March 29, 2017
The past three months haven’t been exactly rife with fun and jollity, between spending January in and out of court, February dealing with meetings and paperwork, and March, well, March has been more paperwork. But we still had a few bits of downtime. More and more, I see the importance of having some fun to balance out all the work, not just collapsing when I run out of steam and calling it a day.
My prescription for a more fulfilled life: more belly rubs for Seamus, more ticklewars with JuggerBaby, more reading time, more relaxing with PiC. This is some of it.
What I watched
City in the Sky: Airbus 380
Everything I didn’t necessarily want to know about airports and the building of the Airbus. Flying was a bit of a mystery to me, and not having had anxiety about the mechanics about it, I was satisfied to leave it that way for the nonce.
But we couldn’t get PBS to cough up any of the Masterpiece shows we wanted to see, not without paying a premium, and so PiC got to pick his free show instead.
It was actually a good documentary. I just didn’t necessarily want to know that a single misplaced rivet could mean a plane is torn apart mid-flight. I wasn’t worried but NOW I am! (more…)
March 6, 2017
On Money
Income
Our normal income is two full time day job salaries. We experiment with earning money on the side, including minimal cash flow that we don’t touch from an investment property. The goal is to replace our day job income before my health gives out and prevents me from working.
Achievemint: I signed up on January 18th (sign up here and get a 250 point bonus!) but the app pulled data from Apple Health and retroactively rewarded me for activity done before I signed up for my account. Whee!! So I got credit for part of December and the full month of January. PiC pointed out a weird thing: he earned 7 points for running 6 miles. I earned 6 points for walking 2900 steps.
My guess was the app learns what your norm is and sets that as the baseline so that it’s not giving someone who usually runs 5-10 miles a week a vast number of points while giving people like me a quarter of a point per month. But it turns out these differentials were pulling from different apps so I am totally confused. (more…)
February 6, 2017
On Money
Income
Our normal income is two full time day job salaries.
We experiment with earning money on the side, including minimal cash flow that we don’t touch from an investment property.
The goal is to replace our day job income before my health gives out and prevents me from working.
Spending
Our normal spending includes the living expenses for two households, these updates ignore those ordinary expenses.
I stopped tracking our expenses to the penny five years ago because it was too time-consuming. That was fine for a couple years but I’ve observed increases in our spending in the last three years, mainly unusual expenses, that need to be budgeted for. For a fresh start this year, I’ve created a new spreadsheet where we list the bills we paid with an average spending amount listed in the budgeting column. Specific types of spending (food, gas, groceries, utilities, insurance, etc) are paid by credit card, so those will be mildly opaque but we seem to do better when we aim at reducing aggregate amounts rather than “$100 per month on drinks”. Not that we spend that on drinks. (more…)
January 9, 2017
2016 highlights
EARNING, SPENDING, SAVING
The good
My day job income stayed the same, PiC’s increased a little. My competitive side HATES that mine stayed the same but my realistic side knows that was part of the deal of accepting the job with more risk. With more risk, I should remind myself to be glad the job is still alive and kicking!
We focused on our areas of our side money project which generated the funds to send much needed support to friends who’d hit rough patches: severe illness, loss of loved ones, injuries.
We didn’t splash out on a jumbo loan for a bigger house, nor did we add a second dog to the pack. I wanted to but reined in those currently unsupportable desires. Reminder, I need early retirement more than I need to take on more responsibility and I don’t want the guilt that comes with taking on more dependents than we can truly care for.
1. Debt reduction is saving. We refinanced our mortgage, freeing up our cash flow, halving our interest, and sending more straight to principal. We had the original mortgage for 4 months of the year, and the refinanced mortgage for the remaining 8. (more…)
January 4, 2017
On Money
Income
Our normal income is two full time day job salaries. We experiment with earning money on the side, including minimal cash flow that we don’t touch from an investment property. The goal is to replace our day job income before my health gives out and prevents me from working.
Our incomes remain the same. I don’t anticipate any danger to them this year, but the election result is very likely to impact both of our industries to varying degrees. I think we have at least a year before we start to see negative changes but that might be optimistic.
Spending
Our normal spending includes the living expenses for two households so this update ignores those ordinary living expenses. (more…)
January 2, 2017
More than ever, it’s been important to do what we can to remember the bright spots in life. Even while I’ve immersed myself in what we can do to make the world a better place, I’ve kept on with paying attention to life and participating in it.
What I read
Jaran, by Kate Elliott. A generous gift from a good friend, I’d been hankering after a new world in a book and I got just what I was hoping for from Jaran.
The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds, Selina Siak Chin Yoke. This was a surprise and a pleasant one at that. Maybe it’s the geographical proximity that I responded to but there were so many parallels between my family and that of the protagonist’s that it felt like reading the biography of grandma’s second cousin. And it was oh so well written, too, blending languages like the flavors of blended cuisines. Oh and life with the changing of the times, losing grip on old traditional cultures with the British influence increasingly encroaching. That too could have been grandma’s dictation as she bid goodbye to her children going abroad for a better life.
Fate of Perfection, K.F. Breene. This was the December free Kindle book for Amazon Prime members. This seemed like it could be interesting but the writing felt stilted and awkward. I wanted to like it but I’m spoiled by excellent writers, who probably also have excellent editors who know how to bring the best out of their raw material, so this was an uncomfortable read. There was exactly one good pair of lines that hit the right note and tickled up a smile in the entire book. Just one pair. And that was my only reaction. Much of the time was filled with painfully overwrought emotions or action. Bored, I was mentally asking, “where’s the baby??” and “when’s the last time you fed her or changed her?” instead of being enthralled by the plot. Clumsy is the word I’m looking for. It’s how I feel my writing is on days when the words just won’t flow. They clunk around, they do the job of conveying what I’m thinking, but there’s no pleasure in reading the result. (more…)
December 5, 2016
On Money
Income
Our normal income is two full time day job salaries. We experiment with earning money on the side, including minimal cash flow that we don’t touch from an investment property. The goal is to replace our day job income before my health gives out and prevents me from working.
Our incomes which I am exceedingly grateful for remain the same. This is good from a stability standpoint. There have been too many nights lying awake after working a 100 hour week for the overtime and wondering how long it was before I fell apart completely and could I get us to a safe place before then? So I’m grateful for what we have.
I’m also aware that the clock could run out on my particular job, whether it be my patience or my professional stagnation, so there is some internal buttkicking going on in trying to nail down the important things I need to address when crafting my next step. (more…)