About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
Two pairs of leggings, four dresses with pockets, a new rug, two serving bowls, a toilet brush, coffee filters and a platter, a set of glass bakeware with lids. A tablecloth and garden shovel. What’s the theme here?
Let’s see… I bought all but one of them using gift cards. They are useful. We’ve needed most or all of them for months and we’ve been making do without. We now need to declutter 15 MORE things to justify adding so many things to our cabinets and closets. All true.
The biggest thing they have in common: They don’t erase that lingering uneasy feeling about how we’re going to weather the next recession and what further job cuts at our jobs may do to our nascent retirement plans.
Discussing my post and this barely contained feeling of discomfort last week on Twitter with Mr. SSC, he pointed out: one has to have a plan but also have faith that it’ll change, so embrace flexibility. Yeeeeees, but that requires a bendiness of mentality and I’m not yet that evolved.
In part, the crux of this being ill-at-ease is my own fault, not the recession’s. Not that the recession isn’t a big thing, it is, but the bigger problem is we have a couple huge life decisions we can’t seem to get a grip on. They’d likely have an equally, or more, enormous impact on our lives as the recession or a job loss or change in careers. Our waffling is doing neither of us any good but I’m not ready to get into it because I can’t make out head or tails of how I really feel about it. My inner turmoil on those points remains a roiling mass of fog.
Mr. SSC also shared that he’s a stress shopper and boy howdy do I empathize. I’ve been scrolling Amazon deals in a badly concealed panicked state, on a quest to get everything we need for emergencies as if that’ll solve the massive problem of not knowing the shape of the next five years. Thankfully my personal money history means that I’m just wildly window shopping with abandon, but not buying anything. Good habits FTW?
Matt has been a welcome vocal feminist ally on Twitter and talks about how that’s impacted his own life here. Spoiler alert: it hasn’t ruined his life and it HAS generated respect for him, in contrast to what the misogynists claim.
A Dying Mother’s Letter to Her Daughters: “While I would have chosen to stay with you for much longer had the choice been mine, if you can learn from my death, if you accepted my challenge to be better people because of my death, then that would bring my spirit inordinate joy and peace.”
As a daughter who lost her mother too early, twice, first to dementia, and then later in truth, this letter broke me a bit. I wish over and over to know what she would have wanted to tell me, as an adult. We had just begun to get to know each other in my adulthood, and see each other as fully people outside of our relationship as mother and daughter, when her grip on her self slipped out of her hands.
Accidental hug at work – I have a fun anecdote of my own on this. Someone reached over to open the door for me but did it in an awkward way that triggered that “he’s coming in for a hug” recognition in my brain the same way it did for the OP and it was NOT accurate. I blurted out: what are you doing?? Because I don’t believe in keeping silent awkward to myself I guess. He was pretty confused.
Although the actor believes that he learnt a lesson from the ordeal after he eventually thought, “What the fuck are you doing?” I’d argue that there’s something even bigger to glean from all of this. Whether we like to admit it or not, racism has and will continue to have a far deeper psychological impact on society than many of us realise.”
Dividend income. We received $157 in dividends this month and year to date net dividends are not surprisingly, $157. I currently reinvest all our dividends.
BeFrugal cashback. After a week long tussle with them, they finally paid me my cashback and $10 join up bonus ($31). I’m so annoyed with their irritating nonsensical “verifications” that after I withdraw the last of my money with them, I’m closing my account. Their extra .25% cashback is not worth it. Strong do not recommend.
This family of four’s downsize from a 4/3 to a 2/1 is visually stunning. I definitely don’t have an eye for creating this kind of living space splendor but I’m taking notes!
K Wright on the idea of job security. No matter how good I am at my job, and I’m pretty dang good, I don’t take my job for granted, ever. Something can always happen. It doesn’t mean I should be hypervigilant like I was for years, but I most definitely don’t assume that my job will always be there.
3 Women on Caring for Disabled Siblings. This was akin to the situation we ran into when Mom’s health precipitously declined: She was cognitively not very functional, she didn’t have control over key functions of her body, and I was running ragged working to keep a roof over her head and desperately trying to figure out how we would function long term. This was before I married PiC, I delayed marriage for years because I was trying to get her in a stable situation before I moved out, but that was a losing proposition.
Do you have the same money anxieties that Tonya and I share?
I’d like to think a bear really did help this child.
After we signed those papers, we sold our previous home and applied a small chunk of those sales proceeds toward our loan with an eye on recasting the loan – recalculating a new monthly payment based on the new principal amount while keeping the same terms (interest rate and length of loan) at no extra charge.
I made sure, when we were researching loans, to confirm that Chase would do this at no charge and there were no limits on how many times we were allowed to do it.
That first recast, and the second one with double the payment to principal when more sale funds were available two months later, brought down our monthly payment a total of $700. Not TO $700, reduced it BY $700. The remaining payment is still in the multi-thousands. That gives you an idea of how high our mortgage is! YEEKS.
Making those two moves not only reduced the total balance and our monthly payments, it also saved $102,599.54 in interest! (I used this calculator to figure that savings out.)
I continued to pay a little over the monthly payment due to cut down the principal further, little by little, and made the equivalent of half an extra payment last year.
We don’t have any huge chunks of money coming in this year (that I know of. Feel free to bless us, universe) so I was only aiming to pay down a set amount to principal this year but then I got this email from Chase inviting me to enroll in their New flexible mortgage payment options!
Ok, I’ll bite.
I went in to explore and see if they could offer me anything better than we could do on our own. (I can never resist a do better with money challenge.)
I knew Ashley Ford’s name first on Twitter as @ismashfizzle because she does good work for the world there but here’s another facet to love: her interview with Michelle Yeoh.
“America First” – not my America. This piece was hugely resonant for me as a child of immigrants, knowing how much the generation of parent-immigrants gave up in order to give us a better life. I still feel that sense of gratitude even if my own remaining parent has turned out to be a terrible person. It’s weird but I do.
Golden Globes
I don’t watch awards shows but I will watch Sandra Oh in pretty much anything. And Samberg is hilarious. This monologue made me laugh out loud. And they cut to her mom.
The kids spent a long while learning about the idea of filling someone’s bucket emotionally and JB spent weeks asking for validation when ze would do something positive: Momma, am I fillin your bucket? Momma, I am doing great listening, does that fill your bucket?
It’s unclear whether ze quite gets the concept but ze spent a lot of time trying to suss out whether what ze was doing was a bucket filler or not.
Daycare bullies
I wrote about this kid, dubbed Jerkface, early on when I was exasperated at the havoc he wreaked as a 2-3 year old and my opinion hasn’t changed now that he’s five except for the worse. I felt bad for judging in the past but now that we’ve had to share a classroom with him for over a year I just have exasperation. To all appearances he’s not struggling with LD or ED, they’re very open about when kids need accommodations and that’s not the case here. He’s kind of like the Haley.
What I’ve observed is that while he does have high spirits just like most of the kids there, the big difference is that he is also allowed to act in completely unacceptable ways: hitting and kicking his parents, even spitting on one memorable occasion, and those behaviors pass without comment. What follows from that is what I observed in my young cousins with negligent parents: He’s taken swings at me and PiC, trying to hit or kick us any time we’re near him, knocking books out of PiC’s hands, trying to kick a chair at me because I was listening to their teacher instead of paying attention to him. One of the teachers we’ve become good personal friends with confirmed that she’s observed the parents being totally irresponsible and negligent, consistently allowing this behavior between his siblings as well. (more…)
Matt has been a welcome vocal feminist ally on Twitter and talks about how that’s impacted his own life 
On Money
In 2017, 
