May 19, 2015
A friend recently eclipsed my career by a rather heady margin. Robin and I have had a friendly almost-competition where we push each other to achieve our goals and making our way up the ladder like a pair of dueling rock climbers has been a fun pastime. None of our other peers were interested in our frank discussions about earning money, negotiating salary, trading tactics and giving one another a good shove in the back to do the uncomfortable thing.
This week, Robin was promoted to the C-suite.
I cheered, of course! It was a move we’d been discussing for a while, as he contemplated whether it made sense to move up there or elsewhere.
Then I realized: oh crap, I can’t match that anytime soon! One of the things I’ve always prided myself on was keeping step with him. It’s one of the things that makes me feel less resentful of the bias against women in the workplace – at least I’m keeping pace with my fantastic male friend, I’m not doing too badly.
Every so often, I get this uneasy feeling that I’m failing myself, failing to live up to my own expectations. It’s not because of comparing myself to others, though I won’t lie and say that I’m impervious to the outside world as competition, it’s because I have an internal set of benchmarks that I don’t always acknowledge.
I keep hearing this echo: you’re getting older, what have you done this year? (more…)
April 30, 2015
Change from Jan 2015: 8% increase
On Money
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn Amazon money for household, Little Bean, and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
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Retirement: I’ve been doing lump sum contributions to my IRA at the end of each tax year, but I should really do it monthly instead. Mostly for superficial reasons: seeing $5500 come out of the savings at once is more painful than ~ $500/month. Plus I can probably cash flow that $500/month if I’m creative, rather than taking it out of savings at all! Or am I getting greedy?
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Update: screw it, I’m cashflowing that sucker. 2014 contribution, done.
2015 contributions, set up as recurring withdrawals.
2016 contributions, will automatically go forth and withdraw.
It’s like a monthly gift to myself!
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April 1, 2015
Change from January: 3.3% increase
On Money
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn Amazon money for household, Little Bean, and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
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Seamus racked up another $450 550 in vet bills.
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I’m only getting half my normal income in maternity leave benefits and surprisingly this hasn’t wrecked our cash flow. I’m not saving anything, and neither am I setting aside the previously budgeted Little Bean money for the moment but we’re doing OK.
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Little Bean money: PiC is still contributing to hir fund and ze has received generous Happy Being Born gifts (called lucky money in our cultures). Kid’s making a killing off being born!
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March 6, 2015
Change from Jan 2015: 3.8% increase
On Money
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn Amazon money for household, Little Bean, and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
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Since I’m down to half-salary, I’ve stopped my contributions to savings. Our cash flow is much tighter but we’re still sending some of PiC’s salary to savings so we haven’t lost all momentum.
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My 2014 IRA contribution needs to come out of savings – boo.
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It’s been challenging making the time to stay on top of the everyday stuff like our finances, writing, cooking. Short month, short notes!
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January 30, 2015
Change from end of 2014: 1.75% increase
On Money
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn a bit of extra money for household, Little Bean, and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
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I didn’t anticipate having any reason to be pleased pulling together this first of the month net worth summary, but I forgot that my CDs with Ally pay out once a year, so hey! Nice little addition to the bank accounts.
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Had reason to be extra grateful for our health insurance coverage. Not only does it cover all of my prenatal related visits, not only are all the OB nurses much nicer than I expect them to be (I don’t know why I always expect them to be a little mean), the prescription side for the unfortunate plague of spots added up really fast. One prescription would have cost $128! Instead I paid $10.
That’s not to say ALL of them are competent, as I discovered to my chagrin one weekend, but by and large we do ok with the HMO.
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Even with one unplanned burst of generosity, we managed to keep Christmas gift costs down to around $300. This is, I’m pretty sure, a little better than we’ve done in previous years that included last minute panic shopping.
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January 1, 2015
2014 highlights
SPENDING
The good: We can do a fair bit of luxury spending: travel, paying a little more for good quality things rather than settling for the cheapest (and lower quality), eating out more than usual to conserve energy.
We’ve considered a new (to us) car but we’re holding off for now. We’ll wait til the new fancy edition that PiC wants is at least a couple years old and available on the used market. That also means paying cash so I’d like to have that on hand.
The bad: I still feel we spend too much of our incomes (about 75% of it) but we live in both a relatively HCOLA and we pay at least $17,000 annually for my dad’s upkeep, more or less depending on shenanigans.
SAVING
The good: We maxed out PiC’s 401(k) contributions.
I made a last minute 2013 IRA contribution and did the same for 2014. (Last minute because I plain forgot.)
We continued to save 25% the whole year, and started a new savings account for LB.
Our side money venture went really well in Q4.
The bad: I don’t have a retirement plan through the new company so I intended to set up my own. Researched, yes. Decisioned, no. So that’s a fail.
The I don’t know yet: We expanded our portfolio into real estate this year.
Since it took me all of Q1 to properly collect our net worth data, I don’t feel like I can really extol our progress accurately on that front. (more…)
December 16, 2014
Change from November: .63% increase
Change from January: 370% increase
On Money
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn Amazon money for household, Little Bean, and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
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Our increases in the net worth from the beginning of the year look astronomical but honestly, that has more to do with me having trouble getting all the accounts in order over the first quarter. It’s not ALL actual growth but I didn’t relish going back and figuring out what it REALLY was in January now that I have all the accounts sorted.
Maybe I’ll just zero out the start-of-year counter again for 2015 and call it a day.
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End of the year money moves
2014 is running out the clock – what else has to be done?
Last charitable donations
Considering: pay the second half of the property tax a couple months early?
Make a usual big lump payment to the mortgage.
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