August 7, 2024
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $295 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
I’m getting an FSA account of my own! This doesn’t change our planned spending, it’ll just reimburse us for that planned health spending that isn’t covered by the first one. There’s the increase in dental fees for our dentist going out of network, at least $600-800 we weren’t previously charged and a number of my brain therapy sessions that aren’t covered by our first FSA. That’s a help. If it works! I’ve been fighting with United Healthcare for weeks and months trying to get them to pay out the very valid claims I’ve submitted repeatedly.
I finally got fed up and asked PiC to call them and find out what the hickory sticks was going on. Would you believe they kept him on the line for almost two hours fiddling and hemming and hawing? They claimed they couldn’t identify the problem claims and that the claims submitted at the start of the year were only “courtesy” approvals. Lies.
So I’m furious and report them to the Department of Labor. Turns out they have a whole department specifically to handle these types of complaints. Magically, when we got on a conference call with them and he introduced himself as a rep from the DoL, you could hear the shift in attitude in that long moment of silence. There was hardly any hot potato at all, they only transferred us once. When he asked the exact same question that PiC did: why are these being rejected when the same type of receipt was provided in Jan and Feb and approved without issues, they paused for a long time, put us on hold for almost an hour, and then came back to say that they sent all of the claims back for reprocessing. That hold time really ticked off our rep so he’s ready to open an investigation into them if they still don’t resolve this within the required amount of time.
Edit to add: This is the Employee Benefits Security Administration – they specifically deal with complaints like this for ERISA related plans. They can’t do anything with medical denials unfortunately which really really needs a department for that, but they can deal with fiduciary-related fails.
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July 2, 2024
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $511.25 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
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June 4, 2024
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $1,053.00 in dividends from the stocks portfolio. Bigger than usual big month, but it all averages out to only a few hundred dollars a month. It was all reinvested immediately as usual.
I moved our emergency fund to Vanguard’s Cash Plus account to get more interest there as well though that might have been a futile attempt since it looks like that APY went down from 4.7 to 4.6 (vs Ally’s 4.2%). Oh well, every penny and dollar count.
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May 7, 2024
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $280.60 in dividends from the stocks portfolio. It all gets reinvested into our index funds.
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April 2, 2024
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $464.00 in dividends in from the stocks portfolio.
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March 5, 2024
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $944 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
The second payment from the Lithium battery settlement landed: $1.44. Someone joked that they could keep that dollar, and I said, I’ll take it! Every one of our dollars goes somewhere important.
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February 7, 2024
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks, cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates) and affiliate links to Bookshop and Amazon sometimes pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running. The sidebar has ways to support the blog and our charitable giving.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $1852 in dividends from the stocks portfolio mostly made up of a surprise dividend from Costco. Well, surprise to me. They announced it last year to the whole world, I just wasn’t paying attention. My buy-and hold, and not timing the market, strategy all lean heavily on the “don’t even pay attention to it at all” tactic. It’s very effective! As you can see. But the value of that, plus my annual bonus, have hardly had any time to spend with me before it’s flown off to take care of home stuff and health stuff. It was nice knowing ya.
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