking if he could use it as capital. Just taking it and lying til the cows came home.
Well, the cow has come home and guess what? Asking forgiveness MIGHT be easier than asking for permission but what they don’t tell you is that you may never get forgiveness.
Knowing that he’d already easily rationalized the very wrong and harmful act of stealing from me and then lying to me about it until caught, what else can he rationalize? This wasn’t the first lie, but it has to be the last before the price is too high and too painful to be counted in dollars.
I’d been quietly resentful before that he hasn’t once lifted a finger to engage with his only grandchild. On arranged visits, he’s a drop-in. He’s a visitor to the proceedings, he’s played with zir maybe twice and that’s because PiC has been even more persistent than I in making sure ze gets Grandpa time.
After all this?
There’s simply no way I could ever trust zir in his care. I suppose it’s a good thing he never offered to help with zir, not even to watch zir for five minutes so I could scarf down a meal, so we haven’t developed the habit of relying on him. In my family, non-parents always lend a hand to the parents of little ones, grandparents above all. I have personally done it for more years than I can count, for everyone’s kids. He’s done it countless times for other relatives but I see that the most special consideration I get is that he’ll show up. Good thing, I guess.
He was an icon, in my eyes. A figure of storied proportions. His sacrifices to make a better life, his hard work, his ethics. I imbibed those with my mother’s home-cooked meals and tutelage. And now he’s made himself all but a stranger.
I’ve wept.
There are still some tears in the days to come, when a fond memory feels shattered, when I can’t remember the word for “meatball” in our native language and I can’t bring myself to dial his number.
I’m still angry with him. I may forgive someday but today is not that day. Tomorrow isn’t either. Even if it ever happens, I still won’t forget.
I don’t doubt he was sorry to be telling me the truth when he was forced to, but how much was regret over being caught and how much for the wrongdoing? History suggests mostly the former, less of the latter.
Years ago, a blogger aptly named Grace said she heard the voice of a hurt daughter wondering why she wasn’t good enough. It seems Grace read me more correctly than I knew.
I know now that I didn’t want it to be true. I wanted to believe in his good intentions. But his good intentions always came with a price and I was always the only one to who paid them. So here I am admitting: I am hurt. I do wonder why my father doesn’t love me enough, never loved me enough, to work with me or to put me and my well-being even equal to that of my Sibling’s when he was still clearly capable but unwilling to take care of himself.
Six years ago, I couldn’t conceive of the notion that my parent could value me so little. That he could see me as nothing more than a way to pay the bills. Today, I’m seeing that it’s not only possible, it’s been the truth for a long time.
I regret the loss of faith. I regret the loss of history. I regret that ze won’t be able to learn our family oral history the way I did from the man who remembers so much of it because he can’t spend an hour in our company. I hate that ze won’t have a living loving grandfather worth knowing.
I hate that when people joke that they still lean on their fathers like JuggerBaby now flops against zir father with complete faith, I feel a pang of envy. I hate that when a dear friend got married and his bride introduced me to her beaming, over the moon father, I felt loss.
Where was my father for all that? For the joy, the support, the fatherly bond? I worshiped him. I still remember before so clearly. At five years old, I was brewing his morning coffee and sitting with him while he drank it before he left for work. I brewed his nightly pot of tea, offering the first pour to our ancestors with lighted incense as is our custom, every night. I carefully washed it and the tea cups afterward, setting them out to dry for the next day. He combed my hair for me, just like his!, before school every morning of first grade. When Mom and I clashed, I could always turn to him for support over books, over clothes, over anything.
When did he stop loving me?
I won’t ask why. I don’t want to know. Maybe I don’t want to know when it happened, either.
A story of acceptance
I refuse to let this diminish me. I refuse to let this make me feel like I’m less than worthy. With or without him I am a person, whole and complete, and I will not be made less because my father forgot I have value.
Just as I learned from his mistakes in money, I’ll learn from his mistakes as a person and as a parent. I know now that not having money can do terrible things to a person, no matter who they were before, and while I cannot save my father from himself, perhaps I can save my chosen family from making the same mistakes.
For better or worse, I am my father’s daughter and inherited many of his traits. But I am not him, just like I’m not my mother, either. I have a choice and can choose to do things differently for my future.
I think it’s clear that I have done that, in finding a way to fulfill what I see to be my responsibilities and still preserve and protect my own family’s future. It’s not as easy as it would be if I were unfettered but I make it work.
More than one friend has asked me: would you ever cut him off?
The reality is he’s 70 years old, he’s unlikely to get hired anywhere, and he has minimal Social Security. He can afford his food and his gas, but clearly not more than one utility bill at a time. It would be inhumane to cut him off when I do have the means to support him, but I will be looking at ways to reduce the burden on our finances by pushing him to move to senior housing. This has been a challenge because he won’t throw out my sibling, the Parasitic Trainwreck (mixing my metaphors to give a clearer picture of his character), and I’m not sure what senior housing would allow for the presence of a person like him.
But for now, it’s enough that I’m able to face this squarely.
Then I’ll fix it. Like I always do.
September 26, 2016
Maybe not all of them are unhinged but these soundbites from startup founders in a survey where they answered questions about their finances sure make them sound like it. I noted that only 6 of the respondents were women so it’s likely there’s some sort of self selection bias going on there.
“Don’t save for retirement. That’s like betting you’ll fail.”
The complete logic fail here is astounding. It assumes that the only success will leave you so wealthy as to have your retirement secured. It ignores the fact that you might succeed but only modestly so, or that you might have more expenses in retirement than a buyout could cover, or that you might succeed but not ever be bought out. Running a business doesn’t always end in being acquired for billions. It also links the act of saving to actively betting against yourself which doesn’t make any sense at all. I have supreme confidence in myself and my success but you betcha I save for retirement because I want one, and I don’t control everything around me.
“You can’t save your way to being wealthy.”
Yes, you can. You could also, if you were really savvy, probably spend (invest) your way to being wealthy. Refusing to do one or the other if you have the opportunity to simply because it’s not the quick and easy way is pretty shortsighted.
“Bet on yourself rather than on external investments (housing, stock market, etc.).”
We all know that’s not an either/or proposition, don’t we? Of course one of our biggest assets is our ability to earn. But that shouldn’t be your only asset if you have a choice about it.
Does this founder also put everything on red and let it ride? Because betting solely on yourself as a single asset and refusing to diversify is pointblank stupid. What happens if you’re killed or crippled in an accident? What if you’re struck by a chronic disease that severely limits your ability to function? What if a dependent family member falls ill and needs full time or long term care?
I don’t pose these as unlikely hypothetical scenarios just to be contrary. All of them have happened to us or a family member.
Other bad advice
That got me thinking about times in my life when I was given pretty bad advice and was chided for being too stubborn to heed it.
I did listen to good advice, I wasn’t immune to all advice, but some of these were just too much.
“Maybe he’s just being nice.”
When a manipulative abusive boss tried to give me cash for a vacation.
No, he was never just being nice. He wanted to buy loyalty for petty change and the loyalty he wanted was unreasonable and unprofessional. You know what I’m talking about.
“You should have kids when you’re young and have energy”
A cousin 12 years my elder pressed me on this point when I was 21 and definitely unprepared for marriage, much less kids. To my family, who expects to see us married by 24 at the latest, it was looking like I’d spend all my time working and never getting married and having kids. The joke was on her, apparently. 8 years later she said, ok, yeah, you should enjoy your life while you can.
Thank you, I believe I will.
Yes, there are times I wished I had JuggerBaby earlier so Mom would have met and enjoyed zir too. But that’s one tiny fraction of the entirety of our lives that I enjoy so much: having amazing flexibility and autonomy in my job, being financially stable, having a solid marriage and partnership, these things would be missing from the equation. Only their fledging counterparts would have been there: paying down debt, managing my health, and growing my career would have been so much harder and would have meant I’d miss so much more of JuggerBaby’s life. We were late to having a kid but because of it, I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy so much of zir growing up. (May we always have this stability and flexibility.)
To be fair to her, it wasn’t objectively a terrible bit of advice. It was just a bad idea to suggest that I should model my life on everyone else’s. I prefer to aim for a little more extraordinary, and that doesn’t fit the safe cookiecutter lives they encourage.
::What bad life advice have you gotten? What’s the best advice you’ve gotten or given? How have you strayed from the expected path?
September 21, 2016
We dubbed him Seamus in the first, rough, weeks of his homecoming, a play on “Shamey-y”.
I can’t be more grateful that we weathered those days, welcoming him even when he broke almost every rule trying to learn the ropes, even when we had a baby on the way and weren’t sure how it would all happen.
From the moment he met JuggerBaby, the squirmy little bundle of noise and mess, with interest and hope, he’s been a trooper, the saintly dog you’d always hope for in just such a circumstance.
Life with DOG!
JuggerBaby and Seamus have a curious sibling relationship. You’d think they didn’t care whether the other existed, until you made the mistake of raising your voice or provoking screeches (which, to be fair, is really easy to do for a toddler of JuggerBaby’s age). Seamus would quietly insert himself into the room and check on everyone, clearly concerned that ze would survive the day, and leave just as quietly when it was clear no one was a casualty.
Likewise, you’d think JuggerBaby was kind of a jerk the way ze petted him like he was a first class drum set, until you notice that zir carefully leaning in to give him Mmmmwah! kisses, before and after overenthusiastic pets. And woe betide you if he looks bored and ze knows where the Chuck-its are hidden. Like an extension of Seamus’s will, ze unearths the toys, presents it to you with a demand: BA!! and points at zir brother. Throw that thing, parent, and do it now! He’s bored! And soon after, carrots! Ze pulls them out and points insistently, EY! Give him treats!
As part of my weekly grocery shop, I prep packs of carrot sticks for Seamus. They sit sit together on the floor, box of carrot sticks clutched in JuggerBaby’s still chubby fist, staring at me for permission to hand them over, one by one. Once in a while JB’s enthusiasm brims over and ze offers him the entire container. He’s no fool, he looks at me for the nod. Even when ze dumps the entire box on the floor in front of him, he waits for the nod before reaching for any.
We do bedtime together, he lays at our feet while we read bedtime stories and sing bedtime songs, then he and I decamp to the living room for his care: brushing teeth, pedicure, cream for his itchy and raw skin. He lays his head on my knee and naps for a while, before his last nighttime stroll with PiC.
Medical woes
His weight has stabilized, he’s lost much of that sympathy pregnancy weight, but he has had a rough road.
He’s had an ulcerated eye, twice.
JuggerBaby nearly poisoned him (maybe).
His skin looks worlds better than it did when he first came home but he still breaks out into hot spots so I’m always on alert for any new trouble areas. Twice a year it gets bad enough for the heavy hitting meds. They’re effective but we don’t want him on steroids more than 20 days a year, they aren’t great for his organs, so I aggressively treat all flare-ups to keep them from progressing past hot spots.
He’s had an endless stream of infections. They crop up when he gets scraped up playing too enthusiastically and sometimes just because it’s fun to make me jump. I’m his on-call emergency medic, always carrying a full kit of topical antibiotics, ointments, bandages and gauze.
We make it through each one because he’s generally an astoundingly good patient, for a dog who surely doesn’t understand why I’m making him lay still while I poke and prod his painful parts, and our vet is good about working with me in filling the appropriate medications when we need them instead of making me bring him in for an exam every time. This saves us anywhere from $200-500 a year.
A Dog and Our Money
I’ve been using the saved proceeds from the blog to pay for his numerous medical needs. Unfortunately, since this isn’t a cash cow, we’ll need another way to fund his care soon.
We can cashflow his food, supplements, the occasional toy, and any other gear a good pup needs out of our regular income.
I do most routine maintenance at home for the cost of materials: war cleaning, nail clipping, pilling, first aid. These could all add to the price tag but luckily I enjoy animal husbandry.
We’d love a companion pup for him, he does best when he has appropriate canine company, but I’m not sure we can take on Number Three any time soon. It’s nearly as much work as a kid in a lot of ways and the costs pile up quickly if you’re not careful.
And another pup would make travel even more expensive. When we go on vacation, so does he. Turns out all the dog sitting I did as a favor to friends back in the day, because I knew I’d appreciate it if I needed the same? Well, there is no dogsitting karma. Nor is there babysitting karma.
Please, keep reminding me of that, because I might still lose my head and adopt another senior dog one day.
:: Are you a dog / cat / other animal person? What makes them great?